Saturday, November 10, 2018

The Fifth Risk: Barbarians Breaching the Governmental Gates


A Michael Lewis book is always an interesting read.  His latest effort, The Fifth Risk, is certainly interesting, but it is much more than that.  It should be a mandatory read for those who view government programs as valuable and necessary contributors to society.  It should also be required reading for all those who believe that government programs are a waste of money and they are populated by freeloaders not competent enough to get hired in the private sector.

One might expect that the nature of the fifth risk would be revealed in a subtitle, but Lewis takes a different path.  He believes the reader might not appreciate the enormity of the fifth risk until he/she receives a bit of an education.  The book cover merely contains a sloppily constructed column of wooden blocks.  One knows the blocks are representing something about our country because glimpses of the stars and stripes are visible on some edges.  The construct is reminiscent of the pile of blocks used in the movie version of Lewis’s The Big Short by one of the characters to illustrate how the failure of one block to provide support could lead to the failure of the entire structure.  It seems to represent some aspect of the United States being at risk of collapse.  One assumes that it is some form of attack on Donald Trump and his administration—and it is—but it is much more than that.  It is also a letter of praise and a thank you to all those unknown and unappreciated federal workers who do the work we may know nothing about, but which is critical in keeping us safe, healthy, and prosperous.  That is why everyone should read this book.

Lewis introduces the reader to several cabinet-level departments in the federal government.  Here the focus will be on the first he encounters—the one in which he is introduced to the fifth risk—the Department of Energy (DOE).  This organization has a very broad mandate beyond what one might think of in terms of energy.  Only a quarter of its roughly $30 billion budget is devoted to fossil fuel, nuclear, and renewable sources of energy and their issues.  The remainder is devoted to various aspects of the nuclear weapons complex.  Two thirds of that is associated with maintaining the nuclear arsenal and one third is devoted to cleaning up the mess created by nuclear weapons production plants in the past.

One might wonder why this collection of activities ended up in one department.  Partly it derives from the desire to keep nuclear weapons technologies under civilian control.  And partly it is because all these activities involve big, expensive scientific research.  The DOE owns the system of national laboratories where much of the nation’s long-term research is performed.

“…the best argument for shoving together the Manhattan Project, nuclear-waste disposal and clean-energy research was that underpinning all of it was Big Science—the sort of scientific research that requires multi-billion-dollar particle accelerators.  The DOE ran the seventeen national labs—Brookhaven, the Fermi National Accelerator Lab, Oak Ridge, the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, and so on.”

As one former DOE manager put it:

“The Office of Science in DOE is not the Office of Science for DOE…it is the Office of Science for all science in America.”

The oversight of nuclear weapons activities extends into areas beyond designing, manufacturing, and assessing continued viability of the nuclear weapons stockpile.

“Two billion [dollars] goes to hunting down weapons grade plutonium and uranium at loose in the world so that it doesn’t fall into the hands of terrorists.  In eight years alone—2010-2018—the DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration collected enough material to make 160 nuclear bombs.  The department trains every international atomic-energy inspector; if nuclear power plants around the world are not producing weapons-grade material on the sly by reprocessing spent fuel rods and recovering plutonium, its because of these people.”

The DOE routinely sends its experts to major public events to search for evidence of a possible terrorist strike.  For example, radiation levels are monitored in order to detect a bomb laced with radioactive materials, a so-called dirty bomb, before it can be detonated.

The DOE plays a critical role in advancing technologies that are too long-term or too risky, or just too expensive for private industry to deal with.  Examples include nuclear reactor technologies and controlled fusion concepts.  It helped get the electric vehicle and solar power industries get started.

“Every Tesla you see on the road came from a facility financed by the DOE.  Its loans to early-stage solar energy companies launched the industry.  There are now thirty-five viable utility-scale, privately funded solar companies—up from zero a decade ago.”

Given the scale and importance of DOE responsibilities, its former director, Ernest Moniz asked John MacWilliams to assume the role of chief risk officer.  It became his job to evaluate the potential and actual situations that have arisen or could arise and insure that the DOE was focusing its resources appropriately.  Lewis went to visit MacWilliams, who is no longer at the DOE, and asked him what he thought were the five biggest risks the DOE needs to be addressing.  Tellingly, no one from the new administration thought to ask him that question.

