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The new people taking over the job of running the government were at best only partially informed, and often deeply suspicious of whatever happened to be going on before they arrived.
Before any of the calls could be made, however, the president of Egypt called in to the switchboard at Trump Tower and somehow got the operator to put him straight through to Trump. “Trump was like . . . I love the Bangles! You know that song ‘Walk Like an Egyptian’?” recalled one of his advisers on the scene.
The method of his execution was unsurprising: Trump always avoided firing people himself. The man who played Mr. You’re Fired on TV avoided personal confrontation in real life.
“Broken Arrow” is a military term of art for a nuclear accident that doesn’t lead to a nuclear war. MacWilliams has had to learn all about these. Now he tells me about an incident that occurred back in 1961, and was largely declassified in 2013, just as he began his stint at DOE. A pair of 4-megaton hydrogen bombs, each more than 250 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, broke off a damaged B-52 over North Carolina.
Another way of putting this is: the risk we should most fear is not the risk we easily imagine. It is the risk that we don’t. Which brought us to the fifth risk.
10 percent of its budget, or $3 billion, into this tiny place.
Beneath Hanford, a massive underground glacier of radioactive sludge is moving slowly but relentlessly toward the Columbia River.
But over the years people who lived downwind of Hanford experienced unusually high rates of miscarriage, certain kinds of cancer, and genetic disorders that went largely ignored. “It’s easy to have no observable health effects when you never look,” the medical director of the Lawrence Livermore lab said, back in the 1980s, after seeing how the private contractors who ran Hanford studied the matter.
There is another way to think of John MacWilliams’s fifth risk: the risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions.
It is the innovation that never occurs, and the knowledge that is never created, because you have ceased to lay the groundwork for it. It is what you never learned that might have saved you.
Here is where the Trump administration’s willful ignorance plays a role. If your ambition is to maximize short-term gain without regard to the long-term cost, you are better off not knowing the cost. If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it’s better never to really understand those problems. There is an upside to ignorance, and a downside to knowledge. Knowledge makes life messier. It makes it a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a worldview.
“There’s a real idealism that you have to indulge to think that people in New Orleans were now going to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. There were no bootstraps.”
Fighting wildfires is the most visible thing the USDA does. It’s the places in our government where the cameras never roll that you have to worry about most.
“I used to tell the people that worked for me: You may not ever meet a single person it benefits. You might never see the infants who are fed, or that family that lost a job. To the extent you can keep in mind that they are out there, it will motivate you to do your job better.”
One rule concerns the speed of the poultry-slaughter lines: 140 birds a minute. In theory, some poor USDA inspector is meant to physically examine each and every bird for defects.
In the fall of 2017, the National Chicken Council petitioned the USDA to allow for line speeds of 175 or faster.
“I was always in love with the patterns in nature,” he said, “and what I needed were the tools to understand them. And for me, math was the most sensible.”
Every day thousands of amateur weather observers report data to their governments, as do a lot of experts aboard commercial planes in the sky and on ships at sea. Every day, twice a day, almost nine hundred weather balloons are released from nine hundred different spots on the globe, ninety-two of them by the U.S. government. A half-dozen countries, including the United States, deploy thousands of buoys to collect weather from the ocean surface. Then there’s the data collected by billion-dollar satellites and fancy radar stations—in the United States alone, the National Weather Service
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“The failed hostage rescue in Iran was caused by a sandstorm we didn’t see coming,” said DJ.
Journalists at ProPublica had combed through it and discovered odd concentrations of opioid prescriptions. “We would never have figured out that there was an opioid crisis without the data,” said DJ.
He discovered that while just over 90 percent of children born in 1940 went on to earn more than their parents, only 50 percent of children born in the 1980s did so.
And so you might have good reason to pray for a tornado, whether it comes in the shape of swirling winds, or a politician. You imagine the thing doing the damage that you would like to see done, and no more. It’s what you fail to imagine that kills you.
“Everyone floats,” explained Art, “but the fatter you are, the further your mouth is from the waterline.”
