One thought stuck in Ali's head: "Poverty is not a family value." He worked as a field organizer in Obama's campaign. "The biggest disappointment was that it was a little bit of a cliche: Harvard liberal," said Ali. "Whereas my politics before were not a cliche." Two years later he graduated from Harvard, and then Obama was sworn in as president of the United States. Ali knew he had at least a shot at a very junior position in the new administration. "I had for whatever reason in my mind decided that I should go to the place where it wasn't sexy but the sausage came together." That place, he further decided, was the White House's Office of Management and Budget. His first job in the new administration was to take the budget numbers produced by the senior people and turn them into a narrative: a document ordinary people could read.
One day in his new job he was handed the budget for the Department of Agriculture. "I was like, Oh yeah, the USDA - they give money to farmers to grow stuff." For the first time, he looked closely at what this arm of the United States government actually does. Its very name is seriously misleading - most of what it does has little to do with agriculture. It runs 193 million acres of national forest and grasslands, for instance. It is charged with inspecting almost all the animals Americans eat, including the nine billion birds a year. Buried inside it is a massive science program, a large fleet of aircraft for firefighting, and a bank with $220 billion in assets. It monitors catfish farms. It maintains a shooting range inside its DC headquarters. It keeps an apiary on its roof, to study bee - colony collapse. There's a drinking game played by people who have worked at the Department of Agriculture: Does the USDA do It? Someone names an odd function of government (say, shooting fireworks at Canada geese that flock too near airport runways) and someone else has to guess If the USDA does it. (In this case, it does.)
A small fraction of its massive annual budget ($164 billion in 2016) was actually spent on farmers, but it financed and managed all these programs in rural America - including the free school lunch for kids living near the poverty line. "I'm sitting there looking at this," said Ali. "The USDA had subsidized the apartment my family had lived in. The hospital we used. The fire department. The town's water. The electricity. It had paid for the food I had eaten."
Michael Lewis "The Fifth Risk" (2018)
