The Fifth Risk(7)
This is not a trivial exercise, and to do it we rely entirely on scientists who go to work at the national labs because the national labs are exciting places to work. They then wind up getting interested in the weapons program. That is, because maintaining the nuclear arsenal was just a by-product of the world’s biggest science project, which also did things like investigating the origins of the universe. “Our weapons scientists didn’t start out as weapons scientists,” says Madelyn Creedon, who was second-in-command of the nuclear-weapons wing of the DOE, and who briefed the incoming administration, briefly. “They didn’t understand that. The one question they asked was,” Wouldn’t you want the guy who grew up wanting to be a weapons scientist?’ Well, actually, no. You wouldn’t.”
In the run-up to the Trump inauguration, the man inside the DOE in charge of the nuclear-weapons program—Frank Klotz was his name—was required to submit his resignation, as were the department’s 137 other political appointees. Frank Klotz was a retired three-star air force lieutenant general with a PhD in politics from Oxford. The keeper of the nation’s nuclear secrets had boxed up most of his books and memorabilia just like everyone else and was on his way out before anyone had apparently given the first thought to who might replace him. It was only after Secretary Moniz called U.S. senators to alert them to the disturbing vacancy, and the senators phoned Trump Tower sounding alarmed, that the Trump people called General Klotz and—on the day before Donald Trump was inaugurated as the forty-fifth president of the United States—asked him to bring back the stuff he had taken home and move back into his office. Aside from him, the people with the most intimate knowledge of the problems and the possibilities of the DOE walked out the door.
It was early June 2017 when I walked through the same door to see what was going on. The DOE makes its home in a long rectangular cinder-block-like building propped up on concrete stilts, just off the National Mall. It’s a jarring sight—as if someone had punched out a skyscraper and it never got back on its feet. It’s relentlessly ugly in the way the swamps around Newark Airport are ugly—so ugly that its ugliness bends back around into a sneaky kind of beauty: it will make an excellent ruin. Inside, the place feels like a lab experiment to determine just how little aesthetic stimulation human beings can endure. The endless hallways are floored with white linoleum and almost insistently devoid of personality. “Like a hospital, without the stretchers,” as one employee put it. But this place is at once desolate and urgent. People still work here, doing stuff that, if left undone, might result in unimaginable death and destruction.
By the time I arrived in Washington, the first eighth of Trump’s first term was nearly complete, and his administration was still largely missing. He hadn’t nominated anyone to serve as head of the Patent Office, for instance, or to run the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). There was no Trump candidate to head the Transportation Security Administration, and no one to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The 2020 national census will be a massive undertaking for which there is not a moment to lose, and yet there’s no Trump appointee in place to run it. “The actual government has not really taken over,” said Max Stier. “It’s kindergarten soccer. Everyone is on the ball. No one is at their positions. But I doubt Trump sees the reality. Everywhere he goes, everything is going to be hunky-dory and nice. No one gives him the bad news.”
At this point in their administrations, Obama and Bush had nominated their top ten people at the DOE and installed most of them in their offices. Trump had nominated three people and installed just one, former Texas governor Rick Perry. Perry is of course responsible for one of the DOE’s most famous moments—when in a 2011 presidential debate he said he intended to eliminate three entire departments of the federal government. Asked to list them he named Commerce, Education, and . . . then hit a wall. “The third agency of government I would do away with . . . Education . . . the . . . ahhhh . . . ahhh . . . Commerce, and let’s see.” As his eyes bored a hole in his lectern, his mind drew a blank. “I can’t, the third one. I can’t. Sorry. Oops.” The third department Perry wanted to get rid of, he later recalled, was the Department of Energy. In his confirmation hearings to run the department, Perry confessed that when he called for its elimination he hadn’t actually known what the Department of Energy did—and he now regretted having said that it didn’t do anything worth doing.
The question on the minds of the people who currently work at the department: Does he know what it does now? In his hearings, Perry made a show of having educated himself. He said how useful it was to be briefed by former secretary Ernest Moniz. But when I asked someone familiar with those briefings how many hours Perry had spent with Moniz, he laughed and said, “That’s the wrong unit of account.” With the nuclear physicist who understood the DOE perhaps better than anyone else on earth Perry had spent minutes, not hours. “He has no personal interest in understanding what we do and effecting change,” a DOE staffer told me in June 2017. “He’s never been briefed on a program—not a single one, which to me is shocking.”
Since Perry was confirmed, his role has been ceremonial and bizarre. He pops up in distant lands and tweets in praise of this or that DOE program while his masters inside the White House create budgets to eliminate those very programs. His sporadic public communications have had in them something of the shell-shocked grandmother trying to preside over a pleasant family Thanksgiving dinner while pretending that her blind-drunk husband isn’t standing naked on the dining-room table waving the carving knife over his head.