The Fifth Risk, Liar's Poker, Money Ball, The Big Short and others by Michael Lewis November 27, 2018

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I have read the titles listed above, all written by Michael Lewis over a considerable amount of time. You can read his work by clicking on www.michaellewiswrites.com
I'm currently diving through The Fifth Risk (purchased from Amazon) that deals with the USA government departments transition from the Obama to the Trump administrations. There are 2,000,000 employees in the government doing their daily work and reporting to their bosses who report to their bosses and on up to the top. It's the absence of qualified individuals to lead these departments that is the focus of this book.
When Trump and Clinton won their respective party nominations the rules mandate a transitional team be put in place well before the election in November. This team seeks out agreeable candidates to head up all of the government's departments such as secretary of Defence, State, Commerce, Agriculture and a host of others and gets them on side and committed to take over the job after the inauguration in January. The cost of this work is borne by the candidate. When Mr. Trump got wind of this expense he yelled and screamed at his campaign people (who knew the rules) that they weren't going to use his money for any such nonsense; he was going to break the law and he didn't give a damn. Of course his campaign team and advisors had to agree if they wanted to stay employed. The pattern in the Whitehouse was going to be the same if he was elected.
When Trump was elected there was a few weeks to get the transitional team in place, and Trump had his list of candidates ready to go. Look at the money he saved! However, his would-be appointments left plenty to be desired: one example was Rick Perry (who had stated in his campaign speeches that he would get rid of the Department of Energy, and when asked, he didn't know what the department was all about). Perry was slated by Mr. Trump to be Secretary of Energy. Did this mean that Trump wanted to dump Energy, or underfund it to save money? After all, its budget was $30,000,000,000.00 to toss around every year and to whom? Perry had no idea; he was going to be the top man reporting to the Whitehouse.

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