Tag Archives: Trump Administration

Nature Abhors a Vacuum

The dominance of climate-change deniers in the Trump cabinet, and Trump’s own dismissal of science and expertise–exemplified by his withdrawal from the Paris Accords–has rational people understandably depressed and worried.

Fortunately, policy is not made or implemented exclusively at the federal level.

Earlier this month, the New York Times reported that California Governor Jerry Brown had announced his own global summit.

Gov. Jerry Brown of California on Thursday reinforced his reputation as America’s de facto leader on climate change, announcing to cheering crowds in Hamburg, Germany that his state would gather leaders from around the world for a global warming summit next year.

Speaking by videoconference to the Global Citizens Festival in Hamburg, where President Donald Trump is joining other world leaders for the Group of 20 economic summit, Governor Brown said the president “doesn’t speak for the rest of America” in pulling out of the Paris agreement on climate change.

Governor Brown announced a Climate Action Summit, to take place in San Francisco in September of 2018. The California meeting will include leaders of states, cities, businesses and a variety of other organizations pledged to the goals of the Paris Accords. Organizers anticipate thousands of attendees from among those who have been galvanized by Mr. Trump’s decision.

It isn’t just Jerry Brown, either. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has  published a letter to the United Nations that has been signed by more than 1,200 mayors, business leaders, university presidents and others who confirmed that “we are still in” the climate deal.

The response has been overwhelmingly positive.

“With the Trump administration’s rather comprehensive moves to reverse the Obama administration’s suite of climate policies, the potential importance and the prominence of all these subnational actions and actors is greater now than ever before,” said Robert Stavins, an energy economist at Harvard University….

Governor Brown maintained that his goal was not to antagonize the president, but to urge everyone to do more. “It isn’t being cooked up because of Trump,” Governor Brown said in an interview Wednesday. “No nation or state is doing what they should be doing. This is damn serious, and most people are taking it far too lightly than the reality of the threat. You can’t do too much to sound the alarm because so far the response is not adequate to the challenge.”

He predicted the opposition to climate change policies by Mr. Trump and many Republicans would shift as evidence of the consequences of climate change mounted. “If the whole world except the U.S. is sufficiently galvanized, it will only be a short period before the U.S. falls in line,” he said. “I think President Trump unwittingly is serving to stimulate the movement toward decarbonization by his very public, idiosyncratic resistance to both the science, the diplomacy and the politics.”

To characterize Trump’s resistance as “idiosyncratic” is incredibly diplomatic. But I entirely agree that any positive results of Trump’s election have been entirely inadvertent…

Addendum: For readers inclined to enjoy nature and our national parks while we still have them and the latter are still affordable, I’m passing along a message from Betty:

You may want to let your readers 62-over know that they can get a Lifetime Senior Pass to all national parks/monuments right now for $10. The pass jumps to $80 on Aug. 28, 2017. Passes are available online at www.nps.gov ($10 service fee added, still a bargain) or by a visit to a Visitor Center at any national park/monument.
I got mine at Shiloh National Military Park and it stays in my vehicle. The pass comes with a hangtag and a plastic card for the owner to sign, insert on the hangtag, and display on the rearview mirror at any national park/monument.
Your readers have a month before the price goes through the roof.

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Reality Doesn’t Care Whether You Believe It (Part II)

One of the defining features of our time is increasing complexity; the rapid growth and sophistication of technology, the globalization of economics, science and even governance, in short, the accelerating production of vast amounts of knowledge that no one person can hope to master (or even identify).

This complexity requires informed and thoughtful policymaking, an understanding of how the various aspects of our shared environment interact, if we are to avoid unintended and very harmful consequences.

Unfortunately, we have elected a President and numerous lawmakers who are not up to the task, to put it as delicately as possible. They are supported by voters who dismiss people who do have expertise, people who actually know things, as “elitist.”

