41 pages • 1 hour read
The Fifth Risk
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Themes
The Risks of Being Unprepared
Throughout The Fifth Risk, Lewis highlights risks at every turn, beginning with the risk of a bad transition between presidential administrations. He includes the work of Max Stier and the Partnership for Public Service in the Preface to show that a lack of continuity between presidents does not necessarily mean that the partisan work of Obama needed to be continued by Trump; rather, it had more to do with practical management. He cites work on improving hiring processes between the Bush and Obama administrations, saying, “The George W. Bush administration had begun to attack that particular mundane problem. The Obama administration, instead of running with the work done during the Bush years, had simply started all over again” (27). Not taking seriously the progress of a previous administration can leave the new one stuck in the weeds, which can have lasting effects. Regardless of political ideology, new staff members need to understand why certain issues were approached the way that they were.
Lewis gives readers a sense of this in the Preface by noting that Donald Trump was unwilling to take seriously the work of the transition team and instead opted to handle it himself. The effect, seen throughout the book, is that very few showed up to help transition between departments in the months following the election. This approach seeps down the chain of command. Those who were charged with handling the transition did not seem to take seriously the need to communicate with their predecessors to understanding the process mentioned above.
Another type of risk pervades this book: that risk that is not easily imagined or anticipated. In Part 1, Lewis discusses how former Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz encouraged the DOE to think about approaches to disasters that had never happened before, such as what would need to happen if a major earthquake hit the Pacific Northwest and caused a power outage. However, he notes that what is most easily imagined is not what is most likely going to happen; therefore, handling risks is an act of imagination. From there, the federal government also needs to be flexible in taking its ability to manage risks and apply it to those risks that cannot be easily imagined. These risks, Lewis says, are “the risk[s] we should most fear” (68). He returns to this idea in Part 3 in discussing the work of Kathy Sullivan, Kim Klockow, and the NWS. At one point, it was difficult to accurately predict a tornado, and therefore people did not heed warnings once they became more accurate. Now, the NOAA and the NWS are faced with the problem of getting a population to respond and act when a tornado is headed their way. In this case, he writes, “it’s what you fail to imagine that kills you” (219). While not explicitly referring to a risk in governance, his statement reiterates the idea that not being prepared can have devastating effects.
Project Management and Working for Long-Term Solutions
After discussing the expected risks one might expect to hear when discussing the DOE, John MacWilliams turns to project management, the “fifth risk.” Lewis defines this as “the risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions” (75). The public’s response to tornadoes is an apt metaphor for project management. The public that had not responded to the threat of the tornado did not understand that the risks were real. They needed to be persuaded to respond and take shelter. When they do, casualties are much lower. Likewise, when people understand that the risks that they need to anticipate in managing a project could become real, they are better able to prepare and thus better able to address them when they arise.
For the DOE, this risk has manifested itself in the management of the Hanford nuclear reactor site, where millions of gallons of waste were buried. When Hanford was selected as a location for the site during World War II, it was unlikely that the government completely understood the effect this choice could have on the area. When the effects of radiation were discovered, they were, for the most part, ignored. However, the effect of the over 120 million gallons of nuclear waste that were buried at the site has been devastating. Tom Carpenter, the executive direct of the Hanford Challenge, which monitors the site, bluntly told Lewis, “The reason the Hanford cleanup sucks—in a word—is shortcuts” (75). Every year, 10% of the department’s budget goes into Hanford, and this allocation will likely have to recur for a century to get the site completely cleaned up. When Secretary Moniz suggested doing a study of the risks posed by the site to work toward a long-term solution, no one, except for the indigenous tribes in the area, wanted to because each stood to benefit from what was happening there. In another example, Kathy Sullivan provides a long-term solution to the polar satellite problem by not only fixing it when she becomes director of the NOAA but also budgeting for future satellites so that her successors do not run into the same issue.
