The Fifth Risk(20)
Anyone who takes over his old job, he explains, needs to be especially vigilant about fraud, even though there is probably less of it in the program than ever. Actual fraud in the food-stamp program in 2015 was about 5 percent of the $70 billion paid out. People still succeed in understating their income and get benefits they would otherwise not. People occasionally “traffic,” the term of art for exchanging food stamps at less than face value, for cash or ineligible goods. (The storeowner then puts through a bunch of phony purchases, and pockets the difference between what the government pays him and what he has paid to the food-stamper.) And fraud is far more likely in some parts of the country than in others. “The Dakotas—they’re all Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts who live there,” Concannon says. “But just look at Miami. Or Columbus, Ohio.” But replacing food stamps with a card that has a PIN has made fraud, and theft, much less common. The USDA hires specialists to search food-purchase data for suspicious patterns. When they find what appears to be a problem, they send in one of the 100 USDA food-stamp undercover investigators, to gather evidence.
I stop writing and look up. “The Department of Agriculture has private eyes?”
“They’re more like Columbos,” he says.
But that’s not his point, he says. His point is that, while actual fraud is relatively rare, “instances of fraud attract huge media attention and can have big effects—like Surfer Dude.” Surfer Dude was a guy in San Diego who claimed on Fox News that the food-stamp program gave him the cushion he needed to surf all day. The network ate it up. And that was the problem: the distorting media coverage of any cheating creates political resistance to the entire enterprise. No one in the Trump administration was likely to ever come right out and say: “We want to let kids and old people go hungry.” But, obviously, they might run the program so ineptly that it lost political support. And then kids and old people would go hungry.
What I needed to keep in mind, said Concannon, was just how much was at stake for the people who needed the program. “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.”
It now occurs to me that this question of motivation sits somewhere near the middle of the problem I am investigating. Why does someone go to work inside this little box—or any little box—inside the federal government? There’s always an answer to this question. And it’s obviously important. Why a person does what he does has a big effect on how he does it. And yet Kevin Concannon, whose little box had spent nearly a trillion dollars, had never really been asked it.
He has an answer to the question, as it turns out. He’d grown up in Portland, Maine, in a working-class family with seven children. His older brother had suffered from schizophrenia. His parents, immigrants from Ireland, had been crippled by the sense that they were responsible for their child’s illness. “There was a very strong belief in those days in nurture versus nature,” he says. Then one day—like a bolt from the blue—a pair of social workers from the Veterans Administration visited their home. They put his brother on a new medication, which eased his symptoms. “They helped my parents to understand that the fact that he had this illness had nothing whatever to do with how they raised him,” says Concannon. “It was luck of the draw.”
The effect of these government angels on his family’s life was astonishing. By the time Concannon left for college, in 1959, he wondered what it might be like to do that kind of work. In college he read The Other America, Michael Harrington’s account of the lives of the American poor, and listened to John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech, with its bracing call to public service. By the time he graduated he knew what he wanted to be. Fourteen years later he was running Maine’s mental-health services.
He proved effective enough at the job that, after an election pushed him out of it, other states recruited him. In 1987 he took a job running the mental-health and developmental-disabilities programs for Oregon. Four months into his new gig, Oregon’s governor, Neil Goldschmidt, grabbed him in the hallway. “He said,‘C’mon to the pressroom. They’re naming the new director of human services.’ I said,‘Who is it?’ And he says,” It’s you!’”
As the head of Oregon’s nutrition programs, he learned that the country’s willingness to feed people who are hungry does not mean that hungry people are always fed. The federal government makes the benefits available but then leaves it to states to administer them. “Where you live in this country makes a huge difference if you are poor,” says Concannon. “And it’s not just the weather. You have states with these sixty-or seventy-page documents people have to fill out to get benefits. Poor people are easy to wear down.” Georgia was usually a problem. Texas, too. “If they ran any of their football teams the way they run their food program, they’d fire the coach,” said Concannon. A Wyoming legislator, proud of how badly he had gummed up the state’s nutrition programs, told him, “We pride ourselves on doing the minimum required by the federal government.” An Arizona congressman proposed that the card used by people receiving food-stamp benefits be made prison orange, conferring not just nutrition but shame. In 2016, after several counties in North Carolina suffered severe flooding, the state tried to distribute federal disaster-relief food-benefit cards on the day of the presidential election, to give poor people a choice between eating and voting. In Kansas, Concannon had explained to an executive who oversaw the state’s food-stamp program how he had made it easier for people in Oregon who were going hungry to access their program. “He said,” Jeez, if we did that we’d have more people coming in the door.’ And I said,” Yeah, but isn’t that the idea?’”