The Weed Agency

by Jim Geraghty

  Humphrey once again began shadowing Hargis, ostensibly to keep the congressman informed about how the shutdown affected agency operations. But Wilkins knew that for the first time, Humphrey felt genuinely powerless about his work, and his “advice” to Hargis was becoming less veiled and subtle with every conversation. Wilkins sensed that if you took Humphrey’s work away from him, he might lose his mind.

  Humphrey and Wilkins were supposed to meet the congressman on Capitol Hill. Hargis wasn’t leading the negotiations but remained on their periphery. As an appropriator, his duty was periodically to remind the White House that they could not make concessions about spending, which his Democratic colleagues in the House considered their divine right. The White House was also counting on Hargis to win over Republicans who had been on the Appropriations Committee for a long time, nudging them to get them to urge their hard-line colleagues to concede. Thankfully, Hargis and his fellow Democrats had allies on the Appropriations Committee staff, almost all of whom were holdovers from when the Democrats were running the committee a year earlier.

  So a few days before Christmas, Wilkins and Humphrey found themselves wandering the halls of the Senate office buildings, with Humphrey beginning to wonder if Hargis was deliberately avoiding him.

  “Are they meeting in Dole’s office, or in Daschle’s office?” Wilkins asked.

  Humphrey opened a door on the other side of the room, and entered one of the nicer meeting rooms he had ever seen on Capitol Hill. The room had a fireplace, and was fragrant with pine. Outside, a few flurries could be seen outside the window, which was flanked by long, gold curtains. A plate of cookies sat on the table.

  “Oooh, cookies!” Wilkins’s face lit up. He crossed the room, reached for one—and then heard one of the doors on the other side of the room being unlocked.

  Wilkins shot a panicked look at Humphrey, and ducked behind the gold curtain. Humphrey glared but followed, and the pair stood silently as they heard two familiar voices enter.

  “In here, George—this back room,” said a flat, low Kansas twang. “The fireplace keeps it warmer—I’m starting to wonder if you guys got the building folks to turn down the heat, trying to freeze us out.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it, Senator,” replied the young, cheerily chirping George Stephanopoulos with a laugh.

  “Moravian spice cookie?”

  “Thank you, Senator,” Stephanopoulos replied. “Not where we were supposed to be right before Christmas, huh? An incumbent president, a likely challenger, stuck in Washington, far from the primary states.”

  “Ergh. Argh. I’ve got to get to New Hampshire,” Dole muttered, tugging on his cardigan sweater with his left hand. “One way or the other, this thing is over on the thirty-first, because I’m out of here.”

  Stephanopoulos nearly choked on his cookie, and behind the curtain, Humphrey’s eyes bulged and he smiled aggressively.

  Wilkins and Humphrey remained absolutely silent throughout the brief meeting; the two men had rehearsed their talking points before the cameras, and they reiterated the usual points about budgetary discipline and the difficulties of the shutdown and the need for flexibility, but also the importance of standing on core principles. Nothing seemed to change, but when the two men rose from the table, Stephanopoulos’s gait was different: cheerier and excited.

  When no sound had been heard for a solid minute, the pair of agency employees emerged from behind the curtains and hastily strode toward the door they entered.

  In the Senate hallway, relieved their eavesdropping stunt hadn’t triggered a visit from the U.S. Capitol Police, Humphrey was like a teakettle ready to boil over.

  “Unbelievable!” Humphrey was giddy.

  “I can’t believe I just stole one of Bob Dole’s cookies.”

  “Forget the cookies!” Humphrey ecstatically cried. “They’re going to fold! This will be over by January!”

  “Wait, just so Dole can get to New Hampshire?” Wilkins asked.

  “Precisely! He can’t afford to wait! The budget fight going into the New Year would interfere with Dole’s chances in the primary! This is the biggest budget brinkmanship in generations, and the leader of the Republicans in the Senate just told a leading negotiator for the Democrats that he has to accept whatever’s on the table at the end of the year. He just revealed his whole hand to Stephanopoulos!” He shook his head, laughed, and then laughed some more. “We’re saved by Dole’s ambition!”

