The Fifth Risk(2)

Shut it down, said Trump. Shut down the transition.

Here Christie and Bannon parted ways. Neither thought it was a good idea to shut down the transition, but each had his own misgivings. Christie thought that Trump had little chance of running the government without a formal transition. Bannon wasn’t so sure if Trump would ever get his mind around running the federal government: he just thought it would look bad if Trump didn’t at least seem to prepare. Seeing that Trump wasn’t listening to Christie, he said, “What do you think Morning Joe will say—if you shut down your transition?” What Morning Joe would say—or at least what Bannon thought it would say—was that Trump was closing his presidential transition office because he didn’t think he had any chance of being president.

Trump stopped hollering. For the first time he seemed actually to have listened.

“That makes sense,” he said.

With that, Christie went back to preparing for a Trump administration. He tried to stay out of the news, but that proved difficult. From time to time Trump would see something in the paper about Christie’s fund-raising and become upset all over again. The money people donated to his campaign Trump considered, effectively, his own. He thought the planning and forethought pointless. At one point he turned to Christie and said, “Chris, you and I are so smart that we can leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition ourselves.”



At that moment in American history, if you could somehow organize the entire population into a single line, all three hundred fifty million people, ordered not by height or weight or age but by each citizen’s interest in the federal government, and Donald Trump loitered somewhere near one end of it, Max Stier would occupy the other.

By the fall of 2016 Max Stier might have been the American with the greatest understanding of how the U.S. government actually worked. Oddly, for an American of his age and status, he’d romanticized public service since he was a child. He’d gone through Yale in the mid-1980s and Stanford Law School in the early 1990s without ever being tempted by money or anything else. He thought the U.S. government was the single most important and most interesting institution in the history of the planet and couldn’t imagine doing anything but working to improve it. A few years out of law school he’d met a financier named Sam Heyman, who was as disturbed as Max was by how uninterested talented young people were in government work. Max persuaded Heyman to set aside $25 million for him so that he might create an organization to address the problem.

Max soon realized that to attract talented young people to government service he’d need to turn the government into a place talented young people wanted to work. He’d need to fix the United States government. Partnership for Public Service, as Max called his organization, was not nearly as dull as its name. It trained civil servants to be business managers; it brokered new relationships across the federal government; it surveyed the federal workforce to identify specific management failures and success; and it lobbied Congress to fix deep structural problems. It was Max Stier who had persuaded Congress to pass the laws that made it so annoyingly difficult for Donald Trump to avoid preparing to be president.

Anyway, from the point of view of a smart, talented person trying to decide whether to work for the U.S. government, the single most glaring defect was the absence of an upside. The jobs weren’t well paid compared to their equivalents in the private sector. And the only time government employees were recognized was if they screwed up—in which case they often became the wrong kind of famous. In 2002 Max created an annual black tie, Oscars-like awards ceremony to celebrate people who had done extraordinary things in government. Every year the Sammies—as Max called them, in honor of his original patron—attracted a few more celebrities and a bit more media attention. And every year the list of achievements was mind-blowing. A guy in the Energy Department (Frazer Lockhart) organized the first successful cleanup of a nuclear weapons factory, in Rocky Flats, Colorado, and had brought it in sixty years early and $30 billion under budget. A woman at the Federal Trade Commission (Eileen Harrington) had built the Do Not Call Registry, which spared the entire country from trillions of irritating sales pitches. A National Institutes of Health researcher (Steven Rosenberg) had pioneered immunotherapy, which had successfully treated previously incurable cancers. There were hundreds of fantastically important success stories in the United States government. They just never got told.

Max knew an astonishing number of them. He’d detected a pattern: a surprising number of the people responsible for them were first-generation Americans who had come from places without well-functioning governments. People who had lived without government were more likely to find meaning in it. On the other hand, people who had never experienced a collapsed state were slow to appreciate a state that had not yet collapsed. That was maybe Max’s biggest challenge: explaining the value of this enterprise at the center of a democratic society to people who either took it for granted or imagined it as a pernicious force in their lives over which they had no control. He’d explain that the federal government provided services that the private sector couldn’t or wouldn’t: medical care for veterans, air traffic control, national highways, food safety guidelines. He’d explain that the federal government was an engine of opportunity: millions of American children, for instance, would have found it even harder than they did to make the most of their lives without the basic nutrition supplied by the federal government. When all else failed, he’d explain the many places the U.S. government stood between Americans and the things that might kill them. “The basic role of government is to keep us safe,” he’d say.