This book can be a scary read. At times I had to put it down because what it was talking about was just too disturbing . This isn’t fiction: it’s not just about all the bad things that may happen, but the things that have:
Just before the (Trump) inauguration, a trump representative called the USDA and said … he was sending thirty-something new people (to take over positions the Obama administration was vacating). .. A member of the Obama transition team wondered how the newcomers could have been vetted so quickly by the Office of Presidential Personnel. Nine months later, Politico published an eye-popping account about these new appointees … Into USDA jobs, some of which paid nearly $80K a year, the Trump team had inserted a long-haul truck driver, a clerk at AT&T, a gas-company meter reader, a country-club cabana attendant, a Republican National Committee intern, and the owner of a scented-candle company … “(they) demonstrated little to no experience with federal policy … some appear to lack the credentials, such as a college degree…”
What these people had in common, she pointed out, was loyalty to Donald Trump.
There are examples of this criminal incompetence from everybody Trump has chosen to run the government. The USDA is only one of the agencies crippled or badly managed by these people.
Since the book’s publication in 2018 some of the damage has been blocked or avoided, but still people like Wilbur Ross is in charge of the Department of Commerce yet has no idea what his department does. And that USDA head Sonny Perdue rescinded all the school food health quality federal guidelines Obama had instituted.
Most of the book is not about the stupidity of the Trump administration, but of the incredibly frightening possible catastrophes that need constant effort to prevent but which the Trump administration is completely ignoring. This is not only the obvious stuff like climate change and global trade connections but things like the massive underground sludge of radioactive wastes slowly migrating toward the Columbia River at Hanford, WA (where 2/3s all of all US radioactive waste is stored). Or the time some determined saboteurs shot out seventeen electric transformers and cut the critical cables at a California substation that came this close to disabling Google and Amazon for an indefinite time.
Then you get the stories from a former USDA administrator like this:
“I had this conversation with elected and state officials almost everywhere in the South ..
“Them: We hate the government and you suck.
“Me: My mission alone put $1B into your economy this year,so are you sure about that?
“Me(thinking): We are the only reason your shitty state is still standing.”
There is far more material in this book about what the many divisions of our federal government do, much of which is unknown by almost all Americans. But it does show how vast and interconnected all the working parts of this government is to every American in ways we take for granted and just expect as our rights. But the lesson here is also that if we ignore taking care of those connections by electing crooks, fraudsters and Republicans, those privileges we enjoy can vanish in an instant.
Read it, and be afraid.