The first risk on MacWilliams’s list is an accident with a nuclear weapon.

“’It’s a thing Rick Perry should worry about every day,’ he says.”

Lewis asks, naively, whether there have ever been any significant accidents.  MacWilliams is hampered by DOE classification limitations and suggests he search on the term “Broken Arrow.”  That term has been used to describe an accident with a nuclear device that did not lead to a nuclear detonation.  Then MacWilliams describes a recently declassified event that happened in 1961.

“A pair of 4-megaton hydrogen bombs, each more than 250 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, broke off a damaged B-52 over North Carolina.  One of the bombs disintegrated upon impact, but the other floated down beneath its parachute and armed itself.”

Actually, it didn’t fully arm itself.  The scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratory spend a good deal of their time, and the DOE’s budget, making sure that nuclear devices can only detonate in the manner they were designed for.  That means electrical and environmental checks are in place to validate the device is being used as its designers and Department of Defense users intended.  All other environments must not lead to a nuclear detonation.  No type of impact, no fire conditions, and no access by a terrorist should allow a nuclear explosion.  Radioactive material, however, can be dispersed in any of those scenarios.

“It was later found in a field outside Goldsboro, North Carolina, with three of its four safety mechanisms tripped or rendered ineffective by the plane’s breakup.  Had the fourth switch flipped, a vast section of eastern North Carolina would have been destroyed, and nuclear fallout might have descended on Washington, DC, and New York City.”

MacWilliams indicates that North Korea would be second on his risk list.

“…there lately have been signs that the risk of some kind of attack by North Korea is increasing.  The missiles the North Koreans have been firing into the sea are not the absurd acts of a lunatic mind but experiments.  Obviously, the DOE is not the only agency inside the U.S. government trying to make sense of these experiments, but the people inside the national labs are the world’s most qualified to determine just what North Korea’s missiles can do.”

Third on the list would come Iran.  DOE experts were critical in helping devise a treaty that would insure that Iran could not produce a nuclear device from uranium enriched by centrifuges, from plutonium enriched by nuclear reactors, or by buying a weapon or the needed weapon materials from some entity. 

“After the deal was done, U.S. Army officers had approached DOE officials to thank them for saving American lives.  The deal, they felt sure, had greatly lessened the chance of yet another war in the Middle East that the United States would be dragged into.”

At the time of Lewis’s conversation, the risk was not that Iran would secretly figure out a way to acquire a nuclear weapon, it was that the U.S. president would not understand the issues and back away from the deal.  And that is exactly what Trump decided to do.

The forth risk listed by MacWilliams involved the nation’s electrical grid.

“…we don’t actually have a national grid.  Our electricity is supplied by a patchwork of not terribly innovative or imaginatively managed regional utilities.  The federal government offers the only hope of a coordinated, intelligent response to threats to the system: there is no private sector mechanism.”

The grid had proved highly vulnerable to physical attack on subsystems, but cyber attacks have become the most serious threat.

“In 2016 the DOE counted half a million cyber intrusions into various parts of the U.S. grid.”

“To that end the DOE had begun to gather the executives of the utility companies, to educate them about the threats they face.  ‘They all sort of said “But is this really real?”’ said MacWilliams.  ‘You get them security clearance for a day and tell them about the attacks and all of a sudden you see their eyes go really wide’.”

When asked about the fifth risk, MacWilliams had a simple reply.

“Project management.”

These discussions with MacWilliams and other things he had learned about DOE efforts had convinced Lewis that the department has responsibility for some really important activities.  The implication of the fifth risk is that the department assembled over decades as new issues arose could collapse under incompetent or corrupt leadership.

One thing that must be understood about the federal workforce is that the greater the expertise and responsibility that one acquires, the lower is the pay relative to what can be earned in the private sector with equivalent levels of knowledge and responsibility.  High-level people do not come to the government for the money, they come to be of service.  If they believe their work is no longer appreciated or they can no longer be of service, they can leave.  And they take their experiential base with them.  Much of the technical knowledge required for DOE projects consists of things that are not taught in schools.  For the system to work properly, older workers must hang around long enough to impart what they have learned on the job to new employees.  If your experts suddenly decide to walk away, they take their knowledge with them.

