Famed author Michael Lewis has written a new book about the administration of President Donald Trump titled, “The Fifth Risk” and the author says that what he’s found should be “terrifying” to Americans.
Lewis’s book goes inside the Trump administration’s transition after the 2016 election and details ways staffers were unprepared, unqualified and in some cases downright harmful in their roles. Further, he discusses the importance of government agencies like the Department of Energy, Department of Agriculture and others that many Americans may not be familiar with, but that play pivotal roles in many aspects of safety and security for the United States.
“The basic role of government is to keep us safe, we’d all agree. But keep us safe from a lot of things that we’re not even thinking about,” Lewis told Yahoo Finance. “If an airborne virus hit right now I would be very uncomfortable with the Trump administration’s ability to manage the problem.”
In “The Fifth Risk” Lewis, who also wrote “The Blind Side,” “The Big Short” and “Moneyball” among others, details how Trump added and removed staffers from various departments almost at will and then sent administration representatives who had no interest in the departments they were sent to oversee or were more interested in stopping the departments’ missions than in aiding them.
He cites numerous instances, particularly at the Department of Energy, which manages not just U.S. nuclear weapons, but the efforts to contain and track nuclear weapons programs around the globe, including in countries hostile to the United States like North Korea and Russia.
He specifically pointed to Energy Secretary Rick Perry, who was appointed to lead the department after saying as a presidential candidate in 2016 that he wanted to get rid of it entirely. Perry quickly changed his tune, Lewis said, after learning what the Department of Energy does.
“You could really drop a writer down into any department of the government right now and find some existential risk that needs to be managed,” he said. “The question is which one of these ends up being the big problem.”
The author said his greatest fear for the country is what the Trump administration is not doing.
“The cost may be generation[al] hits because of the kind of things they are not doing: not paying attention to basic research, for example, and the kind of basic research that fuels the technological revolutions of the future,” Lewis said.
“They’ve tried to zero out the budgets on these things and they certainly don’t want to run them,” he added. “They’ve shut down financial regulation, at least the CFPB. I mean, the consequences of this, I think, are felt down the road.”
Asked how fearful people should be about the current state of affairs, Lewis did not mince words.
“Terrified,” he said. “But I think in a measured way, because we can fix it.”
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Dion Rabouin is a global markets reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter: @DionRabouin.
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