A couple of examples: a while back, the New York Times ran an article about automation, addressing a number of likely consequences of new AI (Artificial Intelligence) technologies:

A.I. products that now exist are improving faster than most people realize and promise to radically transform our world, not always for the better. They are only tools, not a competing form of intelligence. But they will reshape what work means and how wealth is created, leading to unprecedented economic inequalities and even altering the global balance of power.

It is imperative that we turn our attention to these imminent challenges.

What is artificial intelligence today? Roughly speaking, it’s technology that takes in huge amounts of information from a specific domain (say, loan repayment histories) and uses it to make a decision in a specific case (whether to give an individual a loan) in the service of a specified goal (maximizing profits for the lender). Think of a spreadsheet on steroids, trained on big data. These tools can outperform human beings at a given task.

I have posted previously about the potential consequences of AI and automation generally for job creation. The number of jobs lost to automation already dwarfs those lost to outsourcing and trade–and yet, activists on both the Right and Left continue to focus only on trade policy.

This kind of A.I. is spreading to thousands of domains (not just loans), and as it does, it will eliminate many jobs. Bank tellers, customer service representatives, telemarketers, stock and bond traders, even paralegals and radiologists will gradually be replaced by such software. Over time this technology will come to control semiautonomous and autonomous hardware like self-driving cars and robots, displacing factory workers, construction workers, drivers, delivery workers and many others.

Unlike the Industrial Revolution and the computer revolution, the A.I. revolution is not taking certain jobs (artisans, personal assistants who use paper and typewriters) and replacing them with other jobs (assembly-line workers, personal assistants conversant with computers). Instead, it is poised to bring about a wide-scale decimation of jobs — mostly lower-paying jobs, but some higher-paying ones, too.

If Donald Trump has ever addressed this issue, or suggested that he is even aware of it, it has escaped my notice.

Richard Hofstadter’s book, Anti-intellectualism in American Life is, if anything, more relevant today than when it was written. What Hofstadter and others who have addressed this particular element of American culture failed to foresee, however, was a time in which the federal government (together with a good number of state governments–Texas comes immediately to mind) would be controlled by people who neither understand the world they live in nor know what they don’t know.

Science Magazine  recently reported on the EPA’s dismissal of 38 science advisors.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt continues to clean house at a key advisory committee, signaling plans to drop several dozen current members of the Board of Scientific Counselors (BOSC), according to an email yesterday from a senior agency official.

Unlike most of Trump’s cabinet, Pruitt is proving to be effective. Unfortunately, he is proving effective in his efforts to destroy the EPA–not just by denying the reality of climate change science, but by rolling back regulations that protect air and water quality. He appears to be operating on a theory common to this administration: if a reality is uncongenial, ignore it or deny its existence. If evidence contradicts your worldview, dismiss it.

Yesterday, in a reference to Neil DeGrasse Tyson, I observed that science and reality are true whether or not you believe them.

The worst thing about giving simple and/or corrupt people the power to run a government they do not understand is that complicated realities continue to be realities, and the longer we fail to engage those realities, the worse the consequences.

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An Unsettling Omen…

I vividly remember my first few months on the 25th floor of Indianapolis’ City-County Building. I was the brand-new Corporation Counsel, suddenly responsible for the legal affairs of the city, and getting up to speed was both imperative and disorienting. I especially remember encountering situations where City Legal had previously taken positions that seemed…odd. Situations where I would wonder “Why did they do that?”

Fast-forward three years, to my departure, and I remember thinking “Boy, I wish I could put a memo in several of these files, saying ‘I know this looks strange, but there’s a good reason we did thus and so…'” At least there were long-time employees, civil servants who could explain some of these situations to the next appointee.

In any institution, public or private, institutional memory is incredibly important. (As the salesmen sang in The Music Man, you’ve got to know the territory!) In the federal government, that store of institutional knowledge is most important in the State Department, where understanding foreign cultures, the histories of complex relationships, and the idiosyncrasies of various heads of state can be critical.