  “I can’t believe what you’re saying,” Wilkins said, cheered but almost afraid to believe. “Why did he do that? Is he really sick of the budget showdown and looking for a way out, or did he just inadvertently blurt out the one thing he couldn’t afford to reveal?”

  “Does it matter?” laughed Humphrey. “Either way, the negotiations are effectively over. In a fight like this, the first side that splinters ends up conceding. Dole just told Stephanopoulos the precise date that the Republicans will give up.”

  They walked down the hall, privy to a joyful secret.

  “Wilkins … remind me to touch base with Congressman Bader early next year.”

  * * *

  19 Matthew Continetti, The K Street Gang (New York: Doubleday, 2006).

  20 Actually from a speech by Gingrich to House Republicans, December 5, 1994.

  21 John M. Broder and Sam Fulwood III, “Gingrich’s Gavel Sends a Signal to New Political Power Rangers,” Los Angeles Times, January 5, 1995.

  22 Bob Novak’s foreword to Sen. Tom Coburn’s book Breach of Trust (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2003).

  23 “The White House figured out how to play Newt,” said Tony Rush, Tom DeLay’s chief of staff. “They would put the Time magazine cover with Newt as the ‘Man of the Year’ on the coffee table in front of where they would have Newt sit. Newt would come back from leadership meetings with the White House and tell us how the White House understood his significance. And people would look around and say to themselves, ‘Have you lost your mind?’ ” Steven M. Gillon, The Pact: Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and the Rivalry That Defined a Generation, p. 153.

  5

  MARCH 1996

  U.S. National Debt: $5.11 trillion

  Budget, USDA Agency of Invasive Species: $125.9 million

  They met, month after month, meeting after meeting. Each time, Agency of Invasive Species Assistant Administrative Director Jack Wilkins tried to explain to Ava Summers, the twenty-four-year-old who somehow had become the driving force behind a massively ambitious plan to expand and revamp the agency’s nascent presence on the World Wide Web, just how complicated the creation of Weed.gov would become.

  It was surprisingly difficult. The inoculations of patience and lowered expectations just wouldn’t take hold within her bloodstream.

  “It’s like the Stations of the Cross,” Wilkins blurted out before realizing that the fishnet-clad woman in front of him could very well be Wiccan or something and he may have just created a workplace environment that reeked of religious intolerance in the eyes of an opportunistic litigator.

  “The what?”

  “Er, forget that,” Wilkins said. “The bottom line is we have to go person to person, office to office, and get a lot of people to sign off on this before we even begin purchasing the equipment to make this happen.”

  “I like it, you like it, Humphrey likes it, and even the Speaker of the House liked it,” she rolled her eyes. “You would think that would be enough.”

  “As you’re rapidly learning, if somebody doesn’t get a chance to weigh in, they’ll get their noses out of joint, and there are about a million ways for them to delay or louse up a project they feel like they’ve been ignored on,” Wilkins warned, picking up a list he had composed. “Tech, the Ag Sec, the deputy assistant administrative director for international programs, the deputy assistant administrative director for domestic programs, who will want to at least give the branch offices a chance for input.… At the very least, you’ll have to send a memo to all of our agency liaisons. They’ll probably ig
nore it, but you don’t want this project to get halfway done and then have somebody screaming that they would have red-flagged some issue if they had been told at the beginning.”

  “Oh, this is my baby,” Ava said with just a bit of pugnacity. “There aren’t going to be any issues.”

  “There’ll be issues. There are always issues.” He liked Ava a lot, admiring her relentless enthusiasm for all of her ideas—a lot like he remembered from that first job in the Carter White House. Of course, she would learn, he concluded.

