By Michael Lewis for Vanity Fair's Sept. 2017 issue, available free in full online
Donald Trump’s secretary of energy, Rick Perry, once campaigned to abolish the $30 billion agency that he now runs, which oversees everything from our nuclear arsenal to the electrical grid. The department’s budget is now on the chopping block. But does anyone in the White House really understand what the Department of Energy actually does? And what a horrible risk it would be to ignore its extraordinary, life-or-death responsibilities?
Excellent writing as always, but quite depressing. Because: it makes very clear that we have an extremely incompetent and dysfunctional or non-functional Executive branch right now, where much of the government we are paying for has no one running it. And that's not just the D.O.E., which normally does very sophisticated and very complicated work which Lewis attempts to explain; he also gives examples of others. Lewis also makes clear it's mostly not "drain the swamp" purposeful activity, but total lack of activity, or incompetent activity. It seems to be like this: little young Trumpkin ideologues pop into department buildings for visits very infrequently, to see if anyone's working there anymore, and maybe yell at them. Otherwise totally rudderless (Perry is shown to be doing: basically nothing purposeful, neither negative nor positive, just collecting a salary) and those still left on staff are still clueless as to what this administration wants.
He spends some time on the massive preparation Obama people did to be ready and waiting for turnover, because Obama had been so grateful that Bush did similar for his administration, he wanted to better the example. But that the transfer prep work under Obama was wasted. Nobody came to use it, basically very little turn over has happened yet and many people who knew how to run things and could train the newbies have left.
When Trump brags we are #1 at this or that, and can do this or that, chances are likely we're not, because those people that used to do those things and could instruct newbies, they are gone and no one has replaced them.