The Fifth Risk(8)

Meanwhile, inside the DOE building, people claiming to be from the Trump administration appeared willy-nilly, unannounced, and unintroduced to the career people. “There’s a mysterious kind of chain from the Trump loyalists who have shown up inside DOE to the White House,” said a career civil servant. “That’s how decisions, like the budget, seem to get made. Not by Perry.” The woman who ran the Obama department’s energy-policy analysis unit received a call from DOE staff telling her that her office was now occupied by Eric Trump’s brother-in-law. Why? No one knew. “Yes, you can notice the difference,” says one young career civil servant, in response to the obvious question. “There’s a lack of professionalism. They’re not very polite. Maybe they’ve never worked in an office or government setting. It’s not hostility so much as a real sense of concern with sharing information with career employees. Because of that lack of communication, nothing is being done. All policy questions remain unanswered.”

The DOE has a program to provide low-interest loans to companies to encourage risky corporate innovation in alternative energy and energy efficiency. The program became infamous when one of its borrowers, the solar energy company Solyndra, was unable to repay its loan, but, as a whole, since its inception in 2009, the program has turned a profit. And it has been demonstrably effective: it lent money to Tesla to build its factory in Fremont, California, when the private sector would not, for instance. Every Tesla you see on the road came from a facility financed by the DOE. Its loans to early-stage solar energy companies launched the industry. There are now thirty-five viable utility-scale, privately funded solar companies—up from zero a decade ago. And yet today the program sits frozen. “There’s no direction what to do with the applications,” says the young career civil servant. “Are we shutting the program down? There’s no staff, just me. People keep bugging me for direction. It’s got to the point I don’t care if you tell me to tear the program down. Just tell me what you want to do so I can do it intelligently.” Another permanent employee, in another wing of the DOE, says, “The biggest change is the grinding to a halt of any proactive work. There’s very little work happening. There’s a lot of confusion about what our mission was going to be. For a majority of the workforce it’s been demoralizing.”

Over and over again, I was asked by people who worked inside the DOE not to use their names, or identify them in any way, for fear of reprisal. “People are heading for the doors,” says Tarak Shah. “And that’s really sad and destructive. The best and the brightest are the ones being targeted. They will leave fastest. Because they will get the best job offers.”

There might be no time in the history of the country when it was so interesting to know what was going on inside these bland federal office buildings—because there has been no time when those things might be done ineptly, or not done at all. But if you want to know how the DOE works—the problems it manages, the fears that keep its employees awake at night, the things it does you just sort of assume will continue being done—there’s no real point in being inside the DOE. Anyone who wants a blunt, open assessment of the risks inherent in the United States government now has to leave it to find it.



By the time I reached John MacWilliams’s kitchen table, in Quogue, Long Island, I knew about as much about the DOE as he had when he’d started there, back in 2013. MacWilliams had spent a lot of his life pursuing and obtaining a place in the world that he actually hadn’t wanted. In the early 1980s, after graduating from Stanford and Harvard Law School, he took a coveted job at a prestigious New York law firm. Seeing that the action was not in law but in finance, he jumped to Goldman Sachs, where, as an investment banker specializing in the energy sector, he rose quickly. Six years into his career as a Goldman banker, he realized he didn’t want to be a banker any more than he’d wanted to be a lawyer. He was actually seriously interested in the energy sector—he could see it was on the cusp of a great transformation—but he didn’t particularly care for Wall Street or the effect it was having on him. “One day I looked in the mirror shaving and there was this haggard face and I said,” But for the money, would you do this?’” What he wanted, he thought, was to be a writer—but when he shared his secret ambition with his Goldman boss, his boss just looked at him pityingly and said, “John, you have to have talent to write a book.” He wasn’t rich at that point—he had a few hundred grand to his name—but, at the age of thirty-five, he quit his Goldman job and set out to be a novelist.

For the next year he wrote the novel he had imagined—The Fire Dream, he called it—and, despite the indifference of the publishing industry, he began another one. But while the first story had come naturally to him, the second one felt forced. He sensed that he probably didn’t want to be a writer much more than he had wanted to be a lawyer or an investment banker. “The hardest part was admitting to myself in my black blue jeans that I missed my old life,” he said. He set out to raise money for a fund that would invest in energy companies—at which point an editor from Random House called and said he couldn’t get The Fire Dream out of his head and regretted having rejected it. MacWilliams sensed absurdity in his situation: he’d already abandoned his literary ambition. “I can’t be a novelist trying to raise an equity fund,” he said, so he stuck his novel back in the drawer and became a founding partner of the Beacon Group, a private investment firm, and also within that group was co-head of a Beacon fund that specifically invested in the energy field. Seven years later he and his partners sold the Beacon Group to JPMorgan Chase for $500 million.