On August 17, 2014, Matt Dyer, a forty-nine-year-old legal aid lawyer from Turner, Maine, emerged from the cabin of the fishing vessel the Robert Bradford as it neared the shores of Nachvak Fjord in northern Labrador. The steep peaks of the Torngat Mountains sliced down to the cold water of the fjord below. The last time Dyer had seen the fjord was thirteen months before, when he was loaded onto a helicopter, semiconscious and covered in blood. Nonetheless, when a group of journalists invited him to join them a year later for a week in the Torngats, he accepted immediately. He wanted to experience this beautiful place on different terms, building memories of its awe-inducing splendor rather than of the horror of a polar bear attack.

This trip was much different than his first. The group of five slept on the Robert Bradford, not on land. And they didn’t go anywhere without Maria or Eli Merkuratsuk, the Inuit brother and sister bear guards—both armed with shotguns—who had been hired to guide and protect them.

With one bear guard at the front and one at the rear, the group wove a path inland and crested a small hill. Dyer found himself looking down through binoculars at the site where he had been attacked. Within minutes, he spotted a polar bear. It was standing on a raised piece of land where his party had considered camping a year earlier. Over the next three days, the group saw eight more bears. But instead of meeting them with fear or hesitation, or backsliding into the trauma of what had happened to him, Dyer was filled with a sense of peace.

Back home in Maine now, Dyer is still consumed by—maybe even obsessed with—polar bears. It’s not post-traumatic stress disorder. He’s just fascinated. He plans to get a tattoo of a polar bear on each of his forearms. If you’re a tattoo guy, he explains, you don’t go through an experience like that without getting a little ink. Along with the scars on his face and neck, covered now by his newly grown ponytail and beard, and the low, husky rasp that is now his voice, the tattoos will be permanent reminders of just how close he came to death. There won’t be a day in Dyer’s life that he won’t remember the bears.

The ad in a fall 2012 issue of Sierra magazine promised the adventure of a lifetime: two weeks trekking through the untouched lower reaches of Canada’s Arctic tundra, with the possibility of seeing the world’s largest land carnivore, the polar bear. Participants must be fit and experienced hikers, the ad warned. They would also have to accept an element of risk, including lack of access to emergency medical care. But the payoff would be big. “If you dream of experiencing a place that is both pristine and magical, a land of spirits and polar bears rarely seen by humans, this is the trip you have been waiting for,” the ad said.

Two seasoned Sierra Club guides would be leading the trip. Rich Gross, now sixty-one, worked for a low-income housing nonprofit in San Francisco but since 1990 had spent a week or two each year guiding Sierra Club trips in remote parts of the world. Marta Chase, sixty years old, was a medical diagnostics consultant who’d been leading hiking trips since she was in high school. She and Gross had guided fourteen trips together.

It was Gross’s idea to go into the Torngats, one of Canada’s newest national parks. He’d never seen a polar bear in the wild and was drawn to the spiritual appeal of the mountains. The park was named after Torngarsoak, an ancient Inuit spirit who appeared as a polar bear and controlled the lives of sea animals. The terrain itself has a mystical appearance, with sharply peaked mountains and fjords cutting into the land from the coast of the Labrador Sea. Only a few hundred people venture there each year, and Gross wanted to be part of that exclusive group. Chase wanted to see the park, too. But she worried about hiking in polar bear country.

Polar bears sit at the top of the Arctic food chain. A large male can weigh as much as 1,700 pounds and stand ten feet tall. Unlike black bears or grizzlies, polar bears are carnivores through and through—they can’t survive without meat. They live most of their lives on the sea ice, lurking near holes, watching and waiting—sometimes for hours, sometimes for days—for their favorite prey, the ring seal. When a seal surfaces to breathe, the bear pounces, grabbing it by its head and crushing its skull. Polar bears typically stay clear of humans. But if there were a time and a place to see one, the Torngats in midsummer would be a good bet. That’s when the sea ice melts for a while, forcing the bears onto land.

In New York City, sixty-five-year-old Larry Rodman signed up the same day he saw the ad on the Sierra Club website. The walls of Rodman’s midtown Manhattan law office were adorned with photos of wildlife and scenery he’d taken on past wilderness trips, including one with Chase and Gross. But he’d never seen a polar bear.

Marilyn Frankel, a sixty-six-year-old exercise physiologist from West Lynn, Oregon, had traveled with Gross and Chase many times before. After some years away from backpacking, this would be her first trip back. Rick Isenberg, a fifty-six-year-old physician from Scottsdale, Arizona, signed up because he wanted to get away. Isenberg, a clinical researcher, hadn’t practiced medicine in fifteen years. This would be his third Sierra Club trip but by far the most adventurous
and extreme.

Matt Dyer was dreaming of adventure when he filled out the forms for the trip. But Gross was concerned about Dyer’s lack of experience. “This trip requires backpacking experience and I don’t see any on your forms,” he said in an email to Dyer. “This is a particularly tough trip since it is all off trail and packs will be quite heavy (50+ pounds). The area is remote and evacuation is only by helicopter.” Dyer told Gross he was in good shape and had been hiking and camping in New England for years, including some trekking with the Appalachian Mountain Club. “I’m not a city person (I grew up on an island about 8 miles from the mainland) so being away from the [7-Eleven] is not going to bother me,” Dyer wrote. Dyer agreed to follow a strict training plan, and Gross agreed to take him.

University of Alberta and longtime Environment Canada biologist Ian Stirling has devoted forty years to studying polar bears, and many consider him one of the preeminent biologists on the subject. His long-term studies in Canada’s western Hudson Bay helped establish the link between polar bears and climate change. That link is now so strong that the bears have become one of the most visible symbols of global warming. In 2012, Stirling wrote a paper for the journal Global Change Biology, coauthored with one of his former PhD students, Andrew Derocher, also a leader in the field. The long-term picture they painted is bleak.

Ocean temperatures are climbing faster in the Arctic than anywhere else in the world, leading to a substantial decrease in sea ice. In September 2012, the Arctic sea ice level was 49 percent lower than the historical average from 1979 to 2000. The southern parts of the Arctic, including the Torngats, have had an ice-free summer season throughout modern times. But the ice-free period is growing longer. Since the late 1970s, the number of ice-free days in the area around the Torngats has increased from 125 days to 175 days. Less sea ice means polar bears must spend more time on land. To survive, they live off the body fat stored from their earlier kills on the ice. As the period when they have to live off that reserve grows longer, some eat goose eggs, grasses, or berries. But their foraging goes only so far—they can’t survive without the fat they get from seals. “As the bears’ body condition declines, more seek alternate food sources so the frequency of conflicts between bears and humans increases,” the scientists concluded.

After all, to a starving polar bear, a human is just meat.

On July 18, 2013, Matt Dyer lugged his fifty-pound pack into the Quality Hotel Dorval in Montreal. He’d taken a twelve-hour overnight bus from Lewiston, Maine. The afternoon sun was hot, and he was tired. Larry Rodman walked in at the same time, fresh off the airport shuttle bus after a quick flight from New York City. The two men started talking. Rodman, the big-city law partner, and Dyer, the legal aid attorney with the scraggly gray ponytail, hit it off immediately. For Dyer, especially, that was a relief. He’d been less concerned about the arduous journey than about the people he’d be trapped with in the wilderness. When you’re paying for the trip of a lifetime, you want to enjoy the company.

Rich Gross and Marta Chase had flown in a day earlier to buy supplies and make last-minute arrangements. Chase’s husband, Kicab Castañeda-Mendez, was there, too. Chase had introduced him to hiking when they were in their thirties, and since then the sixty-four-year-old management consultant had joined all of her Sierra Club trips, playing the default role of group photographer. On this trip his presence was even more reassuring. In June, Chase had been diagnosed with breast cancer and was told she needed a mastectomy. At first, she assumed she’d have to cancel the trip. But when her doctor assured her that postponing the surgery for a few weeks wouldn’t matter, she decided to go.

Chase and Gross had developed a division of labor for their trips. Chase handled logistics like transportation and meals. Gross handled park permits and the route, poring over maps and plotting out the various options for getting from A to B. Each year they alternated who took the lead on research and outreach. For the Torngats trip, it was Chase’s turn.

Chase studied the website for the Torngat Mountains Base Camp & Research Station, which Canada’s parks department opened in 2006 in the Nunatsiavut region. This autonomous area in Labrador includes five small Inuit communities and the Torngat Mountains National Park. The camp sits just outside the southern limit of the park, on Saglek Fjord.

Chase sent an email to Base Camp, thinking it might serve as their entry point to the park. When she didn’t get a response, she contacted Vicki Storey, an adventure travel agent in Alberta. Storey sent Chase to Alain Lagacè, who operated two camps that offered guided tours, fishing expeditions, and wildlife safaris. Lagaccè knew the area well, Storey assured Chase. He’d been arranging trips into the Torngats for decades. In emails and phone calls over the course of months, Chase and Lagacè shaped the Sierra Club trip. The group would fly from Montreal to Kuujjuaq, the largest Inuit community in Nunavik, the Inuit region of Quebec. Then they’d take a small charter plane to Lagacè’s Barnoin River Camp and spend the night. The next morning a floatplane would deposit them in the Torngats, where they’d be on their own for eleven days. “The thought of polar bears is still a concern to me,” Chase said in one of her emails to Lagacè. “I have experience with black and brown bears but not with polar.”

Guns are generally prohibited in Canada’s national parks, but in 2011 Parks Canada broadened the rules for parks with polar bears, allowing researchers, guides licensed by Parks Canada, and local, native Canadians to apply for gun permits for those parks. Guns could also be carried by Inuit bear guards who have taken a polar bear safety course and been licensed by Parks Canada. In its explanation for loosening the restrictions, Parks Canada cited an “increased risk of dangerous human-bear encounters” due to the impact of climate change on sea ice.

Parks Canada’s website “strongly encourages” visitors to the Torngats to hire bear guards, but they are not required. When Chase asked Lagacè whether they’d need a bear guard, she said he told her that no one who traveled through his camp used them. And none of the Parks Canada employees mentioned bear guards. Chase and Gross decided that flare guns, bear spray, and electric fences would offer them the protection they needed. The guides arranged to rent two flare guns from Lagacè, each with four shells. Gross picked up two electric fences from the Sierra Club—one to encircle their campsite, the other to protect the area where they would cook and store their food. Each fence stood about three feet high and consisted of three parallel wires suspended from four-foot posts. Although the wires looked flimsy, they carried five to seven kilovolts of charge—not enough to seriously injure a bear, but supposedly enough to send it running.

Gross emailed a picture of the fence to Castañeda-Mendez. “What’s the polar bear supposed to do? Die of laughter?” Castañeda-Mendez wrote back. They’d also take bear spray, which they had carried on previous trips to ward off grizzly bears. Should something go wrong, they would have a satellite phone to call for help.

A Parks Canada employee told Chase that anyone entering the park was required to watch a DVD on polar bear safety. Parks Canada agreed to send the video to Lagacè’s camp, so they could watch it right before they entered the park. The employee assured them they were in good hands with Alain Lagacè.

Parks Canada also discussed options for their backpacking route. Chase says bear guards were never mentioned during these conversations, nor were Gross and Chase warned that the area is a “polar bear highway,” as one Parks Canada official later described it. The group decided to start at Nachvak Fjord and move inland, packing up camp most mornings and working their way toward Komaktorvik Fjord, where they’d be met by a plane from Lagacè’s camp. It would be a tough trip. They’d be carrying their fifty-plus-pound bags for about six hours each day, stopping in midafternoon to find a place to camp. Halfway through the trip, Lagacè would send a plane to drop off the rest of their food.

The conversation about climate change and its consequences often revolves around abstract concepts—sea-level rise, ocean acidification—but that’s not the case with the melting of the sea ice. In the Arctic, the consequences are more tangible, more immediate. Using yearly averages taken throughout the Arctic, NASA scientist Claire Parkinson has reported that about 695,000 square miles of sea ice have been lost since 1979. That’s roughly the same as if the western portion of the United States—California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Utah, and most of Idaho—had disappeared.

Parkinson explains that sea ice has a symbiotic relationship with climate change. It’s not just that the ice is melting, but also that its disappearance is exposing the dark ocean below. A surface that once reflected the sun’s radiation is being replaced by a surface that absorbs it, further warming the ocean and leading to even more sea ice melt. This process, called ice albedo feedback, contributes to a phenomenon called polar amplification, which refers to the increased rate of warming near the poles in response to rising temperatures, which are precipitated by greenhouse gas emissions.

In a study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, published in June 2014, Parkinson analyzed the satellite record and found that since 1979 there has been an average of at least five fewer days of sea ice per decade in areas with seasonal ice. In some areas, the decline is much steeper. Parkinson looked at the number of ice-free days in the Davis Strait, which is part of the ecoregion that includes the Torngat Mountains National Park. She found a decrease of about fifteen days per decade—or roughly fifty days since 1979.

Reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change earlier this year also quantified the sea ice loss. The IPCC said that Arctic sea ice has disappeared at a mean rate of between 173,000 and 196,000 square miles per decade since 1979—a loss larger than the state of California every ten years. The ice is disappearing even faster in the more southern areas of the Arctic—between 280,000 square miles (California plus Arizona) and 410,000 square miles (California, Arizona, and Colorado) per decade.

It wasn’t long ago that scientists who came out with such alarming findings faced doubt and ridicule. In 2006, Cecilia Bitz, a physicist who studies sea ice and does climate modeling at the University of Washington, coauthored an article in Geophysical Research Letters that projected the Arctic would have its first completely ice-free period by the end of the summer of 2040. The findings were greeted with skepticism, even a touch of derision. The Village Voice ran a cartoon mocking them. Even Bitz had trouble internalizing the magnitude of what she had learned.

When the 2007 readings came out, she, like many of her colleagues, was caught by surprise. By mid-August of that year, the sea ice minimum had broken every existing record—and there was still a month to go before it hit the annual low point. By the time the ice melted to its minimum that year, it was almost 40 percent below the 1979-2000 average. “To be that fooled by what came to pass was really shocking to me and a big wakeup call,” Bitz said. “I think the whole community felt that way. We were startled.” When the next record-breaking low came around, in 2012, Bitz and other experts were less shocked. Another 300,000 square miles of sea ice had been lost—more than the area of the state of Texas.

As the melting continues, a ripple of change reverberates through the flora and fauna that rely on sea ice as their habitat—the capelin and other fish that harvest the plankton along the ice’s edge, the narwhals and beluga whales that swim below, and, of course, the polar bear, the king of the Arctic, sitting patiently on the shrinking ice, waiting for its prey.

On the afternoon of July 19, the nineteen-seat Air Inuit Twin Otter descended over a steep waterfall and bumped down onto the gravel landing strip at Barnoin River Camp, some 900 miles north of Montreal. The camp is a series of small plywood structures set on concrete blocks near the banks of the Barnoin River. The water is so clear that the Twin Otter’s passengers could see trout swimming under the surface. The river also serves as a driveway for floatplanes. With no roads, planes and helicopters are the only way in or out of the area.

The group paired off, deciding who would sleep where. The two lawyers—Rodman from New York City and Dyer from Maine—bunked together. Already they felt like old friends. Gross, Castañeda-Mendez, and Isenberg unwrapped the electric fences, to give them a final test. What they saw wasn’t particularly inspiring. The fences had come wrapped up haphazardly, with no instructions, so Lagacè offered them two of his own fences, which were in much better shape. These did come with directions, were wrapped properly, and looked sturdy.

The men set up the fences one at a time. They switched on the first fence, but couldn’t tell if it was working. Lagacè produced a voltage tester, a small rectangular device with a number of lights, attached to a thin pole that is pushed into the earth. When the device is touched to the fence, the lights are supposed to come on. As the voltage increases, more lights illuminate. When Lagacè touched the tester to the fence, only a few of the lights lit up. Castañeda-Mendez got the same result. Gross wasn’t surprised. The voltage tester they were using wasn’t meant to read this type of fence, which sends pulses of electricity rather than a constant current. But at least the test proved that some electricity was pulsing through the fence.

They broke down the first fence and set up the second, with the same results. Most of the hikers were reassured. But Isenberg, the doctor, still had reservations. As the others stood around talking, he grabbed the fence with his bare hand. Instead of a shock, he felt a light tingle. “Look at your feet,” Lagacè said, pointing to Isenberg’s hiking boots. They had rubber soles, perfect insulation for that kind of shock. Isenberg decided not to try again without his shoes.

Next, Gross pulled out one of the flare guns to test it. Bright orange, it looked almost like a toy. He pulled the trigger, and the twelve-gauge flare shell erupted with a bang. The bright light of the flare shot about 150 feet in a straight path toward the ground. Upon impact, the cartridge exploded with a whoosh and a second burst of light.

The clouds thickened, with temperatures in the forties. Rodman and Dyer took cover in their bunkhouse, napping and chatting. They found they had a lot in common—both had fenced, and both loved opera. When Dyer changed his shirt, Rodman got a glimpse of the tattoos that covered his new friend’s shoulders and back, all images from nature—a turtle, a winged bull, a giant tree of life with ravens.

At dinnertime they headed to one of the main buildings to eat and watch the Parks Canada DVD on bear safety. The seven backpackers said that Lagacè told them the DVD hadn’t arrived, so they asked him to talk to them about safety in polar bear country. Lagacè disputes that account; he says he showed them the DVD. As they dug into their meal, Lagacè shared stories about his run-ins with polar bears and what he had learned in his decades of bringing people into the Torngats.

The most important rule, he said, was to be aware and prepared at all times. Polar bears aren’t like the grizzlies they were familiar with, he warned—they’re hunters, looking for meat. Because the bears travel along water, the group should camp away from the edge of the fjord. He told them if they obeyed those rules, and slept within the perimeter of their electric fence, they should be just fine.

In February 2013, five months before the Sierra Club group entered the Torngats, more than thirty-five polar bear scientists, conservationists, tour operators, government and community representatives, and police gathered in Tromsø, Norway, to discuss an increasingly relevant question: What do we know about polar bear attacks on humans, and are such attacks on the rise?

One of the key speakers was James Wilder, at the time a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist. He was compiling a database that tracks the number of attacks and catalogs key information: the bears’ health, what the humans did to deter the attack, and whether anyone died. Wilder’s data is still incomplete. But two things are already clear: the number of people killed by polar bears is relatively small—so far, Wilder has found just twenty-one deaths in the last 140 years—but the number of interactions between humans and polar bears is rising. According to Wilder’s tabulations, there were fewer than ten attacks per decade in the 1960s and ’70s. But in the first four years of this decade, Wilder has already documented fourteen interactions. At this pace, he expects to see about thirty-five incidents by the end of 2019—nearly as many as the last forty years combined.

In 2011, a cell phone camera captured a bear biting and pawing a woman in the middle of a northern Russian town. In 2013, a forty-year-old man was chased down a main street and pinned in the doorway of a bakery in Churchill, Manitoba; he scared the bear off with an illuminated cell phone screen. A month later, in the same town, a thirty-year-old woman was attacked while she walked home from a Halloween party at 5 a.m.

One encounter that doesn’t appear in Wilder’s records took place in 2009, not far from Nachvak Fjord in the Torngat Mountains National Park, where the Sierra Club group was headed. A group of hikers had arrived by boat at the North Arm of the Torngats for a camping trip. Before they even pitched their tents, a polar bear swam up to the shore and approached them. Their bear guard, John Merkuratsuk, followed the standard protocol, gathering the group together and making loud noises. One group member fired flares. But the bear kept coming.

Merkuratsuk loaded his gun with bullets, but it jammed. With the bear moving closer, Merkuratsuk cleared the gun, reloaded, and fired. He shot the bear three times before it died. When some of the Inuit at Base Camp skinned the bear for its pelt, they found that it was severely underweight and had an abscessed tooth, which could have contributed to its poor health and its bold attack.

Wilder can’t say with scientific certainty why the number of incidents is increasing, just as he can’t say whether any specific attack was caused by climate change. No one can. In looking at the trend, Wilder says it could be that more people are traveling into polar bear country. Or it could be that the melting sea ice is forcing bears to spend more time on land, away from the ringed seals that are their primary prey.

According to Wilder’s data, 70 percent of the bears involved in fatal attacks on humans were in below-average body condition, meaning they were skinny or thin. Sixty-three percent of the bears in the nonfatal attacks fell into that category. “Obviously that’s a concern if sea ice is melting and bears have less access to their normal prey,” Wilder said in a recent interview. “So they’re in poorer body condition and they wind up on shore because the ice melts. That’s a worry for people living along the coasts in polar bear country.”

It’s unclear whether the bears’ health played a role in two vicious attacks that Norwegian police officers described at the Tromsø conference. In the first, in 2010, two Norwegian kayakers were trying to paddle the 1,250 miles around the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. They had camped in an inlet on the island of Nordaustalendet and were sleeping in a two-man tent surrounded by a trip wire connected to a flare. In the early hours of the morning, a polar bear reached into the tent and clamped its jaws around the head of twenty-three-year-old Sebastian Plur Nilssen. As the bear carried Nilssen away, it punctured his lung, head, and neck, narrowly missing an artery. The other kayaker shot and killed the bear. Nilssen was airlifted to a hospital and survived. The trip wire and flare had failed. The bear was an adult male that weighed 784 pounds—on the low side of average—and had no existing injuries or disease.

