The Weed Agency Read online

  Anne Bader had been initially excited about public life—she spoke at a few campaign events, and when her husband won, she felt a quiet thrill that the people of this Pennsylvania congressional district seemed to see the greatness she saw in him. But within a year, she wanted the voters to go away and let her and their children live a normal life. Neighbors and acquaintances shared any and all complaints about government at any level, with the unspoken assumption that her husband would be able to do something about it. Every new friend had to be regarded with a certain unspoken suspicion; sudden acts of kindness often seemed to come with a subsequent request for a favor. Suddenly, every new friendly face had to be treated warily.

  In 1996 Bader won reelection fairly handily, and Anne thought that the stressful transition to life in the public spotlight would ease. Nick Bader became a slightly less perpetually stressed husband and father, and his temperamental outbursts occurred less frequently, but she sensed a low-boil frustration within him.

  That night, after all the packing, lying in bed in the dark and dreading the partial move the next day—the Baders intended to keep the house in Bucks County as his legal residence—Nick Bader let out that frustration, in a quiet whisper rather than the burst of anger Anne expected.

  “I’m not sure I’m ever going to do what I thought I was meant to do,” he said quietly. “A lot of days I feel like I’m talking to myself, or to an empty chamber. My bills go nowhere. I don’t feel like anybody really listens to me. We didn’t really cut much of anything our first year, didn’t happen the second year, and it’s not looking that good in this year or next,” he sighed.

  “You’re fighting the good fight,” she said, brushing his head. “That’s all anyone can ask of you—including yourself.”

  “At least Sisyphus managed to move the rock,” he continued. “Everyone who comes to Washington intending to cut the government comes with some other goal as well—defense, abortion, schools, whatever. And everyone who likes the government the way it is has gotten very, very skilled at figuring out how to get us to focus on the other stuff.”

  “The first day I saw you at Princeton, you were wearing glasses and a leather jacket, and you were arguing with some College Republican about Nixon—something about …”

  “Price controls,” Bader recalled with a smile. “I was trying to get that my-party-can-do-no-wrong dweeb—God, what was his name?—to grasp that our guy had just unilaterally decided that the government can freeze wages for everyone in the country.”

  “Anyway, I kind of knew who you were, but I remember thinking—that guy’s going to get things done.” She kissed him on the cheek. “I still believe in that man.”

  She went to sleep, and Nick Bader slept a bit better than he had the previous few nights.

  6

  FEBRUARY 1998

  U.S. National Debt: $5.52 trillion

  Budget, USDA Agency of Invasive Species: $148.7 million

  As administrative director, Adam Humphrey was deeply concerned about the office’s sexual harassment management policies. Wilkins didn’t see what the big deal was.

  “After the whole Anita Hill thing, we set up the system to run the annual seminars—we haven’t had any serious complaints. That guy Tom, the analyst, waited until the cute one finished her internship before he asked her out.”

  “Jack, that was before the entire city and country heard that the president had been … with an intern.”

  “Oh, he didn’t do it!” scoffed Wilkins. “Probably.”

  Humphrey shot him a witheringly disappointed look.

  “Jack, I don’t gamble, but if I did, I would bet on the credibility of any allegation of sexual conduct between the president and a young lady. No matter what woman, inside or outside the administration, I would always bet that the claim is true. Do you know why?”

  “Illuminate me, Adam.”

  “Because it would be a sound long-term investment strategy!” Humphrey barked with sarcasm. “Sure, periodically, I would lose the bet, but in the long term, the number of women who would voluntarily expose themselves to ridicule over their sex life for the sake of a false allegation to discredit a hated politician is far fewer than the number of women who would only find that price worth paying in the name of exposing the truth.”

  Wilkins shook his head. “Adam, your view of women’s unwillingness to lie isn’t just dated, it’s carbon-dated.”

  “Chivalrous,” Humphrey corrected. “Either way, the emerging scandal guarantees that the preeminent topic of discussion for everyone in the entire agency in every office, both here and in the field, will be sex. Sex between bosses and subordinates, sex between married people and unmarried people, sex in the office, sex on the phone …”

  “Ah, I get it. Way too easy for someone to say something and offend someone, huh?”

  “At the very least!” Humphrey harrumphed. “Jack, now that the president of the United States has started enjoying the intern pool as his own personal harem, how many other men in our agency will contemplate the same approach to their coworkers?”

  “Okay, I see where you’re going with this,” Wilkins nodded. “You’re afraid the old rule of, ‘Don’t shi—er, make a mess where you eat’ is going to fall by the wayside.”

  Humphrey gave him a knowing glance. “The modern workplace puts men and women into close quarters for long periods of time. Throw in stress and deadlines, the need to work as a team, the desire for team camaraderie, after-hours happy hour trips, business travel, and the natural inclinations of men and women for … affection and contact and … things will happen. If I could permit these adult acts to be sorted out by adults, I would be happy. But any one of these interactions could result in a messy lawsuit or bad publicity.”

  “Lin’s been talking to you, hasn’t he?” Wilkins asked, recognizing the telltale panic of the agency’s general counsel John Lin, the most lawsuit-averse lawyer to walk the earth.

