What's a federal agency to do when one of its major program offices continues to see its work get dragged through the mud on Capitol Hill and on the 2012 campaign trail?

If you're the Department of Energy, you release a slide show.

That's what DOE did today after a particularly brutal week for the agency's Loan Programs Office.

The agency's various loan efforts represent a $35 billion investment, the 14-page slide show notes, that is expected to support more than 60,000 jobs at projects that include what will be the world's largest photovoltaic and concentrating solar power plants.

Notably, the only time Solyndra -- the solar energy company that received more than half a billion dollars in taxpayer-backed loan guarantees before going bankrupt last year -- appears in the entire presentation is on the front page.

The report is titled "Beyond Solyndra."

But despite what might be described as a certain amount of wishful thinking on the part of DOE, presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney and Republicans on Capitol Hill aren't quite ready to move beyond Solyndra.

This week, the Solyndra hits came early and often in a pair of hearings on Capitol Hill on Tuesday morning.

"DOE's Loan Programs Office has given out nearly $35 billion, including to recipients such as Solyndra," Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) said in his opening statement at the House Energy and Commerce Committee meeting. "Many are now bankrupt, and thousands of people have been laid off."

At about the same time in a hearing in the same building, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) was using his opening statement at an Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing to blast the loan program and the Obama administration's desire for a "government-engineered green energy utopia."

"The Department of Energy's loan guarantee program in particular is of great concern," Jordan said. "After the bankruptcies of Solyndra and Beacon Power and with other taxpayer-funded companies teetering on the brink, taxpayers have a right to know how and why their money was spent in such poor ways."

Those hearings came in the wake of Romney's surprise campaign stop three weeks ago outside the shuttered Solyndra headquarters in California, where he declared the company a symbol of the Obama administration's economic failures (E&ENews PM, May 31).

That visit helped put Solyndra back in the spotlight at a time when even some Republicans acknowledged that the investigation into the company had faded from the public eye since several high-profile hearings in November featuring Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

The renewed focus on Solyndra seems to have struck a nerve with Dan Leistikow, director of DOE's Office of Public Affairs.

"While critics have focused their attention on the Department's loan guarantee to Solyndra, the full story is that the Department's loan portfolio as a whole is having a transformative impact, supporting tens of thousands of jobs and helping double America's renewable electricity generation," Leistikow said in a blog post today.

The new slide show "offers a more complete picture of how the loan program is helping accelerate America's transition to a clean energy future," he said.

Leistikow's attempt to move "beyond Solyndra" may be somewhat undermined by the "related articles" link on his blog page. Among the other articles that readers are directed to is the Sept. 9, 2009, news release in which Vice President Joe Biden visited Solyndra's headquarters to announce the finalization of DOE's $535 million loan to the company.

That release states that Solyndra's new plant is estimated to create "3,000 construction jobs, and lead to as many as 1,000 jobs once the facility opens. Hundreds more will install Solyndra's solar panels on rooftops around the country."

As it turned out, 1,861 employees lost their jobs when Solyndra went bankrupt in August 2011 (E&ENews PM, June 13).