So, if project management is such a risk, how is the Trump administration doing in managing the DOE?  Lewis gave a clue when he began his tale with this tweet from Trump on November 15, 2016.

“Very organized process taking place as I decide on Cabinet and many other positions.  I am the only one who knows who the finalists are!”

Every time a new administration takes office it installs a lot of people in power who might have little prior knowledge about a particular department’s activities.  Someone has to provide them with that knowledge.

“To address that problem, a year before he left office, Barack Obama had instructed a lot of knowledgeable people across his administration, including fifty or so inside the DOE, to gather the knowledge his successor would need in order to understand the government he or she was taking charge of.  The Bush administration had done the same for Obama, and Obama had been grateful for their efforts.  He told his staff that their goal should be to ensure an even smoother transfer of power than the Bush people had achieved.”

“Thousands of people inside the federal government had spent the better part of a year drawing a vivid picture of it for the benefit of the new administration.”

On the day after the election it was expected that a squad of new administration people would descend on DOE to begin the transition.  At least 30 people were expected who would be presented with all the briefing materials that had been assembled.  No one showed up.  It would be weeks before any semblance of a transition team was encountered.

“The one concrete action the Trump transition team took before inauguration day was the attempt to clear the DOE and other federal agencies of people appointed by Obama.  It was traditional that political appointees stay around long enough to ensure their replacement knew what they needed to know.  But Trump’s people had no interest in learning what they didn’t know.”

“In the run-up to the Trump inauguration, the man inside the DOE in charge of the nuclear weapons program—Frank Klotz was his name—was required to submit his resignation, as were the department’s 137 other political appointees.  Frank Klotz was a retired three-star air force lieutenant general with a PhD in politics from Oxford.  The keeper of the nation’s nuclear secrets had boxed up most of his books and memorabilia like everyone else and was on his way out before anyone had apparently given the first thought to who might replace him.  It was only after Secretary Moniz called U.S. senators to alert them to the disturbing vacancy, and the senators called Trump Tower sounding alarmed, that the Trump people called General Klotz and—on the day before Donald Trump was inaugurated as the forty-fifth president of the United States—asked him to bring back the stuff he had taken home and move back into his office.  Aside from him, the people with the most intimate knowledge of the problems and possibilities of the DOE walked out the door.”

Trump showed his contempt for the department and its employees by naming Rick Perry, a former Texas governor, who is most famous for claiming he wanted to eliminate the DOE but couldn’t remember the name of the department on national television.

In his confirmation hearings Perry confessed that he didn’t understand all the things the DOE did and now didn’t want to eliminate it.  He claimed he had subsequently learned a lot from briefings presented by the former secretary, Ernest Moniz.  However, a quite different picture of Perry emerges when DOE employees are asked about Perry’s education.

“With the nuclear physicist who understood the DOE perhaps better than anyone else on earth Perry had spent minutes, not hours.  “He has no personal interest in understanding what we do and effecting change,’ a DOE staffer told me in June 2017.  ‘He’s never been briefed on a program—not a single one, which to me is shocking’.”

“Since Perry was confirmed, his role has been ceremonial and bizarre.  He pops up in distant lands and tweets in praise of this or that DOE program while his masters inside the White House create budgets to eliminate those very programs.”

The people who have power in the DOE derive that power directly from people within the White House.  Perry seems to have nothing to do with it.  About these people Lewis received this quote from a career staffer.

“There’s a lack of professionalism.  They’re not very polite.  Maybe they’ve never worked in an office or government setting.  It’s not hostility so much as a real sense of concern with sharing information with career employees.  Because of that lack of communication, nothing is being done.  All policy questions remain unanswered.”

It is not clear whether any of those briefings produced for the transition team that didn’t exist were actually presented to anyone.  Certainly, no one had any interest in MacWilliams’s cataloguing of the risks faced by DOE.

“My team prepared its own books.  They were never given to anybody.  I never had a chance to sit with Trump people and tell them what we are doing, even for a day.  And I’d have done it for weeks.  I think this is a sad thing.  There are things you want to know that would keep you up at night.  And I never talked to anyone about them”

Lewis sees a strategy in the Trump administration’s willful ignorance.

“If your ambition is to maximize short-term gain without regard to long-term cost, you are better off not knowing the 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 it a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a worldview.”


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