The Weed Agency (5 page)

Budget, USDA Agency of Invasive Species: $13.4 million

Wilkins had spent three years working as the lowest-paid, least-senior staff researcher in the Carter administration. His friends told him he looked like he aged a decade in that time. White House work had that effect on people, particularly among those too junior to really change anything, but still senior enough to get yelled at and to feel emotionally invested in the performance of the administration.

The trouble had started early. First Tip O’Neill threw a fit when his tickets to the Inaugural Gala at the Kennedy Center had been in the back row of the balcony, and had later
complained about the skimpy continental breakfasts at White House meetings.
¹⁰
The late 1970s turned into a blur of presidential disasters: Managing the tennis courts. Sweaters. Letters and phone calls unreturned. Throw in 18 percent inflation and gas lines. Now everyone at the White House was screaming about whether they should let the Shah of Iran come to the Mayo Clinic, as if letting a man seek a treatment for his cancer could somehow be a bad thing. Wilkins had sensed the need to push the ejector button and get out of politics and get into something quieter, safer, more stable and predictable. He decided he needed a safe job in the civil service.

Wilkins heard the administrative director in some obscure federal agency was looking for a new right-hand man—and so he ended up sitting before the desk of Adam Humphrey, Administrative Director, Department of Agriculture’s Agency of Invasive Species, serving under the Bureau of Agricultural Risk Management, under the Undersecretary of Farm Services, under the Deputy Secretary of Agriculture, under the Secretary of Agriculture.

The president appointed and the Senate confirmed the agency’s director—currently some congressman who desperately sought, and found, an excuse to avoid the judgment of his district’s disgruntled voters—but Humphrey was the real power.

“So why do you want to leave that most glamorous of workplaces, the White House, and come work at a place like the Agency of Invasive Species?”

“I want to serve my country in the civil service.”

“Very good, Mr. Wilkins, your utterly predictable textbook answer will be noted. So what’s the
real
reason?”

Wilkins stared for a moment, sighed, and figured he might as well reveal it all to see if his potential new boss sympathized.

“I’ve now had my heart broken twice,” he said, glancing out the window. “First as a volunteer for Teens for McGovern when he lost, then by Carter when he won. I figure there’s a 50-50 shot I may lose my White House job next January. Campaign work means long hours, candidates that forget to pay you, and low pay even when they remember, sleeping on the couch in the office and watching your candidate blow it all by saying he’s undecided on whether kids should start the day by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. The Hill isn’t much better, and every two years your boss can get fired by fickle hicks who decide they like some smooth-talking local car salesman better—and that’s presuming he doesn’t get caught jumping into the Tidal Basin with a stripper.”

Wilkins watched Humphrey’s face for any sign of disapproval, but he simply saw a serene smile staring back at him.

“Plus, my girlfriend wants me to marry her, and I figure that means I need a steadier job. Regular hours, weekends off, less craziness, less stress.”

Humphrey’s smile turned into a chuckle and he put his fingertips together. “Ah, the civilizing influence of women.” He picked up Wilkins’s resume.

“Mr. Wilkins, your resume and references excited all of the right personnel people—such dedication to public service! Such a spirited drive to every task before you! But I saw a warning sign or two. I feared you might be some upstart, hell-bent on turning everything upside down in an impatient crusade to achieve your theoretical ideal overnight. As you no doubt saw at the White House, the wheels of government turn slowly. Deliberately. I envision great things for the future of this agency, but at a careful and measured pace! I prefer to consolidate our gains and carefully and methodically manage our steady
growth and progress. Cabinet secretaries and agency directors come and go every few years. Comparably, we are eternal.”

Wilkins smiled at the audacious boast.

“If the young lady in your life desires you to be in steady work, we will fit that bill.”

Wilkins settled in within a few weeks.

Many of the mornings began with Wilkins keeping up with Humphrey’s deliberate stride through the labyrinthine halls of the Department of Agriculture.

“We’re lucky to work in this building,” Humphrey said thoughtfully. “We’re the only federal department on the national mall. More tourists see us, by accident, than the Pentagon or the State Department or any other cabinet department.”

“I feel like these hallways go on forever,” Wilkins said.

The Department of Agriculture’s headquarters actually uses up two massive buildings, the Administrative Building on the north side of Independence Avenue and the South Building, connected with two arched pedestrian bridges. Employees rarely if ever use them. The South Building is seven stories and includes 4,500 rooms in a precise grid; only the departmental auditorium and library interrupt the dizzying pattern. With floors, hallways, and closed office doors all looking the same, Wilkins found himself getting turned around and lost with surprising frequency.

