The Weed Agency Read online

  ALSO BY JIM GERAGHTY

  Voting to Kill

  Copyright © 2014 by Jim Geraghty

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Forum, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN FORUM with colophon is a registered trademark of Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Geraghty, Jim.

  The weed agency : a comic tale of federal bureaucracy without limits / Jim Geraghty.

  pages cm

  1. Political fiction. 2. Satire. I. Title.

  PS3607 E726W44 2014

  813′.6—dc23

  2013048933

  ISBN 978-0-7704-3652-0

  eBook ISBN 978-0-7704-3653-7

  Cover design by Michael Nagin

  Cover illustration by Owen Richardson

  v3.1

  To Allison,

  for more than anyone will ever know

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  A careful review of the Federal Register for the past thirty years will reveal that the U.S. Department of Agriculture Agency of Invasive Species does not, technically, exist.

  However, the Federal Interagency Committee for the Management of Noxious and Exotic Weeds, the Aquatic Nuisance Species Task Force, and the Federal Interagency Committee on Invasive Terrestrial Animals and Pathogens are very real. And the USDA does play a key role in the federal National Invasive Species Council, along with the Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Agency for International Development, NASA, the Department of Homeland Security, and eight other federal departments and agencies.

  In short, each time in the following pages you encounter an anecdote that seems too wildly implausible to actually be a funded and officially authorized activity of the federal government, rest assured that the tale you are reading does not overstate such things; if anything, the sheer scope of such inexplicable and odd expenditures is understated for the sake of storytelling.

  The gargantuan, ever-growing, ever-less-accountable, impossible-to-uproot federal bureaucracy is actually the sleeper issue of our time. It’s at the heart of the conservative critique of modern government: faceless bureaucrats writing incomprehensible regulations that complicate our lives for no good reason.

  But if you put enough drinks—or sodium pentothal—in a liberal, they’ll usually admit that they find the federal government’s performance to be deeply disappointing. They envision so many ways that government can improve the lives of citizens, and enact program after program pursuing those goals … only to find money wasted, deadlines missed, departments and agencies burning through their budgets, complicated forms, and a mess of structures and procedures that even Rube Goldberg would feel an urge to simplify.

  In my lifetime, three waves of Republicans came to Washington pledging to cut red tape and eliminate waste—the Reagan wave, the Gingrich wave, and the Bush wave—and all of them largely failed. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama arrived, full of ideas of how government could “put people first” and “work smarter” … with little to show for it. In some ways, the fight of the Left vs. the Right is the undercard fight. The real showdown—certain to intensify in the budget fights to come—is the Permanent Bureaucracy vs. Everyone Else.

  The monetary waste is scandalous enough, but there’s a human waste, too. Despite the current zeal for demonizing Washington, each year thousands of young people come to the nation’s capital, eager to make the world a better place. Many of them end up working for the federal government—and utilizing only a fraction of their potential, often hammered into accepting a role as a cog in a large, self-propelled, unstoppable machine dedicated to its own perpetuation. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit works in the public sector now.

  In September of 2004, a headline in the New York Times proclaimed:

  Memos on Bush Are Fake but Accurate, Typist Says

  So if, indeed, “fake but accurate” is a classification good enough for the esteemed pages of the New York Times, then what you are about to encounter in this story—characters whose existence has not been proven, witnessing historical events and interacting with actual lawmakers and high-level officials who have populated our nation’s capital since the early 1980s—can accurately portray the truth of how the government works …

  —Jim Geraghty

  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-nine-page 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 who had filed extensions had submitted their paperwork. Mastering the ever-more-complicated tax code, coupled with the unpleasant news of telling other people how much they owed, tended to make Reynard short-tempered and prone to lengthy diatribes about individual and corporate minimum taxes, the alternative minimum tax, and the antifamily implications of the marriage penalty instituted by the Tax Reform Act of 1969.

  Nick’s mother, Helena, spent much of his childhood running a struggling catering business; if the business cycle wasn’t squeezing her, some city health inspector or rule triggered some other headache. The Bader family dinner table conversations were full of lamentations and fury over the tax code and federal, state, and city regulations of every kind, and they cultivated a righteous indignation in the son.

