Michael Lewis of Moneyball and The Big Short fame has a new book called The Fifth Risk. This book describes the corruption/incompetency in the US government since Trump ascended to office in early 2017. The main character in Lewis’s book is a guy named John MacWilliams, who joined DOE under Obama as chief risk officer. For Lewis, MacWilliams identified five big risks to the US that he observed. The first four are pretty obvious:
- Broken Arrows (loose nukes)
- North Korea
- Iran (keeping them from building nukes)
- Protecting the electric grid from cyberterrorism
The fifth risk, though, is the scariest – Program Management. That doesn’t sound scary, but it is. Lewis puts it this way:
“The risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions. … ‘Program management’ is the existential threat that you never really even imagine as a risk. … It is the innovation that never occurs and the knowledge that is never created, because you have ceased to lay the groundwork for it. It is what you never learned that might have saved you.”
In other words, the biggest risk to the US is likely something you’ve never even thought about thinking about. Lewis outlines a number of issues that the US government assesses used to assess that could be cataclysmic if it occurred. However, when Trump took over the government, he didn’t give a hoot about those threats, or, more tragic, was too stupid to even recognize those threats; since then he has stripped funding and slashed key staff positions that manage those risks. One typical example of this negligence is the Office of Chief Scientist at the Department of Agriculture. This office manages $3 billion a year in research grants for important programs such as how to grow food in a changing climate, which seems sort of important. The person holding that job was a distinguished research scientist in agriculture named Cathie Woteki. Trump fired her and named a climate denying talk radio host, Sam Clovis, who had ZERO science background to be chief scientist. Ol’ Sam, though, withdrew suddenly from the nomination when he became embroiled in the Mueller investigation. Trump has since named a Dow Chemical pesticide executive as chief scientist. Swell.
Another glaring example of Trump’s incompetence is naming our own Rootin’ Tootin’ Rick Perry to be Secretary of Energy. Perry famously announced during the 2012 primary that he wanted to shut down Energy, Education, and, er… that other one (oops), so Trump thought he would be the perfect pick to protect our power grid, nuclear arsenal, and fossil fuel industries. Perry clearly has no idea what he’s doing, so our energy security is in the hands of devoted public employees who are not morons like him. He didn’t even take a briefing from staff, and has left day to day management to lieutenants, who are more interested in promoting the oil and coal industries and couldn’t care less about nuclear security or resilience of the power grid.
Even worse, budgets for data collection have been slashed. That includes everything from weather data at NOAA to climate science and food safety and the USDA. Essentially, the federal bureaucracy has been set adrift with slashed funding and no appointed leadership. Career employees have been either ignored or fired, and so the US is essentially blind to threats against everything from our power grid to pharmaceuticals to nuclear weapons.
This bungling of management of the government is certainly incompetence on the part of Trump and his cronies; but that is not the only problem. There is the profit motive. If Trump succeeds in cutting off weather data from the public, then private providers of that data are then free to sell it for a profit. And since that data is critical to state and local governments, farmers, ranchers, distribution companies, then the value of their monopoly of critical data is virtually limitless.
The Trump administration is nothing but a gigantic robber baron scheme. The rich get richer, government services crumble and private companies receive soaring profits. Lewis’s book should be a wakeup call, but I fear no one who can do anything is paying attention. And that is when the threat you’ve never even thought about thinking about strikes with tragic consequences.
Don’t say I didn’t tell you so.