The Importance of Government Research and the Tension Between Knowledge and Ignorance
In each section, Lewis refers to research that the government funds in preparation of addressing current and/or future risks. In the first chapter, he focuses on the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) program, which funded grants to “researchers who had scientifically plausible, wildly creative ideas that might change the world” (77). In Part 2, Lewis notes that Cathie Woteki got her start in the USDA doing research on patterns of food consumption and iterates how vulnerable research funding is. Finally, he discusses the research done at the Storm Prediction Center on the day of the Elk City tornado. The team had provided the National Weather Service, and, by extension, Lonnie Risenhoover, a better sense of what the storm was going to be like, allowing him to trigger warning protocols in the town much more quickly, saving lives in a tornado that destroyed over 200 homes.
Furthermore, government data has provided a boon for private companies, like AccuWeather and the Climate Corporation. Both benefited from their ability to utilize the National Weather Service’s data. Concerning AccuWeather, this potential benefit was such that Barry Myers, its CEO, did not want the public to be able to access that data for fear it would hurt the private weather forecasting business. This position, however, is counterintuitive to serving the American people. One Bush official told Lewis, “The more people have access to the weather data, the better it is for the country […] There’s so much gold in there. People just don’t know how to get to it” (176).
Myers’s desire to keep NWS data from the public touches another key tension underlying the discussion of government data: the fight between knowledge and ignorance. The Obama administration made a concerted effort to make data more publicly available, hiring DJ Patil as the United States’ first chief data scientist. Obama also signed an executive order so that unclassified government data could be accessed by the public. This move led to a variety of research for the betterment of society, answering questions about excessive use of force by the police and how likely it is that American children will be financially better off than their parents. Lewis also notes that this order enabled the discovery of the opioid crisis. After Trump took office, both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior took climate change data off their websites. Across the government, less data was available to the public.
It is clear that Lewis is an ardent support of knowledge, both in terms of making it accessible and in terms of government accountability. He asserts, “If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it’s better never to really understand those problems. There is an upside to ignorance and a downside to knowledge” (77). To him, it is beneficial if one is seeking “to preserve a certain worldview” (80), and Trump is the “ultimate expression” of those who want to stay ignorant—ignorance that manifests in the lack of availability of government data.
The Witch Hunt Against Climate Change
In The Fifth Risk, climate change brings together many of the above themes. Lewis consistently uses it as a means of thinking about project management, long-term solutions, research, knowledge, and ignorance. He mentions in each section how funding for climate change research either has been cut or is at risk of being cut. He also notes that those who worked on researching and preparing for climate change were rooted out of the three departments on which he focuses in a style reminiscent of a witch hunt. In the first section, Lewis mentions how Deputy Secretary of Energy Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall was asked for a list of employees and contractors who attended any meetings of the Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Carbon. She herself even said, “It reminded me of McCarthyism” (41), referring to the hunt for Communists during the Cold War led by Senator Joseph McCarthy.
The idea returns in Part 2 during the discussion of Cathie Woteki’s work as chief scientist for the USDA. She understood that climate change impacted much of her work, and some of the programs funded during her tenure sought to address its long-term effects. As Lewis notes, “It might sound silly that the USDA funds a project that seeks to improve the ability of sheep to graze at high altitudes—until you realize that this may one day be the only place sheep will be able to graze” (113). This comment serves to show that it’s important to think about long-term solutions to a problem like climate change. In the next paragraph, however, Woteki expresses her concern that research like this will be cut and replaced with “junk science.”
Lewis continues to emphasize the threat that climate change poses by focusing on data from the NWS as his primary example of the risks posed by being unprepared in the Department of Commerce. Because of climate change, weather patterns are expected to be more unpredictable and could lead to more disasters, which could ultimately benefit private weather forecasts that use NWS data. In this final section, while discussing the importance of making data available to the public, Lewis also points to the fact that climate change data has been removed from the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of the Interior websites.
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