The Fifth Risk

“Most of the big problems inside the U.S. government were of the practical management sort and had nothing to do with political ideology.”

Lewis’s book is not meant to be partisan, and he notes critiques of both the Bush and the Obama transitions into office in the Preface. Rather, his main argument is about project management and how the Trump administration did not take steps to prepare to run the government. He also uses this quote to introduce the importance of a smooth transition into office after a new election, believing that it can alleviate some of the issues that hinder productivity within the government.

“On his visits to the White House soon after the election, Jared Kushner expressed surprise that so much of its staff seemed to be leaving. ‘It was like he thought it was a corporate acquisition or something,’ says an Obama White House staffer. ‘He thought everyone just stayed.’” 

Lewis sets up the Preface so that the reader knows that the Trump campaign did not seem to understand the importance of preparing for a presidential transition. This excerpt cements this idea, as Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor, appears to be confused about what exactly happens during a change in government. It also underscores that Chris Christie’s work to hire for approximately 500 government positions that would need filling after the election would have been beneficial had he not been fired and his work discarded.

“There might be no time in the history of the country when it was so interesting to know what was going on inside these bland federal office buildings—because there has been no time when those things might be done ineptly, or not done at all. But if you want to know how the DOE works—the problems it manages, the fears that keep its employees awake at night, the things it does you just sort of assume will continue being done—there’s no real point in being inside the DOE. Anyone who wants a blunt, open assessment of the risk inherent in the United States government now has to leave to find it.”

Lewis frames his first interview with John MacWilliams as the briefing that a Trump staffer should have conducted with the Department of Energy’s chief risk officer. Not only does this quote reiterate the Trump administration’s lack of preparedness, but it also frames Lewis’s approach to The Fifth Risk. In this book, he conveys his findings from interviews on the risks present every day in the government. This quote can also impart an underlying concern: that the Trump presidency, still in full swing when Lewis’s book was published, was not managing these risks.

“The Office of Science in DOE is not the Office of Science for DOE,’ said MacWilliams. ‘It’s the Office of Science for all science in America. I realized pretty quickly that it was the place where you could work on the two biggest risks to human existence, nuclear weapons, and climate change.” 

Part of Lewis’s reasoning for selecting the departments of Energy, Agriculture, and Commerce is to reveal what they do, since they aren’t always in the public eye. Here, he uses MacWilliams’s quote to explain the role that science plays in this department. Lewis wants it to be clear that science forms the backbone of the work toward addressing problems like nuclear energy and climate change. Another one of Lewis’s themes is that of climate change; this quote from John MacWilliams names it explicitly as a risk, and Lewis uses it as a segue into talking about government employees as dedicated to addressing these problems.

“At any rate, the serious risk in Iran wasn’t that the Iranians would secretly acquire a weapon. It was that the president of the United States would not understand his nuclear scientists’ reasoning about the unlikelihood of the Iranians obtaining a weapon, and that he would have the United States back away foolishly from the deal. Released from the complicated set of restrictions on its nuclear-power program, Iran would then build its bomb. It wasn’t enough to have the world’s finest forensic nuclear physicists. Our political leaders needed to be predisposed to listen to them and equipped to understand what they said.” 

The Fifth Risk was written at the beginning of the Trump presidency, and this section links to one of the few footnotes in the book. In it, Lewis connects a choice President Trump made to the prescient risks he highlights in his narrative. Trump chose to pull the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal, and Lewis is able to use information he gathered during his interviews along with that real-life action to show how Trump was not listening to researchers and to the recommendations made by the previous administration in the DOE. Additionally, this connection returns to the tension between knowledge and ignorance within this text. Lewis uses it to show that politicians must make a choice between listening to scientists and ignoring their recommendations.

“The idea that the private sector underinvests in energy innovation is the origin story of the DOE. […] Existing energy businesses—oil companies, utilities—are obviously hostile to government-sponsored competition. At the same time, they are essentially commodity businesses, without a lot of fat in them. The stock market does not reward even big oil companies for research and development that will take decades to pay off. And the sort of research that might lead to huge changes in energy production often doesn’t pay off for decades. Plus it requires a lot of expensive science: discovering a new kind of battery or a new way of capturing solar energy is not like creating a new app.”

Lewis frequently gives an inside look at government work, basing it on the assumption that most people are not aware of what federal employees do on a day-to-day basis. He often refers to programs funded by the government that the average person may not be aware of. In this excerpt, Lewis illustrates the fact that the government often has to invest in research that would not otherwise be done because large companies see no benefit to spending the money to fund it.

“The risk we should most fear is not the risk we easily imagine. It is the risk that we don’t.” 

