In Defense of the DOC, DOE & USDA
In Defense of the Department of Commerce
The Department of Commerce (DOC) is seriously misnamed. It has almost nothing to do with commerce directly. As a Bush official said, “Its mission is a science and technology mission.” It should really be called the Department of Information or the Department of Science and Technology.
The DOC is a massive data-collecting enterprise. It runs the U.S. Census which conducts more than 200 economic and demographic surveys every year. But of the roughly $20 billion spent each year by the Commerce Department, the biggest collector — $5.4 billion — goes to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the bulk of that money is spent on figuring out the weather.
NOAA provides incredible value but everyone shits on it. It’s stacked with great people who aren’t in it for the money. It regulates the fishing industry, maps the ocean floor, and maintains the fleet of ships and planes used in gathering information. It collected climate and weather data going back to records kept by Thomas Jefferson.
The yearly budget for the National Weather Service is $1 billion, which doesn’t even include all the costs incurred by privately funded meteorological institutions and the military and local TV stations and every other organization with a vested interest in predicting what the unexperienced world will be like. As a result of this investment, our weather can be correctly predicted around 66% of the time.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology, stuffed with Nobel laureates, does everything from setting the standards for construction materials to determining the definition of a “second” and of an “inch.”
AccuWeather, one of the first for-profit weather companies, claimed that it was better than the National Weather Service at forecasting the weather. It wasn’t. ForecastAdvisor, the authority on the relative accuracy of various weather forecasts, ranks The Weather Channel #1.
A private company whose weather predictions were totally dependent on the billions of dollars spent by U.S. taxpayers to gather the data necessary for those predictions, on decades of intellectual weather work sponsored by the U.S. taxpayer, on international data-sharing treaties made on behalf of the U.S. taxpayer, and on the very forecasts that the National Weather Service generated, was, in effect, trying to force the U.S. taxpayer to pay all over again for what the National Weather Service will tell us for free.
Pause a moment to consider the audacity of this maneuver. It’s taking a public good that’s been paid for with taxpayer dollars and restricting it to the privileged few who want to make money off it.
In 2013, AccuWeather began to issue a 45-day weather forecast. In 2016 that became a 90-day weather forecast. Dan Satterfield, a meteorologist on CBS’s Maryland affiliate, said, “We are in the realm of palm reading and horoscopes here, not science. This kind of thing should be condemned, and if you have an AccuWeather app on your smartphone, my advice is to stand up for science and replace it.”
The National Weather Service was forbidden by law from advertising the value of its services. NASA had been encouraged, right from the start, to promote itself. “NASA was allowed to tell its story to the world.”
In 2017, AccuWeather was selling the locations of people using its app, even when these individuals had declined to give AccuWeather permission to do this.
In Defense of the Department of Energy (DOE)
The DOE is a $35 billion/year organization with 14,000 employees and 83 field locations. It has The very little to do with oil. Roughly half of it’s budget is spent on maintaining and guarding the U.S. nuclear arsenal ($2 billion of that goes to hunting down weapons-grade plutonium and uranium at loose in the world so that it doesn’t fall into the hands of terrorists), one quarter goes to cleaning up all the unholy world-historic mess left behind by the manufacture of nuclear weapons and the last quarter goes into a variety of programs aimed at shaping Americans’ access to, and use of, energy.
To maintain the U.S. nuclear arsenal, the DOE conducts endless expensive experiments on tiny amounts of nuclear material to try to understand what is happening to plutonium when it fissions, which no one really does. To study the process, it’s funding what promises to be the next generation of supercomputers.
The DOE also does things like investigating the origins of the universe. The whole point was to take big risks the market wouldn’t take, and they were making money too.
Conservatives say the market should take care of everything. But the market doesn’t go into the lab and work on something that might or might not work. “The private sector only steps in once [the] DOE shows it can work,” said Franklin Orr, Stanford professor of engineering who took a 2-year leave of absence to oversee the DOE’s science programs.
The sort of research that might lead to huge changes in energy production often doesn’t pay off for decades. Plus it requires a lot of expensive science: discovering a new kind of battery or a new way of capturing solar energy is not like creating a new app.
DARPA — the Defense Department’s research-grant program — funded the creation of GPS, the internet, the Kevlar vest. Fracking wasn’t the brainchild of the private-sector but the fruit of research paid for 20+ years ago by the DOE. This research collapsed the price of oil and gas and led to America’s energy independence — however, this causes earthquakes which is a topic for another discussion.
In 2016, the DOE counted half a million cyber-intrusions into various parts of the U.S. electrical grid.
As John MacWilliams, Associate Deputy Secretary of the U.S. DOE said, “The Office of Science in DOE is not the Office of Science for DOE, it’s the Office of Science for all science in America.”
However, the Trump administration didn’t seem to grasp how much more than just oil the Department of Energy was about.
