Michael Lewis interviewed the pre-Trump Energy Department’s “chief
risk officer” for The Fifth Risk. That official identified the fifth risk as “project
management.”
Lewis elaborates on the concept throughout the book as he
tell the stories of other pre-Trump government managers, focusing on the
department of energy and the weather bureaus of the department of commerce. More than institutional knowledge, project
management involves a passion to anticipate (imagine) service to the public. Good project management needs people who are
mission driven. It encompasses the
government’s providing services or solving problems that the government can provide
or solve or that the government does in the absence of action by other
institutions or business interests.
On the other hand, the Trump transition and the appointment
of cabinet secretaries and agency managers, with few exceptions, reveal
indifference, incompetency, lack of knowledge in general and an ignorance of
science in particular and an arrogant pre-disposition that everything government
does is “stupid and bad.” The Trump
Administration, as Lewis details with respect to the weather agencies, favors
exploitation of public data for narrow commercial motives. Just like Trump himself.
This is how Lewis characterized Rick Perry, the head of the
department of energy. “[Perry’s]
sporadic public communications have had in them something of the shell-shocked
grandmother trying to preside over a pleasant family Thanksgiving dinner while
pretending that her blind-drunk husband isn’t standing naked on the dining-room
table waving the carving knife over his head.”
The Fifth Risk also
describes the other cited risks, three of which involve nuclear matters. To borrow the title of an earlier Trump book
by David Cay Johnston, It’s
Even Worse Than You Think.
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