Buried in the House of Cards - “The Fifth Risk” by Michael Lewis - Grant Hiskes
Picture from Amazon.com
If I had to credit one person for establishing my interest in reading, I think it would have to be Michael Lewis. Books like Liar’s Poker, Moneyball (I may have watched the movie first … what up Astin) and The Big Short (the movie is also one of my all-time favorites) all really drove curiosity in me. Now, his most recent book published in 2018, The Fifth Risk, is not as invigorating as his more recent books like Flash Boys or The Undoing Project (which btw, I would definitely make required reading for secondary school students if I had any authority in the matter). However, Lewis seems to admit this in the Acknowledgments, “as the material mushroomed into a book and threatened to receive more attention than I expected”. Something this book brings attention to is how distracted the American people seem to get with “presidential” politics and the show business aspect of the government that they lose sight of some of our government’s most critical elements, truly non-partisan issues that get lost in the sauce of CNN and Fox News coverage.
Before I lose you thinking that is another article of what we are championing today as “non-partisan” issues like social justice reform and stopping the spread of a global pandemic, this book was written a couple of years ago when the sentiments around these subjects were not nearly as strong. Instead, The Fifth Risk discusses other issues like those stemming from our nuclear weapons arsenal or natural disasters. With an undertone of a criticism of Trump and his inner circle’s negligence of some of these key roles with the prologue featuring stories from securing the GOP nomination for the 2016 election to the months after he officially took over the reigns as President. The prologue will make it pretty clear that Trump, with zero political experience, had no fucking clue as to what was supposed to happen between actually winning the election and being sworn in to actually run the country. It just so happens that his inner circle, which consisted primarily of his kids, Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon, and son-in-law Jared Kushner, did not really know what was going on either.
If you’re still in the race late enough in the election, a law exists where you must form a “transition team” to start vetting and planning your potential administration personnel in case you are elected so that the changing of power between the outbound and inbound administrations is as seamless as possible. With the President needing to make 1200 appointments that require confirmation by the Senate, doing this task without anywhere to start or any guidance is borderline impossible. Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was supposed to lead the transition team, but Trump did not want to take his money and do it. Christie received a berating from Trump at the Trump Tower, when Trump also called in his big brother, Steve Bannon, to make it stop. Bannon explained to Trump why this was necessary, and Trump finally seemed to understand. However, shortly after Election Day, Christie was dismissed from his duties. Without anyone overseeing the transition, many integral government agencies were left without a leader.
After the prologue, Lewis focuses on three key government agencies that were largely neglected between Obama’s guys leaving and someone new waiting to fill in: the Department of Energy, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the Department of Commerce. To my surprise, none of these government agencies happen to do what I had originally thought they did. I had always thought the Department of Energy was focused on the oil industry, and evidently that seems to be what Trump thought too when he nominated Rick Perry to be Secretary of the Department of Energy. Rick Perry served as the governor of the oil rich state of Texas (Hook ‘em) from 2000 to 2015, and infamously stated in a 2011 Presidential Debate that if he were president he would eliminate three agencies of government: commerce, education, and uh… he forgets the third but later said, the Department of Energy. So, obviously Perry was the logical option to head the Department of Energy, which happens to deal far more with nuclear power and safely maintaining nuclear weapons and waste than oil. Perry left his position on December 1, 2019.
The other agency whose role I was surprised by was the USDA. I had thought this would be an agency devoted to farmers. While they do deal with farmers, only a small portion of their $164 Billion budget is actually spent on farmers. The USDA is tasked with a multitude of other operations: running 193 million acres of national forest and grasslands, inspecting almost all of the animals Americans eat, running a massive science program, monitoring catfish farms, facilitating the free lunch programs for impoverished kids, and also managing the food stamps and food banks programs. David Perdue was named as Trump’s United States Secretary of Agriculture. Perdue the former Governor of Georgia and has no experience in anything even related to agriculture, nonetheless any of the other operations related to the USDA.
For the second half of the book, Lewis directs most energy towards the Department of Commerce, which, you guessed it, does not really have anything to do with commerce. As a matter of fact, the Department of Commerce is actually forbidden by law to engage in business. Some within the department think a more fitting name for the agency would be the Department of Data or the Department of Information. This agency is responsible for the US Census. $5 Billion of the agency’s roughly $9 Billion is devoted to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is the parent of the National Weather Service. The National Weather Service has data dating back to the early 1800s and releases 900 weather balloons twice a day every day. The data collected by the National Weather Service is what powers the websites or apps you use to check the weather like Weather Channel or AccuWeather. AccuWeather was one of the first for-profit weather companies. They are trying to make the government provide weather data less transparent, but they are also seeking to only share key weather warnings in advance for tropical storms, hurricanes, and tornadoes with their paying customers. The boss at AccuWeather? Barry Myers. Trump’s selection for Secretary of Commerce? Barry Myers.
Michael Lewis does not spend the whole book demonizing President Trump or his picks for these very important government positions. Instead, Michael Lewis goes about it in a much more professional way, sharing details on the conversations he has had with some of the most respected employees and past employees of these divisions. Lewis hypes up these public servant’s accomplishments, none who plead for recognition or seek to claim much credit, listens to the type of work they do, and their biggest concerns. So much of the book is dedicated to highlighting the excellent work and accomplishments of these lifelong government workers.
Even the 32-page afterword is largely devoted to discussing the accomplishments of Arthur A. Allen. Art Allen was an oceanographer in the Office of Search and Rescue within the US Coast Guard. You have probably never heard of him, but he is credited with developing the model built to predict where people lost at sea will be found. His model has drastically reduced search and rescue times and saved thousands of lives.
Lewis focuses so much on these true public servants to show that there are good people in the government, but when transitions are botched and faced with utter incompetence, the good of the government ceases to exist. Americans so rarely hear the stories of our true heroes because they are such modest individuals with not a whole lot of desire for clout, fame, and wealth. After all, working in the public sector tends to pay much lower compared to the private sector. These are the people who are serious about protecting and providing for us, but there is not really a platform for them to publicize this work. Even a US Congressman wanted to abolish the National Weather Service in favor of the Weather Channel and AccuWeather, not knowing those companies cannot function without the data from the National Weather Service.
It does not seem feasible to call for some sort of effort to ramp up publicity for the good work of these public servants. The work is critical to our nation’s continued protection, livelihood, and well-being, but it is not the most exhilarating work necessarily, or something the average American would be dying to hear about. The unfortunate aspect is that there seems to be a fairly large constituency of people in the country opposed to government in general. Americans are not constantly reminded of the good the government provides. Instead, their TV screens and social media feeds are inundated with strong feelings one way or another to the “faces” of American politics, today the likes of Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, etc. That’s the scary thing. We can shout and debate all we want about the morality of policy longshots like building a wall between the US and Mexico, yet we would probably not even notice if we had an ice cream truck driver in charge of sniffing out enriched uranium in Iran (it’s an exaggeration). I don’t know how we solve this issue, but taking the time to read books like The Fifth Risk might be a start.
