The Fifth Risk
By Michael Lewis
One of the best books ever written about why good government really matters—now more than ever.
Someone I used to know would occasionally use the expression “good enough for government” to describe things that are mediocre. The phrase’s suggestion that government is filled with bureaucrats and hacks always irritated me. Me, I’m corny about public service, in large part because I know lots of smart and dedicated and hard-working people who help make our government function to make all of our lives better and safer. Professionally speaking, I’ve long thought that coverage of government agencies is woefully insufficient. These institutions do hugely important work, and our ignorance of that work leads to public cynicism and the sense that it’s OK to vote for people who don’t care about or don’t like government because, after all, government can’t do anything right.
In The Fifth Risk, an examination of what happens when a person who hates the federal government and knows virtually nothing about it somehow becomes president, Michael Lewis writes about public servants whom you and I have never heard of. Whether they work at the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Energy or NOAA, Lewis shows them to be passionate, principled and highly skilled. More to the point, he shows them—and the work of their agencies—to be important. Really important—as in, keeping-us-alive level of important. And that work is all being neglected, undone, reversed or swept under the carpet under an administration that has no meaningful interest in public policy uncorrelated to ideological warfare, personal resentment or personal gain. (Two years into the Trump administration, some 37 percent of White House-appointed jobs remain unfilled.)
This isn’t a sexy story, but it’s a hugely important one. The loss of these people’s expertise—and, in some cases, their replacement with corrupt and/or incompetent Trump cronies—is undermining our government’s ability to function. It’s making what Trump supporters say they hate about the government actually true.
We may not know all the work that the people Lewis writes about do—although many Americans felt the loss of it during the recent government shutdown—but we’ll be feeling the effects of the assault on them for decades to come. Published by W.W. Norton & Company
