The Fifth Risk(24)

Since she had run two of the little boxes on the org chart, I decided to kill two birds with one stone and ask Woteki what most worried her about food safety.

“Regulatory reform in food safety without science,” she said.

That was too general. I pressed her for some real, specific concern. “They could increase the line speeds,” she said, without having to think.

The USDA has big, fat, quite readable rule books to prevent meat from killing people. 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. But obviously no human being can inspect 140 birds a minute. No industry can kill nine billion birds each year without wanting to find faster ways to do it. In the fall of 2017, the National Chicken Council petitioned the USDA to allow for line speeds of 175 or faster. “It’ll make it even harder for inspectors to do their jobs,” says Woteki. (The petition, at least for now, stands rejected.)

What she fears isn’t so much the bad intentions of the people who fill the jobs she once did. She fears their seeming commitment to scientific ignorance. No big chicken company wants to poison a bunch of children with salmonella. But if you speed up the slaughter lines, you need to make the new speed safe. Ignorance allows people to disregard the consequences of their actions. And sometimes it leads to consequences even they did not intend.

Ali Zaidi drew a distinction between the little boxes inside the Department of Agriculture that enforced regulation (such as Food Safety) and those that spent money (such as Science). “One is the stick and the other is the carrot,” he said. “You pay for things often that you can’t or won’t regulate.” Where the government had the power to regulate, it had less need to pay for things. It couldn’t compel university professors to do agricultural research, and so it paid them to do it. It had the power to compel, say, egg producers to adhere to rules that kept eggs from making people sick, and so didn’t need to pay them to do it. “In the extreme case the federal government could just buy eggs for everyone and test all of these eggs,” said Zaidi. “That’s obviously a dumb thing to do from an economic point of view, but it shows you how regulation takes the place of expenditure.”

The regulation side of things is, as a rule, less vulnerable to the short-term idiocy of a new administration than the money side of things. The big show Trump has made of removing regulations by executive order has done far less than he suggests, as there is a formal rule-changing process: you must solicit outside opinion, wait a certain amount of time for those opinions to arrive, and then deal with the inevitable legal challenges to your rule change. To increase the number of chickens a poultry company murders each minute might take years, even if it is the smart thing to do.

But to change who gets money to do agricultural research, or whether they get it at all, is a cinch. For that reason, Ali thought the little box marked “Science” was of far greater concern than the box marked “Food Safety.”

There were two other important little boxes inside the USDA. One was marked “Farm,” and the other was “Rural Development.” Ali Zaidi had watched many billions flow through the first and a few billion flow through the second. He thought it highly unlikely the Trump administration’s budget cuts would have much effect on the farm dollars. A lot of that money went to big grain producers. The same Republican senators from farm states who said they abhorred government spending of almost any sort became radical socialists when the conversation turned to handouts to big grain producers. “The money follows the political power of the constituencies,” said Ali, “instead of the evidence of need in America. If you really boil down the difference between the farm side of the budget and the rural-development side of the budget, the farm subsidies can wind up in the pockets of large corporations. It’s the rural-development money that tends to stay in these communities.”

Without that money, he thought, rural America would be a very different place than it is. “Without the USDA money it’s possible we’d look like sub-Saharan Africa, or rural China,” said Ali. Much of small-town America is dispersed and disorganized and poor. The people in those communities don’t have the money to hire Washington lobbyists. Yet a way of life depends on the sort of federal subsidies only a powerful lobbyist might procure. “It’s preserving an emotional infrastructure,” said Ali. “We have decided this is the type of community we want to preserve. But the entire time I was in the White House, we grappled with the question: Where do we find the political capital for rural development? Because it can’t just come from the people rural development helps.”



By the time she left the little box marked “Rural Development,” Lillian Salerno had spent the better part of five years inside it. The box’s function was simple: to channel low-interest-rate loans, along with a few grants, mainly to towns with fewer than fifty thousand people in them. Her department ran the $220 billion bank that serviced the poorest of the poor in rural America: in the Deep South, and in the tribal lands, and in the communities, called colonias, along the U.S.-Mexico border. “Some of the communities in the South, the only checks going in are government checks,” she said. And yet, amazingly, they nearly always repaid their loans.

Half her job had been vetting the demands from rural America for help. The other half had been one long unglamorous road trip. “It wasn’t like I could just fly to New York City. I’d be going to, like, Minco, Oklahoma. Everywhere I went was two flights minimum plus a two-or three-hour drive.” On the other end of the trip lay some small town in dire need of a health center, or housing, or a small business. “You go through these small towns and you see these ridiculously nice fire stations. That’s us,” she said. It was always more expensive for these towns to get electricity and internet access and health care. “But for the federal government, rural Alaska wouldn’t have any drinking water.” The need was incredible; her work felt urgent. “We’d give forty thousand dollars for a health clinic and the whole time you’re like, Shit, this makes a difference.”