Trump’s DOE team
Trump’s DOE landing team was led by Thomas Pyle. As president of the American Energy Alliance, Pyle led a propaganda machine funded with millions of dollars by ExxonMobil and Koch Industries, in Washington. He served as a Koch Industries lobbyist and ran a business on the side writing editorials attacking the DOE’s attempts to reduce the dependence of the American economy on carbon.
After a long period of waiting Pyle finally sends a list of 74 questions to the DOE he wanted answers to:
- 1. Can you provide a list of all Department of Energy employees or contractors who have attended any Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Carbon meetings?
- Can you provide a list of Department employees or contractors who attended any of the Conference of the Parties (under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) in the last 5 years?
He and his landing team demanded to know the names and salaries of the twenty highest-paid people in the national science labs overseen by the DOE.
He was asked to visit one day each week until the inauguration. He never showed up. “He didn’t seem motivated to spend a lot of time understanding the place,” says Sherwood-Randall. “He didn’t bring a pencil or a piece of paper. He didn’t ask questions. He spent an hour. That was it. He never asked to meet with us again. This is a $35 billion/year organization with 14,000 employees and 83 field locations. If you’re going to run it, wouldn’t you want to know something about it?
“They mainly ran around the building insulting people,” says a former Obama official. “There was a mentality that everything that government does is stupid and bad and the people in it are stupid and bad.”
“These people were insane,” says the former DOE staffer. “They weren’t prepared. They didn’t know what they were doing.” “We…tried desperately to prepare them,” said Tarak Shah, chief of staff for the DOE’s $6 billion basic-science program. “But that required them to show up. And bring qualified people. But they didn’t. They didn’t ask for even an introductory briefing. Like, ‘What do you do?’” The Obama people, on the other hand, did what they could to preserve the institution’s understanding of itself.
There was a reason Obama appointed nuclear physicists to run the place: it, like other problems the government grappled with, was technical and complex.
Knobloch, a decade before he joined the DOE in 2013, served as president of the Union of Concerned Scientists. “I had worked closely with DOE throughout my career,” he says. “I thought I knew and understood the agency. But when I came in I thought, Holy cow.”
Trump’s team eventually delete the contact list with the email addresses of all DOE-funded scientists — apparently to make it more difficult for them to communicate with one another.
The one concrete action the Trump transition team took before Inauguration Day was to attempt to clear the DOE and other federal agencies of people appointed by Obama. But there was actually a long history of even the appointees of one administration hanging around to help the new appointees of the next. The man who served as the DOE’s chief financial officer during the Bush administration stayed 1.5 years into the Obama administration. Just because he had a detailed understanding of the money end of things that was hard to replicate quickly.
The CFO of the DOE at the end of the Obama administration was a mild-mannered civil-servant type named Joe Hezir. He had no particular political identity and was widely thought to have done a good job — and so he half-expected a call from the Trump people asking him to stay on, just to keep the money side of things running smoothly. But, the call never came. No one even let him know his services were no longer required. Not knowing what else to do, but without anyone to replace him, the CFO of a $30 billion operation just up and left.
Rick Perry, Donald Trump’s nomination to lead the DOE, confessed that when he called for its elimination he hadn’t actually known what the Department of Energy did — and he now regretted having said that it didn’t do anything worth doing.
Trump’s first budget eliminated ARPA-E, cut funding to the national labs which laid off f 6,000 employees. It eliminated all research on climate change. Trump’s budget, like the social forces behind it, is powered by a perverse desire to remain ignorant.
*People are really good at responding to the crisis that just happened, as they naturally imagine that whatever just happened is most likely to happen again. They are less good at imagining a crisis before it happens — and taking action to prevent it.
In Defend of the U.S. Department of Agriculture
The USDA is responsible for the safety of all meat — including 8 billion chicken per year that Americans eat. But, most of what it does has little to do with agriculture. Only a small fraction of its massive annual budget ($198 billion budget in 2022) was spent on farmers.
Buried inside the USDA is a massive science program, a large fleet of aircraft for firefighting, it monitors catfish farms, maintain a shooting range inside its DC headquarters, keeps an apiary on its roof to study bee-colony collapse, runs 193 million acres of national forest and grasslands and contains the U.S. Forest Service. It subsidizes apartments, hospitals, the fire department, water, electricity, food and includes a free school lunch for kids living near the poverty line. The USDA helped genetically engineer a papaya tree that was resistant to ring-spot virus. It polices conflicts between people and animals. It brings legal action against people who abused animals.
It has the power to compel, for example, egg producers to adhere to rules that kept eggs from making people sick. Another is a rule of the speed of the poultry-slaughter lines, which is 140. No industry can kill 8 billion birds each year without wanting to find faster ways to do it. In the fall of 2017, the National Chicken Council petitioned the USDA to allow for line speeds of 175 or faster.
*This entire portfolio of catastrophic risks (war, disease, bad products) — the biggest portfolio of such risks ever managed by a single institution in the history of the world. #departments
*”Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States.” -DOE Office of Science Twitter bio
To your success,
Nikhil Mahadea
