41

Monday, February 8, 2021, Noon Eastern Standard Time

Kathleen rode the escalator up from the depths of the DuPont Metro station, reading the Walt Whitman inscription from the Civil War that encircled the north exit as she rose:

THUS IN SILENCE IN DREAMS’ PROJECTIONS,
RETURNING, RESUMING, I THREAD MY WAY THROUGH THE HOSPITALS;
THE HURT AND WOUNDED I PACIFY WITH SOOTHING HAND,
I SIT BY THE RESTLESS ALL THE DARK NIGHT — SOME ARE SO YOUNG;
SOME SUFFER SO MUCH — I RECALL THE EXPERIENCE SWEET AND SAD,…

Pretty damned topical, Kathleen thought to herself.
She crossed the Circle and went into the Starbucks, being careful to keep away from the other customers.

I should have asked him what he looked like, she said to herself. But there wasn’t much of a mystery there. A lone tall skinny man in glasses rose as she came in.

“I looked you up on line to see what you looked like,” he said. Then, realizing what that sounded like, he said quickly, “Not in a stalky way. I just realized one of us had to know what the other one looked like.”

“It’s fine,” she said. “Where do you want to eat?”

“Let’s walk for a bit,” he said.

“Okay,” she said, wondering where this was leading. Jesus, let this not be another #MeToo situation, she thought.

As they exited, at a prudent distance from one another, Hunter looked around as if he did not want to be followed. Kathleen wondered what exactly was going to happen here.

“Where are we headed?” she asked as they strode northwest up Connecticut Avenue.

“Just walking for now,” he said. They reached the light at Q Street and stopped with a number of other pedestrians, all of whom spread out to achieve social distance.

“Let’s turn right for a bit.”

Kathleen followed him east on Q.

“It seems like there’s something you want to tell me,” she said from behind.

“In a bit,” he said, walking out into the street to avoid an oncoming gaggle of unmasked and un-distanced tourists. They walked a block further and were alone. She thought he might begin to talk then, but he kept going until he reached 16th Street and turned left. She was about to ask exactly where they were headed again when he stopped at a Turkish restaurant on the east side of the street, walked to the door, and opened it for her. She looked at him, saw he looked more relaxed, and nodded slightly to him in thanks as she walked in.

He hailed a man behind the bar in what she assumed was Turkish, and headed up some stairs at the back to a mezzanine above. “You want some Turkish coffee?” he asked. “It’s the best in the District.”

“Sure,” she said, sitting down at a small table across from him.

He yelled down to the man behind the bar. “Two Turkish coffees.”

The man responded with a long nod forward and went off, presumably to brew their drinks.

“Okay,” she said. “This is all very mysterious. What do you have to tell me?”

He paused, then began asking her questions.

“What did you notice about the virus numbers?”

“Uh, they seemed suspiciously… upbeat the last six months or so. Straight-line declines.”

“Very good,” he said, rocking back and forth. He stopped suddenly. “Should I say this is all on background?”

She cringed inwardly, but kept her expression unchanged. “Why?”

“Because what I have to tell you is big, and big people would not like that I’m telling it to you.”

“So why are you telling it to me?”

He stopped and looked down at the table.

“Because I’m sick of the bullshit.”

“Okay,” she said. “What bullshit?”

“The war on numbers,” he said. “This is on background right now.”

“Okay,” she said slowly. “Just for future reference, you’re supposed to say that before we even start talking. But I’ll respect your privacy.” She thought to herself, well here’s a waste of an hour I’ll never get back.

“All right then,” he said, exhaling. “Have you ever heard of the USDA Economic Research Service?”

“Vaguely,” she said. Oh boy, she thought. We’re going to get to the heart of the Department of Agriculture! Pulitzer here we come!

“It’s a lot more important an agency than you might think. It’s not just counting cows. You can make an argument that the ERS is the mother of all statistical agencies in the United States government. It was formed 40 years before the Census Bureau. It goes back to the Civil War.”

“So, what does this have to do with the CDC virus numbers?”

“You remember a couple of years ago when the entire ERS was relocated to the Kansas City area?”

“Vaguely, again,” she said.

“The ERS did research on hunger, and provided the statistical rationale for the Food Stamp program and a bunch of other safety net programs,” Hunter said. “That angered a lot of Republicans. They want those programs destroyed.”

“So they relocated an agency. What effect did that have?”

“Exactly the one they wanted,” Hunter answered. “Two thirds of the staff refused to move. Hiring to replace them was a lost cause. Most of the intellectual capital of the agency walked out the door two Septembers ago. Reports were delayed, numbers were questionable. Even with the Democrats in charge of the House, it was difficult to get statistical support to maintain those programs.”

