Serious Reporting on Unserious People
The Transparency in Government Act sailed through Congress this week to overwhelming bipartisan support, with industry representatives expressing pleasant surprise at how reasonable the legislation turned out to be. Pure coincidence that it mirrors talking points from a certain K Street lunch meeting, officials insist.
Mar 21, 2026
The newly formed Office of Government Reduction has submitted an emergency budget request for 200 additional employees, explaining that achieving permanent governmental smallness requires temporary but essential largeness. A $800,000 consulting report confirms the office is definitely on the right track.
Mar 21, 2026
The Federal Advisory Committee on Public Engagement has postponed its inaugural public hearing indefinitely after discovering that actual members of the public wanted to participate. Officials expressed bewilderment at the 'unprecedented' level of citizen interest in being heard by a committee specifically created to hear them.
Mar 19, 2026
The Senate Subcommittee on Government Transparency has quietly moved its public accountability hearings behind closed doors for the fourteenth consecutive month, explaining that genuine openness requires temporary secrecy. Committee members insist they're making tremendous progress on transparency while refusing to say what that progress entails.
Mar 19, 2026
The Department of Veterans Affairs announced a groundbreaking 40% reduction in appointment backlogs through the innovative creation of a 'Pre-Scheduling Assessment Queue' that veterans must complete before joining the original waiting list. Officials celebrate this as a triumph of creative problem-solving.
Mar 19, 2026
The Senate Subcommittee on Government Waste has completed a comprehensive headquarters renovation featuring hand-carved motivational messages and a dedicated smoothie station. Officials insist the expenditure represents a strategic investment in fiscal responsibility.
Mar 18, 2026
The Office of Straightforward Communications has unveiled its latest 847-page guidebook designed to help Americans understand last year's 823-page guidebook, which was itself created to clarify an earlier 756-page document about making things clearer. Officials describe the new publication as 'refreshingly digestible' for anyone with a graduate degree in bureaucratic interpretation.
Mar 18, 2026
Senator's corruption investigation concludes with unanimous exoneration following what committee members describe as 'textbook ethical oversight.' The three newest committee appointees particularly praised the thoroughness of their own work.
Mar 18, 2026
The Pentagon has assembled a distinguished committee to solve the mystery of three missing efficiency reports, each costing taxpayers millions. Officials remain confident they'll locate the studies once they figure out where they put the committee's charter documents.
Mar 18, 2026
The Pentagon's newest cybersecurity division has successfully spent its entire annual budget on logo design and commemorative merchandise while maintaining an unprecedented 100% success rate at being unhackable due to having no systems to hack. Officials praise the innovative 'security through absence' approach.
Mar 18, 2026
After 18 months of careful deliberation, the Pentagon's Internal Efficiency Review Assessment Board has concluded that their evaluation of a previous efficiency review requires further evaluation. The decision has prompted the formation of three additional sub-committees and a catering budget that rivals the annual defense spending of Luxembourg.
Mar 17, 2026
The House Committee on Legislative Efficiency has unveiled groundbreaking legislation designed to make it faster and easier for lawmakers to propose measures that will die in committee. The bill itself has already been referred to three subcommittees, none of which have met since the Obama administration.
Mar 17, 2026
The House Subcommittee on Governmental Oversight has allocated $2.8 million to examine why its previous $3.2 million investigation into government waste was completely ignored. The new study will reportedly determine optimal font sizes for ensuring future reports remain equally unread.
Mar 17, 2026
The Senate Subcommittee on Streamlining Government Operations, established during the Reagan era to combat bureaucratic bloat, has commissioned a $400,000 independent assessment to determine whether it serves any meaningful function. The review cost exceeds the panel's entire annual budget by 43%.
Mar 16, 2026
What began as a noble 2019 effort to streamline government efficiency has evolved into a self-replicating administrative organism that now requires its own organizational chart and GPS system to navigate. The Senate Committee on Committee Reduction has somehow birthed eleven offspring, each with distinct catering preferences and acronym requirements.
Mar 16, 2026
A coalition of fourteen think tanks has published a landmark 600-page report concluding that the United States is, by most measurable indicators, quite politically divided. The study, which took three years and $4.2 million in grant funding to produce, features a color-coded chart that one researcher described as 'essentially a picture of red and blue with a thin grey strip nobody agrees on.'
Mar 13, 2026
Rep. Gerald Stanhope (R-TX-14) has introduced the Future of American Mobility and Mobility-Adjacent Infrastructure Act following what his office describes as a 'transformative' eleven-minute Amtrak journey between Union Station and New Carrollton, Maryland, taken primarily for a photograph. The bill, which technically mentions buses, allocates the majority of its proposed funding toward a feasibility study to determine whether a further feasibility study is warranted.
Mar 13, 2026
The Office of Procedural Management and Procedural Management Oversight has unveiled a landmark 47-step process for requesting the preliminary form that identifies which primary form a citizen should request. Officials describe it as the most significant reduction in bureaucratic friction since the Clinton administration accidentally deleted a spreadsheet.
Mar 13, 2026
The White House has named a Senior Coordinator for Artificial Intelligence Governance Engagement and Stakeholder Ecosystem Dialogue — a newly created role with no staff, no budget, and no defined powers. The official's first 90 days will be spent attending seventeen panels, four summits, and a keynote address at a Las Vegas expo sponsored by the companies he is nominally overseeing. The executive order creating the position expires before Christmas.
Mar 13, 2026
The federal government has unveiled its landmark Form Acquisition Pre-Pathway Initiative, a streamlined 47-step procedure for obtaining the form that tells you which form you actually need. Officials describe it as a dramatic improvement over the previous system. The agency responsible for overseeing the simplification has requested a 14-month extension to finish simplifying it.
Mar 13, 2026