  “I have a legal duty to make sure that there is a well-posted set of rules and regulations indicating how men and women should interact with each other at this agency!” said an agitated Humphrey.

  Seeking out the most groundbreaking and far-reaching approach to mitigating sexual confusion, Humphrey turned to a policy adopted a few years earlier by Antioch College:

  1. For the purpose of this policy, “consent” shall be defined as follows: the act of willingly and verbally agreeing to engage in specific sexual contact or conduct.

  2. If sexual contact and/or conduct is not mutually and simultaneously initiated, then the person who initiates sexual contact/conduct is responsible for getting the verbal consent of the other individual(s) involved.

  Ava, Jamie, and Lisa found it all quite laughable.

  For a few weeks, every routine request or interaction prompted a response of, “Are you initiating sexual contact or conduct with me?”

  3. Obtaining consent is an on-going process in any sexual interaction. Verbal consent should be obtained with each new level of physical and/or sexual contact/conduct in any given interaction, regardless of who initiates it. Asking “Do you want to have sex with me?” is not enough. The request for consent must be specific to each act.

  “Dammit, Lisa, when we were in the copy room, I specifically indicated that I granted consent to second base and no further!” Ava shouted loudly across the cubicles. “I did not give any signal to steal third!”

  4. The person with whom sexual contact/conduct is initiated is responsible to express verbally and/or physically her/his willingness or lack of willingness when reasonably possible.

  “When reasonably possible?” Jamie giggled.

  “Remember, it’s rude to talk when your mouth is full!” roared Ava.

  Humphrey was mortified to learn that his policy designed to prevent and deter sexual comments had ensured that dozens of agency employees took the opportunity to make suggestive jokes about each other, in the name of mocking the policy, for the entire day. He closed his office door and hoped noth
ing would happen.

  JUNE 1998

  “Would you ever sleep with your boss?” Ava asked.

  “That’s a completely different question from whether I would ever sleep with Bill Clinton,” Lisa replied. “And if it meant the president’s golfing buddies would start trying to find me a better job, that would be a hell of an afterglow.”

  Lisa’s love life had been … dissatisfying in recent years.

  “This town doesn’t have that many real men, outside of the military,” she said after a gulp. Jamie had been dating a handsome Marine recently, and the new couple seemed quite happy.

  “No, that’s not true. It just attracts a particular type, and you have to know what you’re getting,” Ava said. “You can develop your brain, or you can develop your body, and it’s very hard to develop both. Here, most of the guys have developed their brains. They’re very career focused. They don’t dress spectacularly well, but they wear dark suits and ties most days. They don’t need to stand out, they don’t want to stand out too much, and they’re probably going to get in trouble if they stand out too much.”

  “Sometimes I wonder if I should move somewhere else,” Lisa sighed. “Someplace … real.”

  “No, Ava’s right, here you get guys working crazy hours on the Hill and checking their pagers and catching their friends on C-SPAN,” Jamie chimed in. “But the culture in D.C. weeds out a lot of other varieties of jerk. Back home in Miami, you get people who want to look good. It’s very, very important to them. They work out constantly. They wear almost nothing on the beach. They wear almost nothing off the beach. The women wear higher heels, shorter skirts—all the outfits that we get those tsk-tsk looks for here in Washington are, like, formal wear in Miami.”

  “New York’s kinda the same,” Ava replied. “Every time I go back home to visit my folks I get culture shock over cleavage and tight jeans and glossy lipstick. I know they call me ‘Fishnets Girl,’ but compared to Manhattan, I’m wearing a hijab.” She shrugged. “Sometimes I wonder who I’m dressing for. Who is here? When did this place become full of … bores?”

  “That’s not true,” Jamie said, feeling a bit of local pride burning through her margarita buzz. “Washington has culture. There’s Georgetown.”

  “Old money,” Ava said with a roll of her eyes. “WASPs lining up their antiques in their bay windows for the gawking tourists who wander up from M Street.”

  “Dupont Circle.”

  “Gay.”

  “Adams Morgan.”

  “Hipster bike messenger working on his one-act play about women in Bosnia.”

  “That was just one guy!” laughed Jamie. “And he was mature compared to that guy who wanted to watch The Muppet Movie on his birthday.”

  “So if half the guys around here take themselves way too seriously, and the other half have serious cases of arrested development, it’s not surprising that some women our age turn to … more mature men as an option,” Lisa said, wondering if either of her friends would wonder if she had some particular more mature man in mind.

  But neither took the bait, and Ava began analyzing Washington’s social mores as though they were a giant complicated system or machine: “This town has more almost-celebrities per capita than … like, Nashville or Hollywood. The assistant undersecretary of whatever, or the head of Concerned Americans for American Concerns, or the Washington Bureau Chief of the Nowhere Times-Herald. Almost all of the celebrities are married, and aren’t supposed to be looking. Everybody’s worried about reputation; everybody’s worried that they could get caught banging somebody on the photocopier after hours. Of course, in this situation, once there are impossibly dire consequences for doing that, all anybody can think about is banging the object of their desire on the photocopier after hours.”

  They laughed and ordered another round.

