The Weed Agency Read Online Free PDF

Management, Agency of Invasive Species, Administrative Director.
    2 Steven Hayward,
The Age of Reagan
, p. 47.
    3 Editorial, “Fleeced Again,”
Wilmington Morning Star
, April 24, 1980.
    4 Ronald Reagan’s radio commentary on “Government Cost,” November 16, 1976. Whether or not these figures are accurate, Reagan (and a Reaganite like Bader) believed they were accurate.
    5 A slight exaggeration; in 1982, the comic strip
Doonesbury
portrayed a distraught EPA official crawling out onto his ledge in protest of ‘dismantling the whole enforcement team.’ Shortly thereafter, the real-life EPA administrator, Anne Gorsuch, issued a memo to all EPA employees protesting “windowsill politics.”
    6 Associated Press, “Furniture Spending Questioned,” March 18, 1980.
    7 Frank Corimer, “Government Waste? Here Is a Perfect Example,” Associated Press, July 19, 1979.
    8 Associated Press, “Government Waste Described at Hearing,” March 16, 1979.
    9 Actually, it was the General Services Administration under the Ford administration in 1975 that purchased a sculpture from Isamu Noguchi.

2

    Agency of Invasive Species Administrative Director Adam Humphrey told his assistant Jack Wilkins about his run-in with Bader, and Wilkins laughed. He couldn’t believe how much he had once feared Bader. He chuckled about how little he knew when he came to work for Humphrey; all he really remembered was that he was desperate to get away from what he thought would be his dream job, working in the White House.
    OCTOBER 1979
    U.S. National Debt: $826 billion
    Budget, USDA Agency of Invasive Species: $13.4 million
    Wilkins had spent three years working as the lowest-paid, least-senior staff researcher in the Carter administration. His friends told him he looked like he aged a decade in that time. White House work had that effect on people, particularly among those too junior to really change anything, but still senior enough to get yelled at and to feel emotionally invested in the performance of the administration.
    The trouble had started early. First Tip O’Neill threw a fit when his tickets to the Inaugural Gala at the Kennedy Center had been in the back row of the balcony, and had latercomplained about the skimpy continental breakfasts at White House meetings. 10 The late 1970s turned into a blur of presidential disasters: Managing the tennis courts. Sweaters. Letters and phone calls unreturned. Throw in 18 percent inflation and gas lines. Now everyone at the White House was screaming about whether they should let the Shah of Iran come to the Mayo Clinic, as if letting a man seek a treatment for his cancer could somehow be a bad thing. Wilkins had sensed the need to push the ejector button and get out of politics and get into something quieter, safer, more stable and predictable. He decided he needed a safe job in the civil service.
    Wilkins heard the administrative director in some obscure federal agency was looking for a new right-hand man—and so he ended up sitting before the desk of Adam Humphrey, Administrative Director, Department of Agriculture’s Agency of Invasive Species, serving under the Bureau of Agricultural Risk Management, under the Undersecretary of Farm Services, under the Deputy Secretary of Agriculture, under the Secretary of Agriculture.
    The president appointed and the Senate confirmed the agency’s director—currently some congressman who desperately sought, and found, an excuse to avoid the judgment of his district’s disgruntled voters—but Humphrey was the real power.
    “So why do you want to leave that most glamorous of workplaces, the White House, and come work at a place like the Agency of Invasive Species?”
    “I want to serve my country in the civil service.”
    “Very good, Mr. Wilkins, your utterly predictable textbook answer will be noted. So what’s the
real
reason?”
    Wilkins stared for a moment, sighed, and figured he might as well reveal it all to see if his potential new boss