The Fifth Risk

Why isn’t Puzder on the list for Labor? Andrew Puzder, the head of CKE Restaurants, the holding company for Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr., wanted to be the secretary of labor. Christie explained that Puzder’s ex-wife had accused him of abuse, and his fast-food restaurant employees had complained of mistreatment. Even if he was somehow the ideal candidate

“The idea that if you push a network a certain way it might collapse. Is the network stable or unstable? It’s a lot like the question I was asking about weather forecasts.” A terrorist network, like a thunderstorm, might be chaotic. Terrorist networks, along with a lot of other security matters, might be better understood through chaos theory. “If

At any rate, the serious risk in Iran wasn’t that the Iranians would secretly acquire a weapon. It was that the president of the United States would not understand his nuclear scientists’ reasoning about the unlikelihood of the Iranians’ obtaining a weapon, and that he would have the United States back away foolishly from the deal.† Released from t

Pause a moment to consider the audacity of that maneuver. A private company whose weather predictions were totally dependent on the billions of dollars spent by the U.S. taxpayer to gather the data necessary for those predictions, and on decades of intellectual weather work sponsored by the U.S. taxpayer, and on international data-sharing treaties

After Trump took office, DJ Patil watched with wonder as the data disappeared across the federal government. Both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior removed from their websites the links to climate change data. The USDA removed the inspection reports of businesses accused of animal abuse by the government. The ne

Even before that meeting, Christie had made sure that Trump knew the protocol for his discussions with foreign leaders. The transition team had prepared a document to let him know how these were meant to go. The first few calls were easy—the very first was always with the prime minister of Great Britain—but two dozen calls in you were talking to so

There was a rift in American life that was now coursing through American government. It wasn’t between Democrats and Republicans. It was between the people who were in it for the mission, and the people who were in it for the money.

One senior official at the Department of Commerce at the time was struck by how far this one company in the private sector had intruded into what was, in the end, a matter of public safety. “You’re essentially 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,” he

A team of researchers at Stanford University, led by an economist named Raj Chetty, used newly accessible data from the Internal Revenue Service to write a series of papers that addressed questions of opportunity in American life. One, titled “The Fading American Dream,” asked a simple question: How likely is it that an American child will be bette