Why the Scariest Nuclear Threat May Be Coming from Inside the White House

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: Sun, Jul 30, 2017 at 1:45 PM
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Why the Scariest Nuclear Threat May Be Coming from
Inside the White House
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>


Why the Scariest Nuclear Threat May Be Coming from Inside the White House
Donald Trump’s secretary of energy, Rick Perry, once campaigned to abolish
the $30 billion agency that he now runs, which oversees everything from our
nuclear arsenal to the electrical grid. The department’s budget is now on
the chopping block. But does anyone in the White House really understand
what the Department of Energy actually does? And what a horrible risk it
would be to ignore its extraordinary, life-or-death responsibilities?
By MICHAEL LEWIS
Jul 26 2017
<
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/department-of-energy-risks-michael-lewis
>

On the morning after the election, November 9, 2016, the people who ran the
U.S. Department of Energy turned up in their offices and waited. They had
cleared 30 desks and freed up 30 parking spaces. They didn’t know exactly
how many people they’d host that day, but whoever won the election would
surely be sending a small army into the Department of Energy, and every
other federal agency. The morning after he was elected president, eight
years earlier, Obama had sent between 30 and 40 people into the Department
of Energy. The Department of Energy staff planned to deliver the same talks
from the same five-inch-thick three-ring binders, with the Department of
Energy seal on them, to the Trump people as they would have given to the
Clinton people. “Nothing had to be changed,” said one former Department of
Energy staffer. “They’d be done always with the intention that, either
party wins, nothing changes.”

By afternoon the silence was deafening. “Day 1, we’re ready to go,” says a
former senior White House official. “Day 2 it was ‘Maybe they’ll call us?’ ”

“Teams were going around, ‘Have you heard from them?’ ” recalls another
staffer who had prepared for the transition. “ ‘Have you gotten anything? I
haven’t got anything.’ ”

“The election happened,” remembers Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, then deputy
secretary of the D.O.E. “And he won. And then there was radio silence. We
were prepared for the next day. And nothing happened.” Across the federal
government the Trump people weren’t anywhere to be found. Allegedly,
between the election and the inauguration not a single Trump representative
set foot inside the Department of Agriculture, for example. The Department
of Agriculture has employees or contractors in every county in the United
States, and the Trump people seemed simply to be ignoring the place. Where
they did turn up inside the federal government, they appeared confused and
unprepared. A small group attended a briefing at the State Department, for
instance, only to learn that the briefings they needed to hear were
classified. None of the Trump people had security clearance—or, for that
matter, any experience in foreign policy—and so they weren’t allowed to
receive an education. On his visits to the White House soon after the
election, Trump’s son-in-law, 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.”

Even in normal times the people who take over the United States government
can be surprisingly ignorant about it. As a longtime career civil servant
in the D.O.E., who has watched four different administrations show up to
try to run the place, put it, “You always have the issue of maybe they
don’t understand what the department does.” To address that problem, a year
before he left office, Barack Obama had instructed a lot of knowledgeable
people across his administration, including 50 or so inside the D.O.E., to
gather the knowledge that 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 always 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.

That had proved to be a huge undertaking. 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. The United States
government might be the most complicated organization on the face of the
earth. Two million federal employees take orders from 4,000 political
appointees. Dysfunction is baked into the structure of the thing: the
subordinates know that their bosses will be replaced every four or eight
years, and that the direction of their enterprises might change
overnight—with an election or a war or some other political event. Still,
many of the problems our government grapples with aren’t particularly
ideological, and the Obama people tried to keep their political ideology
out of the briefings. “You don’t have to agree with our politics,” as the
former senior White House official put it. “You just have to understand how
we got here. Zika, for instance. You might disagree with how we approached
it. You don’t have to agree. You just have to understand why we approached
it that way.”

[snip]

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