- Geraghty, Jim.
The Weed Agency.
New York: Crown Forum, 2014.
ISBN 978-0-7704-3652-0.
-
During the Carter administration, the peanut farmer become president,
a man very well acquainted with weeds, created the Agency of
Invasive Species (AIS) within the Department of Agriculture to cope
with the menace. Well, not really—the agency which
occupies centre stage in this farce is fictional but, as the
author notes in the preface, the Federal Interagency Committee
for the Management of Noxious and Exotic Weeds, the Aquatic Nuisance
Species Task Force, the Federal Interagency Committee on
Invasive Terrestrial Animals and Pathogens, and the
National
Invasive Species Council of which they are members along with
a list of other agencies, all do exist. So while it may seem
amusing that a bankrupt and over-extended government would have an
agency devoted to weeds, in fact that real government has
an entire portfolio of such agencies, along with, naturally,
a council to co-ordinate their activities.
The AIS has a politically appointed director, but the agency
had been run since inception by Administrative Director
Adam Humphrey, career civil service, who is training his
deputy, Jack Wilkins, new to the civil service after a
frustrating low-level post in the Carter White House, in the
ways of the permanent bureaucracy and how to deal with
political appointees, members of congress, and rival agencies.
Humphrey has an instinct for how to position the agency's
mission as political winds shift over the decades: during
the Reagan years as American agriculture's first line of
defence against the threat of devastation by Soviet weeds,
at the cutting edge of information technology revolutionising
citizens' interaction with government in the Gingrich era, and
essential to avert even more disastrous attacks on the nation
after the terrorist attacks in 2001.
Humphrey and Wilkins are masters of the care and feeding of
congressional allies, who are rewarded with agency facilities
in their districts, and neutralising the occasional
idealistic budget cutter who wishes to limit the growth
of the agency's budget or, horror of horrors, abolish it.
We also see the agency through the eyes of three young women
who arrived at the agency in 1993 suffused with optimism
for “reinventing government” and
“building a bridge to the twenty-first century”.
While each of them—Lisa, hired in the communications
office; Jamie, an event co-ordinator; and Ava, a technology
systems analyst—were well aware that their
positions in the federal bureaucracy were deep in the weeds,
they believed they had the energy and ambition to excel and rise to
positions where they would have the power to effect change
for the better.
Then they began to actually work within the structure of the
agency and realise what the civil service actually was.
Thomas Sowell
has remarked that the experience in his life which
transformed him from being a leftist (actually, a Marxist)
to a champion of free markets and individual liberty was working
as a summer intern in 1960 in a federal agency. He says that
after experiencing the civil service first-hand, he realised
that whatever were the problems of society that concerned him,
government bureaucracy was not the solution. Lisa, Jamie,
and Ava all have similar experiences, and react in different
ways. Ava decides she just can't take it any more and
is tempted by a job in the middle of the dot com boom. Her
experience is both entertaining and enlightening.
Even the most obscure federal agency has the power to mess up on a
colossal scale and wind up on the front page of the Washington
Post and the focus of a congressional inquest. So it was to
be for the AIS, when an ill wind brought a threat to agriculture in
the highly-visible districts of powerful members of congress. All
the bureaucratic and political wiles of the agency had to be summoned
to counter the threat and allow the agency to continue to do what
such organisations do best: nothing.
Jim Geraghty is a veteran reporter, contributing editor, and
blogger at National Review; his work has
appeared in a long list of other publications. His
reportage has always been characterised by a dry wit, but
for a first foray into satire and farce, this is a
masterful accomplishment. It is as funny as some of the
best work of
Christopher Buckley,
and that's about as good
as contemporary political humour gets. Geraghty's plot is
not as zany as most of Buckley's, but it
is more grounded in the political reality of Washington.
One of the most effective devices in the book is to
describe this or that absurdity and then add a
footnote documenting that what
you've just read actually exists, or that an outrageous
statement uttered by a character was said on the record
by a politician or bureaucrat.
Much of this novel reads like an American version of the British
sitcom
Yes Minister
(Margaret Thatcher's favourite television programme), and although
the author doesn't mention it in the author's note or
acknowledgements, I suspect that the master civil servant's
being named “Humphrey” is an homage to that
series. Sharp-eyed readers will discover another oblique reference
to Yes Minister in the entry for November 2012
in the final chapter.
June 2014 