Title: The Fifth Risk
Rating: 4 Stars
This book seems to have two main themes. One is that Donald Trump did not expect to become President. He did not prepare for his transition. When to everyone’s shock, he won then even the preliminary transition work that was done was quite literally thrown into the trash by Steve Bannon.
By law, presidential administrations need to do extensive preparation for the incoming administration. Accordingly, massive briefs were assembled. Office space was allocated. Desks, chairs, and computers were all prepared. The day after the election, members of the Obama administration patiently waited for the Trump transition team to appear. And waited. And waited.
Days later, sometimes weeks later, one or two individual members of the transition team would appear. Often they were not qualified or had even a minimal expertise in the department that they were theoretically going to lead. Those that did appear would only pop in for a quick visit. They’d allocate an hour for a section of a department that had a multi billion dollar budget and tens of thousands of employees.
Sometimes they’d come in with some preset agenda. Instead of learning about an agency’s function, they’d ask for a list of all names of people that had written about climate change. Even worse, they’d bring in someone from the business community that had a vested interest in the agency not fulfilling its mission.
All of this is infuriating, but after five years of Trump, not even close to surprising. If competence, intelligence, or integrity were qualities that you looked for in your political leaders, you’ve long since left the Trump train unless you’ve drunk from the poisoned well of anti-democratic rantings from the likes of QAnon.
That part of the book read to me like just another Tuesday in the Trump administration, so I met most of it with a sad shrug of what our country has come to.
The other theme of the book resonated more with me. Lewis does a deep dive into a couple of corners of semi obscure departments like the Department of Commerce, the Department of Energy and the Department of Agriculture. Certainly with the first two, these are departments that previous Republican presidential candidates have vowed to abolish. Amusingly, one of them was Rick Perry, who wanted to abolish, but then forgot its name in a debate, the Department of Energy. Trump nominated him as the secretary to, yes, the Department of Energy.
If you were to look at these departments, you might think that the Department of Energy might have something to do with oil, gas, or coal. You might think that the Department of Agriculture is mainly about paying subsidies to farmers. And you might think that the Department of Commerce is mainly about trade.
Well, it might surprise you to learn that the Department of Energy is crucial to preventing terrorist groups and/or rogue nations from acquiring nuclear weapons. It is the DoE that’s making sure that the nuclear waste from decades spent in nuclear weapons research doesn’t end up leaching into the Columbia River, the source of clean drinking water for tens of millions.
It might surprise you to learn that the Department of Agriculture is a vital tool keeping rural communities alive. Very conservative businessmen (and yes, they usually are men) are surprised and more than a little shocked and chagrined to learn that the small business loan that they get from their local bank for some entrepreneurial idea actually was funded by the Department of Agriculture.
Those who live in the Tornado Alley of the Midwest get their ever better early tornado warnings from the National Weather Service, which is part of the Department of Commerce.
The point isn’t that the government is some perfect institution of efficiency. Clearly, in any trillion dollar enterprise, there will be waste and, yes, fraud.
However, the fact is that the government does things that are absolutely vital that no one can do. Preventing nuclear proliferation is a good thing, but there’s no money in it. Clean water is a good thing but can easily fall prey to the tragedy of the commons. Rural communities are considered our country’s heartland but, if left unattended, will be strangled by the likes of Amazon and Walmart. The tornado research was based upon decades of weather data collection costing many billions of dollars. What private corporation will spend such sums for decades to save a relatively few lives?
As I read this, I thought back to my review of Evil Geniuses. Starting in 1980, a group of wealthy men (and yes, they were pretty much all men) made a concerted effort to paint the government as incompetent in a bid to reduce their taxes and to promulgate their libertarian philosophies. Governmental officials, not adept in business ideas such as public relations, have done a poor job extolling the virtues of their work. They simply can’t compete with icons like Ronald Reagan and their mocking of the idea that the government is actually here and is here to help you.
In nearly all of the cases that Lewis describes, most of the beneficiaries are from what would be identified as classic red states. Their individualistic ideology refuses to recognize the reality of their reliance upon the federal largesse.
The first three words of our constitution says it all: We the People.
So, the next time that you meet some faceless bureaucrat from some obscure federal organization, make sure to thank them for their service.
dorkenstein 