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.”
The interested reader might find the following articles
informative:
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