Why the Scariest Nuclear Threat May Be Coming from Inside the White House (Michael Lewis)

[swag]

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/department-of-energy-risks-michael-lewis

On the morning after the election, November 9, 2016, the people who ran the U.S. Department of Energy turned up in their offices and waited. They had cleared 30 desks and freed up 30 parking spaces. They didn’t know exactly how many people they’d host that day, but whoever won the election would surely be sending a small army into the Department of Energy, and every other federal agency. The morning after he was elected president, eight years earlier, Obama had sent between 30 and 40 people into the Department of Energy. The Department of Energy staff planned to deliver the same talks from the same five-inch-thick three-ring binders, with the Department of Energy seal on them, to the Trump people as they would have given to the Clinton people. “Nothing had to be changed,” said one former Department of Energy staffer. “They’d be done always with the intention that, either party wins, nothing changes.”

By afternoon the silence was deafening. “Day 1, we’re ready to go,” says a former senior White House official. “Day 2 it was ‘Maybe they’ll call us?’ ”

“Teams were going around, ‘Have you heard from them?’ ” recalls another staffer who had prepared for the transition. “ ‘Have you gotten anything? I haven’t got anything.’ ”

“The election happened,” remembers Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, then deputy secretary of the D.O.E. “And he won. And then there was radio silence. We were prepared for the next day. And nothing happened.” Across the federal government the Trump people weren’t anywhere to be found. Allegedly, between the election and the inauguration not a single Trump representative set foot inside the Department of Agriculture, for example. The Department of Agriculture has employees or contractors in every county in the United States, and the Trump people seemed simply to be ignoring the place. Where they did turn up inside the federal government, they appeared confused and unprepared. A small group attended a briefing at the State Department, for instance, only to learn that the briefings they needed to hear were classified. None of the Trump people had security clearance—or, for that matter, any experience in foreign policy—and so they weren’t allowed to receive an education. On his visits to the White House soon after the election, Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, expressed surprise that so much of its staff seemed to be leaving. “It was like he thought it was a corporate acquisition or something,” says an Obama White House staffer. “He thought everyone just stayed.”

Trump’s people “mainly ran around the building insulting people,” says a former Obama official.

Even in normal times the people who take over the United States government can be surprisingly ignorant about it. As a longtime career civil servant in the D.O.E., who has watched four different administrations show up to try to run the place, put it, “You always have the issue of maybe they don’t understand what the department does.” To address that problem, a year before he left office, Barack Obama had instructed a lot of knowledgeable people across his administration, including 50 or so inside the D.O.E., to gather the knowledge that his successor would need in order to understand the government he or she was taking charge of. The Bush administration had done the same for Obama, and Obama had always been grateful for their efforts. He told his staff that their goal should be to ensure an even smoother transfer of power than the Bush people had achieved.

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[salin]

1. This is one of the most imp things I have read this week.

It's a long read, but worth it.

Rot spreads down from the top. No one bothers to learn about anything. This really is a nihilistic administration. This isn't about partisanship, it is clear that even under W qualified people went in and learned, conducted business, and kept us safe. No one is doing that in this administration. Undoubtedly it is happening across the government.

We should print copies of this and send it to our congressional representatives regardless of party. What is the congress doing to ensure that departments are staffed, have goals (even if they are different than the one's we would desire) and reasonable plans to pursue those goals. Where there are cuts, what metrics have been followed to determine where cuts are made, and are those reasonable? Not to micromanage - but to ensure that management is happening at all, and to ensure that vital programs are continued. This article lays the ground work for looking at one major Dept. Since the admin is clearly not going to do anything, we need to demand the Congressional oversight is engaged and working.