The Fifth Risk(3)
The United States government employed two million people, 70 percent of them one way or another in national security. It managed a portfolio of risks that no private person, or corporation, was able to manage. Some of the risks were easy to imagine: a financial crisis, a hurricane, a terrorist attack. Most weren’t: the risk, say, that some prescription drug proves to be both so addictive and so accessible that each year it kills more Americans than were killed in action by the peak of the Vietnam War. Many of the risks that fell into the government’s lap felt so remote as to be unreal: that a cyberattack left half the country without electricity, or that some airborne virus wiped out millions, or that economic inequality reached the point where it triggered a violent revolution. Maybe the least visible risks were of things not happening that, with better government, might have happened. A cure for cancer, for instance.
Enter the presidential transition. A bad transition took this entire portfolio of catastrophic risks—the biggest portfolio of such risks ever managed by a single institution in the history of the world—and made all the bad things more likely to happen and the good things less likely to happen. Even before Max created an organization to fix the federal government, the haphazard nature of presidential transitions drove him nuts. “We have a legacy government that hasn’t kept up with the world we live in, largely because of disruptions from bad transitions,” he said. “People don’t understand that a bungled transition becomes a bungled presidency.” The new people taking over the job of running the government were at best only partially informed, and often deeply suspicious of whatever happened to be going on before they arrived. By the time they fully grasped the problems they were dealing with, it was time to go. “It’s Groundhog Day,” said Max. “The new people come in and think that the previous administration and the civil service are lazy or stupid. Then they actually get to know the place they are managing. And when they leave they say, ‘This was a really hard job, and those are the best people I’ve ever worked with.’ This happens over and over and over.”
Most of the big problems inside the U.S. government were of the practical management sort and had nothing to do with political ideology. A mundane but important example was how hard it was for any government agency to hire new people. Some agencies couldn’t hire anyone without sixty different people signing off on him. The George W. Bush administration had begun to attack that particular mundane problem. The Obama administration, instead of running with the work done during the Bush years, had simply started all over again.
Max Stier’s Partnership for Public Service had helped to push through three separate laws related to the transition. In 2010 Congress gave free office space and other resources to the nominees of the two major political parties right after the summer conventions. “The reason campaigns didn’t prepare is that they thought it would cost them politically: no one wanted to be seen measuring the drapes,” said Max. “The idea was to give the nominees of the major political parties cover to do what they should do.” In 2011–2012, to enable the president to put people in jobs more quickly, Congress reduced the number of presidential appointments that required Senate confirmation from about 1,400 to roughly 1,200—still over a thousand too many, in Max’s view, but a start. Finally, in 2015, Congress required the sitting president to prepare in various ways to hand the government over to his or her successor. The person who had already taken the test was now required by law to help the person who may not have studied for it.
As the 2016 presidential election approached, Max was about as hopeful as he’d ever been that the United States government would be handed from one leader to another with minimum stupidity. His partnership had worked with both the Clinton and the Trump campaigns. “Their work was good,” said Max. He was disappointed with Barack Obama in some ways. President Obama had been slow to engage with the federal workforce. He’d appointed some poor managers to run some agencies. The fiasco of the rollout of HealthCare.gov was not an accident but a by-product of bad management. But Obama’s preparations to hand over the government had been superb: the Obama administration had created what amounted to the best course ever on the inner workings of the most powerful institution on earth. What could go wrong?
Chris Christie was sitting on a sofa beside Donald Trump when Pennsylvania was finally called. It was one thirty-five in the morning, but that wasn’t the only reason the feeling in the room was odd. Mike Pence went to kiss his wife, Karen, and she turned away from him. “You got what you wanted, Mike,” she said, “now leave me alone.” She wouldn’t so much as say hello to Trump. Trump himself just stared at the tube without saying anything, like a man with a pair of twos whose bluff has been called. His campaign hadn’t even bothered to prepare an acceptance speech. It wasn’t hard to see why Trump hadn’t seen the point in preparing to take over the federal government: Why study for a test you’ll never need to take? Why take the risk of discovering you might at your very best be a C student? This was the real part of becoming president of the United States. And, Christie thought, it scared the crap out of the president-elect.
Not long after the people on TV announced that Trump had won Pennsylvania, Jared Kushner grabbed Christie anxiously and said, “We have to have a transition meeting tomorrow morning!” Even before that meeting, Christie had made sure that Trump knew the protocol for his discussions with foreign leaders. The transition team had prepared a document to let him know how these were meant to go. The first few calls were easy—the very first was always with the prime minister of Great Britain—but two dozen calls in you were talking to some kleptocrat and tiptoeing around sensitive security issues. Before any of the calls could be made, however, the president of Egypt called in to the switchboard at Trump Tower and somehow got the operator to put him straight through to Trump. “Trump was like . . . I love the Bangles! You know that song ‘Walk Like an Egyptian’?” recalled one of his advisers on the scene.