This excerpt gets to the heart of Lewis’s argument that we should be concerned that the Trump campaign and administration did not prepare to take control of the federal government, because they were therefore not ready to address unexpected challenges that could pose a serious threat to the country. The whole book is dedicated to discussing what might happen as a result of their unpreparedness.

“There is another way to think of John MacWilliams’s fifth risk: the risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions ‘Program management’ is not just program management. ‘Program management’ is the existential threat that you never really even image as a risk. Some of the things any incoming president should work about are fast-moving: pandemics, hurricanes, terrorist attacks. But most are not. Most are like bombs with very long fuses that, in the distant future, when the fuse reaches the bomb, might or might not explode. It is delaying repairs to a tunnel filled with lethal waste until, one day, it collapses […] It is the innovation that never occurs, and the knowledge that is never created, because you have ceased to lay the groundwork for it. It is what you never learned that might have saved you.” 

Lewis names his book not after the threat of a nuclear accident or the fragility of the energy grid; rather, The Fifth Risk refers to project management, a seemingly mundane skill that Lewis asserts is absolutely crucial for government employees, the president most of all. His reference to “a tunnel filled with lethal waste” is to Hanford, Washington, the site of millions of gallons of nuclear waste and the primary example of the ways that short-term solutions have been used in places where long-term solutions are needed.

“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 tension between knowledge and ignorance that is a key theme in The Fifth Risk. For Lewis, it is also the primary reason that the Trump administration does not fund research: They want to preserve their worldview without really understanding all sides of it. This quote ties that tension with the risk of using short-term solutions to fix long-term problems. The Trump administration, in Lewis’s view, is not concerned with what problems it will leave the next president and their Cabinet; instead, it wishes to ignore to these difficult issues.

“‘All the risks are science-based,’ said John MacWilliams when he saw the budget. ‘You can’t gut the science. If you do, you are hurting the country. If you gut the core competency of the DOE, you gut the country.’ But you can. Indeed, if you are seeking to preserve a certain worldview, it actually helps to gut science. Trump’s budget, like the social forces behind it, is powered by a perverse desire—to remain ignorant. Donald Trump didn’t invent this desire. He was just its ultimate expression.” 

Lewis gives examples of scientific research of all types across the three departments he discusses, and MacWilliams’s quote applies across the board. Lewis also invokes Trump himself here. Aside from the Preface and a few mentions, the president does not appear much in Lewis’s narrative; rather, we see how his ideology and approach trickled down to each department, manifesting how he, as the “ultimate expression” of ignorance, imparted it to his appointees. By saying that Trump “didn’t invent this desire,” Lewis speaks to a larger movement and a fear that this approach to governance will continue even after Trump’s term as president.

“‘I’m sitting there looking at this,’ said Ali. ‘The USDA had subsidized the apartment my family had lived in. The hospital we used. The fire department. The town’s water. The electricity. It had paid for the food I had eaten.’” 

This quote comes from Ali Zaidi, a Republican-turned-Democrat who worked for the Office of Management and Budget. Lewis offers Zaidi’s background as a Pakistani immigrant whose family had encountered economic hardship and received support from government programs when he was growing up. Zaidi’s realization that much of the support he, his town, and his family had received came from the USDA touches on the recurring notion that not many recognize what the government does and how it can affect their lives. It was not until Zaidi has an inside look that he himself understood. Part of Lewis’s goal in writing this book is to provide a similar realization for his readers.

“‘At most of the federal agencies, there were no real briefings,’ says a former senior White House official who watched the process closely. ‘They were basically for show. The Trump transition sent in these teams in the end just to say they were doing it.”

This comment from a White House staffer gets to Lewis’s argument that we first see in the Preface: Trump didn’t really care to invest in the transition. While Steve Bannon and Chris Christie told him that he was required by law to prepare to take office, he still wanted the transition shut down. In most cases, very few from the Trump team even showed up in the days following the election, hence Lewis’s approach to the book. This quote also notes that, when Trump staffers did finally show up, they did so only to check a box, not necessarily to listen to and learn from their predecessors. Lewis makes this case on several occasions, with appointees sitting for an hour or two to listen to the Obama administrators rather than spending days working with them to learn the inner workings of each department.

“These undersecretaries and deputy secretaries occupy public offices, but they are not really public figures: no one outside the department knows their names or faces. And their little boxes are not equally exposed to the whims and idiocies of any given presidential administration. The question of the day, at least seems to me, is: Where in these little boxes [referring to the organizational chart] is the greatest damage likely to be done, through neglect or mismanagement or malice?”