A 2011 encounter ended more tragically. A group of British students and their guides camped near the Von Post glacier on the island of Spitsbergen, which is also part of the Svalbard archipelago. Their tents were protected by a trip wire attached to explosives that were supposed to detonate if triggered by a bear. At about 7:30 a.m., a polar bear tore a hole through the wall of seventeen-year-old Horatio Chapple’s tent and grabbed the sleeping teenager by the head. Horatio’s screams woke the others, who scrambled from their tents in time to see the bear rear up and slam the teenager to the ground. While the group leaders wrestled with what turned out to be faulty rifles, two other students and two of the leaders were mauled. The leaders finally managed to shoot and kill the bear. Horatio died from his injuries; the others survived. The bear that killed Chapple was old and weighed just 551 pounds, about half the average weight of an adult male polar bear. It had worn and probably painful teeth that could have left it starving.

The Norwegian officers ended their talk with a warning: hikers shouldn’t rely solely on fences to keep them safe in polar bear country. In both of the cases they described, the campers had so much confidence in their fences that they hadn’t posted overnight watches. When the fences failed, the campers in their tents were like fish in a barrel. Or, perhaps more aptly, like seals in the sea ice.

On Sunday, July 21, a floatplane carried the Sierra Club party over the western portion of the Torngats and then descended toward the eastern shore, weaving between the final peaks. The landscape the group saw on the forty-five-minute flight was desolate but breathtaking—treeless, with ice covering parts of the glassy lakes below. Rivulets of icy water cascaded from mountain peaks that jutted into the cloud-filled sky.

The plane landed perfectly on Nachvak Fjord, backing into the shore so the passengers could exit without getting their feet wet. Castaèeda-Mendez held on to the plane’s pontoon while the others offloaded their gear. The pilot said goodbye, and the sound of the engines receded into the distance, leaving them alone with just the sound of small waves on the shore. The skies were clear, but a cold rain started to fall. In an untouched place like this, it was easy to imagine a world before humans. Fjords are usually formed when the ocean pours into valleys left behind by melting glaciers. What was left behind on Nachvak Fjord felt prehistoric—like the end of the earth, with the long fingers of the fjord reaching into the shoreline.

Chase and Gross left the group on the shore while they scouted for a suitable place to set up camp. Lagacè had said they should find a high place to sleep because polar bears are known to come right up the fjord where they had landed. But when Chase and Gross reached an area that met Lagacé’s criteria—an elevated spot about a quarter mile away—they discovered it didn’t have easy access to drinking water. Further down, a bit closer to where they had been dropped off, they found a spot that looked ideal: flat enough for comfortable sleeping and cooking, with easy access to fresh water. It was still at least 150 yards away from the shore, and people had obviously camped there before: they’d left behind stakes and piles of rocks. As if on cue, a rainbow appeared.

The first thing the group did at the campsite was set up their electric fences, using rocks to help stabilize the poles. The perimeter of the sleeping area was twenty-seven feet by twenty-seven feet, a bit larger than a boxing ring. The six tents would be separated by about three feet. Each person had his or her own tent, with Chase and Castañeda-Mendez sharing a slightly larger tent.

On every trip, Rodman made a point of finding out who the loudest snorers were, so he could pitch his tent as far away as possible. In this case, he didn’t need to ask around. His new friend Dyer was a serious snorer. Once Dyer set up his tent, Rodman picked a spot in the opposite corner. The group set up their food and cook station inside the second fence, about 200 yards away. Once everything was ready, they flipped on the switches for both fences and watched the lights on the battery packs flicker to life. They were pleased to see that they were in a prime location for viewing wildlife. “No sooner had we gotten the tents up than we looked down towards the water a ways away and there was a wolf,” Chase said.

The food chain that leads to polar bears starts with phytoplankton, tiny, free-floating, plant-like organisms that live in water and in the ice. In the spring, the breakup of the seasonal sea ice triggers a phytoplankton bloom, and light green shelves of it swirl into the Arctic Ocean, signaling that winter’s cold grip is fading, at least for a while. In recent years, however, these blooms have been showing up in places where they haven’t been seen before. In 2011, scientists found whole swaths of the Arctic teeming with phytoplankton blooms. What’s happening, says physicist Cecilia Bitz, is that old, thick sea ice is being thinned by the warmer ocean temperatures. That allows more sunlight to permeate the ice surface, stimulating the phytoplankton to grow within the ice. Because the blooms are much darker than ice or snow and absorb more energy from the sun, they trigger further melting.

In the southern parts of the Arctic, where these blooms have always been part of the ecosystem, the spring melting is happening earlier. That can trigger an earlier bloom, which in turn sets off ripples that affect zooplankton—miniscule, free-drifting organisms, like shrimp larvae or tiny marine bugs, that feed on the phytoplankton. That affects fish like capelin, a small fish from the smelt family that feeds on the zooplankton. Historically, this has occurred in spring, when the capelin feast on the bloom along the shelf of the retreating ice. The plankton is high in fat, and the fish rely on it for the growth of their reproductive systems. As the ice melts earlier, however, the timing is being thrown off. The zooplankton isn’t getting to the phytoplankton on time, and the fish don’t have as much to eat.

A 2014 study in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE found that as ice retreats earlier, capelin numbers drop off. That leaves the species at the next level of the food chain—seals—with less access to one of their primary food sources. Polar bears generally eat ringed seals, but in the region that includes the Torngats, they eat harp seals. Each spring, harp seals follow the ice breakup south, to Labrador, Newfoundland, and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where they haul themselves out onto the ice and give birth to pups, which can’t yet swim. Polar bears flock to the seals’ whelping patches, because the pups make for high-calorie, easy-to-catch meals at a crucial time, when the bears need to put on weight before the ice-free months.

In some areas, however, the supply of seal pups is declining. Garry Stenson, head of the marine mammal section at Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans, has found that harp seal pup survival declines drastically in low sea ice years. In 2011, 70 percent of the harp seals born in the northwest Atlantic did not survive. The lower numbers are attributed in part to higher rates of miscarriages, called “late-term abortions” in seals. A 2013 study connected the miscarriages to lower biomass among capelin in years with less sea ice. “These ecosystem changes are predicted to continue,” Stenson wrote in a 2014 assessment of northwest Atlantic harp seals. “Therefore, it is likely that reproductive rates will remain low.”

For the bears, the relationship between seal pup survival and sea ice levels means that in low sea ice years, the bears don’t just lose access to their food—they lose the supply as well.

The Sierra Club hikers clustered behind the electric fence in the cooking area and prepared cream of potato soup and pesto pasta for dinner. While they worked, they watched lemmings weave in and out of tall grasses nearby. Wolves occasionally wandered into view. Dessert was blueberry cheesecake. Then the cleanup crew took over, washing the dishes in water from a nearby stream that they heated on their camping stoves. In small groups, they left the cooking area and headed back to their tents, announcing each time the fences were turned on or off. Rodman, who is tall and lean, could step easily over the fence. For the shorter people, like Frankel, the risk of being zapped wasn’t worth it, so they switched the fence off to get in or out.

When the sky finally darkened at about 10:30 p.m., they retired to their tents. The quiet was punctuated only by the steady lapping of water onto the shore of the fjord.

At about 4 a.m., Castañeda-Mendez woke up to pee. Trying not to disturb his wife, he slipped out of his sleeping bag and unzipped the door of their tent. When he stepped outside, he saw that he wasn’t alone. “Hey!” he called out. “Polar bear on the beach!” A mother and her cub were walking along the shore in the early morning light. The mother bear’s snout was raised in the air, sniffing out her neighbors. Chase joined her husband while Dyer and the others grabbed their cameras. They were shouting distance from two of the world’s most violent predators, yet the scene was overwhelmingly peaceful. Dyer was on the verge of tears as he watched the bears walk along the shore, the cub close on its mother’s heels.

Safe in the confines of their electric fence, the hikers felt a quiet connection with animals they all knew would, in some circumstances, see them as prey. That reality, though, felt very far away. Here was a parent taking care of its young and teaching it how to survive. They were in awe of their good fortune.

Although polar bears don’t normally hibernate, pregnant bears spend the winter in dens, rather than hunting on the ice. That means that in the spring and early summer before they enter the dens, they need to gain as much weight as possible. But when the ice broke up early in 2012, the spring hunting season was cut short, and pregnant bears had less time to store up calories. Studies of the western Hudson Bay polar bears have shown a direct link between the timing of sea ice breakup and the survival rates of newborn cubs.

Elizabeth Peacock, a biologist working with the government of Nunavut and the U.S. Geological Survey, flew around the Davis Strait in helicopters from 2005 to 2007, locating polar bears and darting them with tranquilizers to measure their vital statistics. In the winter of 2013, Peacock’s analysis of her data, along with thirty-five years of capture and harvest data from the region, was published in the Journal of Wildlife Management. Her first finding was, on its face, good news for polar bears in the area: population numbers in the Davis Strait were strong. With more than 2,100 bears, the strait boasted about 10 percent of the estimated 20,000 bears worldwide. That was in sharp contrast to bear populations in the southern Beaufort Sea and the western Hudson Bay, which are declining.

But Peacock’s other findings raised questions about the population’s long-term stability. The litter size for newborn cubs, known as cubs of the year, was lower in the Davis Strait than in any other subpopulation. Cub recruitment, the survival of cubs into adulthood, was also declining. So was the general body condition of the bears. Peacock didn’t point to a direct cause for the bears’ declining health. But she offered two possible causes: population density, which leads to increased competition for food, and a loss of habitat. Essentially, she found that while there’s an abundance of polar bears in the Davis Strait, there isn’t enough of their natural habitat—sea ice—to support them. In a year with low sea ice levels, that could add up to lots of hungry bears.

On Monday, July 22, after a breakfast of oatmeal and coffee, the hikers packed up their daypacks and headed east to explore the area around the fjord. Gross stuck one of the flare guns in his backpack; Chase carried the other. The weather felt unpredictable, with heavy clouds settling in over the fjord and wind and rain beginning to whip through their campsite. Everyone bundled up.

The Torngat Mountains are technically subarctic, but they lie along the fifty-eighth parallel, putting them above the tree line and within the Arctic ecoregion. The group hiked through scrub willows and grassy hills and along the ledges above the campsite. The rain turned to a cool mist and then gradually cleared, revealing blue skies and spectacular views of the Labrador Sea.

As usual, Castañeda-Mendez took the lead. Gross, Rodman, and Isenberg typically stayed in the middle of the pack, while Dyer, Chase, and Frankel brought up the rear. They bantered while they walked. Occasionally, Gross called out to Castañeda-Mendez: Slow down; wait up. It was important that no one get too far from the group. They came across black bear scat, caribou antlers, and what appeared to be a wolf skull— everyday detritus from the park’s regular residents. Dyer tucked a tooth from the skull into his pocket.

After a quick lunch of beef jerky and bagels with peanut butter, honey, and Nutella, they turned back. At about 3:30 p.m. they reached a wide stream near their campsite. They sat on rocks and changed to waterproof boots or left their feet bare. The water was shallow, clear, and shockingly cold. For feet that had been banging around in hiking boots all day, the cool stream offered quick relief, even through rubber boots.

Castañeda-Mendez was walking barefoot, halfway across the stream, when Dyer saw something lumbering toward them. “Polar bear!” he shouted. “Get back here! Get back here!” Chase yelled at her husband. “We have a bear!”

The animal was about 150 yards away and walking toward them. Castañeda-Mendez tromped back through the water and the group clustered together on the side of the stream, following the protocol Lagacè had rehearsed with them: Stand together. Make yourself seem big. Make loud noises, especially metal on metal, like the banging of poles.

The bear was larger and had a fuller coat than the female they had seen that morning. Slowly it walked toward them, nose in the air and tongue sticking out, apparently trying to assess the two-legged creatures it had stumbled upon. Despite the group’s banging and shouting, the bear kept coming. While Castañeda-Mendez fired away with his camera, Gross pulled out his flare gun. “I’m gonna shoot,” he told Chase when the bear was within fifty yards. “I think that’s a good idea,” she replied calmly.

The flare shot forward with a flash of light, but the bear kept advancing. It wasn’t until the shell landed in front of the animal, causing a second burst, that the bear turned and took off in a dead run. The group cheered, clapped, and banged their poles together, celebrating their victory. But the bear didn’t go far. It settled on a ledge about 300 yards from their camp and lay there quietly, watching them.

By the time they reached the safety of their fence, the rain was coming down hard. Most of the group settled into their tents for a nap before dinner. But Dyer was uneasy. He stationed himself outside his tent, leaning on his poles and staring down the bear as it watched them. He stood watching the bear for more than an hour, drenched under the dreary gray sky as the afternoon waned.

Finally, the bear and the rain wore him down. Gross and Isenberg were watching the bear from inside their tents, so Dyer retired to his tent, too. He opened Leaves of Grass—the only book he’d brought with him—and soon fell asleep.

The cold, rainy afternoon became a cold, rainy evening, and still the bear watched them. At about 5 p.m. the campers made their way across a rocky strip to the cooking area. Up on the ledge, the bear appeared to be lounging. Using the zoom lenses on their cameras, they watched it roll on its back and then lie on its belly, resting its head on its crossed forelegs. To Frankel, it looked like a big dog. To others, including Dyer, it looked like a menace.

Half of the Sierra Club hikers helped prep and cook dinner that night: cream of potato soup, pesto pasta, cheesecake with blueberries and almonds. The others handled cleanup. They were already comfortable enough with each other to mimic the soft drawl of Dyer’s Maine accent and share stories of past trips and their lives back home. They didn’t talk much about the bear that was still watching them from the ledge. It seemed almost like a piece of the landscape—just one more detail in the majestic setting.

Castañeda-Mendez felt reassured by the bear interactions they’d had that day. The mother and cub hadn’t seemed the least bit interested in them. And the bear up on the ledge had responded to the flare in the way they had hoped it would. But Dyer couldn’t shake his unease. “Why don’t we post a watch?” he asked Gross after dinner. They could take two-hour shifts overnight until the bear was gone, he suggested. But Gross wasn’t worried. “That’s what the fence is for,” he told Dyer.

They had been asleep for several hours when Rodman woke to the sound of screaming. Quickly, he realized it was Chase, in the tent next door, having a nightmare. Rodman could hear Castañeda-Mendez soothing her. Isenberg slept fitfully too. Each time he woke up, he checked to see if the bear was still there. “Sure enough he was, sure enough he was,” he said later. And then, about 1 a.m., “he wasn’t.” It was unnerving, but there was nothing Isenberg could do about it. He went back to sleep.

The next morning was cold and rainy. The hikers bundled into layers—jackets, waterproof pants, winter hats and gloves. The plan had been to pack up camp and move to the next destination. But the weather wasn’t cooperating, so they loaded their daypacks and went exploring. Again, they were surrounded by wildlife: whales in the fjord, caribou, ptarmigan, black bear scat full of berries. By afternoon the weather began improving and they peeled off some of their warm layers. They stopped at a rock perched high above their campsite to take silly pictures of each other.

When they got back to camp, Chase unpacked a little happy-hour meal for them to enjoy: salami, crackers, and Bacardi 151 rum mixed with lemonade. Before Gross turned in, he walked the camp’s perimeter, confirming that the electric fence was still working. Isenberg detached the fly cover from his tent so he could watch the clearing sky. It was too early in the year for the Northern Lights to appear, but he wanted to be ready, just in case. Before Gross crawled into his sleeping bag, he tucked his flare gun into his boot. He fell asleep listening to the waves.

Dyer pulled on his silk long underwear and slid into his sleeping bag. He’d always been able to fall asleep anywhere, and this night was no exception.

At 3:30 a.m. the campers woke to screams.

From the little window of her tent Chase saw the shape of a polar bear just a few feet away, standing over the tent beside her. It was down on all fours, eye level with her, huge and white except for the black of its eyes and nose. It turned and stared right at her. “RICH!” she screamed. She grabbed her flare gun while Castañeda-Mendez raced out of the tent. The bear was just a few yards away. It bit at the tent next door and then dragged it into the darkness.

Gross grabbed the flare gun from the boot near his head. He ran into the grass in his long underwear and aimed the flare gun toward the bear as it started running. It was a moving target, now seventy-five feet down the beach, heading west, parallel to the shore of the fjord. Something was dangling from its mouth.

One by one, the hikers burst out of their tents. They could see only a few yards away into the darkness. But they saw enough to know that the thing in the bear’s mouth wasn’t a thing at all. It was one of them. It was Dyer. Gross fired the flare gun. The flare erupted, and then a second brilliant light exploded in front of the bear. The bear dropped Dyer and took off running. But it didn’t run far. After another seventy-five feet or so, it stopped and turned around. Dyer lay crumpled on the ground. It was coming back for its prize. Gross reloaded and fired again. This time, the bear ran off into the distance.

Nachvak Fjord echoed with the group’s screams and cries—one part fear, one part desperate attempt to keep the bear from coming back. Frankel screamed Dyer’s name, but he didn’t respond. Dyer wanted to let his friends know where he was—to yell to them, to wave. But his jaw wasn’t working and he could barely move his arms. Silently, he repeated a mantra: “Go away, bear, go away, bear. Just go away.”

He had been sound asleep when something—he wasn’t sure what—had caused him to stir. As his eyes adjusted, he saw two large arms, silhouetted by the bright Arctic moon, sweep across the thin nylon of the tent. Polar bear paws can be a foot wide, with claws up to two inches long. There was no mistaking what was happening. His tent was lifted off the ground, with him in it. “Bear in the camp!” Dyer remembers shouting. “He’s got me! Oh, he’s got me!” The bear clamped its mouth around the crown of Dyer’s head and ripped him out of the tent. Dyer heard his jaw break and felt the bear’s huge teeth, which can grow to an inch and a half long, puncture his head and neck. He could smell the fishy, oily stench of the animal’s saliva.

The bear dragged him toward the mouth of the fjord, Dyer’s face bumping against its chest. Dyer stared at its white stomach and the yellow stains on its hindquarters as it carried him farther and farther from camp. He noticed with detachment that one of his socks had fallen off.

And then there was noise coming from behind him—the shouts of his friends.

The bear turned its head toward the sounds, flipping Dyer into the air and slamming him against the ground. Without losing its grip on Dyer’s head, it continued moving toward the water.

Dyer had sometimes thought about how it would feel, that terrifying last moment before you die. But instead of fear or panic, he found himself filled with an overwhelming sense of calm. In the arms of something so strong, there was no point in holding on to hope. At that moment, his head still in the polar bear’s jaws, Dyer saw a flash of light and heard the unmistakable whoosh of a flare gun. The bear dropped him—hard. He heard vertebrae in his neck crack as they broke. He was in shock, mercifully, and couldn’t feel the pain.

The sounds of the animal’s massive paws on the gravel began to fade. Then they stopped and grew louder again. The bear was coming back. A second flare lit up the sky. The bear took off, and its plodding footsteps grew faint in the distance.

Gross handed his flare gun and binoculars to Frankel so she could cover him. “I’ve got to get out there,” he said. Isenberg went with him. About seventy-five feet from the campsite they found the lawyer’s crumpled, blood-drenched body. At first, they thought Dyer was dead. But when Isenberg knelt beside him, he saw that Dyer was breathing. They tried to lift him, but he was too heavy. Castañeda-Mendez and Rodman, now dressed, ran out to them. The four men laced their arms under Dyer’s body and carried him back to camp. Dyer hung limply between them, a dead weight. Castañeda-Mendez grabbed a sleeping pad from his tent, and they carefully laid Dyer down on it in the middle of the campsite. Castañeda-Mendez covered him with the double sleeping bag he and Chase shared and placed a duffle bag under Dyer’s head for a pillow. Gross and Castañeda-Mendez ran to the cook tent and pulled up its stakes. The teepee-style shape of the tent gave Isenberg enough room to work and protected Dyer from the wind. Although Chase had wilderness first-responder training and certification, Isenberg was a physician, and she deferred to him.

All Isenberg had to work with was a basic medical kit with typical first-responder materials—four-by-four gauze pads, a roll of gauze strip, antibiotic ointment, splints. Isenberg cut off Dyer’s shirt. It was wet with blood, and the doctor was afraid he wouldn’t be able to keep his patient warm. Dyer’s face was swollen and bruised, and his jaw was displaced. The good news was that he was talking. “Thank you. Oh, thank you,” he said over and over, his voice a raspy whisper because of his crushed jaw.

Much of the blood appeared to be coming from his head and neck, but the wounds were hidden beneath his long ponytail. Isenberg hacked through the blood-soaked hair with first aid scissors. Puncture wounds ringed Dyer’s face and head, but they were oozing blood, rather than pumping it—a good sign. The biggest wound was a gash on Dyer’s neck that looked as if it had been filleted open by the bear. Isenberg could see Dyer’s carotid artery, the principal blood supplier to the head and neck. The artery was intact, but if anything caused it to tear, Dyer would bleed to death. Isenberg was terrified. Dyer was in critical condition; they were hundreds of miles from help; and Isenberg hadn’t practiced medicine in fifteen years.

It was also becoming clear that Dyer’s wounds might not all be external. The lawyer was struggling to breathe and spitting up blood and mucus. If he stopped breathing, Isenberg would have to perform a tracheotomy, cutting a hole in Dyer’s windpipe to open up the airway. But how?

Opening the hole would be easy—he had a pocketknife that would work for that. But what would keep it open? A drinking straw was too small to allow enough air in. He hit on something: the drinking tube in a CamelBak hydration bottle. The tubes to the water pouches are sturdy, and definitely big enough. At least he had a plan. There was little more Isenberg could do there in the wilderness, without sophisticated medical equipment. He held Dyer’s hand and prayed as his patient slipped in and out of sleep.

Outside the tent, Chase forced herself to stay calm as she worked her satellite phone, using the list of emergency numbers she’d been given by Parks Canada. Rodman helped her. At 3:45 a.m., Chase got a police dispatcher on the line. Her group had been attacked by a polar bear, she said. One member of their party needed to be evacuated, and the rest of them were in danger.

