Even as a kid he was interested in politics. That helped. He got that from his parents. “They spent a lot of time talking about society. Good and bad. Justice. About what we owe people,” said Ali. In rural Pennsylvania most people were Republicans. Ali became a Republican, too. “I believe in personal responsibility,” he said. “It’s exciting when people come together because of their faith to do something for their community. To care about something more than themselves.” In high school he volunteered for America’s Promise Alliance, Colin and Alma Powell’s foundation to help poor children. He knocked on doors for the presidential campaign of George W. Bush. He ran track and excelled in the 400-meter dash. He was bright and ambitious and good at school. On a family trip to Boston he got his first, brief glimpse of Harvard and, without giving much thought to how he would pay for it, decided that was where he’d like to go to college. Faculty members at his high school thought Harvard was a bit of a stretch, and they encouraged him to apply to Penn State or the University of Pennsylvania, recalls Ali. He thought they were trying to lower his expectations. In the end he applied to Harvard, and only to Harvard, because, as he put it, “after you applied to one place, why would you waste money to apply to other places?”
Harvard admitted Ali to its class of 2008 and gave him financial aid. Around the same time, the CEO of America’s Promise passed through rural Pennsylvania and asked to meet with volunteers. Ali went to a meeting, and one thing led to another: before he knew it Alma Powell, the group’s board chairman, asked him to join the America’s Promise board. At the time, he thought this was preposterous. The America’s Promise board was filled with the biggest names in Republican politics and the CEOs of huge corporations. “I thought it was crazy,” recalls Ali. “They’d fly me to DC and put me up in a hotel.”
The Iraq War happened. Guantánamo Bay happened. Hostility toward his fellow Muslims found a greater welcome in his party than elsewhere. Yet Ali remained a Republican. Six or seven months after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast he traveled there, with America’s Promise, to help. In New Orleans he saw poverty he’d never imagined. “They had to rebuild these schools, and the kids were effusive,” he said. “The thing that got me was that they weren’t happy because they had just got their school back. They were effusive because suddenly they had a school that worked in the first place.” If you had asked Ali, before he went to New Orleans, what he thought of people who didn’t help themselves, he would have said, “My parents had to start all over again. What’s the big deal? Just suck it up.” The sight of little kids post-Katrina jolted him. “It kind of blew my mind—if you are in kindergarten you should at least get a fair shot. It was just eye-opening: to see how much your geography could determine the opportunities available to you.”
Now he sensed that poverty came in many flavors. He’d been lucky to have his particular parents and his particular community. He was reminded of the first time he’d run on a track with spikes. “You just fly on the track.” The poor kids he saw in New Orleans were trying to run the same race in life that he was. But he was wearing spikes and they weren’t. “There’s a real idealism that you have to indulge to think that people in New Orleans were now going to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. There were no bootstraps.”
He returned to college and rejoined the Harvard Republican Club. The surface of his life remained unchanged. But a new crackling sound in his head made the political program playing there more difficult to hear. One day he attended a debate between his two most famous professors: Michael Sandel, the philosopher, and Greg Mankiw, the economist who had served as chair of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers. “Someone got up and asked,” If you are a store owner after Katrina, should you hike up the price of flashlights?’ Greg Mankiw said yes, without hesitation.” Ali remembers thinking: Greg Mankiw is a good guy. But that answer is absolutely wrong. We don’t just have markets. We have values. “I started to think, Ah, man, I’m probably not a Republican.”
A year or so later he listened to a speech by the junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama. One line from it stuck in Ali’s head: “Poverty is not a family value.” He worked as a field organizer in Obama’s campaign. “The biggest disappointment was that it was a little bit of a cliché: Harvard liberal,” said Ali. “Whereas my politics before were not a cliché.” Two years later he graduated from Harvard, and then Obama was sworn in as president of the United States. Ali knew he had at least a shot at a very junior position in the new administration. “I had for whatever reason in my mind decided that I should go to the place where it wasn’t sexy but the sausage came together.” That place, he further decided, was the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. His first job in the new administration was to take the budget numbers produced by the senior people and turn them into a narrative: a document ordinary people could read.
One day in his new job he was handed the budget for the Department of Agriculture. “I was like, Oh yeah, the USDA—they give money to farmers to grow stuff.” For the first time, he looked closely at what this arm of the United States government actually does. Its very name is seriously misleading—most of what it does has little to do with agriculture. It runs 193 million acres of national forest and grasslands, for instance. It is charged with inspecting almost all the animals Americans eat, including the nine billion birds a year. Buried inside it is a massive science program, a large fleet of aircraft for firefighting, and a bank with $220 billion in assets. It monitors catfish farms. It maintains a shooting range inside its DC headquarters. It keeps an apiary on its roof, to study bee-colony collapse. There’s a drinking game played by people who have worked at the Department of Agriculture: Does the USDA do it? Someone names an odd function of government (say, shooting fireworks at Canada geese that flock too near airport runways) and someone else has to guess if the USDA does it. (In this case, it does.)