In this section, Lewis takes some time to explain how he will approach the USDA. Lewis is again backing up the notion that his criticism of the Trump transition is not because of a political bias in one direction or the other. Using the chart on the previous page, he provides a full illustration of the method specific to this chapter. Furthermore, Lewis’s interviews illustrate a real fear of “neglect or mismanagement or malice” of what the Trump appointees will do while they have control of the government.

“In Kansas, Concannon had explained to an executive who oversaw the state’s food-stamp program how he had made it easier for people in Oregon who were going hungry to access their program. ‘He said, “Jeez, if we did that we’d have more people coming in the door.” And I said, “Yeah, but isn’t that the idea?”’” 

Concannon’s anecdote offers some credence to the average person’s concern that those in government don’t care about the public. However, Lewis tries to counter this misconception by not only interviewing but also giving some background on dedicated federal employees who worked in the pre-Trump administrations and labored tirelessly to manage the risks accompanying their specific department. In Concannon’s case, Lewis shows how he is trying to make the food-stamp program more accessible so that people can access their benefits more easily while also mitigating fraud since a common criticism is that some access the program without meeting its requirements. As such, Lewis’s example also illustrates the fine line that many government officials walk between balancing uninformed criticism with the work that they do so that their programs continue to receive funding.

“Changes in agricultural science trigger changes in the structure of the society: where people live, what they do, what they value, the metaphors that naturally pop in their minds. Those changes have been driven by research funded by the Department of Agriculture, done inside the land-grant colleges created alongside it.” 

Lewis hits again on the theme that people are not aware of the ways that the government affects their daily lives. Here, he connects it directly with research being done and makes reference to the Morrill Act of 1862, which gave states money to found colleges like Virginia Tech and the University of Wisconsin. The same year, the Department of Agriculture was founded. Lewis’s quote also refers to the research funded by the US government, which is often conducted by public university partners. This research prepares long-term solutions for the imagined risks that may or may not become real as society changes and shifts. He is also making a subtle nod to climate change in mentioning “where people live.”

“The regulation side of things is, as a rule, less vulnerable to the short-term idiocy of a new administration than the money side of things. The big show Trump has made of removing regulations by executive order has done far less than he suggests, as there is a formal rule-changing process: you must solicit outside opinion, wait a certain amount of time for those opinions to arrive, and then deal with the inevitable legal challenges to your rule change. To increase the number of chickens a poultry company murders each minute might take years, even if it is the smart thing to do.”

Lewis makes a point to include mentions of funding of research throughout The Fifth Risk, and in this instance, he’s comparing the fragility of funding with more the difficult process of making changes to regulatory practices, which take much longer than one might imagine. This fact contrasts the ease with which an administration can add or cut funding to different departments or research. He also takes a jab at Trump’s claims that he has made leaps of progress using executive orders to alter regulations by noting that there is a whole process that must be followed in order to do so.

“The big messy federal government was still the only tool for dealing with what she saw as a growing crisis: the deconstruction of rural America. ‘It’s hard to quantify what it means not to have your entire town’s businesses shuttered up because Walmart moved there,’ she said. There was a hole in the American capital markets: they simply didn’t reach small towns. And there were lots of stats that suggested that society benefited from having small towns—and that small-town life made some important, perhaps undervalued contributes to the whole.” 

In writing this book, Lewis endeavors to educate his readers, and his interview with Lillian Salerno sheds lights on what the government does for rural America. This excerpt focuses on illustrating the ways that federal support works to mitigates risk for the everyday American by supporting small businesses whose existence can be threatened when a large retailer (like Walmart) moves into town. Lewis insists that this is done for a reason: Small towns do their part as well, as he also notes in this section that a greater proportion of the armed services are residents of rural America.

“The National Weather Service had seen the tornado and issued a warning. Her people had given these people what they needed to survive. And yet on May 22, 2011, more Americans had been killed by a single tornado than on any day in the past sixty-four years […] She might have said nothing. Just thrown up her hands in the privacy of her office and told herself it wasn’t her job to save people from their own stupidity. Instead she asked herself: What don’t we understand about our own citizens? She flew back to Washington and gathered the relevant parties—all of whom might have claimed credit for a job well done—and asked them, ‘Is anyone here happy about the outcome?’”

In the case of the Joplin tornado, the NWS had achieved its goal of giving Americans adequate time—more than usual, in this case—to escape the disaster. Still, the warning went unheeded, and people died as a result. While the objective goal had been achieved, Sullivan and her colleagues were unhappy and set themselves on a new task of understanding Americans better. For Lewis, this example serves the purpose of proving his argument that government officials are more than just bureaucrats while also reiterating that problems are solved using research so that the government can best serve its citizens. His notion of the shift between pre-Trump and Trump administrators is predicated on the existence of government workers like Sullivan and her team, who only feel success when they have saved lives, not just when they have hit their numerical goals of issuing earlier warnings.