Their electric fence—which clearly hadn’t worked—was in tatters. The fence around the cooking area was still intact, but they no longer believed the few strands of wire could protect them. Frankel made slow circles around the perimeter of the camp, holding Gross’s flare gun, her eyes scanning the horizon. Castañeda-Mendez and Rodman took turns patrolling with the second flare gun. Gross stationed himself just outside the cook tent, ready to get whatever Isenberg needed. Every fifteen minutes, Chase called the police dispatcher to update their status and ask about the rescue plan. The area from Base Camp to Nachvak Fjord was socked in with fog. Until that cleared, there was no way to launch a rescue.

At 4:20 a.m., the unspeakable, unshakable fear that had been driving them for the last hour finally eased. Dyer was stable, Isenberg announced. If his carotid artery didn’t rupture and he kept breathing—and if the rescue team arrived relatively soon—he would survive. The sun was coming up. If a bear came their way now, at least they’d be able to see it.

Although Chase didn’t know it, Base Camp had been alerted at 6 a.m. and was already working on plans, backup plans, and backup-backup plans. Gary Baike, a Parks Canada employee, had awakened a medic, Larry Brandridge, and told him to get ready to go. Baike and Base Camp manager Wayne Broomfield checked the route the group had filed and figured out where they might be.

Base Camp consists of a couple of year-round buildings and a few dozen tents for sleeping. Everything sits behind a five-foot-tall electric bear fence that is connected to an alarm system. Because the camp is surrounded by mountains, the only way in is by boat or helicopter.

In case the helicopter could not take off, they started preparing a speedboat to take Brandridge and a bear guard named Jacko Merkuratsuk up to Nachvak Fjord. At the same time, they dispatched the Robert Bradford, a commercial fishing boat they contracted for the summer, to make the ten-hour trip up to the fjord. Unlike the helicopter, the Robert Bradford was big enough to get all of the hikers out together.

Back at the fjord, Dyer woke up occasionally, murmuring thanks to whoever was with him at the time. Isenberg occasionally barked orders—asking for a towel, water, or a bottle for Dyer to urinate in. Moments later, a hand would reach under the tent, holding whatever was needed.

By 7:30 a.m., the clouds were lifting. Minutes later, the group heard the thump-thump-thump of the chopper’s blades and saw it moving through the mountains and across the fjord toward them. Brandridge got off the helicopter and huddled with Isenberg to get an update on Dyer’s status. He ducked into the cook tent and found Dyer conscious and checkered with bloody bandages. He had a laceration over one eye and the lower part of his left earlobe was gone, but all things considered, Brandridge was pleasantly surprised. “I was expecting chunks of meat missing, more puncture wounds,” he said later. He maneuvered Dyer onto a scoop stretcher—a clam shell-like contraption that can open up and be placed around a patient—and with the other men put the stretcher on a backboard. Chase held Dyer’s hand as they carried him to the helicopter. As the helicopter rose through the clouds, the people they left behind became tiny specks and then disappeared entirely. Isenberg looked out the window, counting polar bears and black bears along the way.

Back on the ground, Merkuratsuk, the Parks Canada bear guard who had flown in on the helicopter, began gathering wood and building a fire, his gun slung over his shoulder. He told the group what he had seen before the helicopter landed: a large polar bear walking in the area where the group had planned to hike that day.

Merkuratsuk knew Nachvak Fjord—and polar bears—as well as anyone in the region. When he and his nine siblings were growing up in Nain, they spent most of their summers at the fjord. One of his brothers was born there. Three of his siblings, as well as his son, were bear guards, licensed by Parks Canada to travel into the park as guides.

He and other local Inuit had helped inspire the population study of the Davis Strait polar bears that biologist Elizabeth Peacock launched in 2005. They seemed to be seeing more polar bears in the region, and if they were right, they wanted Parks Canada to raise the annual quota for polar bear hunting. At that point, the five Inuit communities in Nunatsiavut could kill a total of six bears a year, a quota that had been in place since 2001. The hunting licenses are distributed via a first-come, first-served system to members of Nunatsiavut’s native communities. Hunters are given seventy-two hours to try to kill a bear before they have to return the license so it can be passed along to someone else. Once the quota is met—six bears in the past; twelve bears in 2014—the season ends. Different quotas are set for the other regions of Canada where polar bears are hunted.

In these Arctic communities, the changing ice can have deadly repercussions. For residents of Nain and other communities around the Torngats, snowmobiles are their cars; the ice is their winter highway. But the ice is no longer fully trustworthy. Not only is the Arctic climate changing on a grand scale, over years and decades, but it’s also changing on an immediate scale, with higher highs and lower lows and more variability within the seasons. In Nain, locals say a snowmobile can be flying across ice that appears normal when suddenly the ice cracks and the sled crashes through to the frigid ocean below.

In 2010, Moshi Kotierk, a social science researcher with the Department of Environment in the government of Nunavut, questioned thirty-one Davis Strait hunters and elders about polar bears and climate change. Twenty-four reported seeing more polar bears in the region. Few connected the increase in bear sightings with climate change, but the majority agreed that the sea ice has changed significantly.

The helicopter touched down at Base Camp around 8:30 a.m. As the propellers slowed, an ATV with a trailer pulled up. Dyer’s stretcher was loaded onto a mattress in the trailer and driven to the medic tent. With Isenberg at his side, Brandridge inventoried and cleaned Dyer’s wounds. He began with the bite and claw marks on his face, which were dripping blood into Dyer’s eyes. After removing each bandage, Brandridge cleaned away the blood and photographed the wound.

“How are you feeling?” Brandridge asked.

“Like shit,” Dyer said.

“That’s not bad for someone who just got attacked by a polar bear.”

After finishing with Dyer’s face, Brandridge peeled off the bandage covering the big wound on his neck. The thick odor of meat immediately filled the tent—an odor that, to Brandridge, smelled like death. He saw that the hole in Dyer’s neck was about the width of a pencil and went behind his jugular and toward his esophagus. Each time Dyer inhaled, he was wicking blood into the wound. The medic rushed to the main office of Base Camp. The plan to wait for a medevac plane from Goose Bay, Labrador, wasn’t going to work, he said. Based on his assessment, Dyer’s condition wasn’t stable after all. His lungs could be filling with blood as they spoke. Brandridge could clean him up and make him comfortable, but he didn’t have the medical equipment or the expertise for the kind of operation Dyer needed to save his life.

They decided to put Dyer back on the helicopter and send him to George River, a town about forty-five minutes away, where a first-response team with more sophisticated equipment would meet them. From there he’d be flown to Kuujjuaq and then on to Montreal. Within about a half hour, the helicopter was up in the air, weaving through the passes between Base Camp and the river valley en route to George River. The weather was terrible, with snow in one pass, and sleet and rain in others. Brandridge radioed Base Camp to say they were making progress. But he couldn’t help but feel that it was unlikely Dyer would survive.

At about 4:40 p.m., thirteen hours after the polar bear had attacked the camp, the Robert Bradford, a vision in green and white, dropped anchor in Nachvak Fjord. The fishing boat’s owners, brothers Chesley and Joe Webb, welcomed the five remaining hikers and Jacko Merkuratsuk aboard. Most of the group huddled in the cabin, at a small kitchen table with bench seats. At the front of the cabin Chesley Webb steered the boat through the nasty weather and toward the mouth of the fjord. Frankel stood beside him, looking straight ahead and trying not to succumb to seasickness. At 7:30 p.m., they neared the mouth of the fjord. But instead of entering the open waters of the Labrador Sea, the Webbs dropped anchor. With little to no visibility, and icebergs dotting the coastline, it wasn’t safe to continue in the dark. Freshly caught Arctic char was on the menu for dinner—“the most delicious char you’d ever have,” Rodman said. They tucked in where they could for the night.

Toward morning the Webbs pulled up anchor and the Robert Bradford steamed into the Labrador Sea. At 5 p.m., after a long day of high waves and bad weather, they entered Saglek Bay with Base Camp in sight. That night, their most basic needs were met: A warm meal. Showers. Cabin-like tents to sleep in. All behind the formidable bear fence that surrounded the camp.

Decades of studies about polar bears and the rapidly changing climate have led to a prevailing scientific narrative about the bears’ future: the loss of sea ice, driven by man-made climate change, will eventually force them ashore for such long periods of time that the species is inevitably doomed. In recent years, however, a competing narrative has emerged, driven in large part by the work of Robert “Rocky” Rockwell, a biologist and ecologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Rockwell has studied various species in the lowlands of the western Hudson Bay for forty-six years, and in 2009 he began publishing his findings about polar bears and their eating habits. He suggests that because the bears are opportunistic eaters, they might be able to survive climate change by foraging for food during their extended periods on land. Rockwell writes that the western Hudson Bay bears don’t necessarily fast during their months off the ice, when their hunting skills are thought to be almost useless. Some gorge on snow goose eggs and even the geese themselves. They also eat berries and plants. Rockwell points out that while a polar bear can’t run down a caribou, he has seen bears wait for a herd to pass by and pounce on stragglers. He also has seen bears stalk sleeping seals on land. Locals in the Torngats report similar incidents, as well as occasional sightings of polar bears catching char in streams, much as their grizzly ancestors fished for salmon.

Rockwell’s critics say that his Hudson Bay studies focus on such small sample sizes—in a few cases just ten bears—that the data can’t be extrapolated to predict how polar bears are responding to climate change globally. Perhaps the biggest flaw they see in his work is the idea that terrestrial eating—eating on the land while off the ice—is helping bears in the western Hudson Bay. In addition to having decreased body condition and lower reproduction rates, the bear population there has declined by 22 percent since the early 1980s as the ice has broken up earlier. “If terrestrial feeding was the savior for polar bears, why are polar bears starving on land during the ice-free period?” asked Andrew Derocher, a biologist who has been studying polar bears since 1984.

The big question, of course, is whether polar bears can adapt to the latest changes in their habitat. Brendan Kelly, former deputy director for Arctic science at the National Science Foundation, explains that a species’ ability to evolve in the face of new conditions depends in large part on the length of its life span. If the habitat changes slowly and multiple generations can survive during that period, traits that prepare the species to thrive in the new habitat will flourish while other traits gradually disappear. But when a species with a long life span, like polar bears, is confronted with a rapidly changing environment like the melting of the Arctic, adaptation is less likely. “When environments change really abruptly, more typical than adaptation, which takes just incredible luck, is extinction,” Kelly says.

In George River, Dyer was loaded into an ambulance and taken to the town’s infirmary, where nurses got an IV into him, gave him oxygen, and put a stabilizing collar around his neck. The clinic had no doctor, but an x-ray technician who visited every two weeks happened to be working. She x-rayed Dyer’s chest and gave them a preliminary report: one of Dyer’s lungs appeared to be damaged.

Before the nurses could do much else, a plane landed with a medical team from Kuujjuaq, the Inuit community the Sierra Club hikers had flown through on their way into the Torngats. For Isenberg, seeing the medical team come in was like seeing “the cavalry coming over the hill.” They quickly loaded Dyer onto the plane and headed for Kuujjuaq. Doctors at the town’s small hospital discovered that Dyer’s lung was, in fact, punctured. While the team worked on him, Dyer repeatedly thanked them for their help. He pointed across the room at Isenberg. “That man saved my life,” he said.

Dyer was put into a medically induced coma, and a breathing tube was inserted into his throat. At about 8 p.m., the Challenger, Quebec’s flying intensive care unit, arrived to take him south to Montreal. Isenberg stayed behind to wait for the group. As he walked around the village he tried to process all that had happened in the last sixteen hours. Wherever he went, people stopped him to talk about it. Bear attacks are rare, and news travels fast in small, isolated communities like Kuujjuaq. Every time he described the events, Isenberg said he was met with the same reaction: You did what? You went there without a rifle?

Around midnight on July 25, about twenty hours after being attacked by the polar bear, Matt Dyer was admitted into intensive care at Montreal General, still in a medically induced coma. He had two broken vertebrae in his spine, but they were in his neck, high enough that the doctors weren’t worried about paralysis. His jaw was crushed. His left hand was broken in several places. His right lung had collapsed. He had at least a dozen puncture wounds, including the gaping hole in his neck. A tendon in his right arm was punctured. Two arteries in his brain were occluded—permanently clogged—but his remaining arteries had taken over and his blood was flowing fine.

At 12:30 a.m., Dyer blinked his eyes open as he was brought out of the coma. He focused under the fluorescent lights, and the first thing he recognized was the face staring back at him: his partner of twenty-five years, Jeanne Wells. Dyer couldn’t speak with the breathing tube in his throat. But the medical staff had given him a board with the alphabet written on it, and he pointed to the letters. She had brought an iPod, and he asked for some John Prine. She played the folk singer’s album German Afternoons.

On July 27, the rest of the hikers arrived at the hospital. They were allowed into Dyer’s room in small groups. Gross and Chase went in first, standing at the foot of the bed where he lay sleeping. He was still drifting in and out of sedation. As Dyer woke up, he saw his friends staring back at him. Slowly he spelled out two questions: Would they all like to come to his house for a lobster bake? And would someone take him slap dancing?

It was the kind of random humor that had helped endear Dyer to the group in the first place, and seeing it now was a huge relief. Dyer really was okay.

Afterword: After an internal investigation, the Sierra Club cleared Marta Chase and Rich Gross of any wrongdoing. They remain trip leaders in good standing. The Sierra Club is considering whether it will send other groups into polar bear country. Parks Canada, meanwhile, is revising its policies for licensing groups to go into the Torngats. A Parks Canada official said the agency won’t require groups to take along bear guards, but the possibility of requiring guards in the future will “never be off the table.”

The post In the Jaws of Climate Change appeared first on Washington Monthly.

These trends have been with us at least since I started writing for this magazine in the mid-1980s (though they subsided somewhat in the latter 1990s). What’s different now is that the vast majority of Americans get it. They understand, in a way they did not even a few years ago, that the system is really, profoundly broken; that the downward trajectory of their lives is not temporary or an isolated individual fate, but part of a broad, deep, and long-term trend; and that this decline is somehow connected to the dysfunction they read about in Washington.

In that broad recognition there is a seed of hope. As many observers have noted, there are arresting parallels between our age and the 1890s, the dawn of the Progressive Era. Then as now, vast numbers of Americans found themselves left behind economically. Plutocrats running monopolistic corporations created fantastic accumulations of wealth and enjoyed seemingly unbreakable control of the political, legal, and policymaking process. A rising class of educated, technologically savvy professionals grew alienated from and hostile to a government they saw as corrupt, inefficient, and incompetent at anything other than perpetuating the careers of those in power. This broad dissatisfaction led to sweeping reforms of public institutions and of the rules governing the economy. These reform efforts, which continued in the New Deal, happened in the face of a powerful ideological resistance on the right to the very idea of government having a legitimate role to play in these areas.

Today you see, on the left at least, a growing constellation of voices and organizations inspired by those parallels and trying to build a new progressive reform movement. It’s no accident that liberals now call themselves progressives and that the main Democratic Party-oriented think tank in Washington is named the Center for American Progress. Obviously there are many differences between the two eras, too numerous to name. (I hope we are not going to have a repeat of the eugenics movement, for instance.) But as someone who desperately wants to see a new progressive era come into being, there are two differences that are the most striking and crucial.

The first is that progressivism between 1890 and 1921 was bipartisan. Each party had its progressive wing, and each competed with the other in articulating a reform agenda. Today, progressivism is profoundly one-sided. It is the dominant force within the Democratic Party and at best a tiny, rump, besieged minority in the Republican Party. There are nodes of enlightenment on the right, visible at publications like National Affairs, at emerging think tanks like the R Street Institute, and in the odd David Brooks column. But generally the GOP has given itself over to know-nothing madness on the subject of government, especially the federal government.

The second great difference is the almost complete lack of attention being paid by modern progressives to public administration and government structure. Many of the most important leaders and thinkers of the original Progressive Era—Teddy Roosevelt, Louis Brandeis, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Lester Frank Ward, Gifford Pinchot, Robert La Follette—put tremendous stake in the design, functioning, and reform of government bureaucracies and of the broader political economy. We’ve seen flashes of this sort of thinking in modern times. Examples include the Clinton/Gore experiments in reinventing government and Elizabeth Warren and her crafting of the architecture for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In academia there is a cadre of institution-focused thinkers like Warren, many of whom have contributed to this magazine, including Steve Teles, Dan Carpenter, Suzanne Mettler, and Mark Kleiman. Similar-minded individuals can be found at think tanks around D.C., including the Center for American Progress, the Brookings Institution, and the New America Foundation.

But for the most part today’s left-leaning progressives are almost entirely focused on politics, economic justice, social issues, and the influence of money in politics. These are important subjects. But the vast complex of government is largely a black box to these folks. Other than defending the idea of government against anti-government conservatives, getting rid of the filibuster, reforming the primary system, and occasionally calling for more “accountability” and “transparency,” they would be hard pressed to articulate any coherent vision of how to reform the government we have, or any real understanding of how the damn thing works.

What I’m saying is this: there are energies being unleashed today that give the country a shot at reforming itself. But reform can’t and won’t happen until the left takes government—its structure and functioning—far more seriously, and until the right develops a stronger pro-government wing that can win over conservative supporters and compete with Democrats, challenging their blind spots while partnering on needed reforms.

If both of these things don’t happen, I honestly think the country as we know it is screwed. It’s really as simple as that. We cannot right ourselves without a better-functioning federal government. But we cannot have a better functioning federal government if one party is trying to destroy it and the other, the one that claims to embrace it, has too little knowledge of how it actually functions and no blueprint in mind for how to rebuild it.

The central mission of the Washington Monthly is to promote the filling of this gap. That means running pieces that attempt to discern government’s problems, not just at the level of policy-making but more broadly, as a system, and specifically, at the implementation level; that offer solutions to those problems; that educate left-leaning progressives on these subjects; and that encourage voices on the right who get it and who can articulate conservative arguments for a stronger, better-performing federal government.

The current issue of the Monthly expresses that mission well. In it, Donald Kettl pens a memo to the next president on what he (or she) can learn from the management mistakes of Barack Obama and George W. Bush, and where the original source of most of the government’s systematic management problems can be found (hint: it’s a tall domed building on Pennsylvania Avenue). Kent Greenfield argues that the new progressive crusade against “corporate personhood” is not only legally naive but also a threat to a smarter emerging progressive campaign against the primacy of “maximizing shareholder value,” a campaign that might actually help fix what ails the economy. Kevin Kosar explains why dysfunction on Capitol Hill led him to leave a job he loved as a research analyst for the Congressional Research Service. John DiIulio explores the argument of Francis Fukuyama’s new book, Political Order and Political Decay, that America’s greatest risk is that its government is reverting to a pre-Progressive Era form of “clientism” in which even supposedly independent bureaucracies are controlled by moneyed interests and the politically wired. A vivid example of precisely what Fukuyama is saying can be found in Nina Teicholz’s new book, The Big Fat Surprise, reviewed here by Kukula Glastris. It tells the story of how a handful of politically connected scientists, working with the vegetable oil and food-processing industries, quietly took control of key scientific institutions in and out of government, and in so doing managed to sell America on a thinly supported policy of reducing saturated fats in their diets, a policy that is now collapsing under the weight of overwhelming scientific evidence.

These are stories you wouldn’t find in any other magazines, including others in what the publishing world calls the “thought leader” category. The sad truth is that fewer and fewer outlets of any kind, print or digital, seem interested in covering the guts of government. One reason, I suspect, is that not that many editors are interested in the subject, and they presume their readers aren’t either. Another is that ambitious writers feel the same way; they don’t want to dive into complicated subjects that can’t easily be turned into “narratives.” (We like narratives too, by the way, as long they have a point—see Sabrina Shankman’s terrific cover story on how climate change is affecting the behavior of polar bears in frightening ways.) Or maybe stories that look systematically at government just don’t fit the business models of publications trying to turn themselves into “vertically integrated digital-media companies.”

Whatever the reason, we think that these other outlets are missing the most important story of our time. In his new book, Fukuyama makes the fascinating point that while European countries built modern states as defenses against foreign military threats, America, unique among nations, did so in response to the demands of its citizens during the Progressive Era. The signs are everywhere that a similar demand is growing again. Whether it gels into a full-blown second Progressive Movement cannot be known. But you can count on the Washington Monthly to encourage its emergence.

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Congratulations! You’ve won the nasty 2016 election for president of these United States. It was a long slog through more bad chicken dinners and dusty halls than anyone could be expected to tolerate. You won because you listened carefully to Republican strategist Frank Luntz’s take on the 2014 midterm election, that the “results were less about the size of government than about making government efficient, effective, and accountable.” And that’s just what you built your campaign on.

On January 20, 2017, you’ll be sworn in at noon, give a great speech, sneak out of the Beast for as much of a walk down Pennsylvania Avenue as the Secret Service will allow, cheer your hometown high school band, and dance the night away.

And then you’ll take over as chief executive and actually have to do what Luntz said: make government more efficient, effective, and accountable. As you settle into your new chair in the Oval Office, here are ten handy truths worth keeping in your pocket or purse.

I. Government works better than people think. Most of the time.

You told us during the campaign that government programs fail often, and a September 2014 Washington Post/ABC News poll shows that most Americans agree. Of those surveyed, 74 percent said they were dissatisfied or angry with the way the federal government works. Another 23 percent were satisfied—but not enthusiastic. Those enthusiastic about the federal government’s performance? Just 1 percent.

In fact, however, much of government actually works pretty well, most of the time. The Heritage Foundation points to “the breathtaking, long-term improvements in safety in the airline industry,” with tough, smart work by the National Transportation Safety Board leading to just a single fatal accident on an American airline since 2009, when a commuter jet crashed near Buffalo. For all the (often overblown) concerns about the long-term fiscal strength of Social Security, the bureaucracy that actually administers the program, the Social Security Administration, makes monthly payments to sixty-four million Americans with an accuracy rate of more than 99 percent and administrative costs that are (at 0.7 percent) but a fraction of those of private pension plans. Harvard University researchers found that stronger government regulations for air quality have led to longer lives. Even at the troubled Veterans Health Administration, a new technology system shrank the claims backlog by 60 percent.