So hearing that the State Department’s entire senior administrative team has just resigned was both significant and deeply troubling. As the Washington Post reported,

The entire senior level of management officials resigned Wednesday, part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior Foreign Service officers who don’t want to stick around for the Trump era….All are career Foreign Service officers who have served under both Republican and Democratic administrations…

In addition, Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security Gregory Starr retired Jan. 20, and the director of the Bureau of Overseas Building Operations, Lydia Muniz, departed the same day. That amounts to a near-complete housecleaning of all the senior officials that deal with managing the State Department, its overseas posts and its people.

It is difficult to overstate the impact of these mass resignations on the ability of the United States to safeguard critical American interests.

“It’s the single biggest simultaneous departure of institutional memory that anyone can remember, and that’s incredibly difficult to replicate,” said David Wade, who served as State Department chief of staff under Secretary of State John Kerry. “Department expertise in security, management, administrative and consular positions in particular are very difficult to replicate and particularly difficult to find in the private sector.”

As Wade emphasized,

“Diplomatic security, consular affairs, there’s just not a corollary that exists outside the department, and you can least afford a learning curve in these areas where issues can quickly become matters of life and death,” he said. “The muscle memory is critical. These retirements are a big loss. They leave a void. These are very difficult people to replace.”

America has installed a President who–to put the most charitable possible spin on it–doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. And the people who could fill in the blanks–the people with the knowledge and experience to keep us safe and to protect American interests, the people who actually understand what those interests are, have bailed.

Not a good sign.

We really are in uncharted waters.

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Pinning My Hopes on the “Iron Triangle.”

In the Public Interest issues a weekly privatization report, detailing efforts around the country to “outsource” management of public programs to the private sector. This interesting nugget was reported in a recent one:

Emanuel Savas, one of the key figures driving the privatization agenda for the right wing for five decades, has some advice for Donald Trump on “personnel”: follow Reagan. “Early in his administration, Reagan held frequent cabinet meetings, sometimes two or three a week, the principal purpose of which was to acclimate the members of his cabinet to the idea that they worked for the president, not for the Iron Triangle. By coming so frequently to the White House, Reagan’s appointees bonded with their peers—and with the president. If he is to avoid the threat to his agenda posed by the Iron Triangle, Trump should follow Reagan’s lead.” The “iron triangle” is “(1) the permanent employees of a department or agency; (2) the congressional committees with a stake in the growth of—and deference to—a corresponding executive department or agency; (3) the department or agency’s constituents.”

I hadn’t heard the phrase “iron triangle,” but anyone teaching public policy or government administration is familiar with the phenomenon of “capture”–the undeniable tendency of agency employees, Congressional committees and even the businesses or industries being regulated to resist proposed changes to business as usual.

Humans have a tendency to prefer the known to the unknown, to feel uneasy when rules and structures with which we are comfortable are upended. Typically, this resistance to change is considered a problem to be overcome, and it can be a barrier to needed reforms.

But it can also be a safeguard against unwise or ill-advised change.

Government agencies are staffed with workers having professional expertise in the agency’s mission. The political appointees who come and go with various administrations may or may not know very much about those missions; in the era of Trump, we have been treated to a lineup of nominees who have displayed a stunning ignorance of the rules they will be expected to enforce and/or dismissive of the challenges their agencies are meant to confront.

When ideologues hostile to science and evidence are put in charge of agencies staffed by people who actually know what they’re doing and why they are doing it, that staff can slow– or even in some cases subvert– efforts meant to undermine the work of the agency.

In just the first week since his inauguration, Trump and a number of his cabinet nominees have displayed a total lack of understanding of how American government actually works. (If we are to believe the numerous leaks from his still-skeletal White House staff, Trump himself has very little interest in learning how it works.)  Politico recently reported that the administration issued its flurry of Executive Orders without bothering to check whether there were laws or practical impediments to their enforcement.