“Okay,” she replied. “What does this have to do with the CDC?”

“Well, as you know, the CDC used to publish regular pandemic reports and the official outlook for infections and deaths going forward.”

“Yes.”

“The election was possibly going to be won or lost based on what my old agency reported. You can’t nail down exactly whether one particular report swung one election. But you post steady improvement in the outlook for the virus, and record declining deaths, for a few months prior to an election, and the President is definitely going to be harder to beat.”

“Right.”

“And conversely,” Hunter said, “If the CDC reported rising infections, and hospitalizations, and higher deaths every month for a few months before the election, that was going to make his re-election pretty difficult.”

“Got it.”

“If you could put your thumb on the CDC scale, and also maybe on the agencies that report job growth and Gross Domestic Product, which are the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the BLS, and U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, or BEA, well, then, you’ve really got something. You can push the numbers toward whatever you want them to be.”

“Are you saying that the President got re-elected because of some deep dark conspiracy to produce fake statistics?” Kathleen was now officially annoyed.

“Actually, I’m not,” Hunter said. “I can’t prove that causality. I suspect they couldn’t quite pull that off for last November’s election. Him getting the virus – if he really did – probably pushed him over the top more than anything else.”

“Are you saying he did not actually have the virus?” Kathleen’s pulse quickened as she detected something that might actually resemble a story.

“No,” Hunter replied. Kathleen’s face fell. If Hunter noticed, he didn’t let on.

“Though there were definitely some questionable decisions that caused unemployment to be understated, at least for May of 2020,” he continued. “And of course, the White House took the collection of national virus cases and deaths away from the CDC last July and gave it to HHS. And did their best to stop testing.”

“So what exactly are you saying?”

“I’m saying that they used the Economic Research Service of the USDA as a test case. They succeeded there in crippling that agency’s ability to gather numbers that would not serve the purposes of wealthy Republican donors. Now that they got away with that, and the heist, so to speak, was not really reported, well, now they are out for bigger game.”

“Such as?”

“All the federal government statistical agencies. Across the board. Every single one of them used to be stocked with career federal employees who took their oaths to the Constitution seriously.”

“Statisticians take oaths to the Constitution?”

“You bet they do.” Hunter raised his hand. ‘I, Hunter Laszlo, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.’ Every employee of the federal government takes that pledge. From the Secretary of State down to the janitor in the Department of Transportation headquarters lobby buffing the floor.”

“Wow. I did not know that.”

“But you know who doesn’t take that oath?”

“Who?”

“Private contractors. Unless they are read into some classified project, they don’t take any oath. So, when government functions get outsourced, you replace these literally dedicated public servants with someone whose only motive is profit. Which boils down to, pleasing whoever is paying you.”

“And there’s privatization going on in this sphere?”

“All over the place. It’s what we military vets used to call ‘a self-licking ice-cream cone.’ Republicans in Congress get campaign funds from private interests. Then Republicans in Congress downsize federal agencies. Then the federal agencies, predictably, do a less good job than they used to. Then Republicans in Congress scream bloody murder that the federal government is a bloated bureaucracy that cannot get the job done, and that must be downsized further. Also, to get the job done, they get their friends in the private sector – some of whom used to work in the same agency – to contract with the agency to do the same stuff the downsized oath-taking federal employees used to. Almost always, there’s no real savings, nor is there better performance. And that’s great! Because the Republicans can use that to scream bloody murder about how terrible the federal government is again, and downsize the agency even more. You ever hear of Maxfield King?”

“Sure. He’s some kind of power behind the throne in the President’s administration.”

“He is the prime example of this. I used to be a first lieutenant in the infantry in Iraq. I used to make, I don’t know, $800 a month. Half the time I’d be standing next to a private contractor who was making $200,000 a year, tax free. He wasn’t doing anything different from me, unless it was something that was less of a pain in the ass than the stuff my CO had me doing. Hell, sometimes I’d be reporting to these guys. I don’t even know if that was kosher, but it happened.”

“Huh,” Kathleen said. The guy behind the bar was lumbering up the stairs with two Turkish coffees.

“Teşekkür ederim,” Hunter said to the man as he placed the tray on the table. The waiter tilted his head and stuck out his chin in response, turned, and went back down the stairs.