Government usually gets only the hard problems—the puzzles that the private sector cannot or will not tackle, or that the private sector itself creates. In 2009, the United States found itself the majority stockholder in General Motors and pumped billions into Chrysler. Government bailouts saved an insurance company (AIG) and a bank (Citigroup). With its $49.5 billion bailout, the feds saved GM and millions of jobs, lost just $11.2 billion in the turnaround, and got out of the car business by the end of 2013. The government actually made money—$22.7 billion—on the AIG bailout and another $15 billion on Citigroup, far offsetting its auto-industry loss. Six years after the government launched these bailouts, it’s still staggering to imagine how bad things would have gotten if the government had left private enterprise to itself. And these weren’t aberrations. Again and again over the years, Washington has bailed out companies deemed vital to the economy, like Lockheed in 1971, Chrysler in 1980, and the entire airline industry after 9/11. Each time, the actions saved the companies and Washington made a profit on its investments.

A huge part of government works pretty well most of the time, as we take for granted every time safe drinking water comes out of the tap. You start your administration with a lot of points on the board, even if not many citizens notice the score.

II. Good management doesn’t win elections—but bad management can ruin presidencies. Fast.

The painful experiences of your two predecessors create a stark warning: voters don’t reward good performance, but they fiercely punish bad management. For George W. Bush, the point at which his negatives exceeded his positives and never recovered was not “Mission Accomplished” or Abu Ghraib. Rather, it was the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in September 2005. Barack Obama tumbled down the same road after the failed launch of the Obamacare website in October 2013, at almost the same point in his presidency.

It isn’t an inevitable part of second-term-itis. Bill Clinton fought off the impeachment barrage and Ronald Reagan was besieged by Iran-Contra, but neither took the hit in presidential approval that Bush and Obama suffered. The difference? The Clinton and Reagan battles were fundamentally political. The Bush and Obama problems were at their core managerial. The managerial failures created a negative narrative into which other problems played and on which their opponents relentlessly piled. For Team Obama, there’s been Benghazi, the IRS, the Obamacare website, the VA, the Secret Service, Ebola, and a lengthening list of other managerial mishaps. The Republicans turned this into a winning play in their battle for Congress in 2014: the president didn’t know what he was doing, they said, and Democrats needed to pay.

III. We don’t distinguish between failures that are truly consequential and those that have lesser impact.

You’ve benefited from the “Obama is incompetent” narrative. It increased the public’s appetite for getting you—and some fresh air—into Washington. But let’s be honest: you lucked out because of the media’s inability or unwillingness to notice, care about, or explain the difference between hugely consequential management screw-ups and only modestly consequential ones.

Failing to plan for the occupation of Iraq? Disbanding the Iraqi military? Putting inexperienced political cronies in charge of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and downsizing the agency prior to Hurricane Katrina? Now those were screw-ups—big, far-reaching, world-historic blunders that led directly to the deaths of thousands.

But Ebola? In the United States (as opposed to Africa) Ebola claimed two victims through the first few months, both travelers from West Africa who arrived at hospitals already gravely ill. In all, three health care workers, two in Dallas, one in New York, caught the disease—and then they recovered. The media’s freak-out over this story was insane. True, administration officials fed the frenzy with some inaccurate early assertions and advice—for instance, that the safety protocols the Centers for Disease Control had provided hospitals were not as careful and detailed as they needed to be. But within a few days the administration had better calibrated its media presence, the CDC had issued stronger protocols, and the outbreak had died down, just as the agency predicted. Meanwhile, in Texas alone, twenty children died in the 2012-13 flu season, and annual deaths from the flu across the nation range from 3,000 to 49,000—numbers that provoke mostly yawns from reporters.

The media mis-calibrated other big stories. In the Obamacare website fiasco, no one died. It took people a few extra months to sign up for care. Early press reports that forty veterans had died because of long wait times for primary care appointments at the Phoenix and other VA hospitals turned out to be bogus. The department’s acting inspector general told lawmakers that the embarrassingly long wait times in places like Phoenix “may have contributed” to patient deaths but that his investigations had turned up no conclusive proof that any vet had died.

Of course, these were big stories—but they were mostly big political stories. The stumbles embarrassed the Obama administration, hinted at an underlying management problem in the administration (more on that shortly), and helped the Republicans weave a powerful campaign narrative. But the stories weren’t about big failures with huge consequences. They were about putting torpedoes below the political waterline.

IV. We say we want to run government more like the private sector— but we expect government to meet standards that the private sector could never manage.

You made the case in your campaign that government needs to learn from the best-run private companies. That’s an irresistible line that Republicans invented and Democrats—especially Obama—have come to champion. But, of course, you know that the private sector isn’t always a model of good management. Remember New Coke, Windows 8, the collapse of Chi-Chi’s restaurants, and shrapnel-filled airbags? That’s even before we get to the wholesale financial miscalculations and fraud that led to global economic collapse.

The private market has a big advantage over government: it can bury its bodies in balance sheets and deal with its failures by quietly turning out the lights and locking the doors. Government’s problems, no matter how small, are fodder for news headlines (see point #3): “Report: DHS Employees Put $30,000 Worth of Starbucks on Government Credit Card.” We need to insist on government transparency, but sometimes that only creates more fodder.

For instance, how do we know that some VA facilities failed to measure up to the department’s fourteen-day maximum wait time for first-time primary care appointments? Because the VA measures such wait times and then, through its inspector general, makes its failure rates public. Private health care systems don’t disclose their wait times or have an inspector general looking out for patients and the financials. The only data we have on wait times at private-sector hospitals comes from a periodic survey by a health care consulting group. Compare those survey numbers and the VA’s numbers (the audited ones, not the “juked” stats), and it turns out that on average the wait time at the VA isn’t much different than in the private sector.

Expectations for government are higher than for the private sector and impossible to meet. Failures, no matter how small, hit the media spotlight. Government even gets blamed for private-sector failures. When investigators from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration discovered that Takata airbags killed and injured drivers, they recalled millions of cars. And who did members of Congress blame for the failure of private car companies to oversee the quality of supplies they bought from another private company in Japan? The NHTSA, of course.

V. Much of government’s work isn’t done by government.

You might think you’re the chief executive, but you don’t directly manage most of the programs for which the public holds you accountable. That’s because much of government isn’t actually done by government. The federal government spends $1 trillion per year on Medicare, Medicaid, and related programs, but private and nonprofit medical facilities actually provide the care. The Affordable Care Act is a federal mandate that requires individuals to have health insurance, and it provides subsidies for people who can’t afford it. But the government doesn’t provide the health insurance under the ACA, or the health care the insurance buys: all that comes from the private-sector actors, including some who are greedy, dishonest, and incompetent. The defense budget is a similar story. The Pentagon doesn’t build its own weapon system; private-sector defense contractors do. Amtrak doesn’t own most of the track on which its trains run. When Amtrak trains run late—and only two of its routes meet the national on-time standard of 85.5 percent—it’s most often because privately owned railroads have failed to maintain the tracks or have given priority to their own freight trains. Most of what the federal government does is outsourced to the private sector or to state and local governments. Only about one-sixth of the budget goes to work performed by government employees.

Of course, this doesn’t mean citizens won’t hold you accountable for fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement. You just don’t have direct management control over many of these problems. Much of your job isn’t what people think it is, or what you imagined it would be when you ran for office.

VI. The problem isn’t too many bureaucrats—it’s too few.

Out of frustration, critics—including pundits, many members of Congress, and a fair number of presidential candidates (maybe even you), play an “Off with their heads” strategy: Fire some bureaucrats, and then fire some more until they get the message. Fire more still, to starve the government’s ability to intrude into citizens’ lives. It makes for good press, but it’s a dangerous game, for several reasons.

First, while Washington is the nerve center of the federal government, 88 percent of all feds work outside the D.C. metropolitan area, and most of them do things around the country that citizens want or that government can’t do without. There are Social Security claims workers who help people get their monthly checks, air traffic controllers and Transportation Security Administration screeners who keep air travel running, rangers who tend to national parks, and FBI field agents who track down the most wanted. If you cut across the board, you’d have to eliminate seven feds around the country for each D.C.-based bureaucrat who’d lose a job. The government shutdowns have shown that people quickly notice the difference.

Second, because government workers don’t do much of government’s work (see point #5), cutting feds reduces government’s leverage over the vast and interconnected network of private programs and contracting firms that actually work the front lines. If you want to cut defense waste, you have to figure out how Pentagon staffers can do a better job overseeing contracts. Estimates of waste and improper payments in the Medicare program range as high as $120 billion a year, but you can’t reduce that without getting a handle on people outside government who don’t work for you—and to them, that $120 billion isn’t waste, it’s a windfall they’ll fight to keep.

Here’s a cautionary tale. In the 1990s, thanks to the Clinton administration’s military downsizing and mandates by the GOP Congress, the number of contracting officers at the Department of Defense fell by 50 percent—from 460,000 to 230,000. Many of those civil servants didn’t have the skills to oversee increasingly complex weapon systems and service contracts, and they needed to be replaced. But better-skilled replacements were not hired. Then came 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Suddenly, defense spending soared by hundreds of billions of dollars. Much of that money went to contractors, but it was overseen by what a later Army report called “a skeleton contracting force” of civilian bureaucrats. One result was a horrific chain of accidents—at least twelve in all—in which soldiers serving in Iraq were electrocuted while taking showers. Congressional investigators pointed to the failure of a contractor hired by the Pentagon to perform maintenance on the facilities. Private-sector contractors committed many of the atrocities at the Abu Ghraib prison, to the point that Iraqi prisoners won a $5.8 million judgment against one company. The depleted ranks of civil service acquisitions specialists also contributed to a huge spike in weapon cost overruns, from 6 percent for the average weapon system in 2000 to 25 percent in 2009. Cost overruns for that year alone totaled $296 billion.

Since then, the Obama administration has beefed up the Pentagon contracting force and brought more work in-house, and that’s helped. But Obama, too, has felt the political pain of relying on undermanned bureaucracies to carry out his signature policies.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) manage about $1 trillion in federal spending—the two health programs plus the state Children’s Health Insurance Program—with just 5,720 employees. That’s 0.2 percent of all federal employees responsible for 28 percent of all federal spending; each employee is responsible, on average, for an astounding $175 million in government spending. Every employee who is cut puts more money at risk, unless government can figure out a smarter way of overseeing the programs. And that hasn’t happened—the CMS’s programs were charter members of the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) “high-risk list” of the programs most prone to waste, fraud, and abuse and have been there for twenty-four years.

Meanwhile, as the CMS was overwhelmed with managing two of the government’s biggest programs, it got the job of setting up the federal Obamacare website and creating the federal insurance marketplace. But it didn’t have the staff or the expertise to do the job—the CMS, after all, is a payment-management agency, not a website-design operation. The GAO found that the agency launched the procurement without figuring out what it wanted to buy, which led to a system that didn’t work at first and suffered from enormous cost overruns. Bad things happen when agencies are responsible for important work they don’t have the capacity to do.

This only scratches the surface of the chilling stories that spill out of the GAO’s reports, especially its high-risk list. The biennial report is gripping reading only for the most wonky of policy wonks, but the underlying story is scary and clear. There are thirty programs on the list, and twenty-nine of them have roots in human
capital—getting the right people with the right skills in the right place to solve these problems. The thirtieth program? Human capital itself.

In an August column in the Washington Post, the political scientist John DiIulio asked, “Want better, smaller government?” His answer: “Hire another million federal bureaucrats.” We have no hope of making government work, he wrote, if we don’t hire the government we need to run it—and to rein in the proxies who do so much of the government’s work on its behalf. Much of the talk you hear about how government should be run more like the private sector is nonsense—there are too many fundamental differences in mission, expectations, and accountability. But one piece of advice from successful CEOs you should heed is that the people who work for you are your most important asset. Make sure you have enough of them, in the right places, with the right skills. If you run them down, you undermine yourself.

VII. Half the time, when it looks like it’s the president’s fault, the problems really come from Congress.

Citizens, reporters, and members of Congress deeply believe that the president is responsible for problems when they pop up. But in a huge number of cases, problems in executing laws start in the way Congress writes them.

Let’s go back to the VA for a moment. The ultimate reason why front-line employees at some VA centers couldn’t meet the department’s fourteen-day maximum wait time standard (and chose instead to falsely report their results) was that there was a shortage of primary care doctors to meet the demand from newly enrolled veterans. But the shortage of primary care docs is a nationwide challenge, and Congress contributes mightily to the problem. Every year Congress dishes out $13 billion to academic medical centers for physician training, most of which goes to producing more cardiologists, radiologists, and other specialists that fatten the hospitals’ bottom lines. Congress could demand that more of those dollars go to training primary care docs. It could also increase Medicare reimbursement rates for primary care relative to specialty care. These two reforms would go a long way toward relieving the primary care doc shortage. But because of pressure from the specialist physician lobbies, Congress chooses not to.

Or consider the beleaguered U.S. Postal Service. Congress demands that the service cover all its own costs, like a for-profit business, with no help from the Treasury. Yet it still insists on micromanaging the agency. To cover its growing revenue shortfalls, USPS leaders and outside experts have proposed a long list of ideas: End Saturday delivery. Close underutilized processing facilities. Spend less on pre-funding the employee retirement system. Open revenue-producing “postal banking” services for customers. Congress has refused to approve any of these ideas.

Congested highways making your commute longer? Maybe that’s because Congress can’t even pass a transportation bill, let alone legislation that adequately funds transportation infrastructure, including mass-transit systems. Got food poisoning? Maybe that’s because Congress has all but defunded meat inspection. Worried about where the next big storm is heading? Congress has undercut the National Weather Service’s ability to collect and distribute data. Pick almost any government performance problem and at least some (often most) of it can be traced back to some congressional action or inaction: conflicting statutory mandates, poor oversight, a failure to grant agencies sufficient authority to get the job done, ridiculous loopholes for favored private interests, grossly inadequate funding, and other problems.

It’s certainly not the case that Congress doesn’t care about government. Sometimes it smothers bureaucracy with love: a mind-boggling collection of 108 committees and subcommittees have oversight over the Department of Homeland Security. In fact, homeland security oversight is getting even more popular. The homeland security committee menagerie was just eighty-six in 2004, when the 9/11 Commission warned about the fragmentation of congressional oversight. It’s ballooned since then into one of the Capitol’s biggest time sinks. The Hill reports that in 2012 and 2013, 391 officials from the department testified before Congress in 257 hearings, in addition to 4,000 briefings. The department’s remote location on Nebraska Avenue, six miles from the Capitol, guarantees that department officials will spend a huge amount of their time stuck in traffic to satisfy the insatiable congressional appetite for a piece of the homeland security action. But there’s no evidence that this oversight is helping: the department is one of the government’s most troubled, and its management has been on the GAO’s high-risk list.

VIII. Critics of your government will create self-fulfilling prophecies by underfunding and otherwise sabotaging programs they don’t like.

An especially cynical strategy has emerged in recent years. Antigovernment forces have consciously tried to sabotage government—by shutting it down, slashing the budget, and attacking bureaucrats—with the clear goal of undermining the president’s ability to manage. If opponents can’t eliminate the programs they oppose, they can starve and cripple them. Failures then inevitably crop up. The news cycle doesn’t differentiate between problems that are consequential and those that aren’t (see point #3). What matters is creating a drumbeat of a gang that can’t shoot straight, and finding new stories to reload the ammo as the old tales fade away. Doing the public’s business gets lost in the battle of driving the other guy out of town. The Constitution anticipated one way to deal with the core questions about government, of course: if you don’t like a law, change or repeal it. In gridlocked Washington, however, it’s too hard to do that (or much of anything else). It’s much easier to sabotage government’s long-term operations for short-term political purposes.

This strategy is made possible by a quirk in public opinion: most Americans don’t like government, but they sure do like government programs. When sequestration loomed in early 2013, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press surveyed citizens about what programs ought to be cut. The result: of the nineteen programs on the Pew list, none commanded a 50 percent vote for cutting.

Cutting government waste, of course, really means cutting the other guy’s programs. Deep in the heart of Texas Tea Party country in 2011, there were constant cries to slash government spending. But when wildfires swept through the central part of the state, GOP Representative Michael McCaul, who represents a district stretching from Austin to Houston, complained that the U.S. Forest Service didn’t have tankers at the ready. “Despite all the warnings that Texas faced with it being the driest summer in more than 100 years, there was no prepositioned aircraft to help,” he said. Local residents savaged the USFS for canceling a contract with Aero Union, a California company whose ancient planes, some of which were fifty years old, didn’t meet basic safety standards. They complained more when the agency went looking for help and brought in air tankers from outside the country. But the USFS is responsible only for fires in national forests, and only a tiny fraction of the Texas fires were on federal land. So the agency caught flak from antigovernment activists who complained that they weren’t getting government help fast enough—and that the feds weren’t there to do the state and local governments’ work. By the way, Representative McCaul was reelected in 2014, winning 62 percent of the vote.

IX. Government can be made much better relatively quickly—and can be made worse even more quickly.

After the disastrous launch in 2013 of the ACA website, many Washington pundits asked whether Americans would ever trust the government again. But an equally important story, one almost no one knows, is how quickly a skilled team of feds and private contractors turned the website around. Obama put a former top Office of Management and Budget official, Jeff Zients, in charge. He hired a systems integrator to ride herd on the project and launched a “tech surge” to fix the site and its back-office operations. By December 2013, in three months of nonstop work, the team stabilized the site and ended the “Please try again” messages that bedeviled it at its launch. In November 2014, when the health marketplaces went live around the country, the headlines said “Insurance Exchanges Launch with Few Glitches,” with up to nine million people expected to sign up by the end of open enrollment on February 15, 2015.

There’s an important lesson here for you: government screw-ups can happen quickly, but with the right leadership and energy they can be resolved quickly, too. That is true not just of individual initiatives, like the exchanges, but of whole agencies.

No federal agency demonstrates more clearly how fast big problems can be solved—or how quickly progress can evaporate—than FEMA. The agency created its own disaster when it fumbled the response to Hurricane Andrew’s devastating blow to Florida in August 1992. Pundits afterward wondered if the management failures nearly cost George H. W. Bush the state’s electoral votes. When he became president, Bill Clinton appointed a skilled administrator, James Lee Witt, to engineer a FEMA turnaround. By 1995, Daniel Franklin wrote in the Washington Monthly that “FEMA transformed itself from what many considered to be the worst federal agency (no small distinction) to among the best.” Instead of showing up to write checks after disasters, FEMA worked with communities before disasters happened to reduce risk and damage. The agency discovered, for example, that it was much cheaper to retrofit homes in advance of storms to keep the roofs from blowing off than to pay afterward to put the roofs back on—and to repair or replace flooded homes—so it built partnerships with Florida local governments to make that happen.

FEMA’s success didn’t last long, however. The mega-consolidation that brought twenty-two agencies, including FEMA, into the new Department of Homeland Security derailed the improvements of the Clinton years. After Hurricane Katrina nearly drowned New Orleans, President George W. Bush put his arm around FEMA administrator Michael Brown and famously said, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job,” at precisely the time it was clear that neither he nor FEMA were. David Paulson soon replaced Brown and began getting the agency back on track. Obama’s appointee, Craig Fugate, continued the progress so that, when Superstorm Sandy attacked the northeastern coast, the headline that didn’t appear was “FEMA Fails Again.” The agency’s partnerships with state and local governments, as well as with the private sector, proved a model of disaster response. Companies like Home Depot and Walmart became integral parts of FEMA’s “whole community” strategy, focused on “creating active public-private partnerships to build disaster-resistant communities.” That made a huge difference when the storm hit.

The bad news is that the loss of top-level attention can quickly drive well-functioning agencies to disaster. The good news is that strong top-level leadership can turn poorly performing agencies around. FEMA has gone through the down-and-up cycle twice in the last twenty years. If you pay attention to the game—see point #10—you can avoid this roller-coaster ride.

X. Presidents can win the game if they pay attention.

You won’t be able to avoid the nine truths we’ve explored so far, and they’re full of traps that can undermine your presidency when you least expect it. But you have more ways to avoid those traps than you might imagine.

There are five important, straightforward steps. First are the 3,000 appointments that you directly make in the executive branch. You need a White House personnel operation that goes beyond satisfying campaign contributors to making sure you get the right people in the right jobs with the right skills and instincts.

The second is the civil service. You badly need the best and the brightest to support the executive branch’s work. If you don’t get good performance, you’ll pay—dearly. And the huge impending turnover in the federal workforce is a bigger challenge than you think. Almost a third of the federal workforce will be eligible to retire as you take office. Half of all air traffic controllers could move out as you’re moving in. In the Department of Housing and Urban Development, that number is 42 percent, and it’s 44 percent in the Small Business Administration. You might look to millennials, who want to find jobs where they can have an impact. But right now, many of them are drawn to the nonprofit sector, because the government hiring process is a mess and they worry that if they join the government they’ll be caught up in too much red tape and too little entrepreneurship. More generally, the feds are getting fed up with being the punching bag for dysfunction elsewhere in government. You need to worry about this—and to recruit a leader for the Office of Personnel Management who can get the federal government’s strategy right.

The third step is making sure that the President’s Management Council runs well. This is the group of the departments’ deputy secretaries, chaired by the OMB’s deputy director for management. The PMC has had its ups and downs—but when it has been run well, it has provided a direct connection between the White House and the people who actually manage the agencies. The PMC members can be the best friends you didn’t know you needed.

