The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis
“Michael Lewis’s, The Fifth Risk” writes Carlos Lozada in Washington Post,” looks like a book — it has hard covers, chapters, acknowledgments and the rest — but it reads like a love letter. It is a love letter to underappreciated people and old-fashioned notions, and to underappreciated people holding fast to old-fashioned notions. With Trump-era politics turning Washington into Crazytown, Lewis has written a countercultural, almost subversive, book: one that praises the intellectual curiosity, dedication, foresight and sense of mission he finds among America’s federal workers ….”
I couldn’t find better words to describe this book. The Fifth Risk sheds light on Trump’s chaotic transition and the mismanagement of several core federal agencies. It reveals what is happening when agencies and branches of government are under attack by their own government. What happens when the leader of a country believes that something it’s only good if it’s good for him and his family.
Michael Lewis paints a dire picture of the disinterest, mismanagement and chaos in three government departments during the troubled transition period from Barack Obama to the Trump White House and his government’s wilful ignorance of the federal bureaucracy. The book has three main chapters that examine the Departments of Energy, Agriculture, and Commerce respectively.
The department of Energy (DOE) doesn’t just administer the United States’ energy policy. It also manages the country’s nuclear infrastructure, and it is responsible for preventing the accidental explosions of its nuclear weapons. And yet, Rick Perry, the current Secretary of Energy, once campaigned to abolish the $30 billion agency.
The department of Agriculture (USDA) should be called something else because only about 8 percent of its budget has anything to do with farming. It’s actually the department responsible for feeding people–with the food stamps or nutrition programs for children and poor pregnant women. (It is now called SNAP program).
And finally, the department of Commerce which has very little to do directly with commerce, and it’s in fact forbidden by law from engaging in business. Michael Lewis says that it should really be called the Department of Information or the Department of Data because that is what it does. It collects data on the United States’ economy, population, and environment. It collects data on weather and climate. The National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are inside the Department of Commerce. The choice of Barry Myers, a businessman and a lawyer, head of private weather firm AccuWeather, with no meteorology or science training of any kind is striking. AccuWeather makes heavy use of the NOAA data, which, by the way, is free and available to the public. Not only there was a conflict of interest, but this appointment represented an attempt to dismantle NOAA through privatisation.
These three departments are dealing with some of the most powerful risks facing humanity. Thus, one would say, a new government would want to pay special attention to them. During the transition period the people who run these three crucial departments were prepared and waited to welcome the incoming administration’s transition teams. But nothing happened. When finally, after months in some cases, someone appeared, he (it was usually a he) was totally inappropriate for the job, and he was more interesting in removing climate change data from the agencies’ websites, than filling jobs or learning about the department. This shouldn’t be unexpected, Trump was backed by fossil fuel people, he is hostile to the idea of climate change.
“Here’s is where the Trump administration’s wilful ignorance plays a role,” writes Michael Lewis. “If your ambition is to maximize short-term gain without regard to long-term cost, you are better off not knowing this cost. If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it’s better never to really understand those problems. There is an upside to ignorance, and a downside to knowledge. Knowledge makes life messier. It makes a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a worldview.”
The five risks in the book, according to John MacWilliams who worked at the Department of Energy during the Obama administration investigating risks, are:
An accident with nuclear weapons
North Korea
Iran
The electric grid
Project Management