These days reporters who cover the Pentagon complain they are getting the proverbial “mushroom treatment” — fed a load of fertilizer and kept in the dark.

Under the Trump administration the frequency of on-the-record Pentagon briefings has dropped precipitously compared to the last two decades, but in the last two months the flow of official information has been reduced to a trickle.

Chief Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White was unavailable to ask about the paucity of on-camera briefings because she hasn’t held her “regular” Thursday briefing for eight weeks in a row now.

She did respond to an email, indicating she had a legitimate personal matter to attend to that required her presence outside the building.

White has briefed 15 times this year, either alone or accompanied by Lt. Gen. Frank McKenzie, the director of the Joint Staff, an average of once every two weeks.

By comparison, in the first six months of 2016, the last full year of the Obama administration, Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook alone briefed 22 times, almost once a week.

But it’s not just White who’s been hard to find during the summer. Her deputy, Army Col. Rob Manning, who cheerfully announces at his Monday off-camera gaggles that they regularly occur on the first business day of each week, has briefed reporters only eight out of 30 weeks this year.

Manning is on leave this week and was unavailable for comment. Other spokesmen have volunteered to brief when Manning is unavailable, but so far have not been called on.

And it’s not just the Pentagon.

The aversion to regular press briefings extends to the State Department, where the “daily” press briefing by Heather Nauert is held typically once a week.

“At a time of unprecedented, head-spinning developments for U.S. foreign policy, our relationship with our allies, and our role on the world stage, the lack of interaction with the American public and the world via the press is particularly concerning,” wrote Sen. Robert Menendez in a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last week, urging him to increase the frequency of the briefings.

At the Pentagon, the dearth of briefings is particularly noticeable because Defense Secretary Jim Mattis ended the longstanding practice of holding on-camera question-and-answer sessions in the Pentagon briefing room.

Mattis' only appearance in the room this year was in April, after the latest strikes in Syria.

The speculation is that Mattis likes to keep a low profile to avoid irking the president with inconvenient facts and contrary opinions.

But in one of his relaxed drop-by discussions with reporters last summer, Mattis insisted it’s just his style.

“I'm from the West. I like informal,” Mattis said, explaining that to his mind the briefing room is too much like a college classroom.

“You know, you sit there like dutiful students," he said. “I'm up there like the professor who knows everything. I don't know everything.”

So far in 2018, Mattis has conducted eight no-notice or short-notice off-camera briefings with Pentagon reporters, in addition to 14 in-flight interviews with journalists traveling with him, and six formal news conferences when he’s been out of town or overseas.

Frustrated Pentagon reporters met privately with White in a gripe session this week to request more routine briefings, and more access to the secretary.

The Pentagon blames the current lull on a busy travel schedule and summer vacations of department staff.

Tom Crosson, the Pentagon’s deputy director of press operations, says his office is trying to do a better job of alerting the press to the secretary’s travel plans and public appearances.

For reporters, the saving grace is that real news is rarely announced at a Pentagon briefing, which evokes the old joke told at the beginning of Woody Allen’s 1977 film "Annie Hall."

“Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of them says, ‘Boy, the food at this place is really terrible,’ The other one says, 'Yeah, I know; and such small portions.' "

The Pentagon Press Office has another maxim it may have forgotten, “If you don’t feed the media they’ll just go hunting, and you never know what they’ll find.”