A fourth step is tougher. You need a chief operating officer, someone who can look after the details when you are busy with everything else and speak for you when management muscle is needed. You’ve got three options here.

Option 1: Make your vice president the chief operating officer. Al Gore got Clinton’s blessing to run the National Performance Review from the vice president’s office. Dick Cheney had a huge scope of operating responsibilities in the Bush years. Joe Biden launched and oversaw the $831 billion Recovery Act with nary a scary headline about fraud. These VPs-as-COOs provided valuable service to their presidents, but it’s a potentially risky strategy, since it can create a rival political camp. Moreover, the history has been uneven—Gore barely mentioned the NPR in his presidential campaign, Cheney’s power unsettled many Washington hands, and Biden’s role ebbed after the Recovery Act’s successes. But the vice presidency can be a lot more than a “bucket of warm spit,” as one of Franklin Roosevelt’s vice presidents, John Nance Garner, put it.

Option 2: Run government management through the “M” in OMB. The Office of Management and Budget has a deputy director for management, charged with overseeing the federal government’s operations. You could strengthen this post and give the deputy director muscle (it needs at minimum a doubling of its staff). But this has been a troubled position for a very long time. The “B” (budget) side of OMB has always been more powerful than the much smaller “M” (management) side, and both wings have struggled with staffing reductions in recent years. You need help. This could be the place to get it.

Option 3: Create a czar of czars in the White House. A new post of deputy chief of staff of operations would pull management more clearly into the presidential orbit and give the president’s voice to management issues when the czar of czars speaks (quietly and behind the scenes, of course). It would be an ugly job, pushed aside by the inner-circle power brokers (jealous of their time with you), charged with doing things that most people around you won’t think are important (until it’s too late), ignored by bureaucrats (unless you make it clear that they need to listen), and staffed by someone who will always struggle to stay a step ahead of what’s going on out there (because the more powerful your deputy becomes, the less administrators will want to tell him or her). But the post could also help your administration become less insular. That was a growing problem for both Bush and Obama, the deeper they got into their terms.

The fifth step is dealing with Congress on the management of government. The political rule in Washington is that whatever goes wrong in the bureaucracy is the president’s fault, even if so many problems flow from Capitol Hill. For your sake and the country’s, this misperception needs to be shattered, and you can strike a blow for sanity right away. At your first State of the Union address, announce that you will submit a sweeping plan to fix the big problems in law that cripple the federal government’s management and performance. Tell the assembled lawmakers that if they fail to act on these proposals and screw-ups arise, you know you will be held responsible, and that’s part of your job. But this time, tell them, Congress will share the blame. The point here is not to duck responsibility but to create joint accountability. Fixing a federal bureaucracy as big and complex as ours is not something any president can do alone. You need Congress’s help, and Congress needs political incentives to care. Create those incentives, and great things could happen.

You have more options than you think. You ignore them at your peril. And if you’re like most presidents, you won’t discover that peril until you’re up to your knees in it trying to figure out how it happened. You can learn these ten truths the easy way now, or suffer from them the hard way later. But you can’t escape them.

The post Ten Secret Truths About Government Incompetence appeared first on Washington Monthly.

If there’s one event that epitomizes why I quit my job last October as a researcher at the Congressional Research Service, Congress’s in-house think tank, it’s a phone call I got some weeks before making my decision to leave. The call was from a smart congressional staffer with a law degree. Confessing some embarrassment, he asked if, as the CRS’s resident expert on the U.S. Postal Service, I could help him and his congressman boss respond to a constituent. The constituent wanted to know why the USPS was “stockpiling ammunition.” The staffer forwarded the constituent’s email, which had links to various blogs warning that the USPS was arming itself to the teeth, perhaps preparing for an assault on America.

I explained the facts to the staffer. The USPS had put out a public notice that it was seeking bids from ammunition sellers. It was buying the bullets for the Postal Inspection Service, its law enforcement branch, which for the past two centuries has policed the mail for scam lotteries, child pornography, and more. The USPS makes such purchases regularly because, well, postal inspectors are cops, and they carry guns.

I gave the staffer the material he needed to draft a response. He thanked me (and later consented that I share this anecdote in this article). With any luck, the constituent would come away with a better understanding of the government, and might learn to be a little less credulous of Internet stories from the fever swamps.

Calls like that didn’t bother me, exactly; I didn’t mind doing my bit for the promotion of sanity. But in the previous year, I’d answered that kind of phone calls repeatedly, and much of my workday was now taken up by requests that had little if anything to do with public policy. When I joined the CRS eleven years earlier, researchers had time to research proactively. We wrote reports after lengthy periods of study, often while Congress was out of town for summer or winter vacation. By the time I left, however, I was working year round mostly in a frantic, reactive research mode. Today, it is not unusual for a CRS analyst to respond to 200 or 300 congressional requests annually. I once hit 660 in one year.

The growing workload is partly the result of the agency’s downsizing. Over the past decade, the CRS has gone from 730 employees to 600. My own research section shrank through retirements: after four of the thirteen researchers retired, there was not enough money to replace them all. The Internet has also had a big effect: constituents can easily email or tweet at their elected officials about every matter under the sun—Where can I access a federal grant for my cause? How much does the government spend on this program? Congressional staffers, increasingly young and inexperienced, must respond promptly, helpfully, and accurately, or their members risk losing a vote next election. “We’ve become a reference desk for constituents,” one staffer told me. “And when we can’t find the answer to the question, we call you.” Thus it is that the CRS, set up as a professorial policy analysis shop, now spends a lot of time answering constituent requests.

The CRS’s interactions with Congress are confidential, but members sometimes speak publicly about the agency’s accomplishments, which over the years have been considerable. George Galloway of the CRS helped with congressional reorganization in 1946, and his wife, Eileen, worked with Lyndon Johnson to create NASA in 1958. In the early 1970s, Walter Kravitz, Walter Oleszek, and Louis Fisher helped Congress reorganize itself and claw back some power from the executive branch. Harold Relyea was heavily involved in Congress’s opening of government agency meetings via the Government in Sunshine Act in 1976. Fisher was the research director for the House Iran-Contra Committee, and drafted much of its report. Congress’s foreign affairs committees turned to Joseph Whelan to better understand Leonid Brezhnev and Soviet policy. Vee Burke spent thirty years working and reworking welfare programs, culminating in the 1996 legislation that, in Bill Clinton’s famous phrase, “ended welfare as we know it.”

My aspiration was to follow in the footsteps of these great researchers by using my knowledge of government organization to write the kinds of reports that might help Congress fix the USPS and other entities. Instead, more and more of my time was being diverted to helping congressional staff respond to constituent demands. In addition, thanks to growing pressure from a hyper-partisan Congress, my ability to write clearly and forthrightly about the problems of government—and possible

solutions—was limited. And even when we did find time and space to do serious research, lawmakers ignored our work or trashed us if our findings ran contrary to their beliefs. When no legislation is likely to move through the system, there’s simply not much market for the work the CRS, at its best, can do. So when a think tank offered me a job, I took it. It has given me the freedom and time to think long and deeply about important governance issues and to write about congressional dysfunction.

To be clear, I am not bitter or aggrieved. I loved working at the CRS. Had this think tank opportunity not come along, I might well have stayed for another decade. The agency does incredible work on critical issues, and leaving the agency was hard. Equally difficult was the decision to write this article. Self-inflating, score-settling tell-alls are a dime a dozen in this town. This article is not one of them. I wrote this piece because I want more people in Congress and outside to appreciate how important the CRS is to good governance. My experience at the CRS also provides a window on the dysfunction currently afflicting Congress.

The Congressional Research Service has been around for a century. Congress established the agency in 1914, at the urging of Senator Robert La Follette Sr. and other progressives. It was born of the now-obvious but then-radical notion that governing a modern nation-state was complex business, and elected officials needed good information to make sensible policy decisions. The CRS began as a small, unnamed operation lodged within the Library of Congress, limited to compiling digests of legislation and other legislative clerk-type duties. It was staffed with civil servants, often with library science training, who tracked down useful facts and figures at Congress’s request. Congress grew the agency in 1946 and made it into a policy shop. The new Legislative Reference Service was directed to hire public policy experts who could help committees analyze policy proposals. The LRS also collected data and published reports in anticipation of congressional need, in addition to continuing its bill digest and reference duties.

In response to the growth of an “imperial presidency,” Congress beefed up the agency even further. The LRS became the Congressional Research Service in 1970, and was staffed up. If the president had policy muscle in the form of the Office of Management and Budget and other executive-branch agencies, Congress would have a mighty CRS, along with the newly created Congressional Budget Office. As conceived, the CRS’s experts would work mostly with Congress’s powerful committees, helping their members analyze policy options and identify issues for consideration. The agency was authorized to hire “senior specialists” who were the most learned in their fields of study, and compensate them at the senior executive service level. By law, CRS experts who work for a committee have the authority “to request of any department or agency of the United States the production of such books, records, correspondence, memoranda, papers, and documents as the Service considers necessary.”

Today, the CRS has 600 staff members, most of whom are reference librarians, attorneys, or policy experts. The agency modestly describes its role as “informing the legislative debate,” but the scope of its activities is much more significant. CRS employees train Congress and its staff in legislative procedure; the agency issues legal opinions, analyzes policy, and helps Congress conduct oversight. It assists Congress tens of thousands of times per year, advising its members on just about every topic imaginable. As Thomas Jefferson said in 1814, “There is, in fact, no subject to which a member of Congress may not have occasion to refer.”

I landed at the Congressional Research Service in 2003 via the Presidential Management Fellows Program, shortly after finishing my doctorate in politics. I figured the CRS would give me two years to learn how politics and government really work, after which I might decamp to a university to teach and write. Or I could stay—for as long as I wanted.

The CRS struck me as the perfect place to work. It feels much like a university, stuffed with smart people and dusty papers. It offers a front-row seat to the legislative process. My office was in the Library of Congress, which has a wealth of resources that I could use to research and publish articles and books. Unlike Hill staffers, who work monstrously long hours, I would put in a steady forty-five hours a week. The compensation is good—young CRS experts start at a salary approximating that of an assistant college professor, and many reach the top of the general schedule pay scale (a band of $125,000 to $157,000) in less than ten years.

Much of my eighty-person division had been there since the early 1970s; members of Congress and their staff may come and go, often after a short time, but the CRS endures. Culturally, the CRS approximates the civil service ideal. Its people are unbelievably earnest, and really nice. CRS employees will remind you that Congress is the first branch of government, and they want it to function well. While CRS staff may have opinions about politics and policy, they mostly keep those opinions to themselves. At the Congressional Research Service, objectivity is next to godliness.

But the agency’s cultural dowdiness frustrated me. The CRS’s difficult institutional location is part of the problem. It is housed in a building owned by the Architect of the Capitol that was designed to hold books, not people. Little daylight enters, so employee workspaces are dim and depressing, and the place resembles a rabbit warren. Information doesn’t flow easily between staff members, who seldom know who is where and doing what. But the institutional culture is also to blame. The CRS is a remarkably risk-averse organization, tenaciously clinging to old ways and habits. New ideas are always entertained—the CRS’s people are thinkers—but too many reforms never happen. (I once sought to alter a form used internally by the agency, which could have been done in a day or two. It took me four months of dogging the people responsible to make the change.)

Upon my arrival as a Presidential Management Fellow in 2003, I was shocked that 1980s Selectric typewriters remained in some offices. The CRS stopped using WordPerfect to compose its reports just five years ago, long after the rest of the Hill had moved on. Along with most other analysts, I did not have my sluggish PC tower replaced with a laptop until 2010, and the ones we got were heavy as bricks and buggy. A few years ago the agency gave BlackBerries to staff, even though other workers on the Hill were already using iPhones and Androids. On any given day, printers and copy machines conk out, and Internet connectivity is sometimes erratic.

Despite all this, I had an incredible experience there, especially in my first year. I got to assist Congress at every step of the policymaking process. I analyzed public policy problems, devised possible solutions, and worked with congressional attorneys to prepare legislation. I also helped committees to identify hearing topics, drafted questions to ask witnesses, and testified myself. And I got to work with some veteran greats at the agency, like Louis Fisher, Harold Relyea, and Ronald Moe. At Moe’s suggestion, I wrote in depth about government-sponsored enterprises like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and advised Congress to think systematically about GSE reform. With Nye Stevens, a senior CRS manager and mentor, I studied the U.S. Postal Service. Just a half year into my career, my memorandum on the USPS leadership structure was used by the Senate Homeland Security Committee in both a hearing and a report.

In 2005, after my two-year PMF stint was up, the agency offered me a permanent spot. I took it without a second thought. The CRS offers, as a perceptive colleague once said, a “comfortable” job. My first supervisor once quipped, “This is one of the few places where you can get paid to read the newspaper.” Staying up on the news is a duty of the position, as is studying government reports and poring over academic studies. At the CRS, you get paid to think, and there is very little managerial direction. Congressional staff usually call or email CRS experts directly with their research needs. Few people leave the agency, other than to retire. It is a plum job, especially for anyone who loves reading and writing about government.

During my first few years at the agency, 2003 through 2006, it was not unusual for agency analysts to write thoughtful pieces on governance issues for reputable newspapers and journals. Doing so was lauded by the agency, not least because members of Congress read op-eds. A number of professional journals listed CRS specialists on their editorial board. In my first few years, I wrote on governance topics for outside publication, and joined the editorial board of the Public Administration Review.

That environment changed abruptly in 2006. That year, Louis Fisher made comments to a reporter about the limitations of the whistle-blower protection law. It ought to have been a shrug-worthy comment, especially as the facts indicated that agencies defeated whistle-blowers in court almost every time. But someone in Congress took offense and complained. A media circus ensued, and the Internet lit up with anger. In the end, the agency transferred Fisher out of his job and into another agency within the Library of Congress. We had lost a valuable and productive colleague. Congressional requests that would have gone to him were routed to others at the CRS with much less experience.

The CRS’s blood was in the water, and more attacks came. Many of us were particularly shocked when Michigan Representative Pete Hoekstra, then chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, rebuked the agency. A CRS expert had written a confidential memorandum on wiretapping, concluding that the executive branch probably had not given Congress as much notification as the law required. Hoekstra told the CRS that it had no business writing about the topic. It was remarkable: the CRS’s expert had warned Congress that the executive branch might be taking advantage of the legislature, and a powerful member of Congress had essentially replied, “Shut up.”

Agency management found this new operating environment both bewildering and a bit terrifying. The CRS gets all of its funding from Congress, and management had not forgotten that a decade earlier Congress, led by Newt Gingrich, had slashed the budget of the Government Accountability Office and abolished the Office of Technology Assessment. The CRS clamped down on its analysts talking to the media, and forbade the distribution of CRS reports to anyone who was not a member of Congress or an employee of the legislature.

The crackdown had a large effect on CRS researchers. The job I had signed up for permitted and even encouraged publishing for an audience beyond Congress. In the new environment, outside writing by CRS analysts on public affairs became rare. Outside publications would not get you promoted and became a needless peril. Endlessly we were warned by management to avoid writing anything that might be perceived by someone somewhere as partisan or biased. Increasingly, I devoted my freelancing to uncontroversial, non-governance subjects like the history of whiskey.

A more serious consequence of the attacks on the CRS was a change in the quality of our internal reports. The CRS’s researchers felt the chill. Reaching conclusions—the job of an expert—became verboten. In fact, for a time, CRS analysts were told not to end their reports with a section titled “conclusion.” That sounded far too definitive and authoritative. Analysts were told to end studies with an “observations” section. To ward off these critics, we often larded our work with caveats and “on the one hand”s—“weasel words,” as a colleague colorfully called them.

Despite the agency’s effort to stay beneath the radar, partisans kept hitting it year after year. A particularly ugly incident occurred in 2012. The CRS economist Tom Hungerford published a paper that concluded, “Analysis of … data suggests the reduction in the top tax rates have had little association with saving, investment, or productivity growth. However, the top tax rate reductions appear to be associated with the increasing concentration of income at the top of the income distribution.” In a saner era, the report would have been shrugged off. The debate over taxes and economic growth has been going on forever, with smart economists disagreeing. But Capitol Hill has gone mad. A multi-month media hullaballoo erupted. Republicans called the report flawed; Democrats waved it like a bloody flag. Hungerford later bolted for a think tank. At the end of that same year, another CRS analyst found herself in the soup. Her December 2012 examination of pending legislation related to coal ash raised concerns about its environmental effects. The report instantly became a political football, praised by environmentalists and trashed by industry supporters. When the Senate held off acting on the legislation, its supporters blamed the CRS for a biased analysis.

It was dispiriting to see Congress treating the CRS’s work less as sources of information than as weapons for use in partisan warfare. We were civil servants who tried to render thoughtful assessments about complex matters. We helped Congress respond to the endless torrent of constituent questions and demands—yet this was the thanks we got?

Like most folks at the CRS, I wanted to help Congress do important things. But with the exception of TARP and a few other enactments, not much has been achieved in the past decade in the half-dozen areas I covered. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were not reformed, and despite dozens of reports and memoranda on the USPS, the agency remains broke. Congress, the centerpiece of our democratic machine, is crippled by partisan gridlock.

When I left the CRS, the agency was doing what it could to adjust to the changing environment in Congress. Its technology, always behind the times, has nearly caught up with the rest of the Hill. The agency created new, short-form products that are more easily viewed on the smartphones used by congressional members and staff. Younger staff members are filling some of the spots vacated by CRS retirees, bringing youthful energy and fresh perspectives to the agency.

The CRS cannot, however, do it all on its own. Congress should help itself by helping the agency to further reinvent itself to meet the needs of a twenty-first-century legislature. There is every reason to expect that Congress’s need for research assistance will keep growing. The Internet is adept at spreading what comedian Stephen Colbert called “truthiness,” things that feel true even when they’re not, in fact, true. Helping Congress discern the good information from the biased or crackpot is something the CRS already does and will need to keep doing daily. Congress also will need the agency’s experts to help it parse important issues, like which agencies offer what benefits to same-sex partners or whether Speaker John Boehner’s potential lawsuit against President Obama has any legal grounds (it basically doesn’t, according to a recent CRS report).

Unfortunately, the agency’s budget has not kept pace with demand. In addition, the CRS’s charter is forty years old and full of anachronisms, including the requirement that the agency identify for Congress all the issues worthy of examination. The CRS expends enormous time and energy doing this task, and Congress mostly ignores the agency’s recommendations. (Politics, not reason, tends to guide congressional action.) The CRS’s statute should be revised to better square with the agency’s current research duties, which include conducting complex analysis and rudimentary reference work. With the explosion of constituent-driven requests, the agency needs a bigger workforce, but one with more reference librarians and research assistants.

Amending the charter also would provide the opportunity to liberate the agency from the many Library of Congress regulations that drag on its operations and drive up costs. The human resource rules, in particular, negatively affect the CRS’s productivity. The hiring process is byzantine, time-consuming, and enormously expensive. When an analyst departs the CRS, it can take a year to hire a replacement, dumping extra work onto the desks of already harried staff.

Under library rules, it is nearly impossible to fire anyone, no matter how little work he or she does. With so much work to do, the CRS desperately needs each employee to be highly productive. The agency should have the authority to clear out the few bad apples. It should also be allowed to require that each new hire serve a two-year probationary period, such as my experience in the PMF, to ensure that he or she is the right person for the job. Life tenure should be replaced with a ten-year renewable contract. Those employees who have the passion to continue will be kept on; those who are no longer an asset to the agency will be shown the door and replaced with fresh talent.

Giving the CRS more funds and freedom to run its operations would be good for both the agency and Congress. With our nation’s challenges growing by the day, Congress needs the Congressional Research Service now more than ever. And who knows? Maybe a stronger CRS can help Congress fix itself.

The post Why I Quit the Congressional Research Service appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The American left is notoriously fractious. But one belief that unites more than most is this: corporations are not people. “Corporations are people, my friend,” said Mitt Romney in 2012, and Democrats skewered his cluelessness. “I don’t care how many times you try to explain it,” Barack Obama said on the stump. “Corporations aren’t people. People are people.” During the 2014 midterms, Massachusetts Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren barnstormed the country to rally the faithful. Her most dependable applause line? “Corporations are not people!”

The main target of the corporations-are-not-people crowd is the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling striking down limits on independent corporate spending in elections. After that case, groups sprang up to fight corporate personhood. Others rebranded themselves by newly taking aim at it. But they do not limit themselves to attacking the Court’s campaign finance jurisprudence. Most groups make a broader attack on corporations being able to assert any First Amendment speech rights at all; and some have called for disabusing all corporations or businesses of any constitutional right.

Common Cause, for example, uses Robert Reich to tout its support for “a constitutional amendment declaring that ‘Only People are People’ and that only people should have free speech rights protected by the Constitution.” Public Citizen, the liberal litigation group founded by Ralph Nader, argues that “rights protected by the Constitution were intended for natural people.” Free Speech for People, one of the groups most influential in the anti-personhood movement, is pushing a “People’s Rights Amendment.” A version has already been sponsored in the U.S. Senate by Jon Tester of Montana and in the House by Jim McGovern of Massachusetts. It would declare that “the rights protected by this Constitution” are “the rights of natural persons.” A range of liberal groups have signed on to the anti-personhood project—MoveOn, Sierra Club and NAACP chapters, and steelworker and SEIU locals. By their count, sixteen states and nearly 600 localities have endorsed some kind of anti-personhood amendment. Even in a moment when the progressive left seems otherwise to be fighting rearguard actions, this movement has genuine energy.