  “What was that thing Henry Kissinger said?” Lisa asked.

  Jamie wrinkled her nose. “ ‘South America is a dagger pointed straight at the heart of Antarctica’?”

  “No, no—‘Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.’ A lot of people in Washington work really hard to get power. Budgetary power, lawmaking power, influential power, power to put messages in the press, the power of connections—this is the only city where men brag to women about how they’ve got a great big, thick … Rolodex,” Lisa said, spurring another round of giggles. “Think about how much they sacrifice for it—the degrees from the top schools, the crappy internships, the sucking up to the boss, the long hours.”

  “Sometimes they’ll marry a philanderer and pretend they don’t know just to be First Lady,” quipped Ava.

  “Sounds sad,” Jamie said, and then she realized her assessment applied to both their amateur psychoanalysis of Hillary Clinton and the power-focused men Lisa described.

  “So lots of the people here don’t have the looks,” Lisa continued. “They’ve spent their youth working, but now they reach some perch where they’ve got a little prestige. Nice office, nice watch. And every summer we get skinterns, who don’t know how to dress and who come around the office half naked, showcasing their just-past-teenage bodies. It’s kind of amazing there aren’t midsummer pagan orgies.”

  “The Christian Coalition would object,” Jamie said.

  Ava found the romantic recon assessment bleak. “So you’re saying we’re destined to become the cute young playthings of some older, more successful man.”

  “Oh, no!” Lisa laughed confidently. “You’ve heard about those women senators on the Hill with their much younger, hunkier drivers. We can get our own boy toys.”

  AUGUST 1998

  After President Clinton’s grand jury testimony, calls for impeachment mounted. Upon their return from the August recess, the House Republicans met in one of the Capitol’s cavernous conference rooms, with a few joining via conference call. Tom DeLay had characterized the upcoming effort to impeach Clinton as “the most important thing I do in my political career” and gave his staff and colleagues an ultimatum: “Dedicate yourselves to it or leave.”

  Bader felt torn.

  He knew he would probably end up voting for impeachment; the president’s judgment was just too reckless.

  To flash her thong at the president of the United States in his workplace, Monica Lewinsky had to be at least a little crazy. Perhaps forgivably crazy, as crushes, love, and lust drive us to do mad things, Bader thought. But Bill Clinton should have—had to have—known better. He was the grownup. If you don’t have sufficient impulse control to avoid doing that for eight years, don’t run for two terms as president.

  For Bader, the most revelatory point of the gargantuan Starr report came in just one line from a transcript of a call between Lewinsky and Linda Tripp. Lewinsky told her that Clinton had said, “I have an empty life except for my work.”

  There was no way to be certain if Lewinsky was quoting Clinton verbatim or even accurately, but she would have little reason to lie, and didn’t know she was being recorded. Bader could picture Clinton saying it. Bader could picture Clinton thinking it and believing it. He shuddered when he thought of Hillary and Chelsea reading those words. Putting aside any of the complications of the Clintons’ marriage, what the hell was wrong with this man that he would tell his mistress that his child meant nothing to him?

  Impeach the bastard, Bader concluded.

  BUT … he hadn’t come to Washington to do that. His battle plans to cut the bureaucracy to the bone were gathering dust. As emotionally satisfying as it would be to go after Clinton, he knew that pursuing impeachment meant jumping down the rabbit hole, with no sense of how long the journey would take, where it would end, or how he and his colleagues would emerge when it was all over.

  The Republicans in the conference room appeared increasingly set on pursuing impeachment as the meeting dragged on.

  Finally, Bader spoke up. “Look, guys, isn’t anybody worried that if we start doing this, it takes over our entire agenda for the foreseeable future? I mean, we came here to cut government
, pull up the weeds, and ever since we got our asses kicked in the shutdown, we’ve been afraid to get back into the ring. If Clinton’s on his knees—”

  He heard giggling in the back.

  “Quit giggling, you’re grown men! Why not take this opportunity to press the president on policy?”

  “You mean let him off the hook in exchange for a few budget cuts? Are you serious, Bader?”

  The room rejected the idea instantly and outright. A passionate consensus in favor of impeachment emerged, and the House Republicans exuberantly adjourned the meeting and filed out the doors.

  Bader was the last one left in the room.

  “Doesn’t anybody want to cut the government anymore?” he asked the empty room.

  7

  JANUARY 1999

  U.S. National Debt: $5.6 trillion

  Budget, USDA Agency of Invasive Species: $162.33 million

  For four years, Ava used two verbal sticks of dynamite to dislodge the obstacles facing Weed.gov: the first was, Adam Humphrey says this is a priority. The line’s effectiveness worked in direct relation to how close the person was to Humphrey’s office. It worked within the administrative staff of the Agency of Invasive Species, somewhat with other Department of Agriculture offices, and not much at all with the Mole People in the basement … and it was useless with the agency field offices.

  But the other line that worked less often than she expected was, The Speaker of the House has personally endorsed this project as a priority. Her coworkers often rolled their eyes, and sometimes blurted out how much they detested him. Among the federal workforce, the Speaker of the House of Representatives was surprisingly unfeared.