A small fraction of its massive annual budget ($164 billion in 2016) was actually spent on farmers, but it financed and managed all these programs in rural America—including the free school lunch for kids living near the poverty line. “I’m sitting there looking at this,” said Ali. “The USDA had subsidized the apartment my family had lived in. The hospital we used. The fire department. The town’s water. The electricity. It had paid for the food I had eaten.”
To prepare for the transition after the 2016 election, the USDA staff had created elaborate briefings for the incoming Trump administration. Their written material alone came to 2,300 pages, in 13 volumes. A lot of people who work in the Department of Agriculture grew up on or around farms. They like to think of the Department of Agriculture as a nice, down-to-earth bureaucracy. They consider themselves more bipartisan, and less ideological, than people at the other federal agencies. “Our plan was to be as hospitable as possible,” said one of the transition planners. “We made sure the office space was gorgeous.”
To make the Trump people feel at home, the USDA people had set aside the nicest rooms on the top floor of the nicest building, Whitten, with the nicest view of the National Mall. They had fished out of storage the most beautiful photographs from the USDA’s impressive collection and hung them on the walls. They had brought in computers and office supplies, and organized a bunch of new workstations. When they heard that Joel Leftwich, the guy Trump wanted to lead his USDA transition team, had been a lobbyist for PepsiCo, they brought in a mini-fridge stocked with Pepsis. That was just the way they were at the USDA. They didn’t think: How the fuck can people paid to push sugary drinks on American kids be let anywhere near the federal department with the most influence on what American kids eat? Instead they thought: I hear he’s a nice guy!
No one showed up that first day after the election, or the next. This was strange: the day after he was elected, Obama had sent his people into the USDA, as had Bush. At the end of the second day, the folks at the Department of Agriculture called the White House to ask what was going on. “The White House said they’d be here Monday,” rec
alled one. On Monday morning they worked themselves up all over again into a welcoming spirit. Again, no one showed. Not that entire week. On November 22, Leftwich made a cameo appearance for about an hour. “We had thought, Rural America is who got Trump elected, so he’ll have to make us a priority,” said the transition planner, “but then nothing happened.”
More than a month after the election, the Trump transition team finally appeared. But it wasn’t a team: it was just one guy, named Brian Klippenstein. He came from his job running an organization called Protect the Harvest. Protect the Harvest was founded by a Trump supporter, an Indiana oilman and rancher named Forrest Lucas. Its stated purpose was “to protect your right to hunt, fish, farm, eat meat, and own animals.” In practice it mainly demonized organizations, like the Humane Society, that sought to prevent people who owned animals from doing terrible things to them. They worried, apparently, that if people were forced to be kind to animals they might one day cease to eat them. “This is a weird group,” says Rachael Bale, who writes often about animal welfare for National Geographic.
One of the USDA’s many duties was to police conflicts between people and animals. It brought legal action against people who abused animals, and so maybe it wasn’t the ideal place to insert a man who was preternaturally unconcerned with their welfare. The department maintained its composure—no nasty leaks to the press, no resignations in protest—even as Klippenstein focused, bizarrely, on a single issue. Not animal abuse but climate change. “He came in and wanted to know all about the office on climate change,” says a former USDA employee. “That’s what he wanted to focus on. He wanted the names of the people doing the work.” The career staffer running the transition politely declined to give Klippenstein the names, but he said he bore no ill will toward him for asking. Klip—as he became known affectionately—had reassured everyone by saying, to anyone who would listen, that just as soon as this transition was over he was going straight back to his small livestock farm in Missouri. Bless his heart! Everything on the farm was still normal! (And just you never mind why Uncle Joe likes to be alone with his favorite sheep.)
It was obvious to everyone inside the USDA that Klip was in an impossible position; no one person could get his mind around all the things the department did. Just a couple of weeks before the inauguration, Klip was joined by three other Trump people. The four-person team made a show of sitting down with some of the roughly 100,000-person USDA staff to hear what they had to say. These briefings lived up to their name: the entire introduction to the USDA’s vast scientific-research unit lasted an hour. “At most of the federal agencies, there were no real briefings,” says a former senior White House official who watched the process closely. “They were basically for show. The Trump transition sent in these teams in the end just to say they were doing it.”