These are my people. Many of the leaders of this movement are friends and respected colleagues. I contributed to Elizabeth Warren’s senatorial campaign and voted for Reich when he ran for governor of Massachusetts. Forty years ago, my coal miner grandfather sat me down and told me how a union had saved his life. As a law professor, I have spent my career as an oddity—a progressive who teaches corporate law, almost always the most liberal person in any room of business law academics. A decade ago, I came up with a novel legal theory that shareholder activists recently put to good use suing the Hershey Company over the use of child labor in West African chocolate cultivation.

A corporate lickspittle I’m not.

But the attack on corporate personhood is a mistake. And it may, ironically, be playing into the hands of the financial and managerial elite.

What’s the best way to control corporate power? More corporate personhood, not less.

If you’re shopping for glue sticks or glitter and hearing Christian music over a loudspeaker, you’re probably in a Hobby Lobby store. An arts-and-crafts retailer, Hobby Lobby is a big company, with upwards of 20,000 employees and more than 600 stores. But it’s a “closely held” corporation—meaning its stock is not publicly traded. The stock is owned by members of one family, the Greens of Oklahoma City, who are devout Christians. As enacted, the Affordable Care Act contained a provision requiring the company to provide its employees with health insurance that includes all medically approved forms of contraceptive care. The Greens objected. They believe that four of those methods are “abortifacients,” and claimed that the coverage mandate violated their rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

When their suit made it to the Supreme Court in early 2014, a group of corporate law professors (of which I was one) filed a “friend of the court” brief arguing against the corporation.

The brief’s main argument? Corporate personhood.

Understand that “corporate personhood” simply expresses the idea that the corporation has a legal identity separate from its shareholders. That separateness, the brief pointed out, is inherent in what it means to be a corporation. A “first principle” of corporate law (as we explained) is that “for-profit corporations are entities that possess legal interests and a legal identity of their own—one separate and distinct from their shareholders.” The very purpose of the corporation as a legal form is to create an entity “distinct in its legal interests and existence from those who contribute capital to it.” This separateness means that shareholders are not held liable for the debts of the corporation. That makes it possible for people who do not wish to oversee the day-to-day activities of companies in which they invest—and do not wish to risk every penny they own if the corporation goes bankrupt—to invest in corporate stock. In other words, this separateness is what makes capital markets possible. And capital markets are essential for the development of a vibrant national economy. Beyond that, corporations can exist long after the life of any individual that invests in, or works for, them. This means, as the legal scholar Lynn Stout has pointed out, that corporations provide a mechanism for society to make long-term, intergenerational investments that are not linked to government or a specific family.

It is not an overstatement to say that corporate separateness has been one of the legal innovations most important to the development of national wealth.

The professors argued that this separateness meant that the Greens should not be able to attach their own religious beliefs to the corporation. The reason the Greens had chosen to form a corporation was to be able to operate the business without running the risk of losing their personal assets if the corporation went belly up. They wanted separateness.

They should not then be able to stand in the shoes of the corporation for purposes of religion.

The Supreme Court disagreed. It held, 5-4, that the Greens could project their religious beliefs onto the corporation and refuse to provide their employees the required contraceptive-care benefits. Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion is evidence of the Court’s much-discussed pro-business tilt, to be sure. But it’s also evidence that the majority doesn’t understand the basics of corporate law. Its sin was not an embrace of corporate personhood but a rejection of it.

In fact, let us now praise corporate persons.

Consider the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster. For three months in 2010, Americans woke each morning to the news of another 50,000 barrels of crude spewing into the coastal waters of the Gulf of Mexico. We were justifiably outraged. In a legal system without corporate personhood, the channel for that outrage would be limited to lawsuits and criminal inquiries against individual human beings responsible—managers, workers, and contractors. That’s important, of course. In any legal jurisdiction worth its salt, the search for culpable individuals has to be part of the settling-up of any man-made disaster. But it should not be all. No human being—except, perhaps, Bill Gates—would have enough money to compensate those harmed by a massive disaster like Deepwater Horizon. Because a corporate entity is also on the hook, there’s a chance for something approaching real compensation or real responsibility. Corporate personhood is thus not only a mechanism for the creation of wealth (by encouraging investment), it is also a mechanism for enforcing accountability (by providing a deep pocket to sue).

The movement against “corporate personhood” does not spend much time talking about these aspects of the concept. When the left cries that corporations are not people, what they mean is that corporations should not be able to claim the constitutional rights that human beings can. Yet even here, there is reason to praise corporate personhood. Remember, the opposite of a constitutional right is a government power. If corporations have no rights, then governmental power in connection with corporations is at its maximum. That power can be abused, and corporate personhood is a necessary bulwark.

In 1971, for example, the government sought to stop the New York Times, a for-profit, publicly traded media conglomerate, and the Washington Post, which had gone public as a corporation only a few weeks previously, from publishing the leaked Pentagon Papers. The Supreme Court correctly decided that the newspapers had a First Amendment right to publish. That was one of the most important free speech decisions of the twentieth century. At the time, no one seriously suggested that the correct answer to the constitutional question was that the Times and the Post, as corporations, had no standing to bring a constitutional claim at all. (And for those of you saying to yourselves, “Well, this isn’t a good example, since the newspapers are protected by the First Amendment’s press clause”: the Court has never given any greater substance to the press clause not already covered in the freedom of speech. And the current proposals to end corporate personhood do not claim to save media corporations any more than pharmaceutical or oil companies.)

In 1992, Planned Parenthood won a hard-fought battle to have the Supreme Court reaffirm Roe v. Wade. Planned Parenthood is a corporation; but no one seriously suggested it had no standing to object to limits on its ability to provide abortions. Today, Google and other media companies are fighting government demands to disgorge the contents of their servers. No one seriously suggests that the government’s power should be unchecked because the media companies, as corporations, have no Fourth Amendment rights to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures. Finally, if corporations were not able to claim the Fifth Amendment rights to be free of government takings, their assets and resources would always be at risk of expropriation. The risk of investing in corporations would skyrocket, undermining the reason we have them in the first place.

In fact, the argument that corporations should never have constitutional rights is embarrassingly flawed. I often think that those who make it are aware of that fact, and are using “corporations are not people” not as an analytic principle but as an organizing and fund-raising tool.

Please don’t misunderstand me. Of course corporations are not genuine human beings. They should not automatically receive all the constitutional rights that you and I can claim. Corporations cannot vote or serve on juries, for example; it does not make any sense to think of corporations asserting those rights, both because of the nature of the right and the nature of the corporate entity. Similarly, the Court has held that corporations cannot assert the Fifth Amendment right to be free of self-incrimination. The exclusion makes sense, since corporations could otherwise evade all kinds of disclosure obligations necessary to make markets work. Can you imagine General Motors having a constitutional right not to disclose safety defects in their cars?

When the time comes, the Court should draw the same line with regard to the freedom to exercise religion. The right is to protect the freedom of conscience, and only actual human beings have a conscience. (And only some of them at that.) There should be allowances for genuine associations of religious people, such as churches. But because of corporate separateness—that is, corporate personhood—it will be quite difficult for companies to show that they are genuine associations of religious people.

Should corporations be able to assert First Amendment free speech rights? The answer depends on the context; that context includes the fact that the corporation is a legal form, but is not completely dependent on it. Sometimes it makes little sense to protect the First Amendment rights of corporations. Securities laws, for example, routinely require corporations to disclose to the public their financial well-being. If you or I were required to reveal our personal finances, we could object to the requirement as coerced speech, a violation of the First Amendment. But corporations’ arguments along those lines would fail, and they should. In fact, in 2011, AT&T asked that information about its finances be excluded from Freedom of Information Act requests, because the statute has an exception for “personal privacy.” The Court unanimously rejected this claim—and Chief Justice John Roberts ridiculed it in his opinion. That exception, he wrote, “does not extend to corporations. We trust that AT&T will not take it personally.”

On the other hand, sometimes it’s important to protect the right of a corporation to speak, as in the Pentagon Papers case, not because the corporation owns free speech rights but because of the rights of human listeners to listen to what it has to say. This idea—that listeners have a right to hear the words of corporate speakers—is actually a liberal idea. In the 1970s, Ralph Nader’s group Public Citizen brought a First Amendment challenge to limits on commercial advertising. They argued that these laws violated the public’s right to know. Legal scholar Adam Winkler argues that Public Citizen’s advocacy led directly to Citizens United. In his majority opinion in that case, Justice Anthony Kennedy said that the public has a right to know corporations’ views. Public Citizen now decries corporate personhood; if truth be told, it’s their own fault.

When it comes to campaign finance, I agree with the personhood opponents that Citizens United wrongly expanded corporate rights to spend money on elections. I also agree that the Court’s mistake traces its origins to the 1976 case Buckley v. Valeo, where the Court struck down limits on individual (human) campaign expenditures as violations of free speech. But the problem in Citizens United was not the Court’s supposed holding that corporations are people, and the problem in Buckley was not a supposed ruling that “money is speech.” Both are mischaracterizations, and the critical yelps they attract are poorly targeted in any event. Corporations occasionally say things that matter to voters, even in elections. And while money is not itself speech it is sometimes essential to make speech audible above the din. Giving it, too, can be an expressive act. Imagine if Texas told its citizens they could not contribute to Planned Parenthood or had to pay dues to the National Rifle Association. It would be inane to argue that the First Amendment would not be implicated because money is not speech.

The left and corporate rights: Left, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and publisher Katharine Graham celebrate the paper’s victory in the Pentagon Papers case. The Post parent company had gone public only weeks before. Right, pro-choice demonstrators protect the entrance to a Planned Parenthood clinic. PP, a nonprofit corporation, litigates to protect its right to offer abortion and contraceptive services.

Nevertheless, there are myriad reasons why a commitment to free speech rights—even corporate free speech rights—should not bar reasonable limits on independent campaign expenditures from both corporations and the super rich. It is not hyperbole to say that without such limits, our democracy is at risk. The billions of dollars flooding the electoral process skew it toward the monied and well heeled, and pervert the nature of public service. The current Court is so enamored with a simplistic, libertarian theory of free speech doctrine that it is blind to those risks. A sane Court could easily construct exceptions to otherwise applicable doctrine to protect the sanctity and fairness of our elections. In fact, Canada’s supreme court has done that very thing.

But notice something. One can support campaign finance regulation and still acknowledge corporate personhood as well.

In fact, most of the money flooding into the electoral process isn’t coming from corporations. It’s coming from rich individuals like Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers. There is a lot of corporate money, to be sure. Chevron, the most politically active public corporation in 2012, spent $2.5 million in that year’s election cycle; the Chamber of Commerce, the largest corporate bundler, funneled over $35 million into various 2012 races. But both were dwarfed by the torrent of individual money. Adelson alone threw almost $93 million into various races during the same period, and the Koch brothers ran a network of shady groups that spent over $400 million.

The power of corporations is frequently misused, usually to the advantage of the financial and managerial elite. Employees, communities, consumers, the environment, and the public interest in general are elbowed aside in corporate decisionmaking, unless the corporation can make money by taking them into account. Corporations are managed aggressively to maximize shareholder return. As a result, the risks they run—whether of oil spills in the Gulf or of financial crises erupting from Wall Street—are often unrecognized until too late. The executives who run American corporations do not generally think of themselves as having obligations to the public. The social contract of American corporations is pretty thin.

But these defects of corporate power, fundamental as they are, are not problems of constitutional law or corporate personhood. They are problems of corporate law, and they could be fixed by corporate law.

American courts forged sweeping protections for corporations during the Gilded Age (see sidebar); the legal fortress was slowly breached during the Progressive and New Deal eras. But in many ways we are back where we started. The Supreme Court is applying twisted ideas of free speech and due process to wall corporations off from accountability. In corporate governance, after a mid-century pendulum swing toward more public-spiritedness, managers and investors are now once again fixated on maximizing shareholder value.

In the last few years, however, there’s been a pushback—even a small bandwagon—against the shareholder primacy norm. An article in the Harvard Business Review (that socialist rag!) declared in 2012, “There’s a growing body of evidence … that the companies that are most successful at maximizing shareholder value over time are those that aim toward goals other than maximizing shareholder value. Employees and customers often know more about and have more of a long-term commitment to a company than shareholders do.” New York Times columnist Joe Nocera wrote that “it feels as if we are at the dawn of a new movement—one aimed at overturning the hegemony of shareholder value.” An opinion piece in the Financial Times recently argued that “[c]ompanies need a bigger and better purpose than simply maximising shareholder value.” And speaking of socialist rags, a 2011 Forbes article called shareholder primacy “the dumbest idea in the world.”

The case against shareholder primacy was argued best by Steven Pearlstein last year in the Washington Post. Maximizing shareholder value, he wrote, is a “pernicious” ideology that “has no foundation in history or in law.” He continued, “What began in the 1970s and ’80s as a useful corrective to self-satisfied managerial mediocrity has become a corrupting, self-interested dogma peddled by finance professors, money managers and over-compensated corporate executives.” In fact, he argued, “much of what Americans perceive to be wrong with the economy these days—the slow growth and rising inequality; the recurring scandals; the wild swings from boom to bust; the inadequate investment in R&D, worker training and public goods—has its roots in this ideology.”

These skeptics are popularizing what a number of legal scholars and I have been saying for quite a while—that corporations should be seen as having robust social and public obligations that cannot be encapsulated in share prices. Now, executives have legal obligations to take account of shareholder interests. Progressive corporate scholars argue that these “fiduciary duties” should be extended to employees and other corporate stakeholders.

One way to make these obligations operational is to make the decisionmaking structure of the company itself more pluralistic. In a number of European countries, for example, companies have “codetermined” board structures that require representation of both shareholders and employees. Even with these management structures, corporations continue their focus on building wealth—that is the core purpose of the corporate form—but not for a narrow sliver of their investors only. And it works. Germany, where codetermination is strongest, is the economic powerhouse of Europe. A former CEO of the German company Siemens argued that codetermination is a “comparative advantage” for Germany; the senior managing director of the U.S. investment firm Blackstone Group had said that codetermination was one of the factors that allowed Germany to avoid the worst of the financial crisis.

Notice something. These reforms make corporations more like persons, not less. Human beings routinely balance a multitude of interests—I am, for example, a parent, a spouse, a teacher, a writer. Only the rare oddball—Donald Trump,
maybe?—behaves as if accumulating money is the paramount and unitary good. Humans have consciences; corporations do not. Left to themselves, they will behave as if profit is the only thing that matters. The best way to constrain corporations is to require them to sign on to a more robust social contract and to govern themselves more pluralistically—mechanisms designed to mimic the traits of human personhood within the corporate form.

If corporations had these traits of personhood, I would worry less about corporate involvement in the political arena. American corporations have become a vehicle for the voices and interests of a small managerial and financial elite—the notorious 1 percent. The cure for this is more democracy within businesses—more participation in corporate governance by workers, communities, shareholders, and consumers. If corporations were more democratic, their participation in the nation’s political debate would be of little concern.

But corporate personhood opponents are making these corporate governance reforms less likely. Personhood skeptics often characterize corporations as having a narrow social role; because of that narrow role, the argument goes, they owe it to shareholders to stay out of politics. The famous words of the conservative economist Milton Friedman, that the “one and only social responsibility of business” is to make “as much money as possible,” were long used as the mantra of corporate managers who wanted to be released from any social obligation. Now the opponents of Citizens United are endorsing a similarly narrow view of business as a way to explain why corporations should be exiled from the public square. To fight corporate personhood, they are bolstering shareholder primacy.

Take, for instance, Justice John Paul Stevens’s dissent in Citizens United itself. He argued, among other things, that corporate speech should be limited in order to protect shareholders’ investments. Shareholders are seen as owners, as “those who pay for an electioneering communication,” and are assumed to have “invested in the business corporation for purely economic reasons.” Stevens argued that corporate political speech did not merit protection because “the structure of a business corporation … draws a line between the corporation’s economic interests and the political preferences of the individuals associated with the corporation; the corporation must engage the electoral process with the aim to enhance the profitability of the company, no matter how persuasive the arguments for a broader … set of priorities.”

Even more revealing, Stevens cites as support a set of corporate governance principles adopted by the prestigious American Law Institute. The Principles were the product of compromise, both asking corporations to look after shareholder interests and allowing them to act with an eye toward “ethical” and “humanitarian” purposes. But Stevens quoted only the language embodying shareholder primacy: “A corporation … should have as its objective the conduct of business activities with a view to enhancing corporate profit and shareholder gain.”

Opponents of corporate personhood are following Stevens into the shareholder rights trap. Common Cause now has a “featured campaign” for “strengthening shareholder rights.” The Brennan Center for Justice is supporting a “shareholder protection act” and calls shareholders “the actual owners” of corporations. Professor Jamie Raskin of American University, one of the smartest and most energetic academic opponents of Citizens United, says that corporations should not be spending in elections because, “after all, it’s [shareholders’] money.” This is all shareholder primacy language brought to bear in fighting Citizens United.

Wall Street loves talk of shareholder rights. Sure, many of us are shareholders through our retirement accounts and the like. But widows and orphans are still the minority; most stock held in American businesses is owned by the very wealthy. (The richest 5 percent of Americans own more than two-thirds of all stock assets. The bottom 40 percent—125 million working-class people—essentially own nothing in terms of stock.) So when opponents of Citizens United focus on shareholder rights, they are singing Wall Street’s tune.

I wish this shareholder-protective rhetoric was just that, but it’s not. Corporate personhood opponents urge, as an intermediate measure short of a constitutional amendment, that corporations be required to seek shareholder approval before spending corporate money on political campaigns. I myself have been tempted by this position, mostly because such a rule would help ensure that executives do not spend corporate monies on issues and candidates opposing company interests. But that benefit is probably marginal, and comes at the risk of validating corporate involvement in the political process in furtherance of shareholder value and to the detriment of other stakeholders. Corporations could speak out in favor of Wall Street but not employees? That would be worse, not better.

The efforts of anti-personhood activists are not only in tension with stakeholder theory on the conceptual level. In the political arena, too, a tension exists because the energy for reform is a finite resource. I believe that, in this moment, there is an opening to question the very framework of how we view corporations and their social obligations. But we won’t get anywhere on that front if the progressive left wastes its energy fighting for a constitutional amendment that is unlikely to succeed and would do more harm than good if it did.

To cure the ills of Citizens United, we should stop fighting corporate personhood. Instead, let’s fight to make corporations more like people.

The post Let Us Now Praise Corporate Persons appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The public be damned,” railroad magnate William Henry Vanderbilt snorted at a reporter in 1882. The impertinent scribe had asked whether Vanderbilt ran his railroads with an eye toward public benefit. At the time, Vanderbilt was among the most powerful men in American business—and by his own estimation the richest man in the world. His figurative middle finger to the American public was big news, appearing on the front page of hundreds of newspapers within twenty-four hours.

The week before his comment, two trains had collided on his railroad inside the Fourth Avenue tunnel in New York City, killing two passengers and injuring hundreds. Many New Yorkers blamed the accident on Vanderbilt’s unwillingness to cut into profits by spending money on safety measures. His contemptuous words, spoken as he dined in his private train car, salted an open wound. The satirical magazine Puck ran a cover cartoon of a ballooned, profligate Vanderbilt wearing a diamond pin, smoking a stogie, and leaning back in a leather chair with a foot on the throat of an eagle dressed in Uncle Sam garb.

Impolitic as it was, Vanderbilt’s comment embodied the business and political philosophy of the monied classes of the Gilded Age. And for the most part, the law was a willing ally. The Supreme Court of the era repeatedly stepped in to protect business from regulatory obligations. Its most famous decision of this kind was the 1905 case Lochner v. New York, striking down a law establishing a sixty-hour maximum workweek for bakers. New York’s law was part of a broader effort of relatively meek legislative initiatives that included minimum wage laws and bans of child labor. The Court’s libertarian reasoning undermined any regulatory protections of employees or consumers. Attempts to constrain corporate power with the use of regulation would be struck down, in the Court’s words, as “an illegal interference with the rights of individuals.”

The “Lochner era” lasted for nearly half a century; it did significant harm. Attempts to protect consumers, children, and immigrant workers were thwarted by free market ideology masquerading as constitutional law. The Lochner constitution was a Social Darwinist law of the jungle. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle—a wilderness of unregulated greed and contempt for the
public—was what we got.

But constitutional law was not the only problem. Corporate law, too, helped to keep corporations with a narrow set of obligations. A fight between Henry Ford and his rivals John and Horace Dodge gave rise to the pivotal articulation of the rule.

In the second decade of the twentieth century, Henry Ford was making money—an incredible fortune of money—making cars. Ford Motor Company, the company in which he was the dominant shareholder, was selling his masterpiece
Model T as quickly as it could be produced. By the middle of the decade, the company was doing so well that shareholders were receiving each month in scheduled dividends an amount equal to their initial investment. The company also declared “special” dividends for several years, as much as $11 million in 1914.

Today, we are well aware of the dark side of Henry Ford’s influence—his funding of anti-Semitic propaganda, his financial support for Hitler. But in the teens and twenties, Ford cultivated an image of a benevolent mogul. He made headlines in 1914 with his “Five-Dollar Day,” when he doubled the wages of all his workers, explaining to the New York Times that companies had a direct role in improving the lives of the working class. His rhetoric sounded radical: “I believe it is better for the nation, and far better for humanity, that between 20,000 and 30,000 people should be contented and well fed than that a few millionaires should be made.”

In 1916, Ford declared that special dividends had come to an end. He wanted the money to build a new auto manufacturing facility, to be the largest in the world. (The factory that was eventually built, the River Rouge plant, built everything from Model As in the 1920s to Mustangs in the 2000s. A facility on site assembles F150 trucks even now.) Ford brashly claimed that his decision was motivated by a desire to do social good for the company’s employees and customers, arguing that shareholder gain was not the purpose of a successful business but its by-product. A business was about more than making money for shareholders, he said. It was about satisfying the obligations of a robust social contract, doing “as much good as we can, everywhere, for everybody concerned … [a]nd incidentally to make money.” Ford demoted the role of shareholders and promoted the status of workers, saying in an interview with a local newspaper reporter that the profits earned by shareholders had been “awful” and that he wanted to drive down the price of his cars so more benefits could flow to “users and laborers.”

