Malign Neglect #2

The news media has a weakness for low hanging fruit — the showy story, the obvious story, the lurid story. So, Donald Trump’s personal barbarities get maximum coverage, the soap opera, inner workings of his White House somewhat less, the dysfunction of Congress less, the Supreme Court very little (unless it curtails somebody’s rights), and the quotidian operation of vast executive departments is ignored for years at a time.

Yet, if Trump and his minions are actually going to make America great, or grim, it will occur at places like HHS,HUD, Interior, Treasury, Education or DOE. What’s DOE, again? Oh yeah, the Department of Energy. But does anything happening in such a place matter to me or you? Who cares?

Well, thanks to Michael Lewis, our explainer in chief (“Liar’s Poker,” “Moneyball,” “The Big Short,” “The Undoing Project”, “The Blind Side,” “Flash Boys”), we now know that to a scary degree what the Trumpites are up to at DOE matters a lot. I encourage you to seek out his expose of the perilous course they are trying to chart at DOE, “The Fifth Risk,” in the September “Vanity Fair.”

Under Obama, the Department of Energy was run by Ernest Moniz, a widely admired Stanford PH.D theoretical physicist. Under Trump it has been entrusted to Aggie cheerleader Rick Perry who once wanted to eliminate it, but couldn’t remember its name.

The animosity of the right wing to the Department of Energy comes from the fossil fuel industry which sees it as an enemy of oil and promoter of the climate change heresy they reject as fake news. So naturally, Texan Perry had to be opposed to DOE.

Tellingly, the first person from the Trump camp to visit the department was a Koch Industries lackey, and the first steps taken were to try to identify employees who believed in climate change, so they could be fired. Since then, Obama appointees and career administrators have been replaced or now report to libertarian anti-government zealots and Eric Trump’s brother-in-law. Many of the scientific brain power may abandon ship.

This bias against DOE is founded on a huge misapprehension that a brief study of the agency would dispel. In fact, if facts still matter, DOE is the descendant of the AEC — the Atomic Energy Commission that was created to have dominion over the nuclear arms infrastructure of the country after World War II.

About half of the department’s $30 billion annual budget goes to maintain our nuclear arsenal and to guard against nuclear threats. Another quarter of the budget goes, as Lewis says, to “clean up all the unholy world-historic mess left behind by the manufacture of nuclear weapons.” Only the final quarter goes to programs concerned with our “access to, and use of, energy.”

But even that quarter isn’t hostile to fossil fuels, as those who profit from them claim. Much of what the DOE does is research or the funding of research by outside parties. It does the sort of long term, big science R&D that companies operating under the tyranny of the quarterly report don’t undertake because it may take many years to payoff, if it pays off at all.

So, DOE did some of the original research that led to the fracking revolution that has helped make us energy independent, and incidentally enriched DOE foes like the Koch brothers. DOE research on battery technology made Tesla cars possible and has helped bring the price of solar power down from 27 cents per kilowatt hour to seven cents.

DOE scientists also contrived the protocols behind the much maligned Iran deal that assures the Ayatollahs can’t build a nuclear bomb or import one without being detected. In the last eight years, DOE has tracked and seized enough weapons-grade uranium and plutonium to have allowed rogue nations or terrorists to build 160 nuclear weapons.

The department also pays world-class scientists to worry about loose nukes and how to clean up waste with a radioactive half-life of billions of years. At the now shuttered and toxic Hanford plutonium plant, they are working to prevent buried waste from seeping into and poisoning the Columbia River.

DOE also concerns itself with threats to the antiquated, vulnerable electrical grid. A successful attack could turn out the lights for much of the country for months. In 2016, DOE “counted half a million cyber-intrusions into various parts of the electrical grid.” It also seeks to protect against instances like an attack on million dollar transformers by a sniper that put a substation out of commission. And DOE teams appear at large events like the Super Bowl, and probably Trump’s inaugural, with devices capable of detecting a dirty bomb before it can be detonated and poison a city.

In short, Lewis demonstrates that this little known department of government protects our health and welfare, maintains our arsenal, fights terrorism, and funds innovative research to ensure a continuing supply of the affordable energy that powers our lives. And he warns that the evil clowns of Trumpland are intent on tearing down this vital resource that it took their betters decades to build.

For example, ARPA-E, DOE’s visionary research arm is widely regarded as its crown jewel. It has won praise from capitalist icons included Bill Gates, a former CEO of Wal-Mart and the founder of Fedex. But Trump’s proposed budget would eliminate it entirely. It would also zero out the loan program that has funded research that has discovered ways to increase energy production and make solar power cheaper. The Trump Luddites would fire 6,000 scientists and support personnel, eliminate all climate change research, and cut in half the funds used to protect the power grid from attack.

This isn’t politics as usual. This is cultural vandalism. It is a know-nothing attack on the science that has been behind our country’s rise and prosperity from Ben Franklin to the present. It opposes the force that has fueled our success from the steamboat to the railroad to the electric light to the internal combustion entire to computer science and the human genome project.

Why do they want to destroy DOE? Because understanding the vital role it plays would require a little study? Or because slashing government spending so taxes on Republican donors can be cut is the Republican Party’s be-all and end-all? Because libertarian ideologues believe all government is bad, evidence to the contrary be damned? Or because Trump thinks Obama liked DOE, so he is compelled to hate it and all its works?

Whatever their motive, they might consider the old adage — act in haste, repent at leisure. But in this case, the stakes of hasty action allow no room for error. They are nuclear terror undetected, a power grid blackout, an aquifer poisoned by plutonium, lost opportunities, a competitive disadvantage, national decline, darkness rather than light.

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