  Ava had not liked anything she had been hearing from anyone within the agency since the Gingrich meeting more than a year ago. She shook her head, marveling that the meetings, proposal memos, response memos, and assorted paperwork had been circulating for so long, and that her vision was no closer to getting off sheets of paper and into electronic reality. Generally the meetings involved getting a lot of people together in the conference room, a lot of droning, a realization that some other office should be involved as well, and an agreement to reach out to that group, see what they say, and convene another meeting after that.

  The Department of Agriculture already had a Web site; it featured a small photo of the building, a mailing address, the main switchboard phone number, and a lone e-mail address. Visits were few; it took thirty seconds to load up the page, and users, paying by the hour, tended not to find a visit worth the expense. Ava described what currently existed as the Wright Brothers’ Glider; what she envisioned she compared to the Concorde, after Humphrey had told her to stop comparing it to the Space Shuttle.

  “Our partners at NASA will feel threatened that we’re encroaching upon their turf,” he warned.

  The tech guys—and the tech department was almost entirely guys—greeted her proposal with a series of sighs, groans, “maybes,” and poorly hidden expressions of disinterest. Their pallid skin seemed to radiate the antimatter to her enthusiasm. Her least successful initial meeting came with a group of tech guys who worked in the Agriculture building’s basement and were nicknamed “the Mole People.”

  “We’ve said we really prefer DOS for this kind of stuff,” said one bespectacled guy who Ava had never seen before. She imagined he crawled out from a nest he had made out of old beige computer equipment in one of the basement’s corners.

  “Guys … how we do these things changes,” she said, trying to not lose her temper, burst into tears, or fly off the handle. “My first experience with computers was the little triangle turtle in LOGO, but I learned to let him go years ago.”

  One of the older guys flipped through every page of her memo and plan with a wince.

  “We went through this a few years ago.… We ran into all kinds of bugs with CompuServe and Prodigy,” he said. “The data we collect is going to be a real pain to put into any kind of a database that can be displayed on the World Wide Web.… I’m not really sure this is going to be worth the effort.”

  “Adam Humphrey wants this done,” Ava said, having learned that his name seemed to light a bit of a fire under people in the right circumstances. But his name didn’t seem to have any magic down here in the basement. Ava wondered if she should have just translated her proposal into binary code directly.

  In her cubicle, Ava put up a small marker board with the words “I don’t get it” scrawled across the top; as a joke, she put a check mark every time she heard it from someone from whom she needed help:

  By August she had run out of space. By September she stopped, because the joke was old and her coworkers’ disinterest in seeing the project to fruition was no longer fun.

  Of course, if the Mole People resided in subterranean caverns, the lawyers lived below them in Hades.

  Ava was convinced that despite his sufficiently polite manners, Agency of Invasive Species General Counsel John Lin could make flowers wilt in his presence.

  There was almost nothing outwardly nasty or hostile about Lin; he was professional, even-tempered, very smart, exceptionally diligent, a third-generation Chinese-American from San Francisco who attended Berkeley undergrad and met Humphrey when he was at Georgetown Law. Humphrey adored him, or at least he generated as much affection as anyone saw within the agency.

  To Ava, the man was an endless fountain of bad news. The world of a lawyer was all about protecting his client from litigation from other lawyers, and of course, everything in American life was becoming a potential lawsuit; Lin adjusted to the ever-changing legal scene with what might be described as all-encompassing strategic paranoia. When the agency had been dragged, kicking and screaming, into the use of e-mail, Lin had written the longest standard legal confidentiality disclaimer in the entire federal government.

  He had responded to Ava’s proposal for Weed.gov with a fourteen-page memo that was at least eight pages of impenetrable legalese, but that Ava had no problem grasping the gist: about a hundred variations of “no.”

  Lin didn’t like the idea of giving too many people access to the system. He was terrified of security risks, proprietary information risks, sensitive information risks, misinterpretation risks, and risk management risks. He wanted a thorough, detailed review process to evaluate every piece of information distributed by the agency to the public … which was more or less exactly what Weed.gov was supposed to escape.