  Perfect math SAT scores had gotten him into Princeton University with a brief Naval ROTC stint. He worked on the Hill until jumping on Reagan’s bandwagon in 1976 and again in 1980. Now, he was not even thirty and working in the White House—or so he liked to say, even though technically he worked in the Old Executive Office Building.

  Throughout the first weeks of the new administration, Bader prepared what he called Reagan’s “naughty list” of government programs and agencies to be zeroed out in the upcoming year’s budget proposal. A strange sense of honor and diligence drove him to look his foes in the eye as he broke the news. That sense of honor didn’t go so far as to actually sympathize with the individuals whose jobs he aimed to eliminate; he considered most of the people before him to be parasites sucking on the national treasury. In a world where the Soviets were on the march in Afghanistan, the federal government was spending many times an average American’s annual income on inane, pointless expenditures, such as $525,000 to convert 7 percent of the U.S. Coast Guard’s personnel files to microfiche.3

  Bader saw himself as righting the scales and unleashing a bit of holy wrath upon those who arrogantly assumed the American taxpayer would always pay whatever Washington demanded. He daydreamed of firing them all, but the civil service system made it nearly impossible to fire anyone, and removing the threat of termination had a predictable impact on many government workers’ sense of accountability and work ethic.

  Joining the White House team made Bader feel slightly hypocritical, as he would have to fill out all the forms and become one of those government employees—albeit, he assured himself, temporarily. The public sector—roughly eighty-one million Americans, once you counted everyone receiving one form of public assistance or another—had to be paid for by the seventy million Americans working in the private sector.4 Sure, government employees would quickly insist that they paid taxes too—but all of the money that constituted their salaries originally came from tax dollars taken from the private sector.

  A government cannot raise money by taxing its own spending. All of the money has to come from somewhere else, and that somewhere else was either the private sector or borrowing. In this dilemma, Bader breathed slightly easier, knowing that as president, Reagan was going to draw a hard line on deficit spending.

  When he contemplated the injustice of it all, and the callousness with which the federal bureaucracy greeted every April 16, Bader couldn’t help but secretly feel a tinge of satisfaction at the tears and fury that greeted each meeting’s bad news. One distraught EPA administrator had actually opened a window and stepped out onto the ledge, threatening to jump, after one meeting discussing cuts to environmental enforcement; Bader dealt with
the potential brouhaha by circulating an internal memo outlining new security measures for windows and ledges.5

  Today’s meeting appeared particularly sweet to Bader: Somehow President Carter had been conned into creating a separate federal agency whose sole duty was monitoring and combating weeds. On paper, wiping this agency off the bureaucratic flowchart would be among his easiest and most satisfying. But breaking the news to Adam Humphrey would be a particularly delicious moment, as the small subculture of budget hawks on Capitol Hill had considered Humphrey to be a Svengali of appropriations fights. Bader knew a few bits of his background: Harvard undergrad, then Georgetown Law. He had been the legislative counsel to both House and Senate committees. His reputation was impressive but strangely vague—besides his negotiation skills, few knew much about him.

  Bader smiled as he parked the car. Adam Humphrey and the Agency of Invasive Species would, too, bite the dust.

  Bader awaited them in a conference room within the Old Executive Office Building. On his second day on the job, he had noticed that each leg of the chairs had an adjustable screw-peg at the bottom for balance, and had adjusted the chairs so that the ones on the visitors’ side of the room were a quarter-inch shorter than the chairs on his side. Bader sat behind a conference table, flanked by two silent, stone-faced, square-jawed aides. He liked to think of them as the office assistant version of the Secret Service.

  “Good morning, Mr. Bader!” Humphrey practically burst with good cheer upon entering the room. “Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to give us the opportunity to further illuminate the services this agency provides to the American people.”

  Bader didn’t rise to greet him, but merely nodded.

  “You can dispense with the pleasantries, Humphrey.” He shot a sphincter-tightening smile at Wilkins and declared, “Sucking up to me isn’t going to make me like your pathetic joke of an agency.”