The Weed Agency (26 page)

“Talk to Carrington. He’s on the Oversight committee, and he’s the member whose district would probably be most affected by all this.”

Bader groaned at the thought.

Congressman Theodore Roosevelt Carrington and Bader had served in Congress together for twelve years, but had barely spoken. Bader was a suburban budget hawk, always banging on about pork and earning accolades from the Cato Institute and other small-government groups, hanging with folks like Ron Paul of Texas, Floyd Flake of New York, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, and in earlier Congresses, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, and Mark Sanford of South Carolina.

Carrington ranked among the chamber’s least conservative Republicans, with a lifetime American Conservative Union rating of 51.102 out of a possible 100. To the extent he associated with any of his Republican colleagues, he hung around with Mike Castle of Delaware, Tom Davis of Virginia, and Teddy Van Voorhees VII of New York.

Carrington came from the oldest of old money and had more or less inherited his seat on the reputation of his family’s good name and philanthropic work in Northern California. Nicknamed “the congressman from Merlot,” Carrington was the last person in the world Bader wanted as an ally on a crusade like this.

After Pelosi’s comments, the cheatgrass crisis finally got a bit more national coverage; the bottom of the front page of the
Wall Street Journal
featured one of those pointillism portraits of the weed.

“This is brutal,” groaned Lisa Bloom, recently promoted to the agency’s communications director.

Lisa had finally achieved that long-sought career step, and Jamie Caro-Marcus was now director of event planning, a title she enjoyed. Ava, however, told her friends she was on the
verge of leaving government work for good. She had been writing freelance pieces on government policy and technology—careful to avoid reporting about anything she did at the Agency of Invasive Species, but her knowledge and outlook were clearly shaped by her day job. Payment by payment, pleased editor by pleased editor, Ava felt confident she was close to finding a fulltime writing gig.

Within the sanctum of Humphey’s office, Lisa and her bosses just began to grasp the public relations disaster that had suddenly befallen the agency. She read aloud the first sentence from the jump page: “State agriculture officials say that the slow-moving federal response to the cheatgrass crisis is only the latest and most dramatic example of a pattern of failures from the USDA’s Agency of Invasive Species.”

“Mrs. Bloom, since the day you walked through our door, you wanted to be fully engaged in the battle of public communication. Now, you have your wish,” Humphrey said, almost teasing. “Drop everything else you’re doing and begin coming up with an action plan to … mitigate all this.”

There was a knock at the office and Wilkins popped his head in with a distinctly uneasy look.

“I see our fact-finding mission has garnered our traditionally disastrous results,” sighed Humphrey.

Wilkins closed the door behind him and spoke in a hushed, terrified tone.

“Humphrey … we screwed up.”

“How bad?”

“Think of the
Hindenburg
 … crashing into the
Titanic
 … as it sails to Pompeii … with Ford Pintos sent to rescue the wounded.”

“Calm down and tell me everything you’ve learned.”

“I didn’t write anything down, as you instructed—okay, I wrote it on my hands.”

“Good. The last thing we need are any … unflattering memos or other paperwork to be requested by Congress or FOIAed.”

“Everything that has ever bothered me about this place joined forces just as this cheatgrass wave was coming up from Mexico. The complacency, the miscommunication or lack of communication, the lack of urgency, the pervasive belief that somebody else out there was taking care of the problem, the human cholesterol of incompetent staff that were too much trouble to fire, everyone waiting for approval from everyone else before taking actions, the endless meetings, the postponed meetings, the rescheduled meetings, the missed meetings, the memos that went unread, the e-mails that were ‘skimmed’—I swear to God, the next time I need to tell people something, I’m posting it above the urinals and on the bathroom stall doors.”

“So you’re saying our staff missed red flags,” Humphrey said uneasily.

“It was a friggin’ Turkish army parade, Adam!” Wilkins was furious. “Every farmer in California was finding these things and reporting them! They didn’t get noticed because there was a backlog of old reports piling up! When people did start passing the reports up the chain, everybody acted like it was just another day at the office, instead of the … the … the Pearl Harbor of weeds!”

Humphrey stood for a moment, trying to grasp the enormity of the foul-up now detailed in marker ink up and down his assistant’s forearms.

“Wash your hands,” Humphrey said.

The following week meant a lot of trips up to Capitol Hill for Humphrey, attempting to placate the increasingly upset voices in Congress. Quite a few members of California’s delegation from agricultural districts, usually warm and friendly and eager to vote for more spending, were suddenly nasty and harsh and full of criticism.

The only bright part of the week for Humphrey was running into Congressman Nick Bader again, and another opportunity to antagonize his Reagan-era foe. But even this regularly recurring confrontation proceeded a bit differently than usual.

Humphrey spotted Bader emerging from a fundraiser at the Capitol Hill Club.

