The Fifth Risk

TL;DR: of the whole book...

There are hundreds of thousands of government employees who do very important jobs—preventing nuclear disasters, weather disasters, and health disasters. Many of these employees are bi-partisan field experts with decades of experience.

At transition time when Trump took power these experts summarized all of the critical information to onboard Trump's incoming team.

The incoming team didn't arrive for weeks, months, and when they did arrive they: ignored the experts and onboarding material, were completely incompetent pushing simplistic, destructive political agendas, and shutting down important programs. All for private financial gain, harming Americans.

The fifth risk is a long tail of black swan events that could destroy America due to the ignorance of senior leadership in not investing in preventative measures.

The book dives in to lots of examples of these risks in detail. Feels well researched. But is kind of scattered with no call to action (other than, I guess, don't vote for Trump). 80% of the book is spent describing country/state-wide failure scenarios in detail and the widespread waste of opportunities we're missing by disabling government employees from doing great work.

This book sets out to show why the 45 admin was wrong - not learning from the outgoers nor propelling science forward. It succeeds, I guess.

The real interesting part, and what drew me to it, was looking at top risks as seen from different lenses.

It's curious to me that the top risks for the three departments covered are all essentially ‘not doing basic science'. Of course, the fifth risk...as laid out in part one is project management. — at least that's what's identified. It's not actually project management that is described though. The real identified risk is abandoning the long term gain for the short term gain. This is a risk we all understand intuitively but still fall into. It's partying instead of studying. It's buying the shoes today instead of the computer tomorrow. It's skipping a workout to watch TV. We watch this play out constantly in our private lives and in the government at all levels. ‘Surely the kids will love me more if I give them money now than if I save for their future.'

Eye-opening as to the diligence and dedication of federal agencies and the career employees who make it all happen. Countered by the ignorance of the Trump administration to recognize these assets AND to name political appointees to key positions in these agencies who are openly anti what the agency stands for and whose goal is to diminish them.