The Department of Agriculture normally closes for business on Inauguration Day. It’s the only federal agency with an office building on the Mall, which, once upon a time, had been the site of an experimental farm. The building is now used as a staging post during the inaugural by the National Guard and the Secret Service. Just before the inauguration, a Trump representative called the USDA and said he wanted the building to remain open, as he was sending thirty-something new people in. Why the sudden rush? Why force the government to turn on the lights and staff the cafeteria and go to the rest of the trouble to animate a federal building on a day no one was working? Even getting people into the building would be difficult, with snipers on the roof and the Metro station closed. A member of the Obama transition team wondered how the newcomers could have been vetted so quickly by the Office of Presidential Personnel. Nine months later, Politico published an eye-popping account about these new appointees. Jenny Hopkinson, a Politico reporter, obtained the curricula vitae of the new Trump people. Into USDA jobs, some of which paid nearly $80,000 a year, the Trump team had inserted a long-haul truck driver, a clerk at AT&T, a gas-company meter reader, a country-club cabana attendant, a Republican National Committee intern, and the owner of a scented-candle company, with skills like “pleasant demeanor” listed on their résumés. “In many cases [the new appointees] demonstrated little to no experience with federal policy, let alone deep roots in agriculture,” wrote Hopkinson. “Some of those appointees appear to lack the credentials, such as a college degree, required to qualify for higher government salaries.”
What these people had in common, she pointed out, was loyalty to Donald Trump.
Nine months after they’d arrived, a man I’d been told was the best informed of all the department’s career employees about the haphazard transition couldn’t tell me how many of these people were still roaming the halls. The few fingerprints they left were characteristically bizarre. They sent certified letters to several senior career civil servants perceived to be close to the Obama administration, telling them they were being reassigned—from jobs they were good at to jobs they knew little about. They instructed the staff to stop using the phrase “climate change.” They removed the inspection reports on businesses that abused animals—roadside circuses, puppy mills, research labs—from the department’s website. When reporters from National Geographic contacted the USDA to ask what was going on with animal-abuse issues, “they told us all of this information was public, except now you had to FOIA it,” said Rachael Bale. “We asked for the files, and they sent us seventeen hundred completely blacked-out pages.”
By the time I set out to get the briefings the Trump people had not, it was late summer. Of the fourteen senior jobs at the USDA that required Senate confirmation, only one had been filled: former Georgia governor Sonny Perdue was named secretary of agriculture. In April. If Trump’s interest in a subject is to be judged by the speed with which he appointed his cabinet secretaries, the Department of Agriculture has a catastrophically tiny share of presidential brain space.
At any rate, I’d had a bunch of conversations with people who had run the department under past administrations: former secretaries and deputy secretaries of agriculture. They reached a bipartisan consensus: the best way to get a quick grip on the details of the department is to march through the seven little boxes of its organization chart (see above). For example, if you want to know the likelihood that the geese loitering near the LaGuardia Airport runway will cause your plane to crash-land in the Hudson River and the event will become the subject of a major motion picture, you go to see the undersecretary or deputy undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs, which oversees the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, which handles the bewildering set of conflicts in America between people and animals. (The people tend to get their way.) If you want an up-to-date snapshot of which farmers are most dependent on federal aid, you go see the people who manage the little box marked “Farm and Foreign Agricultural Services.”
These undersecretaries and deputy secretaries occupy public offices, but they are not really public figures: no one outside the department knows their names or faces. And their little boxes are not equally exposed to the whims and idiocies of any given presidential administration. The question of the day, at least it seems to me, is: Where in these little boxes is the greatest damage likely to be done, through neglect or mismanagement or malice? Take the little box labeled “Natural Resources and Environment.” It’s not as abstract as it sounds. It employs around forty thousand people and contains the U.S. Forest Service. Its 193 million acres of forests and grasslands are important to the future of the climate. Its most recent undersecretary, Robert Bonnie, was described to me by one of his superiors as “maybe the single best undersecretary we’ve ever had.” Bonnie himself is a seriously interesting person—and filled with concerns about what the Trump administration might do to his former department. But when I asked him to name his No. 1 concern, he said, “Wildfires.”
But if you worry about everything, you wind up worrying about nothing. The Trump administration can forbid federal employees from using the phrase “climate change” more easily than it
can prevent them from dealing with its consequences. The career people at the U.S. Forest Service, because they have direct lines into Congress, don’t need the White House behind them in the way many other departments do. Fighting wildfires is the most visible thing the USDA does. It’s the places in our government where the cameras never roll that you have to worry about most.
Ali Zaidi had been the first to point this out to me: that the seven little boxes inside the Department of Agriculture are not equally vulnerable. And he would know. He’d spent two years as a grunt in the Office of Management and Budget, before moving into ever more important White House jobs. He’d been one of those young people with the gift for getting old people to forget how young he was, and found himself thrust into jobs normally reserved for the middle-aged. In 2014, at the age of twenty-seven, he was put in charge of a team of experts overseeing the Department of Agriculture’s entire budget—along with the budgets of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Department of Energy, the Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, and a couple of others. He’d been forced to get his mind fully around the federal department that had underpinned his childhood: it wasn’t easy. “Of all the budgets, it’s the weirdest,” he said. It was weird, first, because the USDA did so many different things. It was weird because so many Americans had no idea how much their lives depended upon it. And it was weird because of the sheer sums of money sloshing around the place, dispensed by government employees no one had ever heard of. If you took a follow-the-money approach to what might go wrong inside the USDA, you ended up inside the box run by Kevin Concannon.
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