It's the $16 muffin all over again. Contrary to what you may have read or seen on late-night TV recently, Congress did not declare pizza to be a vegetable, Sarah Kliff reports at the Washington Post's Wonkblog.

I know these kinds of tales are funny, but with the image of government already at all-time lows, it would be nice if the reporting on government operations wasn't so routinely distorted.

(Photo by Flickr user squidpants)

OK, on one level it's funny watching Rick Perry stumble over himself trying to remember exactly which three federal agencies he has pledged to kill:

But there's a deeper point here: When a presidential candidate can't even remember which three large, established ongoing operations of government he would do away with (as if he could do so with the wave of his hand), it's fairly clear he's simply trying to follow talking points and not actually grappling with the issues of what government should be doing and how it should be structured to do it. And in the current fiscal situation, those issues couldn't be more important.

It would be nice if anyone across the political spectrum was taking seriously the task of coming up with a plan for a streamlined government that costs much less than it does today. But that requires more than talking about hacking away whole departments or stopping agencies from buying t-shirts and coffee mugs.

Update, 9:17 a.m.: Nice to see that Perry still isn't taking this seriously. He's actually trying to fundraise around the gaffe, and has put up a poll on his website asking supporters "which part of the federal government you would like to forget about the most." The list includes some typical targets (Education, Commerce and the one Perry forgot, Energy) but also the Marine Mammal Commission. Why? Just because the name sounds funny, I bet.

It's one thing to hold more meetings online, pool agencies' purchasing power to get more bang for the federal buck, convert printed publications to online-only and cut down on travel. Those are all elements of President Obama's Campaign to Cut Waste.

But in his latest order in the campaign, Obama hits at another category of agency purchases: "swag," that is, all those items that organizations purchase to promote themselves. It's right there in black and white: "Agencies should limit the purchase of promotional items (e.g., plaques, clothing, and commemorative items), in particular where they are not cost-effective."

Forget about t-shirts and hats, then, I guess. But does this also mean no more of those cool agency coins?

With President Obama facing a politically agonizing choice over whether to approve the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada, the State Department's inspector general has agreed to a request from 14 lawmakers that his office probe the review process used at State to gauge the environmental impact of the project.

With environmental protesters in the streets hoping to block TransCanada's plan and energy interests pushing the project as a job creator, some have accused the State Department of relying on an analysis from a company with ties to TransCanada.

On Monday, State IG Harold Geisel sent a memo to Deputy Secretary William Burns saying his auditors would soon be interviewing officials to examine adherence to federal laws and regulations at State's Bureau of Economic, Energy and Business Affairs; its Bureau of Oceans, Environment and Science; its Bureau of Western Hemispheric Affairs; and its Office of the Legal Adviser.

The memo was welcomed and posted on the website of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., a pipeline opponent.

House Ways and Means Committee member John Lewis, D-Ga., made a strategic move on Monday, releasing a letter he received from IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman warning against plans by House and Senate appropriators to cut the IRS budget.

Cutting the tax agency's resources by some $600 million as proposed would "lead to noticeable degradation of both service and enforcement and would have a serious detrimental impact on voluntary compliance for years to come, Shulman wrote. The quantified result? A loss of $4 billion in collected revenue, or seven times the savings from the budget haircut, Shulman said.

Republican communications staff on Ways and Means countered with a statement arguing that freezing the IRS budget does not automatically translate into reduced revenue. In 2007, the agency enjoyed no new budget authority but managed to boost enforcement revenue by 17 percent, they argued. "By contrast, in 2010, the IRS did less with more and only collected $57.6 billion in enforcement revenue despite enjoying a handsome budget of $12.1 billion."

Correction: The original version of this item incorrectly stated that John Lewis was the ranking minority member of the Ways and Means Committee. The item has been updated to correct the error.

Amid all the political ruckus over the misbegotten federal loan guarantee that couldn't stave off bankruptcy for the California solar panel maker Solyndra LLC, some observers may have been startled when the Energy Department on Friday announced approval of $5 billion in loans to other solar technology companies under the same program.

It's a fine reminder that civil servants with long-term missions and years of accumulated expertise are not easily distracted by congressional hearings, pundit mockery and calls for the resignation of Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

But authors of the agency's press release clearly felt an explanation was called for. "Loan applications reviewed by the department have undergone many months of due diligence and often receive bipartisan support," the release said. "DOE evaluates the technical aspects of an application to make sure the technology is feasible, works to ensure that projects can be built to scale, does extensive market analysis to ensure there is a place in the market for the product, and evaluates the finances of the project to ensure it is commercially viable."

Last week the movie version of the Michael Lewis book Moneyball opened, starring Brad Pitt in the role of Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane.

