The Fifth Risk(19)

But if you worry about everything, you wind up worrying about nothing. The Trump administration can forbid federal employees from using the phrase “climate change” more easily than it can prevent them from dealing with its consequences. The career people at the U.S. Forest Service, because they have direct lines into Congress, don’t need the White House behind them in the way many other departments do. 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.

Ali Zaidi had been the first to point this out to me: that the seven little boxes inside the Department of Agriculture are not equally vulnerable. And he would know. He’d spent two years as a grunt in the Office of Management and Budget, before moving into ever more important White House jobs. He’d been one of those young people with the gift for getting old people to forget how young he was, and found himself thrust into jobs normally reserved for the middle-aged. In 2014, at the age of twenty-seven, he was put in charge of a team of experts overseeing the Department of Agriculture’s entire budget—along with the budgets of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Department of Energy, the Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, and a couple of others. He’d been forced to get his mind fully around the federal department that had underpinned his childhood: it wasn’t easy. “Of all the budgets, it’s the weirdest,” he said. It was weird, first, because the USDA did so many different things. It was weird because so many Americans had no idea how much their lives depended upon it. And it was weird because of the sheer sums of money sloshing around the place, dispensed by government employees no one had ever heard of. If you took a follow-the-money approach to what might go wrong inside the USDA, you ended up inside the box run by Kevin Concannon.



I found Concannon at home in the woods of Maine. On the phone he’d told me that he’d spent most of his career running health and nutrition services for several different states. Back in 2008 he’d retired to this place, purchased long ago, with his wife. The woods were near the sea, and so they had bought a small boat. “I was sort of unhappy being retired,” he said. “We had the boat. But after two weeks in the boat we said,” Okay, what are we going to do now?’ I don’t understand people who say they can’t wait to retire. It’s like living your life in jail or something.” Not long after he’d had that thought, he got a call from the newly appointed secretary of agriculture, Tom Vilsack. “I hired him for several reasons,” said Vilsack. “But the first is: heart.”

Concannon was pushing seventy, but he came out of retirement to take charge of the box inside the USDA labeled “Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services.” He’d run the place right up until the Trump people finally arrived, in January 2017. In his job at USDA, Concannon had overseen for eight years the nation’s school-lunch program; the program that ensures that pregnant women, new mothers, and young children receive proper nutrition; and a dozen or so smaller programs designed to alleviate hunger. Together these accounted for approximately 70 percent of the USDA’s budget—he’d spent the better part of a trillion dollars feeding people with taxpayer money while somehow remaining virtually anonymous. “We used to say if we stopped the tourists outside the building and told them what we were doing inside, most of them would have no idea that we were doing it,” he said.

He’d helped to prepare for the Trump transition, but, of course, that transition never happened. He hadn’t had a single encounter with anyone associated with it. Nor had the Trump people bothered to speak with anyone who reported to him. And so it seemed fair to say, as Concannon had said to me on the phone, that “they don’t seem to be focused on nutrition.” The Trump people were a bit like those tourists outside the Whitten Building. Only now they were inside it.

Concannon’s house is hidden from the road by trees and so comes as a surprise. So does he: I had expected to meet an old guy with at least some need to convey a sense of his own importance. I expected him to retain at least a trace of the stuffy bureaucrat. Instead I find myself being led through his retirement house by a leprechaun who has disguised himself by shaving his beard. “Media has not been a big part of my life,” he says, laughing, as he leads me to a table and chairs out back. “This is new!” Exposed to the early-autumn chill, we play New England’s favorite outdoor social game: seeing who will be the first to break and beg to go back inside.

“The food-stamps program,” he says, instantly, when I ask him for his biggest concern. The Trump budget had proposed cutting food stamps by more than 25 percent over the next ten years and more or less abandoning the notion that the country should provide some minimum level of nutrition to its citizens. The Trump budget was just an opening bid and unlikely to become policy, at least not right away, because Congress could always fight it. But it signaled an intention and, perhaps, a shift in public attitude. “Why is it that people channel so many of their hang-ups about people who are poor or unsuccessful into the food-stamps program?” asks Concannon as we settle into our chairs, then answers his own question. “No one really knows when you go to the doctor and the government is paying. But people see you with this card or coupon and react. People would say to me,” I saw someone buying butter with food stamps.’ And I would say,” Well, yes.’”