The Fifth Risk(35)
Get to Know the U.S. Government had not been high on Donald Trump’s to-do list, even after he learned that he’d be running it. On the Monday after the presidential election, the same thing that had happened across the rest of the U.S. government happened inside the Department of Commerce: nothing. Dozens of civil servants sat all day waiting to deliver briefings that would, in the end, never be heard. They’d expected Trump’s campaign organization to send in Landing Teams to learn about what was being done there, and why. The problems that had been Obama’s problems for the past eight years were about to become Trump’s problems. But his people didn’t seem to want to know about them. “They just didn’t bring any bodies in at all,” says a senior Commerce official. “There was just very little attention paid to any of the pieces. The Census—they just didn’t seem interested in knowing any of that. It all seemed to be about trade. Or the size of the Commerce workforce.”
Right up until early January, no one turned up at NOAA to figure out who should run the place and how they would run it. But at the end of November Trump nominated Wilbur Ross, a seventy-nine-year-old Wall Street billionaire, to be the next secretary of commerce. A few weeks later Ross came in for a single meeting with Penny Pritzker. “He came by himself,” recalled one of the people who greeted him. “I was shocked. Just this very old guy, all by himself. And it was pretty clear he had no idea what he was getting into. And he had no help.”
He also soon had a problem: two billion or so missing dollars. A Forbes reporter named Dan Alexander, studying the financial disclosure forms Ross had been required to file with the Office of Government Ethics, had been struck by the discrepancy between how much money Ross said he had, and how much he’d told Forbes reporters that he had, over the course of many years. How had $3.7 billion suddenly become $700 million? Three point seven billion is what Ross had told Forbes he was worth. He’d sent Forbes a list of his assets every year for the past thirteen years, so that he would qualify for the magazine’s annual list of the four hundred richest Americans. He’d always failed to answer Forbes’s follow-up questions, and so the people at Forbes who compiled the list reduced the number to $2.9 billion. To be conservative about it.
Alexander was now one of the Forbes staffers who compiled the magazine’s rich list—and he had access to the Forbes files. “I thought this was kind of odd,” he said. “It bugged me that it didn’t add up. I called Ross up to see what he had to say about it. And he sounds like a credible guy.” Ross claimed the explanation was simple: between the election and the inauguration he had simply given away two billion dollars to a trust, owned by his heirs.
Alexander had first assumed that the scandal was that Wilbur Ross was hiding money from the U.S. government. But after pressing the Department of Commerce to fill in the giant holes in Ross’s story, he realized that Ross had misled Forbes. For thirteen years. “I went back in the files,” said Alexander. “We [at Forbes] had [initially] counted the money that belonged to his investors in one of his funds as his own money. I was stunned that anyone had let that slide. He lucked into a way to be on the list, without deserving to be on the list. But once he gets on the list, he lies. For years.” The Forbes reporters were accustomed to having rich people mislead them about the size of their wealth, but nearly all of them had been trying to keep their names off the list. “In the history of the magazine only three people stand out as having made huge efforts to get on, or end up higher than they belonged,” said Alexander. “One was [Saudi] Prince Alwaleed. The second was Donald Trump. And the third was Wilbur Ross.”
The scandal wasn’t that Wilbur Ross was hiding two billion dollars from the government, but that he’d never had the two billion dollars in the first place. Alexander wrote up his findings, after which, he says, “I got a bunch of calls from people who had worked with or for Wilbur Ross, to say how happy they were the truth finally came out.” The former number-three man at Ross’s old firm, who had worked with Ross for twenty-five years, spoke on the record. “Wilbur doesn’t have an issue with bending the truth,” he said. This was the man Trump had chosen to guard the integrity of the data on which our society rests.
Yet inside the Department of Commerce there came, in the spring of 2017, a ray of hope. In March the Trump White House asked the help of a former senior climate policy adviser from the George W. Bush administration who had actually worked for eight years inside the Department of Commerce. “They came into the Department of Commerce,” said the former Bush official, “and they discovered that it has got this thing in it called NOAA. And it’s sixty percent of the Commerce Department budget. And they said,‘What the fuck is NOAA?’”
The Bush official flew to Washington, DC, to speak with Wilbur Ross about the place Ross was meant to have been running for the past several months. It’s not the Department of Commerce, the Bush official told him in so many words. It’s the Department of Science and Technology. It was a massive data-collecting enterprise, and the biggest collector of all was the National Weather Service. NOAA also regulated the fishing industry and mapped the ocean floor and maintained the fleet of ships and planes used in gathering information. It had collected climate and weather data going back to records kept at Monticello by Thomas Jefferson. Without that data, and the Weather Service that made sense of it, no plane would fly, no bridge would be built, and no war would be fought—at least not well. The weather data was also the climate data. “If you don’t believe in climate change, you at least want to understand the climate,” said the Bush official. And if you wanted to understand the climate, you needed to take special care of NOAA’s data.