“Never heard a thing,” Rust recalled in a telephone interview.

The next year, Rust’s boss asked him to do it again. But he didn’t. He sent Congress nothing, and he never heard a thing.

“I killed that, after just one year,” Rust said.

Over time, such congressional reports were becoming a Washington parable about why some big government systems break down.

In cases such as this, the cause is not too little funding or too much corruption or failed technology. It is Congress’s tendency to pile new solutions on top of outdated ones, and to try to make all of them work at once. As a result, funding and energy are spread too thin. Bad ideas live on — sucking in resources — because nobody bothers to kill them.

In one infamous example, the government ended up with 47 job training programs — and still wasn’t very good at job training.

In this case, however, the system that Congress overburdened and broke was its own.

“And at the end of the year, you will see lots and lots of these big kind of mobile trash barrels. And you will see people just throwing away just pounds and pounds of reports into the trash,” said Steve Bell, a longtime staffer for Republicans on Capitol Hill. During the year, he said, “we used them as doorstops. Literally. The thicker ones, we used them as doorstops.”

Today, nobody in Washington can say how many reports are actually done every year, or how much money is spent to prepare them. The last good estimate comes from 1993, when they were believed to cost more than $100 million — $163 million in today’s dollars.

This year, the only thing that Congress could say for sure was how many reports it was expecting to get. In early April, the House administration committee said that official total was 4,637.

But even that was wrong. The Washington Post counted the entries on the House’s list, and the number was more than 300 less than the House said it was. After that, the House administration committee changed its official total to 4,291.

That figure is also probably misleading, since the House’s list of expected reports seems riddled with errors. For one thing, it says Congress is still expecting two annual reports about the Soviet Union, a country that dissolved in 1991. And it still asks for two reports from the association of veterans of the Spanish-American War. The last member of that group died in 1992.