Every new poll finds Congress setting a record for low approval — the latest figure is 9 percent. Clearly, Washington D.C., is dysfunctional. The good news is that congressional approval could hit zero soon, leaving no room to fall farther.

Dismay over Congress is not new, but Americans had fresh reminders this week to ask what motivates politicians and why nothing gets done in Washington.

Already notorius for delaying tough decisions, the current Congress seems to take action only at the last second — or, more often, just kicks problems down the road.

The debt-ceiling debacle in August is just one example of this tendency. Now, the congressional supercommittee, which was created in response to the failure of the full Congress in August, is one week away from its deadline to trim at least $1.2 trillion from the federal budget over the next 10 years.

As that deadline looms, there are few encouraging signs of progress. Democrats don’t want to see serious spending reductions in entitlement programs and Republicans won’t agree to any tax increases.

To make matters worse, some in Congress are already talking about dismantling the automatic spending cuts that would be triggered by a supercommittee failure. Those difficult cuts, targeting domestic spending for 50 percent and defense spending for the other 50 percent, were designed to pressure the supercommittee to find its own cuts.

This week, there were more small reminders of why Congress is held in such low esteem.

The first item generated headlines with a touch of humor, reporting that Congress intends to count pizza as a vegetable in school lunches. The more serious issue is that Big Food corporate interests have lobbied Congress to roll back new recommendations to make school lunches healthier by reducing fat, cholesterol, salt and adding more fresh vegetables and whole grain products while reducing highly processed foods.

But processed-foods corporations ConAgra, DelMonte Foods and frozen-pizza maker Schwan, as well potato-growing interests fought to keep the products they make — and the contracts for supplying lunches to schools that earn them millions of dollars of profits a year — intact.

The changes to make school lunches heathier were based on a 2009 report from the National Academy of Sciences, and were in response to troubling trends in childhood obesity and higher incidences of diabetes in young people.

It would not have been unreasonable to make minor adjustments to the new school lunch proposals, but this week’s action looks like a total cave-in to Big Food interests — and money.

By rolling back the new rules, counting a slice of pizza as a serving of vegetables and allowing daily servings of french fries, Congress is reminding voters that big-money special interests trump the public interest — and campaign contributions mean more than providing healthier meals to school kids.

Another reminder of congressional dysfunction came this week in a press release asking “Who’s writing the farm bill?”

That release noted that as the supercommittee looks to find cost savings in federal spending, one target agreed to by many is the direct payment program that sends billions of dollars every year to corporate farms producing commodity crops like corn, wheat and soybeans.

Seen by many as corporate welfare, there was widespread support for ending the program, which sees most money going to corporate farms and very little support to smaller, family farms. Agribusiness interests contributed $3.7 million to members of the supercommittee since 2001, so cutting direct payments, a fiscal no-brainer with farm profits high, might not happen. Supercommittee members, as incumbents interested in re-election, face pressure to retain the status quo and keep the corporate welfare flowing to giant agriculture and food interests.

Watching efforts to protect corporate welfare in the farm bill and roll back efforts to make school lunches healthier, Americans have to wonder — once again — who is writing the bills and for whom do members of Congress work.

Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Col., made a recent floor speech noting that Congress has a lower approval rating than the IRS or BP during the oil spill.

Little wonder.