The Fifth Risk

Trump, the 45th president, does not appear in the book except in the Preface, but his shadow looms large. He was ardently opposed to the transition team’s existence, not wanting to pay for it out of the campaign’s funds. Lewis highlights some of Trump’s policy decisions in relation to what he has learned from his interviews, as when he discusses the Iran nuclear deal. The risk, Lewis writes, was that the president would not have the background information needed to understand the importance of the deal and that he would then have the United States back out of it. A footnote to this discussion reads, “Which is exactly what he [Trump] did” (62). Otherwise, the focus remains on the Trump transition team, administration, and appointees, but Lewis’s points about negligence in relation to preparing to run the government reflect not only on these individuals but also on the president himself.

John MacWilliams figures prominently in the first chapter of The Fifth Risk. His background is in law and finance: He went from a New York law firm to Goldman Sachs, where he specialized in the energy sector of investment banking. He later founded the Beacon Group, a private investment firm, leading a fund that looked specifically at the energy field. He met his future boss, Ernie Moniz, when he joined an MIT taskforce to study the future of nuclear power. When Moniz became the Energy Secretary, he became the Chief Risk Officer, a position focused on evaluating the Department of Energy’s financial risk. MacWilliams outlines five risks for Lewis, which are an accident with nuclear weapons, North Korea, Iran, the electrical grid, and project management. The last of these forms a major theme throughout the book.

Klippenstein was the first official to come to the Department of Agriculture from the Trump transition team. He ran an organization called Protect the Harvest, which focused on rights to farm, hunt, and fish. Trump’s choice of Klippenstein (or “Klip,” as he was known in the department) was an interesting one, given that Protect the Harvest often demonized organizations like the Humane Society, while the USDA mediates conflicts between people and animals and seeks to protect animals against abusive humans. Once in the USDA, Klip focused on climate change, and he asked for the names of the staffers working on that subject. A career USDA employee refused to give them to him. In this section, Klippenstein serves as an example of a Trump staff member whose interests seem to contradict that of the department where he’s been placed in addition to demonstrating the witch hunt after those who were studying the effects of climate change.

Cathie Woteki was a professor of human nutrition before working on and off at the USDA, where she eventually became the Undersecretary for Food Safety and then chief scientist during the Obama administration. Her role as head of the science within the division touches on science and climate change as a major theme within The Fifth Risk since she supervised a budget of $3 billion for grants alone and, because of this, recognized that climate change was all around. As a result, many of the department’s projects were mindful of addressing it. However, her interview also makes it clear that it is relatively easy to redirect funding, making the research being done in the USDA vulnerable.

Kathy Sullivan was the director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) under the Obama Administration. She began working in government when she was one of 35 hired out of approximately 8,000 who applied to work at NASA in 1977. In 1984, she became the first American woman to walk in space while orbiting on the Challenger. After that, she was in space twice more before going to work at the Department of Commerce in the early 1990s. She served first as the chief scientist. After some time at Ohio State University, she returned to the NOAA and eventually became its head administrator. There, she was interested in the relationship between people and government. This interest manifested in the desire to create a “weather-ready nation” that would respond to severe weather warnings. To do this, she wanted to understand the audience, and she convinced Congress to include social science as part of the NOAA’s mission.

Sullivan is a prime example of an appointee who is mindful of project management and the risks that it can pose. When she recounts her job interview with NASA, she tells a story in which she had to fix a piece of equipment. It was the middle of the night, and the lead oceanographer watched her work on it for only a few hours before he told her to “fix the damn thing” (138). Not only did she do this, but Sullivan also kept working for an extra two hours to make sure that it would continue to work during the storm. Likewise, when it came to the polar satellites, a longtime frustration for the NOAA, she and her team repaired them in such a way that her successors wouldn’t have the same problem. She also began to plan ahead for the next satellites. Having seen the deleterious effects of using one short-term solution after another, Lewis highlights her desire for long-term solutions as part of a better, more efficient way to utilize government resources.