“Without that data [from NOAA], and the Weather Service that made sense of it, no plane would fly, no bridge would be built, and no war would be fought—at least not well. The weather data was also the climate data. ‘If you don’t believe in climate change, you at least want to understand the climate,’ said the Bush official. And if you wanted to understand the climate, you needed to take special care of NOAA’s data.”

In many of Lewis’s books, data is key, and The Fifth Risk is no different. Data backs up research, which should back up policy decisions. For NOAA, data is especially critical to the inner workings of infrastructure, war, weather, and, of course, climate change. Lewis is aware that many people may not recognize that the data forms the backbone of these areas, and so he continues to weave this message about data into his narrative. Lewis also draws on his theme of climate change in this excerpt and example. The Bush official he mentions in this quote illustrates Lewis’s point that it’s not a political move to pay attention to climate data, but he uses a Republican president’s staffer to emphasize that it’s important to use data to pay attention to the climate.

“‘I don’t want someone who has a bottom line, or a concern with shareholders, in charge of saving lives and protecting property,’ he said. But it was more than that. To put Barry Myers in charge of NOAA was to give him control over maybe the most valuable and necessary pile of data that the U.S. government collects. ‘The more people have access to the weather data, the better it is for the country,’ said the Bush official. ‘There’s so much gold in there. People just don’t know how to get to it.’” 

Lewis tries to make a case for people to engage with some of the government’s data, and this quote from a Bush official emphasizes why it is important. This excerpt also implies the risk of not having data available: It’s worse for the country when people don’t have access to data. The use of the Bush official rather than an Obama-era official once again adds to Lewis’s argument that this is not a partisan issue. Rather, it’s a question of good practice in not letting someone who has a financial stake in government operations have a hand in deciding whether data should be available.

“She said something very insightful. She said working for the government, you need to imagine you are tied down, Gulliver-style. And if you want to even wiggle your big toe, first you need to ask permission. And that if you can imagine that and still imagine getting things done, you’ll get things done.”

DJ Patil refers to advice that he got from Kathy Sullivan that provides a look at the inner workings of the government. Lewis includes this advice to balance out his assertion that government officials are dedicated by noting that they are part of a system that isn’t completely efficient. In doing so, he provides insight into the way that the government operates without offering judgment on this inefficiency. At this point, he has laid some foundation about how a good transition can mitigate some of it, but his inclusion of Sullivan’s comment to Patil reinforces the fact that government employees must navigate their areas and do what they can to work inside of the system to make improvements. They must be dedicated to their work to do so as well.

“She got a new polar satellite, launched in November 2017, back on schedule, but with a twist: she arranged it so that the problems that had bedeviled her predecessors would not trouble her successors. […] There was no reason that NOAA could not budget for, and begin to plan, the next two, three, or four satellites; there were even economies of scale for some of the complicated parts. The problem was that no one in government liked to pay now if they could pay later. Nevertheless, she somehow persuaded the relevant parties in Congress and NOAA to make a deal for multiple satellites.” 

Kathy Sullivan is one of Lewis’s primary examples of an administrator who planned ahead for long-term problems, and her work in this instance helped to alleviate a further issue for her successor, increasing the efficiency of the NOAA. In much the same way, Lewis argues, continuing to improve transitions between presidential administrations will advance the efficiency of each succeeding administration, which is better for the country. However, just as he tells us here that the government prefers to put off such problems, he reinforces the inefficiency of not preparing adequately for the future. This notion has nothing to do with Trump and his transition, but Lewis makes it clear that when an unprepared transition team is added to a system that already does not like to prepare for the future, more problems arise, and the system as a whole becomes more inefficient.

“‘It’s hard to talk to dead people about the decisions they made,’ she said. ‘It’s one of the challenges we have. But I was trying to ask what they would do if they’d had more time.’ She interviewed survivors in Alabama and Mississippi and came away with a startling insight: time might be beside the point. It wasn’t that people who had apparently ignored the government’s alerts had been oblivious to them. ‘They were all aware of the warnings,’ she said. ‘It isn’t that people wantonly disregard warnings. It’s that they think it won’t hit them.’” 

This quote from Kim Klockow supports Lewis’s use of the tornado as a metaphor for a bad transition. Lewis notes early on how the Trump campaign didn’t take the transition into office seriously, even though Chris Christie had emphasized preparing for it and they had met with the Partnership for Public Service. Lewis uses this metaphor as a way of saying that because they didn’t heed the warnings, they would be unprepared for managing the risks that lay ahead. Because of this structure, Lewis is then able to imply the potentially devastating effects that are looming over the Trump administration as well. One disaster could have catastrophic effects for the government.