The shareholders were not amused. Particularly upset were the Dodge brothers, John and Horace, who owned 10 percent of Ford stock. Though they had already made more than a 40,000 percent return on their initial $10,000 investment, they sued for more, asking the Michigan courts to force the board of Ford Motor Company to declare a special dividend. It was a crafty demand. The brothers ran the car company that bore their name, a rival to Ford. An extraordinary dividend from Ford Motor Company would both drain it of its financial surplus and provide cash to capitalize the Dodges’ own competing car company.

Henry Ford understood as much. He had no reason to fill the coffers of a competitor, and numerous solid business reasons to keep the capital in-house and keep his customers and employees happy. But instead of defending his refusal to issue special dividends as an exercise of his considered business judgment, which was both true and something that would have easily won the deference of a court, Ford defended his actions by relegating shareholder interests and bringing workers’ rights to the forefront: “My ambition is to employ still more men, to spread the benefits of this industrial system to the greatest possible number, to help them build up their lives and their homes. To do this we are putting the greatest share of our profits back in the business.” The Dodge brothers seized on that rhetoric as evidence that Ford was using the company to further his own social agenda.

The case eventually made it to the Michigan Supreme Court. Ford’s assertions of worker rights and shareholder subordination—in an era when the Russian Revolution had already begun and socialism was on the rise in the United States—were too much for the state court to endorse. Legal scholar Todd Henderson explains that “if a firm as large and important to the American economy were permitted to pursue an overtly socialist strategy, the political impact and the effect on other firms could be enormous.” On the surface, the case was about whether shareholders were due some dividends. But more fundamentally, Henderson says, it was a “test case of the foundations on which American capitalism would be built.”

The eventual decision was, and still stands for, an iconic statement that corporations have no obligations beyond the bottom line. In one of the most famous passages in the history of corporate law, the Michigan supreme court announced,

A business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders. The powers of the directors are to be employed for that end. The discretion of directors is to be exercised in the choice of means to attain that end, and does not extend to a change in the end itself, to the reduction in profits, or to the nondistribution of profits among stockholders in order to devote them to other purposes.

Courts, then and now, follow something called the “business judgment rule”—meaning that they did not, and still do not, typically overturn the considered decisions of corporate managers. But Ford’s rhetoric of worker and customer protection was so radical that it moved the court to rule such motivation out of bounds. Dodge v. Ford was a pivotal moment in the development of corporate law. It defined the core purposes of corporations as being distinct from—even contrary to—the interests of workers, customers, and society. The case remains, a century later, as one of the first opinions law students read in their introductory business law course. It is corporate law’s original sin. —K.G.

The post Corporate Law’s Original Sin appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The Big Fat Surprise:
Why Butter, Meat, and Cheese
Belong in a Healthy Diet
by Nina Teicholz
Simon & Schuster, 479 pp.

After a year, both groups had lost weight. But those on the high-fat diets had dropped three times as much. The higher-fat group had also lost weight in a healthier way, reducing body fat, whereas those on the low-fat diet lost mostly lean muscle mass. Finally, the high-fat, low-carb eaters did better at lowering their risk factors for heart disease. “In the end, people in the low-carbohydrate group saw markers of inflammation and triglycerides—a type of fat that circulates in the blood—plunge,” reported the New York Times, while “[t]heir HDL, the so-called good cholesterol, rose more sharply than it did for people in the low-fat group.”

These findings, needless to say, run exactly counter to the nutritional advice Americans have been given for decades—that fat, especially saturated fat, is unhealthy, a broadener of waistlines and a clogger of arteries. If it were just this one study, the findings could perhaps be dismissed. In fact, it was the latest in a long line of similar research going back years. Six months earlier, the Annals of Internal Medicine published a meta-analysis of twenty-seven clinical trials that found, according to the Boston Globe, “no difference in heart disease rates among those who had the least amount of saturated fat compared to those who consumed the most.” A meta-analysis of twenty-one other studies, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2010, found “no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of coronary heart disease or cardiovascular disease.”

Anybody who’s been reading the papers carefully for the last decade has probably picked up on this news, which may explain the recent popularity of low-carb and “paleo” diets and the growing presence of bacon and pork belly on the menus of trendy restaurants where the educated congregate. But the news has yet to reach the average Joe. A Gallup poll last July showed that twice as many Americans are trying to avoid fats as carbs.

These folks are still following the anti-fat advice drummed into them over the years by government and medical experts, especially the AHA and the federal government’s “Dietary Guidelines for Americans,” jointly published every five years by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Yet instead of backing off the message about the dangers of saturated fat, the AHA has held fast to its position, and the USDA, in its most recent guidelines, lowered its recommended daily consumption of such fat.

These recommendations have led, in turn, to new regulations on school lunch programs. But parents and school lunchroom employees complain that the students won’t eat the new, supposedly healthier food. Most kids, for instance, skip over the skim white milk in favor of low-fat, heavily sweetened chocolate stuff. And, as researchers at the University of Virginia have found—you guessed it—kids who drink low-fat milk are much more likely to be overweight than those who stick to whole milk.

At some point soon, the majority of Americans are going to realize that they’ve been had—that the dire warnings about saturated fat they’ve been hearing from health experts and the government, which they have dutifully been trying to work into their daily eating routines, were flat-out wrong, and may have actually been doing them harm. When we reach that point, two things will happen. First, a collective cheer will go up across the land upon the news that it’s okay to eat cheeseburgers. Second, the public’s growing (if lamentable) distrust of scientific and government experts—be they climate scientists or Centers for Disease Control (CDC) officials—will kick into overdrive.

How official nutritionists and the government blew the call on fat is therefore a hugely important issue. It is also the subject of a remarkable new book, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat, and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet, by former Gourmet magazine and National Public Radio reporter Nina Teicholz. While the title suggests a mass-market diet book, it is far more than that. Building on journalist Gary Taube’s work, Teicholz (who has also written for this magazine) spent nearly a decade combing through tens of thousands of scientific studies and documents and interviewing scores of key scientists, bureaucrats, and industry insiders, many of them in their eighties and nineties. Her attributions and bibliography alone run 115 pages.

The result is a fascinating, detailed, and highly readable investigative history of how some of America’s most trusted scientific institutions went off the rails. The tale involves a small group of ambitious and influential scientists, a credulous media, crusading politicians, a public desperate for easy answers to complex questions, and the largely hidden hand of industry. It is, in short, a very Washington story.

As early as the late nineteenth century, some researchers were beginning to wonder if animal fats, in particular the cholesterol in such fats, might be responsible for heart disease, since cholesterol is a major component of atherosclerotic plaque. The idea slowly gained ground among some researchers in the 1930s and ’40s as the rate of heart attacks among adult males grew. It had—and continues to have—a certain commonsense plausibility. Since plaque clogs arteries “like hot grease down a cold drain,” in Teicholz’s vivid phrase, and stops blood flow, triggering heart attacks, eating more of the stuff plaque is made of must increase the risk of heart disease. But this was by no means the consensus among researchers and nutritionists, most of whom were publishing and publicizing studies on how children raised on a diet rich in meat, eggs, and dairy products grew taller and stronger than those who weren’t.

About the same time, a fundamental change in the American diet was under way, one Teicholz considers especially deleterious: the increasing use of vegetable oils from corn, soybeans, rapeseed, and cottonseeds. For most of human history, vegetable oils were not used for cooking, for the simple reason that (with the exception of olive oil) they turned rancid quickly at room temperature. As recently as 1910, American housewives cooked almost exclusively with butter and animal fat. Vegetable oil was used largely to make soaps, tallow, lubricants, and resins; it was barely considered edible.

Then, in 1911, Procter & Gamble patented the process of hydrogenating vegetable oil—that is, adding hydrogen atoms to the lipid molecule, which allowed the oil to be stored at room temperature without going bad. The first big commercial application of this innovation was the creation of Crisco, which stayed firm and fresh at room temperature, just like lard or butter. As Americans would later learn, some eighty-plus years later, hydrogenated vegetable oil is full of “trans fats,” which increase the risk of heart disease by lowering HDL levels in the blood while raising those of LDL, or “bad” cholesterol. But at the time, the processed food industry successfully promoted vegetable oil as “easier to digest” and a more up-to-date, modern alternative to the meat- and dairy-based fats Grandmother used. Consumption of such products, and of processed food containing them, like cookies and pastries, soared.

Eager to promote their products’ health benefits, in 1941 big food manufacturers like Quaker Oats and the Corn Products Refining Corporation created something called the Nutrition Foundation. The new organization, writes Teicholz, “steered the course of science at its very source by developing relationships with academic researchers, funding important scientific conferences, and funneling millions of dollars into research.” In 1948, Procter & Gamble took that strategy a step further: it donated all the profits from its popular Truth or Consequences radio program to the American Heart Association, then a small, underfunded organization founded in 1924 by cardiologists seeking to understand the growing problem of heart disease. (With further contributions from other food giants, the AHA would grow into a behemoth, with a $30 million budget by 1960, making it the largest non-profit in the country at the time.)

That same year, 1948, the AHA successfully lobbied President Harry Truman to create the National Heart Institute—now the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI)—within the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Truman then appointed AHA founder Paul Dudley White to run the new agency, thereby ensuring, Teicholz suggests, that the AHA and its industry backers had influence over the doling out of NIH research grants.

At around this point in Teicholz’s tale, a second villain—after the vegetable oil industry—enters the picture. He is Dr. Ancel Benjamin Keys, a pathologist with advanced degrees in biology and physiology who worked at the University of Minnesota. Brilliant and charismatic, with a crusading streak and a knack for networking, Keys had managed during World War II to get himself appointed as an adviser to the secretary of defense, a post from which he developed meals for the U.S. Army called K Rations—the “K” stood for “Keys.” By the early 1950s, Keys had become convinced that the consumption of animal-based fat was the key cause of heart disease.

Big fat break: In 1961, Time magazine put Ancel Keys on the cover, guaranteeing him international celebrity status and effectively endorsing his views on diet.

He introduced his thesis, later dubbed the “diet-heart hypothesis,” in a 1953 paper that purportedly showed a close correlation between fat intake and death rates from heart disease in six countries. The paper generated tremendous buzz, and Keys expected to make a big splash when he presented it at a World Health Organization conference in Geneva. He did—just not quite the way he had anticipated. Jacob Yerushalmy, professor of biostatics at the University of California, Berkeley, pointed out that Keys had chosen to study only countries that would support his thesis. He didn’t account for countries like West Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, and, of course, France—where the consumption of diets high in saturated fats did not translate to ill heart health. Keys was humiliated and furious. When Yerushalmy and a colleague presented a paper showing data from twenty-two countries that suggested other factors, such as the number of cars and cigarettes sold, or the amount of sugars and protein consumed, might have a role to play, Keys responded by “devoting several pages to attacking theories that competed with his own” without offering a rebuttal of the hypothesis under review.

While Keys’s extreme self-assurance rankled colleagues, there was a market for it at the time. In the early 1950s, America was in the grip of what looked to be an epidemic of heart disease, with alarming numbers of middle-aged men succumbing to the disease. When President Dwight Eisenhower had a heart attack in 1955, there was panic across America. The public was hungry for definitive answers, and Keys believed he had them. (That Ike’s previous four-pack-a-day smoking habit might have had something to do with his heart disease was not widely discussed.)

Keys also had connections: Paul Dudley White had by then become Ike’s personal physician and was a personal friend of Keys’s. White enjoyed nearly “boundless influence” in his field and regularly took to the airwaves to update the American public on Eisenhower’s health. When invited to write in a front-page piece in the New York Times, the only researcher White mentioned by name was Ancel Keys. (Once he recovered, the president became a fervent adherent to the low-fat way, giving up butter for margarine and eating Melba toast for breakfast every day until his death, from heart disease, in 1969.)

Even within the AHA, however, there were serious doubts about the supposed links between saturated fats and heart disease. In the late 1950s an AHA committee of nutrition experts openly criticized diet-heart advocates like Keys for taking “uncompromising stands based on evidence that does not stand up under critical examination.” Keys responded in 1961 by getting himself and an ally appointed to the AHA nutrition committee. After that, the AHA swung around, announcing to the world that “the best scientific evidence” suggested that people at risk of heart attacks and strokes cut the amount of saturated fats and cholesterol in their diets. Two weeks later, Time magazine put Keys on the cover, guaranteeing him international celebrity status and effectively endorsing his views.

To advance his hypothesis, Keys launched one of the most ambitious epidemiological studies ever done. In the “Seven Countries Study,” he examined the diets in Yugoslavia, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Japan, Finland, and the United States. The results, the first of which were published in 1970, seemed to support Keys’s views. Finnish lumberjacks, for instance, who ate a diet heavy in meat and dairy, died from heart attacks at far higher rates than Greek farmers in Crete, whose diet of grains, fruit, and fish was far lower in saturated fats.

There were many issues with the Seven Countries Study, however. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, when Keys was conducting his survey, Greece was still emerging from the deprivations of World War II and the Greek civil war. As children and young adults in the prewar years, these farmers had eaten diets heavy in lamb and other fatty foods, one of many confounding factors Keys ignored. Diving deep into the study, Teicholz also discovered an astonishing methodological weakness: one of Keys’s three surveys of Crete was conducted during Lent, when Orthodox Christians fast from all animal products.

Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, Keys’s diet-heart hypothesis gained adherents and support in the media, but had not been officially endorsed by the U.S. government. That began to change in 1977, when the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, led by Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, held hearings on the links between certain foods and heart disease.

After the hearings, it fell to a McGovern staffer named Nick Mottern to research and write a report with dietary recommendations for the public. A former labor beat reporter and a “conscientious progressive,” Mottern had a jaundiced view of corporate power, especially the National Cattlemen’s Association, whose arrogant lobbyists regularly strode through the South Dakota senator’s offices. Mottern had no background in science or nutrition, however, so he turned for guidance to a Harvard nutrition professor and devotee of Keys’s diet-heart hypothesis, Mark Hegsted (Keys had by then retired).

The report Mottern and Hegsted produced, Dietary Goals for the United States, recommended lowering overall fat calories from 40 percent to 30 percent and saturated fats to 10 percent. In Mottern’s eyes, writes Teicholz, he was fighting a battle that “pitched the virtuous, AHA-endorsed low-fat diet against the debased meat and dairy industries.” He was, by all appearances, ignorant of the fact that much of the research he relied on had been quietly paid for by the vegetable oil and processed foods industries.

There was a furious backlash to the report from the meat, egg, and dairy industries and their backers in Congress, as might have been expected. But a large number of experts still remained unpersuaded. This complicated the task of translating the Dietary Goals report into federal guidelines, a job that fell to the newly appointed nutrition division director of the USDA. That person happened to be—surprise, surprise—Mark Hegsted. So to garner greater support, Hegsted decided to let his USDA recommendations be guided by a task force set up by the esteemed American Society for Nutrition.

Unfortunately for Hegsted, the task force wound up concluding two things: that the link between fat consumption and heart disease was a tenuous one, and that “the evidence condemning saturated fat was not persuasive,” writes Teicholz. The main problem, the task force explained, was that nearly all the evidence supporting the diet-heart hypothesis had come from observational studies of populations. Such “epidemiological” studies can establish correlation but, because they don’t control for different variables, not causation. For that, clinical trials are needed. But virtually no clinical trials on the diet-heart link had yet been done.

Still, the task force did not affirmatively say that reducing dietary saturated fat would cause harm. Hegsted took that as a green light to proceed, on a tenuous “better safe than sorry” logic. Hegsted’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans formed the basis of the USDA’s subsequent “Food Pyramids.” “Despite having grown from the work of a single congressional staffer and his single academic advisor and despite the lack of endorsement from nutrition experts,” writes Teicholz, “these are now the most broadly recognized food guidelines in the United States.”

One last battle remained to be fought. In a rearguard action, the highly respected Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Sciences reviewed all the same studies everyone else had on the diet-heart hypothesis, and concluded that the studies had “generally unimpressive results.” This should have been a devastating blow. But by then the narrative in Washington was set: saturated fat was bad for you. The New York Times editorial page in essence accused the National Academy of Sciences of being biased, a view it further highlighted with a front-page investigative story in 1980 showing that two members of the academy’s Nutrition Board had done consulting work for the meat, egg, and dairy industries. The fact that two other members of the board were employees of food-processing companies was ignored. So too was the fact that the Nutrition Board had enough integrity to issue findings that ran counter to the interests of one of its own funders, the Nutrition Foundation, which was backed by vegetable oil and other food companies. In the eyes of respectable liberal opinion, anyone who questioned the view that saturated fat was a danger was either unenlightened or a stooge of the meat lobby.

Once government put its official stamp of approval on the diet-heart hypothesis, the American public dutifully complied, cutting its intake of saturated fats and shifting to the “low-fat,” carbohydrate-rich alternatives with which the processed food industry helpfully stocked the nation’s supermarkets. At about the same time, obesity levels skyrocketed, which Teicholz sees as no coincidence. Academics who continued questioning the anti-saturated-fat consensus became professional outcasts. Their funding dried up. Invitations to conferences no longer arrived. Journals would no longer publish their work.

From square to pyramid: What nutritionists told Americans to eat before the low-fat craze began.

Meanwhile, beginning in the 1980s, results from the first clinical trials on the health effects of saturated fat started coming in. One after another failed to show that lower-fat diets lead to lower levels of heart disease. Yet the anti-fat consensus held firm. Experts explained away the disappointing results as anomalous, or questioned the studies’ methodologies, or awaited the results of the next big clinical trial, which would surely prove them right.

Then, beginning in 1990, studies of a different sort started coming in. These documented the health dangers of trans fat. The vegetable oil and processed food industries spent millions trying to counter the studies, but more kept coming. Consumer advocates, who had earlier allied with the vegetable oil and processed food industries in attacking saturated fats, now turned on their former industry partners and led the charge against trans fat.

By 2006, the game was up when FDA began requiring all food labels to list trans fat amounts, effectively forcing food companies to remove trans fat from their products. But without trans fat, the companies were left without a solid fat option to use in their cookies, crackers, chips, and frozen food. They couldn’t very well go back to using more saturated fats, because the public was already in the habit of scanning food labels for them. So in recent years, the vegetable oil companies have been experimenting with oil made from a process called “interesterfication,” which, Teicholz reports, produces various triglycerides with unknown health effects. Meanwhile, fast-food restaurants have been reduced to frying with unprocessed vegetable oils that release chemicals like formaldehyde into the air.

The obvious solution, says Teicholz, is for the government to own up to its mistakes and start telling Americans that it’s safe to eat saturated fats. It is hard not to conclude that she is right. The opportunity, at least, for the government to correct the record may be at hand: the USDA/HHS new Dietary Guidelines for 2015 are currently being formulated and should be out soon.

Some of the media coverage that has greeted The Big Fat Surprise has described the book as an indictment of science. But that is not really the story Teicholz tells. Rather, as her book shows, time and again a consensus of scientists called it right, insisting that the weight of the evidence was insufficient to support the anti-saturated-fat position. What really happened is that, over the course of several decades, a relatively small network of zealous, well-connected, enterprising scientists, working with well-funded industry partners, managed to take control of key scientific institutions inside and outside of government. That gave them the power to roll the scientific consensus. The media and political leaders who went along were, for the most part, too ignorant of the underlying power dynamics to understand that they were being played. And that, unfortunately, is pretty typical of how Washington works to this day.

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Don’t Wait for the Next War:
A Strategy for American Growth
and Global Leadership
by Wesley K. Clark
PublicAffairs, 272 pp.

Stavridis, Clark, and Zinni were the “lead mechanics” for U.S. military interventions in Libya and Kosovo, and played key roles in the first Gulf War, Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. They counseled and watched half a dozen presidents and uncounted congressional committee chairs, seeing those leaders perhaps as closely as anyone outside their inner circles is ever allowed. The three men are soldier-statesmen, perhaps as close as our time comes to “Renaissance men”: classics-quoting, economics-teaching, tweeting, Daily Show-appearing warriors. They hold degrees from Annapolis, West Point, Harvard, Oxford, and other elite institutions, most acquired at taxpayer expense. The operations of the last two decades forced them to get to know, and partner with, social workers and rape counselors, engineers and social media gurus, management consultants and diplomats. Together they gave their country more than a century of service—and at least two of their children followed them into uniform.

And they have a message for our country. Though their three 2014 books cover strategy, autobiography, history, and politics, they can be summed up in one urgent sentence: The “car” of U.S. national strategy needs a new GPS.

Each man points to the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a catastrophic failure, for which they indict the leadership of the Bush administration explicitly. Zinni calls the failure to plan “a clear disaster” and refers to “the stupidity of believing their own bumper stickers.” Implicitly or explicitly, though, all three point the finger more broadly: at our broken politics, weak connections between civilian and military leaders, problematic construct of leadership, outdated civilian institutions, and, above all, a disregard for strategic planning.

If the three books share a villain, they also share a hero: President, also General, Dwight D. Eisenhower. “Modern American strategy really begins with Eisenhower,” Clark writes, and then explains what he means: “Ike created a politically supported, unified national strategy using the Cold War—not a hot war—as the motivating force. This strategy was not just about actions abroad, it was also about building strength at home. … [H]e used the leverage of profound challenges abroad to gain domestic political cooperation between the parties.”

The Accidental Admiral:
A Sailor Takes Command at NATO
by James Stavridis
Naval Institute Press, 288 pp.