The breakneck pace of Trump’s executive actions might please his supporters, but critics are questioning whether the documents are being rushed through without the necessary review from agency experts and lawmakers who will bear the burden of actually carrying them out. For example, there are legal questions on how the country can force companies building pipelines to use materials manufactured domestically, which might not be available or which could violate trade treaty obligations. There’s also the question of whether the federal government can take billions from cities who don’t comply with immigration enforcement actions: Legal experts said it was unclear.

“You want to make sure when you’re dealing with high stakes, important issues you’re getting the best information from the breadth of expertise that exists in government,” said Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan nonprofit that supports the civil service. “You don’t know what you don’t know.”….

By contrast, the Obama White House ran executive orders through a painstaking weeks-long process of soliciting feedback from agencies and briefing lawmakers, according to a former official. Sometimes it even asked expert lawyers in the private sector to check its work.

Being President is nothing at all like being the CEO of a family-owned business, and that recognition will come as a very unwelcome surprise to the Man Who Would Be King.

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Big Tobacco’s Poisonous Legacy

Lung cancer is not the only legacy of Big Tobacco, and arguably not even the worst.

In the years when tobacco companies were fighting emerging medical evidence of the links between smoking and deleterious health consequences, including cancer, they developed a diabolically effective strategy; rather than arguing that the science was wrong, they claimed it was inconclusive, that no one really knew whether cigarettes were the cause of people’s illnesses. The research was inconclusive.

That tactic worked for a long time, and as Senator Sheldon Whitehouse recently wrote, it has been the playbook for efforts by fossil fuel interests to delegitimize scientific consensus about climate change. In an essay for Inside Higher Ed,  Whitehouse called upon universities to confront the tactic.

The threat is simple. The fossil fuel industry has adopted and powered up infrastructure and methods originally built by the tobacco industry and others to attack and deny science. That effort has coalesced into a large, adaptive and well-camouflaged apparatus that aspires to mimic and rival legitimate science. The science that universities support now has an unprecedented and unprincipled new adversary…

The science-denial machinery is an industrial-strength adversary, and it has big advantages over real science. First, it does not need to win its disputes with real science; it just needs to create a public illusion of a dispute. Then industry’s political forces can be put into play to stop any efforts to address whatever problem science had disclosed, since now it is “disputed science.” Hence the infamous phrase from the tobacco-era science denial operation — “Doubt is our product.”

Doubt is aided and abetted by the absence of universally trusted news sources (Where have you gone, Walter Cronkite? A nation turns its weary eyes to you…), increasingly sophisticated propaganda purveyors, and the very human tendency to engage in confirmation bias.

As Whitehouse says, the fossil-fuel apologists and climate-change deniers don’t waste their time in peer-reviewed forums. Instead, they go directly to Fox News and talk radio, to committee hearings and editorial pages. “Their work is, at its heart, PR dressed up as science but not actual science. So they go directly to their audience — and the more uninformed the audience, the better.”

Our universities and other organizations engaged in the enterprise of science struggle for funding. Not so for the science-denial forces. You may think maintaining this complex science-denial apparatus sounds like a lot of effort. So consider the stakes for the fossil fuel industry. The International Monetary Fund — made up of smart people, with no apparent conflict of interest — has calculated the subsidy fossil fuels receive in the United States to be $700 billion annually. That subsidy is mostly what economists call “externalities” — costs the public has to bear from the product’s harm that should be, under market theory, in the price of the product. These $700-billion-per-year stakes mean that the funding available to the science-denial enterprise is virtually unlimited… Make no mistake: in every dispute that this denial machinery manufactures with real science, it is determined to see real science fail. That is its purpose.

As Whitehouse points out, given the strong connections between the incoming Trump Administration and the fossil fuel industry, we can no longer depend on government to be an honest broker and a defender of legitimate science. Hence his plea to universities and other scientific organizations — to join together and step up a common defense.

Sometimes, it all seems like a bad dream…..

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