What with it being summer and all, and with the National Mall in the heart of Washington once more engorged with tens of thousands of tourists, I thought we might take another look at the Capitol Visitor Center, just to see how things are moving along.

The Center is a 580,000 square foot facility being built underground at the east front of the Capitol building. It is part museum, part congressional office building, part refreshment stand, and part holding pen for tourists on their way to a tour of the Capitol.

The last time we checked in, the Center had grown from its original, relatively modest design into a rampaging white elephant — a vanity project that was wildly over budget and behind schedule, absurdly gold-plated and aesthetically disastrous and executed by people of uncertain competence who were hectored at every turn by frivolous politicians working at cross purposes.

That was three years ago. And today? Maybe you’d better sit down: The Capitol Visitor Center is even more wildly over budget and even further behind schedule than it was then, and it’s still absurdly gold-plated and aesthetically disastrous. The politicians haven’t shut up either.

Of course, a little political hectoring might do some good if it came from congressmen or senators who were intent on getting the project under control, or even — remote as the possibility is — reverse course and undo the damage that’s already been done. But in this case, there aren’t many such people — roughly four, by my count, give or take one or two.

Instead, while the sinkhole widens, swallowing tax money and professional reputations alike, congressmen are refusing to take responsibility as they busily shift the blame from themselves. Aren’t you glad I told you to sit down?

The bearer of all this bad news is the project’s contractor, Alan Hantman, the present Architect of the Capitol. In his last appearance before the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on the legislative branch, Mr. Hantman announced that the Center’s planned opening had been pushed back yet again, to July 2007. The expected cost of the project, meanwhile, has risen to $584 million.

The news is all the more striking when you recall that the Center was first given the green light in 1991 at a projected cost of $71 million. At the official groundbreaking in 2000, the budget was $265 million and the opening date set for the presidential inaugural in January 2005. Then the opening was rescheduled for December of that year, then July of this year.

As bearers of bad tidings often are, Mr. Hantman has been blamed for the news he delivers. He has become an obsession of the House of Representatives in particular, which recently passed a bill calling for his removal.

It was an especially petty move, even by congressional standards. Mr. Hantman does what his bosses in Congress tell him to do, and the blame for the runaway project belongs squarely on them.

It was Congress, after all, and not Mr. Hantman, that expanded the scope of the project from a tourist holding pen, meant to regulate the excess flow of visitors to the Capitol, into a vast warren of congressional offices, theaters and hearing rooms — all equipped with “state-of-the-art” technology. “State of the art,” by the way, is congressional lingo for “gold-plated.”

Indeed, more than a third of the new space (which itself expands the Capitol’s square footage by two-thirds) will be accessible only to congressional personnel and official visitors. According to a budget analysis from the anti-Center group Taxpayers for Common Sense, more than 80% of the money added to the original budget is a result of congressional add-ons.

Some of these, totaling roughly $60 million of the additional costs, are post 9/11 security enhancements; most aren’t. An additional tunnel to the Library of Congress across the street from the Capitol is merely a convenience for congressmen (and for the wily bureaucratic in-fighter James Billington, the Librarian of Congress); ditto the new congressional auditorium and private “hideaway” offices for congressmen.

Even the upgrades for tourists are excessive. One large gift shop rather than two should have been sufficient even for shopping-crazed Americans. A new gallery dispensing a live video feed of congressional business will make visitors wonder why they didn’t just stay in their motels and watch C-Span. Another new gallery will allow visitors to track congressional voting records — just in case, I suppose, their home Internet connections aren’t working.

Worst of all, this vast outlay of taxpayer money will only diminish the taxpayers’ ability to admire their Capitol.

Even traditionalist fuddy-duddies acknowledge that the era of open access to government buildings is over. But the exquisite manipulation of citizens represented by the Visitor Center is more than an accommodation to the post 9/11 world.

In the Center, every movement, from entrance to holding pen to elevator to exit, will tug the visitor along an approved track as surely as if he were riding a cart through “Pirates of the Caribbean.” Loafing, dawdling, gazing about in wonder — all those directionless activities celebrated by Walt Whitman, the greatest American poet — will be strictly discouraged. This is treatment more suited to cattle than citizens.

We mossbacks do have one consolation: The newly rescheduled opening for next year is almost certainly too optimistic. We can enjoy another two years at least before Americans are sucked into that gold-plated intake valve below their Capitol.

Mr. Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News.