The three are in broad agreement on some key approaches to American national security policy. They retain immense confidence in U.S. power, and the possibility and desirability of U.S. leadership— for both pragmatic and moral ends. They tie this confidence not as much to the military strength they oversaw as to what they perceive as the reality or potential of American society. Zinni expresses this as faith in a rising generation of civil and military leaders; Stavridis enthuses over the American dynamism and innovation he sees from his own immigrant past to the idea-driven whizzes he commands; and Clark lays out an extensive vision of how American resources and ingenuity could make the United States a net energy exporter, address climate change, and provide new impetus to efforts to help poor and conflict-ridden societies.

Their approach—you could call it “muscular military multilateralism”—lines up excellently, as well, with the characteristics Americans tell pollsters they want to see in our security policy: a strong military, stronger diplomacy, and a willingness to both talk to our enemies and shoot them.

What keeps them awake at night? For Stavridis it is not the Chinese navy (though he writes with longing of his dreams of commanding a ship again) but “convergence”: “deviant globalization” that combines traditional threats such as terrorism and weapons of mass destruction with the networks of criminals, drug dealers, and human traffickers. Clark ranks climate change and the weakness of the U.S. financial system with terrorism and China as key strategic challenges that Washington must organize to overcome.

Before the First Shots Are Fired:
How America Can Win or Lose
Off the Battlefield
by Tony Zinni and Tony Koltz
Palgrave Macmillan Trade, 256 pp.

It has become de rigeur for civilian advocates—conservative, progressive, realist—to argue that the place of some or all transnational challenges in U.S. national security policy, from terrorism and cybersecurity to climate change and poverty, has been overblown. Realists will argue passionately that Washington must refocus on state-sponsored threats, or their absence. Progressives critique a security-industrial complex and its focus on constricting freedom in order to combat terrorism and cybersecurity. Conservatives dismiss worries about climate, disease, and other challenges whose effects are felt most viciously beyond our shores.

These three men would disagree. All three treat transnational threats— terrorism and cybersecurity but also crime and climate—as central problems for U.S. strategy. “Our house,” Zinni writes, “can no longer be defined by our geographic borders. … You can choose to play defense and wait for problems to wash up on your shores, or you can deal with them at their origins.” They treat transnational threats—terrorism and cybersecurity but also crime and climate—as central problems for U.S. strategy.

They find less agreement among themselves on where U.S. military strength ought to be focused and, by extension, how much of a threat is posed by China. Clark supports the Obama administration’s “rebalance” of resources to Asia and, by inference, away from Europe and the Middle East. Zinni, on the other hand, is nearly contemptuous of some features of the U.S. buildup in Asia. He—as might be expected of a Marine—advocates a focus on expeditionary forces that can be sent wherever tomorrow’s crisis arises, in lieu of new outposts. Stavridis, whose last assignment was Allied Supreme Commander Europe, the head of NATO’s military, makes an eloquent plea for the importance of the alliance and Europe.

Alliances, economic diplomacy, mediation: the three men call for more U.S. attention to these civilian tools, rather than a reversal of sequestration-mandated Pentagon cuts or the 4 percent of GDP floor for defense spending urged by some civilian advocates. The life of a modern flag officer, to hear these three tell it, is as much taken up with high-level diplomacy, dealing with public-relations problems, and studying up on models of innovation as with contemplating plans for war fighting.

Not that they believe war fighting is passè—all three believe that we should and will be engaging in military interventions, including some elements of occupation, if not nation building (a phrase they do not use) going forward. Stavridis and Zinni have given considerable thought to both the political and diplomatic elements that make military interventions succeed or fail. They stress strategy, planning, and deep regional and cultural knowledge; but also the legality and legitimacy accorded by the United Nations, regional organizations, and close adherence to international law. In Zinni’s words, “Any narrative making the case for war has to be based and presented on strong legal, ethical and moral grounds.”

What do they want from the civilian leadership? A “big, inclusive picture,” Clark writes, that “links both our foreign policy and security issues with our economy at home, a strategy that is not so completely derived from one administration that it is automatically distrusted by the rival political party.”

But when it comes to explanations of why such leadership is lacking, or strategies to bring it back, the men are largely silent. Is it because U.S. politics is producing weak leaders? Clark and Stavridis must not think so, for, with the exception of George W. Bush, they have little but praise for the presidents and senators they mention. Zinni extends his scorn for Bush to Obama and Hillary Clinton, and calls for elected officials to keep their military advisers closer—but only the right kind of military advisers, not what he calls “chateau generals.”

Is it because of the media? Stavridis offers a thoughtful chapter of how-tos for leaders dealing with the 24/7 media environment. For readers with backgrounds in government, the advice will be tremendous, while for others it may seem rudimentary: Have a good message, understand your audience, don’t miss your moment, tell the truth. Zinni worries over the passing of journalists who sympathized with the soldiers they covered. Clark stresses the importance of rebuilding global perceptions of America. But all three, ultimately, seem to believe that the media can be part of the solution.

Is it because of decay in the quality of American institutions? Clark raises concerns with education, but, if the quality of incoming young servicemembers is as high as all three men say it is, that can’t be it.

Is it because of polarization and partisan acrimony? Clark decries all of these, describes past moments of American success as featuring strategic unity, and suggests that any strategy will have to enjoy acceptance from both parties to be effective.

The narratives share a nostalgia for a time of “good wars” and clear and consensus national strategies. Clark, for example, describes the Manifest Destiny of the first half of the nineteenth century as “just a daring, grand project that the vast majority of Americans agreed on.” Today a strategy that disenfranchised more than half the population, enslaved blacks, and drove Native Americans from their lands couldn’t command majority support of even the white men remaining—and that, of course, is progress.

Zinni writes, “Ah for the good old days of the Good War! The old-fashioned and simple conventional war: defeat the enemy’s military forces, remove the regime, and reconstruct a defeated and compliant population.” But it is only in retrospect that the choices and results seem so simple: the Spanish-American War’s atrocities, the decision to firebomb German cities while sparing the train lines to Auschwitz, the use of nuclear weapons on Japan, the failed attempt to reconstruct Germany and the global order after World War I. Next to them, Libya and even Syria are, well … simple.

Clark is shooting at a bigger target than the other two authors: he wants to use national strategy to mend the woes of political polarization as well as institutional weakness and economic drift. His strategy has several interlinked core elements: ramp up energy production to become a net exporter, while accelerating the move away from fossil fuels through a carbon tax and government incentives; use some of the resulting national income to create a sovereign wealth fund that would both fuel strategic development at home and change the shape of U.S. development assistance abroad, by finding and supporting industries and infrastructures whose emergence would promote stronger governance and the rule of law as well as hastening indigenous growth, thus lessening the health, security, and criminal threats to the United States that breed in environments of injustice and poverty.

Conservatives will dislike this strategy because of the depth of government engagement and market shaping it foresees; progressives will bristle at its embrace of fossil fuels and the optimism that greater economic development leads to better governance. Clark argues that it represents a compromise, a grand bargain between the best insights of both strands of American ideology.

Yet that kind of compromise is exactly what our political system is unable to produce right now, as voters tell pollsters they want leaders to work together and then vote for candidates who promise obstruction. Voters seem to perceive past glories as the outcome of winning arguments and triumphant personalities rather than compromise—and civilian historians might not disagree. It’s no surprise that flag officers have no more idea than the public, political scientists, or good-government crusaders of how to produce any set of coherent policy outcomes, much less grand strategy, in our turbulent, atomized, and polarized political landscape.

What these books offer, finally, is less specific policy prescriptions than a debunking of the ideology-heavy, experience-light sound bites that constitute much of what non-experts are fed as “strategy”: Close the borders to protect ourselves from Ebola-infected terrorists. Build firehouses at home instead of firehouses in Iraq.

Stavridis, the most recently retired of the three, offers two meditations on current realities that might assist civilian strategists. One could be summarized as “When you’re in a hole, stop digging.” Know when you’ve lost a fight, whether over personal ethics, strategic communications, or military offensive—and retire with grace. Recognize when time-honored strategies, such as badgering allies to make good on commitments to burden sharing that neither leaders nor publics have any intention of keeping, have become counterproductive. Invite the allies to do what they are good at—economic development, policing, legal system reform—instead.

He also muses at considerable length about the death of strategic planning—a radical idea indeed for a military officer. Yet if it is true that the twenty-first century “acceleration of knowledge and events” is pushing military planning into “a relentlessly tactical period,” look at what it has done to planning and strategy in the civilian world. A few years ago, a senior official from the State Department’s Policy Planning staff described its function as “looking six months ahead.” George Kennan’s bones may have been rattling in his grave, but if that is the new reality, how can leaders and government, not just the military, adapt to it?

Surprisingly, the answer just may lie with Eisenhower. Stavridis and Zinni both cite a quote that is less well known to civilians than, perhaps, it should be: “Plans are nothing, planning is everything.” All three stress over and over that it is the process of planning, debating, thinking through options and possible outcomes, and asking seemingly unthinkable questions that is the bedrock of good policymaking. Establishing resources and space to do that—in the National Security Council and Cabinet departments but also in Congress and public dialogue—might not lead us to Clark’s future of climate security and energy riches, but it could hardly lead us further away. It would likely have prevented the full extent of the Iraq catastrophe. It wouldn’t end partisan competition—our system is designed for that—but it would make our partisans more informed, and more able to sample the best ideas of their opponents, without credit, in the best American tradition. That alone would be a worthy fusion of the twin traditions of military strategy and partisan governance.

The post Is a Grand Strategy for America Even Possible? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Dirty Entanglements:
Corruption, Crime, and Terrorism
by Louise I. Shelley
Cambridge University Press, 380 pp.

The connection between terrorism and crime ought not to be surprising, given that kidnapping people and killing them—the sorts of things terrorists do—are themselves crimes. This simple fact has sometimes gotten lost in the years since the 9/11 attacks amid ideologically driven efforts to define terrorism and counterterrorism as “war” rather than as a matter of criminal justice. A propensity to break the rules and commit one crime has always been associated with a propensity to commit other crimes, and not necessarily crimes of exactly the same type, which is why there are career criminals and recidivism. A nexus between terrorism and other forms of criminal behavior has long been both acknowledged and also the subject of some serious study.

Where Shelley goes beyond most earlier work on the topic is not only in the sheer volume of the evidence she has amassed but also in adding corruption to terrorism and crime to produce a trifecta of interrelated bad behavior. The malevolent cycle on which she focuses involves corrupt government officials facilitating organized criminal activity which it turn aids terrorist operations. Her principal argument is that such connections are a major part of understanding why terrorists are able to do what they do, but that such understanding has too often been lacking and government enforcement efforts have too often been siloed approaches toward each of the three problems of terrorism, crime, and corruption, with insufficient attention to connections among the three and in particular to the corruption angle. The patterns she describes prevail especially in less-developed countries, but part of her message is that the problem is global and infects developed countries as well.

Dirty Entanglements can serve also as a primer on the whole world of transnational, profit-making crime. Shelley takes the reader on a global tour of criminal operations that include not only the familiar trade in illicit drugs but also operations that deal in counterfeit goods, stolen antiquities, smuggled cigarettes, violation of intellectual property rights, and much else. While taking the tour, one can lose sight of how the connections with terrorism sometimes get thin, if they exist at all. The overall message is that this voluminous illicit activity is part of a worldwide entanglement of the three different forms of bad behavior; the detailed messages that particular terrorist operations have been facilitated by particular crimes or corrupt conduct is sometimes weaker.

At a few points, Shelley stretches to make the connections. She mentions, for example, trips to Las Vegas that the 9/11 pilot-hijackers made in the months before their attack. It is still not entirely known what they did there; Shelley suggests that the purpose of the trips was money laundering. Her main basis for saying so is that Las Vegas has casinos and that casinos have sometimes been used for money laundering. She does not explain how routing money through a Las Vegas casino would have done the hijackers any good in paying the bills for their operation or why any laundering of money would have been necessary for this sort of one-off operation in which the perpetrators would all die. The exhaustive official investigations have concluded that it was more likely that Las Vegas, with its large and diverse tourist trade, was a convenient place for the hijackers, who had been living in different parts of the country, to meet safely and inconspicuously.

Occasional stretches notwithstanding, Shelley successfully makes her case that there are indeed many connections around the world between terrorism and other criminal operations, and that in a significant number of them some sort of official corruption plays a role in facilitating the crime. She also usefully illustrates the variety of ways in which crime that in other circumstances would be only about making money can serve terrorist purposes. The obvious and preeminent way is by helping to finance terrorist operations and the maintenance of the groups that conduct them. Another is to provide services, such as false documents, that by their nature are outputs of criminal enterprise rather than legitimate business. Yet another type of connection occurs when the effect of the criminal activity on larger populations advances other terrorist objectives. Specifically, some Islamist terrorist groups have viewed narcotics trafficking as a way not only to raise money but also to undermine Western societies where the drugs are consumed.

Shelley persuades us, through the quantity and variety of her material, that there is a whole lot of nasty and illicit activity out there and that terrorists are involved in a significant part of it. Putting this finding in a larger perspective is a different matter. Shelley considers her work to be part of the literature on globalization and, as she puts it, the decline of the state. It is true that the freer movement of people, money, information, and ideas that is associated with globalization has facilitated the operations of both international terrorists and transnational crime in the same way it has facilitated the worldwide operations of legitimate business. This does not imply, however, that links among terrorism, crime, and corruption are inherently stronger in a more globalized world. Some of the strongest such links are within the boundaries of a single nation. Afghanistan provides some current examples.

Terrorism is the one sort of illicit business, out of the three that are the subject of this book, that is of greatest public and policy concern. Understanding links to the other two can help us to think about the causes and consequences of terrorism and about better ways to combat it. Shelley touches on the consequences when addressing a subject such as the society-debilitating effects of the terrorist-related drug trade. Her discussion also is a useful reminder that terrorism involves many ingredients besides the evil ideological allure of terrorist leaders, and that reducing terrorism is not just a matter of dispatching with force those leaders and their most dedicated followers.

Crime and corruption are not root causes of terrorism, however. People do not become terrorists because they are able to make money smuggling cigarettes or because corrupt officials make it easier for them to make money illicitly. Crime and corruption are at most operational facilitators of terrorism. That leaves open the question of how much difference they make regarding how much terrorism there will be in the world. Many terrorists are resourceful. If they cannot get money and other operational necessities one way, they are apt to find them some other way.

Shelley weaves corruption into the 9/11 story by recalling that two of the hijackers used as identification fraudulent driver’s licenses obtained from bad apples in the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles whose main customers were illegal immigrants. She invokes the broken-windows theory of crime fighting in arguing that curbing what may seem to be minor offenses such as selling phony driver’s licenses is important in preventing big offenses, including terrorist attacks. One can accept that point and acknowledge that in counterterrorism every little bit helps, including everything that makes a terrorist’s task even slightly more difficult or inconvenient, while also realizing that the level of integrity in the Virginia DMV is not likely to be one of the more important variables in determining how much terrorism hits the United States.

Shelley wants governmental authorities to develop comprehensive strategies that treat terrorism, crime, and corruption together rather than through what she sees as current stovepiped approaches. We can applaud any increase in understanding of the connections she describes but still wonder what practical difference a consciously comprehensive strategy would make. Fighting crime and corruption are, after all, worthy and important objectives even if there were no connection with terrorism. As with so much else in public policy, this is in large part a matter of competing priorities amid limited resources. A strategy that covers everything risks being a strategy that prioritizes nothing, especially when “everything” runs the gamut from graft in a state agency in the United States to trade in counterfeit DVDs in Russia.

The post A Thief, a Dirty Politician, and a Suicide Bomber Walk Into a Bar … appeared first on Washington Monthly.

One lesson of that performance may be that other big-name politicians should also look out for unexpectedly potent insurgent challengers from within their own party. Democrats rooting for someone to take on Hillary Clinton from the left certainly took heart from Teachout’s performance. But another important lesson focuses on Teachout’s individual virtues and talents, which make her someone very much worth watching in national politics. Though a generation younger than Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, Teachout shares the profile of being both a crusading reformer by temperament and also an academic who has set down her ideas about politics and government with intellectual vigor.

Corruption in America:
From Benjamin Franklin’s
Snuff Box to Citizens United
by Zephyr Teachout
Harvard University Press, 376 pp.

The key to Teachout’s political philosophy is expressed in her recently published book, Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United, which she started working on long before she decided to run for governor, and which was still in press at the time of the primary election. She wrote the book, she says, primarily in answer to conservative members of the Supreme Court, who, in a series of decisions climaxing in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010, have successively narrowed the legal definition of corruption to the point that it now effectively includes only outright bribery. In Citizens United, for example, the majority struck down corporate spending limits in politics on the grounds that there is nothing inherently corrupting about corporations trying to buy influence with politicians so long as there is no explicit quid pro quo.

Teachout spends much of her book showing just how naive, dangerous, and, frankly, anti-American the Founding Fathers would have considered such reasoning. She makes the point vivid by recounting the story of the snuffbox presented by Louis XVI to Benjamin Franklin upon completion of Franklin’s diplomatic service in Paris.

Featuring the king’s portrait surrounded by 408 diamonds “of a beautiful water,” set in two wreathed rows around the picture, the gift was an object of great material value. No one mistook it for a bribe, but nor did Franklin’s American contemporaries imagine that such Old World examples of money in politics amounted to anything other than an attempt at corrupting him.

The Founders’ alertness to the psychological effects of gifts found expression in the Articles of Confederation and later in the Constitution, which states, in one of its more strongly worded prohibitions, that “[n]o person holding any office of profit or trust under them [the United States], shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state.” Franklin had to turn the gift over to Congress and ask permission to keep it, which Congress granted, making Franklin beholden to that body rather than to the king of France.

The Founders believed that politicians are responsible for furthering the public good, but that they can do so only if their reason is not clouded by corrupting influences. Franklin himself, in a speech written for the Constitutional Convention, argued that executive-branch officials should work for free, so that “posts of honor” do not become “places of profit.” The idea was shot down, but it sparked a debate that led to residency requirements for House and Senate members and a constitutional prohibition against holding appointed and elected office at the same time.

The framers defined the problem of corruption broadly, so that it included not just simple bribery, but, says Teachout, any behavior or system that “leads to excessive private interest in the exercise of public power.” The goal was to create a legal “bulwark against temptation” that would deter future lawmakers and special interests from acquiring too much wealth and power.

Judges followed suit by upholding expansive corruption laws for the next two hundred years. Federal and state laws held that acts can have a corrupting influence even if they don’t involve an overt bribe. Until the 1920s, courts even refused to enforce contracts that were secured by paid lobbyists, much as they refused to enforce contracts that involved prostitution, because lobbying was considered to have a corrupting influence on politicians. As one Supreme Court ruling from 1853 put it, lobbyists “sully the purity” of lawmakers who are supposed to “act from high considerations of public policy.”

The bulwark against corruption was slowly dismantled in the twentieth century, with ideological attacks that came from both the left and the right. Teachout recounts how many liberal legal theorists came to view corruption as not a significant problem in itself. Rather, they saw unequal access to the political system as the main threat. Under this view, what we really need to worry about is the fact that rich people are able to buy more influence than poor people, not the fact that politicians have come to have a transactional relationship with all their constituents.

Teachout, by contrast, argues that while the problems of unequal political influence are real, a distinct problem of corruption arises when serving “the public interest” comes to mean simply being a broker among different contending interests. It’s a view of government that she credibly associates with James Madison, but with which Andrew Cuomo and even many left-wing Democrats might well disagree. Those who celebrate “pluralism,” for example, tend to view the public interest as whatever occurs when all the interests in society are accorded a fair role in the process, not as a truth that is independent of politics and discoverable by reason.

Yet while liberals have played some role over the last generation in de-emphasizing the relationship between corruption and the public interest, the real harm has been done by conservatives, particularly through their increasing grip over the judiciary. Here, Teachout sees the ideological damage coming from legal theorists who have adopted a Hobbesian view of human nature under which no one ever acts for noble or patriotic causes, but only out of pursuit of material self-interest. In effect, the mind-set holds that since there really is no such thing as public spiritedness (only “public choice” game playing and “rent seeking”), there can’t exist anything that corrupts a politician’s pursuit of the public good. Political corruption, if it exists at all, is in the realm of criminal bribery statutes and property crime, not an existential threat to liberty and self-government as the framers of the Constitution saw it.

This conservative view first became embodied in law with the Supreme Court’s 1976 decision in Buckley v. Valeo, which diminished the framers’ concept of corruption beyond recognition even as it extended the meaning of “free speech” beyond any historical meaning. In Buckley, the Court established a new distinction between political campaign contributions and political expenditures. The Court held that regulating contributions is valid, but placing a limit on expenditures is not, because they are less likely to result in “quid pro quo” corruption. The ruling paved the way for future challenges to campaign finance law, and laid the groundwork for Citizens United. It is certainly refreshing to watch Teachout remind jurists who pretend to wrap themselves in the mantle of strict construction just how at odds their views of human nature and the role of government are with those of the framers.

Today, Teachout writes, we need to re-conceptualize corruption so that it once again includes “the vast range of inappropriate dependencies and self-serving behavior that made up the web of the world of corruption for the founders.” Such behaviors include, in Teachout’s analysis, not only the casual buying and selling of influence that is dressed up these days as lobbying or exercises in plutocratic “free speech.” It also includes the corruption of public purpose that inevitably results when economic power becomes too concentrated—a tendency that can only be checked by reinventing another lost tradition of American life: rigorous antitrust enforcement. Bringing about such change is a generational project, she concedes, but surely she is right in insisting that it must begin by reacquainting Americans with the foundational role that the concept of corruption has played in preserving American freedom and democracy.

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