The Fifth Risk — Michael Lewis (2018)
The Fifth Risk begins promisingly with a compelling demonstration of the cynical and incompetent Trump transition to governance, but then fades with a repetitive series of portraits of career federal employees who quietly and competently manage their federal departments.
The book opens as Michael Lewis paints a memorable and priceless scene when, on the day after the election, Jared Kushner, acting through Steve Bannon, ousts Chris Christie as chair of the transition team. This allows Kushner to not only avenge Christie’s prosecution years before of Kushner’s father for fraud, but also empowers Kushner to fill coveted government political positions with his buddies.
Christie: you sold your soul for nuttin’!
It turns out that a federal law requires the candidates of both political parties, prior to the election, to create transition management plans in anticipation of winning the presidency. It also turns out a federal law requires the outgoing President to mobilize the federal agencies to assist the President-elect’s transition team to take over management of each federal agency.
The promise of Michael Lewis’ book is an inside look at this handoff at three federal agencies (Energy, Commerce and Agriculture). It is easy to guess how that went. No spoiler here. Obama’s teams in each agency prepared exhaustive binders of information explaining the roles and risks of the agency. In the few cases where Trump actually appointed people to manage the agencies in the first year of his administration, those people certainly did not look at the materials or even chat with the outgoing experts of those agencies.
There are two major flaws with Lewis’ book. The first is obvious – and it led to the second flaw. The first flaw is that every story is the same – each agency works extremely hard to hand the ball to Trump’s folks, and every ball is dropped. Lewis attempts to overcome this sameness by describing the amazing work of these three agencies, but doing the same thing three times feels like a horse is being beaten. Just how many times can you describe the set-up: an agency gathers its briefing materials, assembles its experts, prepares its best conference room with coffee and danish, and awaits the incoming Trump team on the day after the Inauguration — only to find that no one shows up.
That first flaw leads to the second flaw. The story of each of the agencies is worthy of a long magazine article, but together they do not have the heft worthy of a book. Lewis makes up for the sameness by introducing us to the incredible risks managed by these agencies, such as the $100 billion project managed by the Department of Energy in Oregon to stop the flow of nuclear weapon waste into the Columbia River.
It feels like Lewis started with an interesting angle, but then had to find filler to make it a book. As the book dragged a bit, I was befuddled by the detail Lewis allotted to NOAA within the Department of Commerce. It was interesting, but it went on disproportionately long compared to the descriptions of the other agencies.
Prior to publishing The Fifth Risk, Lewis released audio on Audible called The Coming Storm. Lewis was one of the first writers to sign on for the audio-first publication strategy of Audible. The Coming Storm consisted of the NOAA portion of The Fifth Risk, which explains why the discussion of NOAA was clearly the core that Lewis had developed as a standalone piece.
The book provides value by debunking the common assumption of government as a bureaucracy of mundane clerical workers who do their best to thwart the efficiency and productivity of private enterprise. Who knew that some agencies have investment funds to seed innovative technology projects that are otherwise too cutting-edge to attract private capital – and that some of these projects have gone on to spearhead the American edge in worldwide business? Or that the routine reports of weather data around the globe collected by NOAA over many years now afford American farmers with the ability seed and monitor their fields at the granular level of a single square meter?
Or that 20% of 6,000 senior governmental managers left in Trump’s first year…
On her NY Times Book Review podcast, Pamela Paul asked Lewis how we can turn around the neglect of the federal government by both Trump and many of his predecessors. His reply was wistful — perhaps the government will so badly fail that the American people will wake up to the need to fund and appreciate the government.
Bob Fall 