The Fifth Risk

Lewis begins the section by discussing Ali Zaidi, who worked for the Office of Management and Budget when he was given the budget for the Department of Agriculture (USDA) to look through. He soon realized that “[t]he 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” (88).

Like the DOE, no one from the Trump transition team showed up at the USDA the day after the election. The first person who did was Brian Klippenstein, who came from a job running Protect the Harvest, an organization founded by a Trump supporter that, according to Lewis, mainly attacked other organizations that set out to protect animal welfare. Klippenstein, or “Klip,” was interested in only one issue—climate change—and specifically in acquiring the names of anyone who worked on it.

When Lewis spoke to current and former USDA staffers, they told him that the best way to get to know the department was to get to know each subsection found on the departmental organizational chart:

·       Natural Resources and Environment

·       Farm and Foreign Agricultural Services

·       Rural Development

·       Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services

·       Food Safety

·       Research, Education, and Economics (Science)

·       Marketing and Regulatory Programs (93).

Lewis frames this section by wondering where in the department “is the greatest damage likely to be done, through neglect or mismanagement or malice?” (94). As an example, the US Forest Service is overseen by the USDA, and while it does not get much attention in the press, the most recent Undersecretary for Natural Resources and the Environment listed it as his top concern.

Kevin Concannon was the Undersecretary for Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services, which oversaw 70% of the USDA budget prior to the Trump administration. This included the nation’s school lunch program and other nutrition-oriented efforts. The food stamp program was Concannon’s biggest concern, and he relates that while food stamp fraud can attract media attention, only 5% of the $70 billion allocated for the program was paid out to fraudulent users in 2017. He emphasizes that it is important to make the benefits of the program available to those who need it and also reinforces that people on food stamps are required to work at least 20 hours a week or be enrolled in a job training program to qualify.

Explaining that the USDA was created during the Civil War and at first was essentially a science lab geared toward making agriculture more efficient, Lewis then transitions to his interview with Cathie Woteki, the first Undersecretary of Food and Safety. Woteki’s top concern is, unsurprisingly, reform to food safety regulations without using science as its foundation. One example is increasing the slaughter line speeds, which makes it more difficult for animals to be inspected.

From Food and Safety, Lewis shifts to his conversation with Lillian Salerno, who worked in the Farm and Rural Development area within the USDA. This section oversees low-interest loans and grants to towns with fewer than 50,000 residents. Many people who received these funds—including Salerno herself—did not realize that they came from the federal government because they were made through local banks. Rural Development was dismantled when the Trump administration split Farm and Foreign Agricultural Services into two sections. President Trump also took the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a move that negatively affected American farmers’ profits.