“Now I’m not saying these were bad guys,” Hunter continued. “Most of them were patriots, competent and professional, and good guys. But once in a while there would be a real son of a bitch in the mix. Some of them had no problem shooting any civilian that looked cross-eyed at them. Maybe you remember the case from about 15 years ago. Right in the center of a big city in Iraq. Some of these guys were doing a security detail for the State Department or somebody. Anyway, there was a traffic jam and one of them started seeing bad guys in every passing jitney. He lit the place up in the middle of rush hour on a Thursday, which is like their Friday over there. Over a dozen civilians got killed because one guy lost his shit. And King had them spirited out of the country, and they avoided a trial for years. Finally, one or two of them got sentenced to hard time. But the President swooped in and pardoned those fuckers. Do you know how dangerous it is to be an American soldier after something like that happens? And those guys just took off. Left us holding a bag full of shit.”

Kathleen stared at him. “Okay,” she said. “But we’ve gotten pretty far away from the CDC virus stats.”

“Not as far as you might think,” he said. “We had contractors getting in to the CDC statistical service even before the White House took the whole thing away from us last summer, and appropriators cutting our headcount. But we also had changes at the top of the management structure, longtime career federal employees replaced by inexperienced cronies of the President. And the whole situation drove a lot of indispensable, knowledgeable people out of the agency, either into the private sector or else into early retirement.

“What effect did that have?”

“It might not have been all that bad if some of them had come back as contractors to keep the place running. But when some of them applied for jobs with the contractors who started working for CDC, it turned out that competence at statistical analysis or managing workflow were completely irrelevant to them.”

“So did they change the numbers to help the President’s re-election?”

“You might think they would hack the virus numbers to make them look better, and there was some of that going on. But mostly, across the government, it was complete indifference as to whether the numbers got reported at all. It’s just vandalism. They are breaking the government, and specifically they are trying to make sure that any part of the government that reports facts is completely unable to do its job. It took me a while to figure it out. They see credible data as the enemy. Even if it’s data that makes them look good, it’s a threat to them. They are trying to break our ability to see reality for what it is. It’s taken since the 1860s to build up this capability in our government. They have deeply damaged that capability in just 4 years.”

“How do you know this is policy, and not just incompetence?”

“That’s the best part for them. They can just throw their hands in the air and tell you, ‘We tried, but the federal government is incompetent by nature. We need to have the private sector do these statistics.’ And the private sector actors that do the statistics? They all just happen to be friends of either the President or the Republican leadership. The Republicans have been slandering the federal government forever. At least since the McCarthy Era. Which by comparison to now seems like a golden age. Because now the forces trying to destroy the government and smear its employees have infinite money and have all the levers of government. Joe McCarthy never had that.”

“Democrats are no angels. I’ve covered them. I know.”

“Of course they aren’t. But Democrats are basically no different than they’ve ever been. Now there’s a left wing to the Democratic Party that didn’t exist ten years ago. But that is the result of the raging inequality in incomes and wealth that agencies like the Bureau of Labor Statistics used to quantify so well. Now we don’t have the funds or the people or the intellectual wherewithal to keep doing it. Some of my colleagues now report to an outside consultant that is responsible for publishing the virus data. My colleagues are trying to get the numbers right, but they don’t control what the White House actually releases anymore. What was today’s number again, for new cases?”

“500.”

“Seems like kind of a round number, doesn’t it?”

“I guess.”

“Just slightly less than last month, which is slightly less than the month before, and so on.”

“Are they fudging the data?”

“I can’t tell you that,” Hunter said. “All I can tell you is that late last summer, when I was still issuing the reports, the numbers were trending higher and higher, and used to vary a lot more. One day it might be 1,973, the next it might be 3,040, the next 2,631. There was an upward trend at that moment, but it jumped around a fair amount around that trend line. That to me looks like reality. This smoothly declining number every day, week after week, that doesn’t look like reality to me. My dad used to be in Naval Intelligence, tracking subs. You know how they would find Soviet subs? They’d look for straight lines in the water. ‘Nature does not operate in a straight line,’ he’d tell me. Well, I don’t think statistics move in a straight line, either. Did you check out the adjustment numbers for previous months’ reporting?”

“I didn’t.”

“My guess is, before the election they decided they were going to show a reassuring decline in deaths and new cases, come hell or high water. And hide some of the negativity in the out-month adjustments. Have you checked those adjustment numbers?”

“No.”

“You guys usually report just the headline numbers, right?”

“I think that’s standard practice.”

“Yeah, they count on that. It’s the same for the jobs numbers, unemployment. They seemed to be about to cover up how bad things were last spring, after the virus shut the economy down. But someone with half a brain cell doped them to the fact that trends, not absolute numbers, win elections. Do you know what the unemployment rate was for Reagan’s re-election in 1984?”

Katherine had no idea. “4 percent? 5 percent?”

