The Fifth Risk

We don’t really celebrate the accomplishments of government employees. They exist in our society to take the blame. But if anyone ever paid attention, they would note that Woteki’s department, among other achievements, had suppressed the potentially catastrophic 2015 outbreak of bird flu. They’d created, very quickly, a fast new test for the diseas

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ARPA-E had since won the praise of business leaders from Bill Gates to Lee Scott, the former CEO of Walmart, to Fred Smith, the Republican founder of FedEx, who has said that “pound for pound, dollar for dollar, activity for activity, it’s hard to find a more effective thing government has done than ARPA-E.” Trump’s first budget eliminated ARPA-E a

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“We asked the question: What causes excessive use of police force?” Combing the data from the ten cities, a team of researchers from several American universities found a pattern that would have been hard to spot with the naked eye. Police officers who had just come from an emotionally fraught situation—a suicide, or a domestic abuse call in which

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She’d come to her job inside the little box marked “Rural Development” without any particular ambition to be there. The sums of money at her disposal were incredible: the little box gave out or guaranteed $30 billion in loans and grants a year. But people who should have known about it hadn’t the first clue what it was up to. “I had this conversati

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Floehr’s analysis uncovered two big trends in weather prediction. One was toward greater relative accuracy in the private sector—which of course was totally dependent on the National Weather Service data for its forecasts. The other was the astonishing improvement in all weather predictions. The five-day-out forecast in 2016 was as accurate as the

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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

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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

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What was most easily imagined was not what was most probable. It wasn’t the things you think of when you try to think of bad things happening that got you killed, he said. “It is the less detectable, systemic risks.” Another way of putting this is: the risk we should most fear is not the risk we easily imagine. It is the risk that we don’t. Which b

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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

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