The Fifth Risk(18)
It was obvious to everyone inside the USDA that Klip was in an impossible position; no one person could get his mind around all the things the department did. Just a couple of weeks before the inauguration, Klip was joined by three other Trump people. The four-person team made a show of sitting down with some of the roughly 100,000-person USDA staff to hear what they had to say. These briefings lived up to their name: the entire introduction to the USDA’s vast scientific-research unit lasted an hour. “At most of the federal agencies, there were no real briefings,” says a former senior White House official who watched the process closely. “They were basically for show. The Trump transition sent in these teams in the end just to say they were doing it.”
The Department of Agriculture normally closes for business on Inauguration Day. It’s the only federal agency with an office building on the Mall, which, once upon a time, had been the site of an experimental farm. The building is now used as a staging post during the inaugural by the National Guard and the Secret Service. Just before the inauguration, a Trump representative called the USDA and said he wanted the building to remain open, as he was sending thirty-something new people in. Why the sudden rush? Why force the government to turn on the lights and staff the cafeteria and go to the rest of the trouble to animate a federal building on a day no one was working? Even getting people into the building would be difficult, with snipers on the roof and the Metro station closed. A member of the Obama transition team wondered how the newcomers could have been vetted so quickly by the Office of Presidential Personnel. Nine months later, Politico published an eye-popping account about these new appointees. Jenny Hopkinson, a Politico reporter, obtained the curricula vitae of the new Trump people. Into USDA jobs, some of which paid nearly $80,000 a year, the Trump team had inserted a long-haul truck driver, a clerk at AT&T, a gas-company meter reader, a country-club cabana attendant, a Republican National Committee intern, and the owner of a scented-candle company, with skills like “pleasant demeanor” listed on their résumés. “In many cases [the new appointees] demonstrated little to no experience with federal policy, let alone deep roots in agriculture,” wrote Hopkinson. “Some of those appointees appear to lack the credentials, such as a college degree, required to qualify for higher government salaries.”
What these people had in common, she pointed out, was loyalty to Donald Trump.
Nine months after they’d arrived, a man I’d been told was the best informed of all the department’s career employees about the haphazard transition couldn’t tell me how many of these people were still roaming the halls. The few fingerprints they left were characteristically bizarre. They sent certified letters to several senior career civil servants perceived to be close to the Obama administration, telling them they were being reassigned—from jobs they were good at to jobs they knew little about. They instructed the staff to stop using the phrase “climate change.” They removed the inspection reports on businesses that abused animals—roadside circuses, puppy mills, research labs—from the department’s website. When reporters from National Geographic contacted the USDA to ask what was going on with animal-abuse issues, “they told us all of this information was public, except now you had to FOIA it,” said Rachael Bale. “We asked for the files, and they sent us seventeen hundred completely blacked-out pages.”
By the time I set out to get the briefings the Trump people had not, it was late summer. Of the fourteen senior jobs at the USDA that required Senate confirmation, only one had been filled: former Georgia governor Sonny Perdue was named secretary of agriculture. In April. If Trump’s interest in a subject is to be judged by the speed with which he appointed his cabinet secretaries, the Department of Agriculture has a catastrophically tiny share of presidential brain space.
At any rate, I’d had a bunch of conversations with people who had run the department under past administrations: former secretaries and deputy secretaries of agriculture. They reached a bipartisan consensus: the best way to get a quick grip on the details of the department is to march through the seven little boxes of its organization chart (see above). For example, if you want to know the likelihood that the geese loitering near the LaGuardia Airport runway will cause your plane to crash-land in the Hudson River and the event will become the subject of a major motion picture, you go to see the undersecretary or deputy undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs, which oversees the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, which handles the bewildering set of conflicts in America between people and animals. (The people tend to get their way.) If you want an up-to-date snapshot of which farmers are most dependent on federal aid, you go see the people who manage the little box marked “Farm and Foreign Agricultural Services.”
These undersecretaries and deputy secretaries occupy public offices, but they are not really public figures: no one outside the department knows their names or faces. And their little boxes are not equally exposed to the whims and idiocies of any given presidential administration. The question of the day, at least it seems to me, is: Where in these little boxes is the greatest damage likely to be done, through neglect or mismanagement or malice? Take the little box labeled “Natural Resources and Environment.” It’s not as abstract as it sounds. It employs around forty thousand people and contains the U.S. Forest Service. Its 193 million acres of forests and grasslands are important to the future of the climate. Its most recent undersecretary, Robert Bonnie, was described to me by one of his superiors as “maybe the single best undersecretary we’ve ever had.” Bonnie himself is a seriously interesting person—and filled with concerns about what the Trump administration might do to his former department. But when I asked him to name his No. 1 concern, he said, “Wildfires.”