“7.2 percent. But it was down from 10.2 percent. The trend is all that matters. If people feel things are getting better, they feel good. So, like I said, someone with half a brain got to them to realize that it was in their interest to jack the cases, and deaths, and unemployment, to the highest possible level, so they could show a substantial drop in those numbers by Election Day.”

“So, then they had to fudge the numbers on the virus and jobs to show steady improvement from that terrible starting point.”

“And the more terrible the starting point, the better the chance they had to show improvement. Remember that May jobs report in 2020?”

“No.”

“Everyone was expecting that it would show 20-plus percent unemployment. Instead, it showed a decline in unemployment, to 13% or so. The stock market boomed, public pessimism eased briefly.”

“You think that was dishonest?”

“I don’t know. I do know that the BLS said within days that the number should have been three points higher, because millions of people who actually were unemployed reported themselves as not quite unemployed, or not looking for work, and that they had made a mistake. There was a ton of chaos back then, so it could have been an honest mistake. But that very chaos meant there was a lot of leeway to alter policies on how things got reported. It’s hard to say what was fudging and what was just a mistake.”

“But at any rate, this goes beyond the CDC or White House virus numbers, is what you are saying?”

“In my judgment, it does. The virus actually interrupted their larger ongoing plan. They had been at war with the truth, but even more, they were at war with the public’s perception that truth is even knowable. They wanted the public to disbelieve all sources of facts and data and analysis. Hell, maybe even theirs. If no facts were knowable, then they could get away with anything, and anyone trying to honestly put forward a generally accurate picture of the truth would be ‘fake news,’ a ‘whiner,’ a ‘sore loser.’ They wanted, and I think still want, an electorate that no longer demands, or even expects, or even thinks it’s possible, for government to tell them what is true. And that applied to CDC, the Intelligence Community, law enforcement, Social Security, Medicare, the Fed, the U.S. Trade Representative, and even their allegedly favorite part of government, the only one they pretended to treat with any respect at all, the military. That’s how they were going for the bipartisanship. ‘We agree with you liberals! The U.S. military is mismanaged too! Look how straight we’re playing it!’ They were taking advantage of a fashionable cynicism that increasingly pervaded all sides, including the liberal side, and especially youth. Somehow, we had raised a generation that believed the U.S. federal government could do nothing right. The government was evil and could solve no problem. Except it somehow also was so diabolically clever it was at the bottom of all world conspiracies. Let me ask you something,” Hunter said to her.

“Wow. Take a breath,” Kathleen said.

“Sorry, this stuff gets me going. Let me ask you something. List the top ten achievements of human beings since we crawled out of the primordial ooze, or, if you’re a fundamentalist, since the world was created in 4004 B.C. Make a list in your mind.”

“Okay,” Kathleen said.

“It might include things like, I don’t know, splitting the atom. Sequencing the human genome. Ending slavery and Jim Crow. Curing diseases like yellow fever, making AIDS survivable. Defeating fascism and communism. Providing civil and voting rights to women and minorities. Transcontinental railroads. Interstate highways. Modern passenger jet travel. Communication satellites. Inventing the Internet. And putting twelve people on the moon and bringing them all back safely. What do all these things have in common? They all were completely or substantially the doing of the United States federal government. The single most stupendously successful organization in the history of the human race. If you think it isn’t, then tell me what is. You think vandalizing and sabotaging this unrivaled paragon of human institutions will have no impact on our lives? Our life as we know it has been created by the U.S. federal government. It’s done some bad things, to be sure. Some really bad things. So have all great institutions. Do you vandalize your home whenever it springs a leak? Do you stop maintaining it out of spite? Maybe if someone in your household can make a buck off of the sabotage by selling the house. This government in many ways is our national home. It’s being vandalized for profit. The thermostats are being hacked. The security system has been turned off. The furniture is being spirited away. The food’s poisoned and the entire family is sick with a virus. Let me ask you one final question, Ms. Kiersay.”

Kathleen waited, mouth agape, stunned by this avalanche of unexpected eloquence.

“The Republican Party likes to go on and on about how they revere the Founders, the Founders, the Founders. Tell me, what did the Founders found? It’s not a trick question. It’s only one thing. One thing. Not ‘free enterprise.’ Not capitalism. Not AR-15s. Only one thing. The United States federal government. When it was great, we were great. Now the government’s ability to see reality for what it is is being destroyed, which means that the government itself is being prepared for destruction. Do something, Ms. Kiersay. Start with the HHS virus statistical department and the BLS and the BEA. Maybe go from there to Maxfield King.”

With that, he threw a bill on the table, spun around, bounced down the stairs, and went out the door, leaving Kathleen still open-mouthed and wondering what had just happened.

© 2020 Nolan O’Brian