“This was, until the Pentagon was completed, the largest office building in the world. Congress decreed that no building in the city could be taller than the Capitol—a rule, I suspect, designed to remind everyone where the power and the money was,” Humphrey explained. “Washington never had skyscrapers,
and I suspect that shapes the way we work. Had the federal workforce been housed in giant towers, well … our office culture might have evolved like the ones of Wall Street banks or publishing houses. But instead of connecting our offices vertically we’re connected horizontally, and it creates a certain …”

“Inefficiency?” Wilkins guessed, noticing that he was wearing through the soles of his dress shoes in the new job.

“Geographic ambiguity.”

They turned a corner. “As you know, we have a new director.”

“I’ve been reading up on him,” Wilkins declared, hoping for approval.

“Most presidential appointees are being rewarded for years of loyal party service,” began Humphrey in one of his monologues of How Washington Works.

“The Secretary of Agriculture always goes to some farmstate senator or governor or member of Congress. Presidents seem to think the primary qualification for the position is the ability to deliver a win in the Iowa caucus. The undersecretary slots often go to lesser friends and figures. A directorship is something of a snub, really. Our former director had been hoping for an ambassadorship to one of those Western European countries with rich food and women with high cheekbones. But our new one, like our first, is a former lawmaker, this one a longtime ally of the president from his time in Georgia. There are many advantages to having former legislators in the role of agency director.”

“They bring good relationships with the Hill with them?”

“Mmm, not what I had in mind. It’s more that they rarely have run very much beyond their congressional office, and thus have little sense of how to handle a large and complicated organization. Any new appointee spends his first months figuring out how everything works, and by that point, their interest
in mucking around with things is … worn away by the sands of time. If we want something, we tell him we need it, and he will approve it. If we don’t want something, we tell him it will be impossible to implement, and he will move on. In time, even the strongest-willed appointee can be conditioned to accept our helpful guidance.”

Wilkins sensed something slightly Orwellian about the term “conditioned,” but nodded and waited.

“Information management is one of the keys. Ideally, our director, the secretary, and the deputy secretaries will be kept hermetically sealed from all potentially troublesome ‘flows’ of information. We screen the calls, sort out the letters, divert the unnecessary memos. Our management’s time is exceptionally valuable and one of our key duties is ensuring that none of their time is wasted by reading or hearing anything that we do not find productive. The old policy was that no one could see the AIS director without a scheduled appointment except the secretary, the undersecretary, myself, my assistant, the director’s personal secretary, and the director’s wife. Under the new policy, wives must call ahead.”

“I’m not even going to ask why.”

“Good instincts, Mr. Wilkins. With a new director, I like to hit the ground running and schedule appointments from 7:15 breakfast meetings to evening dinner receptions ending at 9:00 p.m.”

He handed Wilkins a typewritten form:

Wilkins whistled. “This looks exhausting.”

“Precisely the point, Mr. Wilkins,” Humphrey replied.
“Within weeks, the director is begging for the schedule to be lightened and I comply with the request by dramatically lessening it—one morning meeting, one afternoon evening, and letting him know everything that needs his approval or consent is done by 3:00 p.m. I try to have nothing scheduled for Fridays.”

“That seems a little light.”

“It’s best for all involved. He dare not request a busier schedule, having nearly collapsed under the initial marathon. Eventually he will withdraw from the decision-making loop entirely.”

“I notice most meals end up with two meetings around them.”

“The average director gains twenty pounds during his tenure.”

They turned another corner.

“You will notice the director is constantly escorted by at least two staffers—we need a backup unless he gets separated. He is driven everywhere, and the advance team ensures he spends no more time at any particular meeting than needed. Quickly in, quickly out. No dilly-dallying.”

“I get it. One delay in the morning can set back the whole day.”

“That, and again, we don’t want him talking to anyone if we can help it. If he talks to people, he might listen to them, and if he listens to them, there’s no telling what ideas might end up in his head. That’s why the best and most efficient way for the agency to operate is for us to carefully manage the schedule, what gets briefed to him, and so on. We need to ensure that the director’s time and energy are not wasted by extraneous matters. Otherwise he would be deluged with meetings, calls, letters, demands.”

“How do we make sure he hears what he needs to hear?”

Humphrey couldn’t quite stifle a chuckle. “Your question
presupposes that an agency director cares to hear anything from anyone besides himself. But when we get a particularly curious one, I find it useful to ensure he is deluged with data that confirms his preconceptions. He needs to conclude that he knows all there is to know and to accept the recommendations given to him. I find ‘placidity’ a goal to encourage in agency management. Think of it as ‘strategic disengagement.’ ”

They turned another corner, and Wilkins momentarily wondered if Humphrey had just absentmindedly led him in a circle. “And you can’t watch directors too closely,” Humphrey warned. “Early on, our last one walked out of his office and was lost for an hour. I had security retrieve him. They found him in the print shop, learning from some GS-7 how the equipment worked. I told him that wandering off like that was very unsafe.”