  Frequently when Ava would question one of his objections, Lin would remove his glasses, rub the bridge of his nose, and say with a sigh, “I’m afraid you’re overlooking some very significant liability issues.” He would then cite the case of Somebody vs. Somebody that to Ava sounded completely irrelevant to her Web site, and describe how in that case, somebody had done something that Lin insisted was precisely like what she was proposing, and that not only did the other somebody lose the case, but that the lawsuit decision had opened up a black hole underneath the defendant institution and said institution was sucked into the inky maw, never to be heard from again.

  Every e-mail, every memo, every meeting with Lin was a variation of the same. Ava suspected that Lin would be very happy in a world of perpetually locked doors where no one ever interacted with each other, outside of e-mails with lengthy standard legal confidentiality disclaimers.

  “You guys look like you’ve been whipped by dogs,” Jamie said, realizing a moment later that she didn’t really know precisely what that metaphor meant.

  She had picked this week’s happy hour destination, a cheery, yellow-walled Latin place called Gabriel at 2121 P Street, which offered free tapas during happy hour and promised sangria by the pitcher. Ava wondered if this week’s sorrow-drowning might require tapping the national Strategic Sangria Reserve.

  “I am starting to really understand why postal workers go on shooting rampages,” Ava began. She laid out her latest ordeals in getting anyone to really move, to make Weed.gov an actual priority; it seemed like when people weren’t nitpicking or criticizing Ava’s baby, they were sleepwalking through the motions needed to bring it to fruition.

  “If I’m lucky, I’ll have this done by my retirement,” Ava said, before emptying her sangria glass.

  “Then maybe my triumphant pinnacle of my career will be writing the press release,” quipped Lisa. “When I came here, I thought I would be dealing the New York Times, the Washington Post, George magazine—you know, the real news publications—but not only does absolutely nothing this agency do ever get noticed by anybody, or does anybody care about anything we do, but I don’t even get to handle the few calls we do get. They’re mostly from agricultural trade publications, and my boss handles them, and he’s absolutely terrible at them. He never says anything. His answers go on and on, with this, like, fog of words, and when I read his quotes they’ve been cut down to nothing. Like: ‘We are monitoring the developments in this area and are confident that our responses will be sufficiently adaptive.’ Or something like that, which could mean anything. The only media calls I ever deal with are from some stupid tiny little wire service that has all of its reporters read the Federal Register every morning.”

  �
��Event-planning must be the best job, Jamie,” Ava said, plopping back in her chair. “You get to plan trips and conferences for the senior staff. As the only one of us whose job doesn’t suck our souls out through our eyeballs every day, I think you should buy the next pitcher.”

  Jamie looked down at the table for a second.

  “This week I got a call from the Inspector General’s office.”

  “Next round’s on me,” Lisa said, as Ava shot up into an upright posture.

  Two days earlier, with great trepidation, Jamie poked her head into Humphrey’s office.

  “The Inspector General’s office just called.”

  “What did he want?” Humphrey asked. He almost fooled her into thinking he wasn’t unnerved by those words.

  Suddenly the intercom on his desk beeped to life. His secretary, Carla, announced that it was USDA Inspector General Demetrius Palmer on the line.

  Humphrey picked up the boxy receiver. “Mr. Palmer! How do you do?” The voice on the other end was not nearly so warm.

  “Travel records for the past four years? Absolutely.”

  Shortly after sending over the records, Humphrey asked for a meeting with the recently appointed Inspector General Palmer.

  The first available meeting time was a week later. Humphrey crossed the massive building and arrived early. Humphrey didn’t know much about Palmer, but he instinctively perceived all inspectors general as potential adversaries.

  Palmer was already one of President Clinton’s favorites, starting in the Department of Commerce and finding, in short order, a web of egregious contractor overcharging. He had been appointed to the Department of Agriculture IG spot a few months ago.

  Humphrey had taught Wilkins to consider OIG staff the way cops considered internal affairs snoops in their precincts. He would have sneeringly labeled them the “rat squad,” but that nickname had already been taken by the agency’s invasive rodent management and abatement working group.