January 18

The Fifth Risk (2018)
By Michael Lewis

I discovered this title on the NY Times list of 100 Notable Books of 2018, with an intriguing short summary:

Lewis brings his breezy style to an examination of three government departments, Energy, Agriculture and Commerce, shining a light on the life-or-death work these agencies perform, and showing how the Trump administration is doing what it can to undermine them.

Of the many books I've read about the current administration, this one is the most frightening.  Lewis, expanding on several articles that originally appeared in Vanity Fair, highlights the workings of three cabinet departments: Energy, Agriculture and Commerce.  He opens the book with comments by Chris Christie, who was initially tasked with building the Trump transition team.  Unfortunately, he was ousted early on by Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon, who did not want to waste time or money on a transition process - until they learned candidates were required by federal law to produce organize a transition.  This book illustrates not only how miserably the inept and inexperienced campaign failed in their task of assigning new cabinet secretaries and filling the highest level positions, but also in what a frighteningly dangerous situation they have now placed our country.  As one reviewer (see BarringtonLibrary.org, catalog entry for The Fifth Risk) put it, "If nothing else scares you about the current administration, reading this book WILL do the job."

Lewis points out that ~70% of US government employees are employed in some form of national security.  The Dept of Energy's John MacWilliams cites five major risks to US security: a domestic accident with nuclear weapons,North Korea, Iran, and attack on the electrical grid, and the fifth risk: Failures in project management.

The DOE is currently headed by Rick Perry, who had famously suggested the department be abolished, although he now admits he hadn't actually known what the department did. (Does he know what it does now?)  Perry's predecessor as Energy Secretary was Ernie Moniz (PhD in theoretical physics from Stanford and former MIT faculty member), who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal.  In return for the US lifting sanctions, Iran had dismantled and removed their reactor (needed to produce plutonium) and was unable to produce uranium (no centrifuges); all of this is monitored by the DOE and had greatly reduced the chance of yet another Middle East war.  That is, until the current president, unable to understand the scientific reasoning about the unlikelihood of the Iranians obtaining a weapon, foolishly pulled the US out of the deal.

The Dept of Agriculture is headed by chicken magnate Sonny Perdue.  One of his first actions was to undo the dietary guidelines (whole grains, more fruits and vegetables, less sodium, no artificially sweetened milk, etc) introduced by the Obama administration.

Newly appointed Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross (the oldest first-time cabinet appointee in US history) had claimed to own a fortune of some $3.7B, creating some concern over his missing income taxes; lo and behold, he actually had a mere $700M but had wanted to qualify in the Forbes' 400 and lied about his wealth. (Imagine!)  Ross was surprised to learn that the Commerce Dept actually dealt more in issues of weather (NOAA falls under its umbrella) than in commerce.  Barry Myers was appointed to head up NOAA, but has thus far been unable to be confirmed due to his conflict of interest issues.  A lawyer whose family owns Accuweather, Myers would like to make the National Weather Service's data unavailable to the public, and instead only available through for-profit sites such as Accu-Weather (Sen Rick Santorum, of Myers's home state, had actually proposed such legislation, but it failed to pass).  Any references to climate change are, meanwhile, no longer available on government sites.

It's hard to do justice to Michael Lewis's important book.  It is very readable (I finished it in two sittings).  He cites just three departments.  If they are typical, each one does a range of critical research and work that most of us know very little about; it is crucial that Congress and we the people act soon to stop the destruction of so many essential part of our government.  What we don't know can kill us!