Beane is portrayed in the book and the film as a heroic challenger to baseball's conventional wisdom who developed a new method of evaluating players and assessing overall team strengths that enabled his small-market club to compete against much better capitalized behemoths like the New York Yankees. So it's not surprising that the Office of Management and Budget now wants federal agencies to follow the Billy Beane model.

Today on OMB's blog, Shelley Metzenbaum, the agency's associate director of performance and personnel management, writes that the Obama administration "has been taking its own Moneyball approach to management, driving performance and, ultimately, saving money":

Like Beane, who understood that his goal was to win games - not hit the most home runs, government agencies must learn to be clear about what they want to accomplish and not get stuck in the rut of doing what they have always done. That means setting real, achievable goals that align with agency mission, and sticking to them. For some agencies or programs, that means staying focused on preventing bad things, like accidents and pollution, from happening and reducing their costs when they do - rather than focusing on process goals like completing plan reviews. Processes can be important in achieving the goal, but we should never confuse them with the ultimate goal. To achieve more, government agencies need a clear understanding of the goals each wants to accomplish, focusing on the ultimate goals rather than intermediate process steps.

That seems like pretty good advice. But the folks at OMB might want to be a little careful about how far they take the Moneyball analogy. In the years between the publication of the book in 2003 and the debut of the movie, it's become clear that the Billy Beane story is a little complicated. For example, there's the inconvenient fact that the A's haven't won the World Series in the Beane years, while other small-market teams less single-mindedly focused on analytics have. (And the A's haven't even made the playoffs lately). Meanwhile, the free-spending teams like the Yankees and Boston Red Sox have married a more data-driven approach with massive spending on key free agent players to great success.

That could lead one to conclude that the appropriate use of analytics, when combined with big increases in budgets, is the real path to performance improvement. But it's doubtful that's an approach OMB wants to endorse.

Liberals typically defend government against attacks from conservatives. But Paul Begala takes it a step further in Newsweek, declaring his out-and-out love for the federal establishment in a piece aptly titled "I [heart] Government."

"Government is us," Begala writes. "It's capable of true greatness, real nobility, and majestic triumphs. I'd go further: the U.S. federal government is the greatest force for good in human history. Period."

Indeed, he does go even further:

The federal government freed the slaves and defeated Hitler. It built the interstate highway system, won the Cold War, integrated the South, put men on the moon, and killed Osama bin Laden. By the way, it also created the Internet, with Al Gore's leadership. So there.

That's the provocative question Mike Brownfield explores at the Heritage Foundation's Foundry blog.

Brownfield notes that in a speech this week at Sen. Harry Reid's National Clean Energy Summit, Energy Secretary David Steven Chu said that "the government played an incredibly intimate role in all the technologies that led to prosperity in the United States, and we must not lose sight of that fact."

That included, Chu said, development of powered aircraft. While acknowledging that the Wright Brothers invented their aircraft without federal aid, Chu said that without the support of the military and the Postal Service for aviation, airplanes might never have, so to speak taken off.

But Brownfield argues that the tale of government support for development of the airplane is a bit complicated:

There's a curious fact of history that Chu leaves out. Harry P. Wolfe and John Semmens explain that before the Wright brothers' famous flight (which they funded without government help), Dr. Samuel Langley of the Smithsonian Institution used a $70,000 U.S. government grant to create an airplane. What happened? It crashed into the Potomac River, the Wright brothers succeeded in their flight nine days later, and Langley laid much of the blame on "inadequate" Federal funding. So much for government's "intimate role" in technology.

The clock is ticking for the U.S. Postal Service, which claims it will be unable to pay a number of obligations to the federal government on Sept. 30 unless Congress relieves some of its financial burden. Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., who chairs the House committee responsible for postal issues, has lauched a website to keep the public informed about all things postal as the deadline creeps closer.

"Saving the Postal Service" is counting down the days -- literally -- until USPS defaults. The site outlines Issa's plan to reform the agency and allows the public to sign up for updates from the committee. It also encourages some audience interaction by encouraging users to click through various cost-saving scenarios to bring USPS back into the black.

Postal officials say the agency will not have enough cash to pay $5.5 billion into its retiree health fund, while the Labor Department claims that a USPS failure to make a scheduled $1.2 billion deposit into the workers' compensation fund could jeopardize the program for all federal workers. The Postal Service already has halted payments to its Federal Employees Retirement System account in an effort to conserve cash.

Issa is one of several lawmakers who have introduced postal reform legislation. His bill, cosponsored by Rep. Dennis Ross, R-Fla., would allow USPS to drop a delivery day, mandate parity between health and life insurance premium percentages paid by postal employees and other federal workers, ensure that total compensation at USPS is comparable to the private sector and require arbitrators to consider the agency's finances during labor negotiations.

"Americans deserve an efficient USPS that delivers for decades," the site states. "But misguided action - or none at all - could saddle taxpayers with a multi-billion dollar bailout for the Postal Service. The clock is ticking..."