Michael Lewis is something close to a one-trick pony, but it's a really neat trick. He takes a subject that's interesting to him, tracks down people who are recently retired from a lifetime doing that, and uses their biographies to explain the subject. So it's never a dry recitation of facts; it's a series of personal stories that tell why people learned certain things, how they learned certain things, how that changed their lives. Here, the author of The Big Short tackles a subject near and dear to my nerdy heart: government science laboratories. Because the "fifth risk" of the title came from a series of interviews with someone who'd done nuclear weapons research for the US government for years; his fifth risk, the fifth of five things that keep him awake at night, is the fear of what would happen if government science labs, like his, were mismanaged.
You see, the only reason why there are various mid-sized science labs scattered all over the US Departments of Energy, Agriculture, and Commerce is that there have been past disasters that nobody saw coming, and the public and Congress demanded that something be done to prevent each of those disasters from happening again, or to at least warn us when one is coming: plagues, poisoned food, floods, tornadoes, nuclear waste spills, terrorists trying to obtain plutonium, you name it. To that end, Congress established all these science labs which pay garbage, easily a fourth of what the private sector would pay. And that offer no prestige, because government science labs are prohibited from "advertising" their achievements. So the only reason they attract the best people -- and Lewis shows that they do, in fact, attract the best people -- is that they have the kind of money it takes to collect the BIG data, ALL the data; if you want to study certain subjects, those government labs are the only real place to do it.
And Lewis quotes lifers in these agencies, in these labs, as saying that all four of the last four presidents came into office knowing nothing about those labs and caring less. Clinton, Bush the Younger, Obama, and Trump all took the same attitude towards them: this was not why they went into politics, this is not something they cared about, this is not something they wanted to hear about, and no they weren't interesting in hearing anybody's argument for why they should care. At least not until, some time in their first six months to a year, something went wrong, or almost went wrong, that *made* them care.
Obama did something about it, once he learned to care. In January of '16, he ordered all of these departments to slow or stop what they were doing if they had to, but one way or another write an actual textbook for the next president. He wanted to present his successor with an entire bookcase full of books that were about "This is the department of whatever. This is why you care. This is what you should be looking for in an appointee to run them. This is how they work. And here are all the hard calls we had to make in the last seven years and why we made them the way we did." And they got it done.
You can probably imagine how Donald Trump reacted to a bookcase full of textbooks. But (and you may have already seen some reporting on this a year ago or more) he also screwed up in a whole new way, a way nobody has ever screwed up before. You see, there are about 1200 jobs that the president has to hire people to fill, political appointees who only serve until a few weeks after the next president takes office. Historically, both parties have been eager to fill those jobs, because it's an easy way to reward campaign volunteers and friends (and, say it softly, sometimes donors). Trump came into office flatly determined not to fill any of those offices, and only grudgingly let some actual hard-core industry lobbyists and other grafters take some of them.
Which means, Lewis documents, that the agency in charge of improving tornado predictions and tornado warnings has stopped hiring scientists, stopped working on the problem altogether, because the CEO of AccuWeather, who took the job, only wants them to concentrate on one thing: collecting data that they exclusively give to AccuWeather and making people pay Accuweather if they want to get tornado warnings. The new head of food safety research at the FDA, has been replaced by a guy who thinks that science is a terrible way to find out how to make food safe, that no scientist knows more about what food processors can do safely than food processor CEOs do. Even where it's neglect rather than fraud, nothing is getting done because nobody can sign off on hiring or promotions, or any negotiations with contractors, which (for example) is potentially screwing up work at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation which could, if safety is allowed to deteriorate, poison several whole states.
And throughout the book, Trump's attitude towards *any* attempt to predict or plan for or prepare for *any* part of the future, not just global warming but *anything,* is to say that he doesn't believe in that, he thinks it's all a waste of time and money. It is his firmly held belief that there is no possible problem that a smart guy like him can't solve in two hours. Over and over again, he insists on waiting until some deadline approaches or until after some disaster has occurred. Then he allocates exactly one hour or at most two hours to be briefed on the deadline or the disaster, and then he makes a decision based on his gut. He thinks that makes him smart.
Which means that when it comes to preventing disasters in the US, we've managed to find something worse than corruptly mismanaging disaster preparedness. We have now progressed to the point where the President of the United States is actively trying to stop people in his own government from trying to protect us from disasters.
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