“Congressman!” Humphrey greeted him with transparently fake enthusiasm. “I suppose I should call you by that title every chance I get, since I hear the polls in Pennsylvania indicate you’re hanging by a thread. You must feel so reassured with that Santorum figure, trailing by double digits and leading the charge for you atop your party’s ticket!”

“Shows what an inside-the-Beltway type like you knows,” Bader growled. “We’ve got a legendary NFL Hall of Fame Pittsburgh Steeler on the top of the ticket.”
³⁴

“I’m sure that means so much to your district full of Philadelphia fans.”

“I’ll take my problems over yours, Humphrey,” Bader sparred. “If I lose my seat, I know why: a war that’s going on too long, exhaustion with the president, a bunch of numbskulls in my party playing footsie with Abramoff and strangling their mistresses.”

“As a member of the party of family values, it offends you to see a colleague strangling a woman that isn’t his wife, doesn’t it?”

“Laugh all ya want, Humphrey, just remember you and your whole agency have no friends in either party anymore,” Bader warned. “You guys are the latest poster boys for incompetent government. The CIA, FEMA, every doofus in the Departments of Commerce and Labor, the sneaker-sniffers at TSA—they’re all sighing relief right now, knowing that the walking definition of wasteful government is the Agency of Invasive Species that ignored the weed that ate California wine country.”

For once, Adam Humphrey found himself groping for a snappy comeback.

NOVEMBER 2006

U.S. National Debt: $8.63 trillion

Congressman Nicholas Bader, Republican of Philadelphia’s outer suburbs, shouldn’t have survived the Democratic Tsunami of 2006, but somehow he hung on by about one percentage point.

Bader called in to a well-connected political junkie/talking head, a guy who always went into every election night with a thick binder of data that dissected that year’s electorate in extravagant detail. Two years earlier, he had confidently projected an Ohio win for Bush well before the polls had closed, citing a personally executed exit poll by phone of the key swing streets within the key swing communities of the key swing counties in that most important of swing states. When Ned Simmons of James Street in the Eastmoor neighborhood of Columbus, a former voter for Perot, Clinton, and Gore, said that he was voting for Bush because of the way the president handled the issue of terrorism, this junkie felt confident calling Ohio for Bush, even though the polls were open for another three hours. (He predicted all states correctly except one, Wisconsin, a miss he
attributed to the strange fact that seven thousand more ballots were cast in Milwaukee than the number of people recorded as voting.)

“Congratulations, Congressman.”

“Thanks. Now I get to see if I’m the last of the Mohicans. How bad is it?”

“Well, they just called another race in the Midwest,” the bespectacled guru answered. “By my rankings, the Democrats just knocked off the … the fifty-fourth most vulnerable House Republican.”

Bader swore, and swore, and swore. And then he swore some more.

Morale in the office of the Agency of Invasive Species was mixed the morning after Election Day 2006. The vast majority of the staff was only too happy to kiss Republican congressional majorities good-bye, although they had encountered less and less trouble with the appropriations process each year. And while the Democrats were undoubtedly open to spending more on the Department of Agriculture as a whole (and in most departments), the cheatgrass crisis—“Weedgate,” as it was called in some corners of the Internet—hadn’t really gone away, and California Democrats seemed particularly irate in their criticism of the agency. The news cycle of the election season had provided plenty of distractions away from Humphrey and the AIS—
macaca!
—but there was a pervasive gloom that worse days were ahead.

Bader’s unexpected skin-of-his-teeth victory was just one more disappointment to stick in the agency’s collective craw.

“We almost got rid of him!” cried Wilkins. “So close! If we had just flipped about a thousand votes!”

“I’m afraid we will have Nicholas Bader to kick around for another two years,” sighed Humphrey.

One of the day’s key moments came in the afternoon, when a cheerful group of House Democrats held a press conference to lay out their agenda in the year to come.

Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi and a succession of Democrats announced their intentions to investigate the Bush administration on the handling of the Iraq War, the FEMA response to Katrina, the firing of U.S. Attorneys, the ties to Jack Abramoff, and a “callous and tight-fisted” approach to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, making it far too difficult for ordinary Americans to get home loans.

“Finally, we believe that this administration has ill-served the American people by allowing a crisis in our agricultural community to spread unabated,” Pelosi said, her eyes wide and her cheekbones taut with concern and outrage. “Tens of millions of farmers—I’m sorry, tens of thousands of farmers, and millions of American consumers, are still asking how it could happen. How could something as small and simple as a weed cause such economic and social distress? And where was the federal agency assigned with tracking this threat? How could the Department of Agriculture’s Agency of Invasive Species fail in its mission so thoroughly?”

“I have spoken to Senate Majority Leader-elect Reid, and in January, Democrats in both chambers will vote to establish a bipartisan National Cheatgrass Disaster Commission, to investigate how this crisis occurred and who should be held accountable.”