The Weed Agency: A Comic Tale of Federal Bureaucracy Without Limits - Softcover

Geraghty, Jim

 
9780770436520: The Weed Agency: A Comic Tale of Federal Bureaucracy Without Limits
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0770436528 ISBN 13: 9780770436520
Verlag: PRH Christian Publishing, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

The spellbinding mock history of the Department of Agriculture's most secretive and vital agency.

The little-known USDA Agency of Invasive Species—founded by President and humble peanut farmer Jimmy Carter—would like to reassure you that they rank among the most effective and cost-efficient offices within the sprawling federal bureaucracy. For decades, under Administrative Director Adam Humphrey and his “strategic disengagement” approach, the Agency has epitomized vigilance against the clear and present danger of noxious weeds. Humphrey’s record of triumphant inertia faces only two obstacles. The first is reality; the second is the loud critic who dares to question the magic behind the Agency’s success: Nicholas Bader. Formerly known as President Reagan’s “bloody right hand,” Bader is on an obsessive quest to trim the fat from the federal budget.

Full of oddball characters who shed light on the daily operations of Beltway minions, The Weed Agency showcases a world in which federal budgets balloon every year, where a career can be built upon the skill of rationalizing astronomical expenses, and where the word "accountability" sends roars of laughter through DC office buildings. That’s life inside the federal Agency of Invasive Species… and it may sound suspiciously similar to your reality.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jim Geraghty is a blogger and contributing editor at National Review, and writes columns for the New York Daily News, Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Guardian. He’s the author of the daily newsletter The Morning Jolt. He resides in Alexandria, Virginia.

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1

February 1981

U.S. National Debt: $950 billion

Budget, USDA Agency of Invasive Species: $20.2 million

Jack Wilkins knew he was about to witness history: In the long history of budgetary fights, Adam Humphrey vs. Nicholas Bader was going to be the clash of the titans: Otto von Bismarck vs. Genghis Khan.

At stake was nothing less than the existence of the federal agency that employed Wilkins and Humphrey, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agency of Invasive Species. President Jimmy Carter established the agency, dedicated to protecting American agriculture and gardens from the menace of invasive weeds, just four years earlier, and it stood out as a most likely target for cuts.

Humphrey’s official title at the agency was abbreviated as “USDA DFS BARM A-IS AD,”1 but as the administrative director, the highest-ranking non-appointed position, agency employees considered him the only man within the agency who actually knew what was going on.

And yet, as the two men sat in Humphrey’s office in the U.S. Department of Agriculture building in Washington, Wilkins found his boss oddly quiet and almost too confident.

“We have a week to save our jobs,” Wilkins emphasized. He wasn’t surprised that his boss didn’t share his panic--Humphrey was legendarily unflappable--but unnerved that his boss seemed so engrossed by the articles about the incoming Reagan administration’s budget hawks that he seemed oblivious to the notion that their own jobs were among those they would try to cut.

“I thought that Gergen, Stockman, and the other barbarians coming in with the president would give us more time, but they just called and asked us to meet with Nick Bader Monday morning.” Wilkins exhaled. “Of all the folks we could deal with, Bader’s the worst. ‘Nick the Knife.’ ‘Big, Bad Bader.’ ”

Like most of Washington, Wilkins thought that “President Ronald Reagan” was a fanciful, silly notion that the electorate would never actually indulge as an experiment. But the 1980 election hadn’t even been that close, and now the early days of the administration revealed an even more unthinkable development: Reagan and his team hadn’t merely been talking about cutting the government; they were putting together a budget that would actually do it. The twenty-six-year-old Wilkins had jumped to the high-ranking assistant administrator position at the federal agency after reaching early burnout in the Carter White House, and now what he had been assured was a remarkably safe civil service job felt precarious.

Humphrey was only a decade older than Wilkins but the difference felt generational. Unlike Wilkins’s deepening anxiety, Humphrey shrugged off the incoming administration’s pledge to cut wherever possible; he had recently tried to reassure his younger assistant that those who pledge to uproot bureaucracy are among those most likely to succumb to it. He pointed out that the president arrived in Washington with forty-eight separate task forces assigned to assist in the effort to reorganize the government, with more than 450 eager minds, mouths, and egos involved. The overall government-cutting bible of the merry band, Mandate for Leadership, published by the Heritage Foundation, was a 1,093-page book that represented the work of twenty task forces with three hundred participants, some of whom overlapped with Reagan’s task forces.2 The president’s inner circle selected the dangerous right-winger David Gergen to set up the president’s Initial Actions Project with a forty-ninepage report laying out the plan to not get distracted in his first year in office.

Despite Humphrey’s quiet, inexplicable confidence, the Reagan team moved quickly and his little kingdom--a federal agency assigned the silly-sounding duty of ensuring the nation’s safety from invasive weeds--stood out, glaringly, high on the list of potential cuts.

The decisive meeting with the administration loomed a week away, with every expectation that the session would end with the administration announcing its intent to eliminate the Agency of Invasive Species entirely.

Wilkins had hoped the meetings would be with someone reasonable, someone like David Stockman, the congressman who was leaving the Hill to become Reagan’s new head of the White House Office of Management and Budget. Instead . . .

Bader.

No name struck more fear into the hearts of government employees than the newly named Special Assistant to the President for Budgetary Discipline Nicholas Bader. Among federal employees, Bader was deemed slightly more threatening and evil than Charles Manson. Bader was jealous of Stockman’s reputation as the administration’s most fearsome axman, and shortly after a Newsweek cover piece on Stockman, Bader cooperated with a Time profile on himself that called him, “Reagan’s bloody right hand, always grasping a meat cleaver and craving the chance to cut deeper and faster.” The accompanying caricature portrayed him as Jack the Ripper.

In a heavy-handed symbolism rarely found outside Herblock cartoons, slain women labeled with various government agencies’ three-letter acronyms were depicted lying at Bader’s feet as his head was thrown back, roaring with laughter. The comparison didn’t bother Bader in the slightest; he joked that the cartoonist intended the comparison of government agencies to prostitutes.

A Time’s reporter asked Bader what, if any, government spending was legitimate and necessary. The pugnacious Reaganite instantly and easily replied that at this moment in American history, all government resources should be refocused upon the threat of the Soviet Union, now on the march in Afghanistan and who knows where next.

One week later, Wilkins felt even less assured about the upcoming budget battle, and Humphrey’s mysterious confidence continued unabated. They met at the agency offices in the Department of Agriculture building at 14th Street and Independence Avenue, then grabbed a cab for the short ride to Bader’s lair in the Old Executive Office Building. Humphrey never walked in winter.

On the cab’s radio, Pat Benatar dared her suitors to demonstrate their marksmanship.

“So the plan is, what, Adam, hypnotize him?” asked Wilkins, fidgeting with the handle on his briefcase.

“Relax, Jack,” Humphrey instructed. “Bader feeds off of anxiety, and if you show weakness, suggest any concession, he will pounce. He will begin with bluster and an attempt to demonstrate dominance to set the tone of the meeting, like a great ape beating his chest. Ignore it all and appear unimpressed. Let me do the talking. And concur with anything I say.”

Wilkins nodded, and nervously cracked his knuckles.

Bader himself drove in from the Virginia suburbs. Despite his reputation as part of the Reaganite preppie vanguard, he had a soft spot for pop music. British rockers singing about one after another biting the dust put him in the appropriately ruthless mood for the workday.

He drummed the steering wheel and wiggled his tush to the beat in the driver’s seat, amusing the occasional commuter in the next lane. Next to the perpetually sunny president, Bader enjoyed his job more than anyone else in Washington.

The grandson of German immigrants, Bader grew up in Queens, New York, in a thoroughly middle-class lifestyle, the son of an accountant father and aspiring entrepreneurial mother.

Young Nick had learned to give his father, Reynard P. Bader, CPA, a wide berth from about mid-January to mid-April. Life returned to its relaxed and warm tone after the last of those...

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Verlag
PRH Christian Publishing
Erscheinungsdatum
2014
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0770436528
ISBN 13 
9780770436520
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
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