Narrator: On May 22, 2011, the National Weather Service issued a tornado watch for Joplin, Missouri, four hours before disaster struck. The city’s sirens blared a warning seventeen minutes before the tornado touched down. Yet, when the mile-wide funnel cloud tore through the city, it killed 158 people and injured over a thousand more. A post-disaster report found that the majority of residents had not immediately sought shelter. The warnings were clear, the data was accurate, but the connection between information and action was broken.

This tragic gap between knowing a risk and preventing a catastrophe is the central puzzle explored in Michael Lewis's book, The Fifth Risk. Lewis investigates what happens when the vast, complex, and often invisible machinery of the U.S. government—a machine built to manage catastrophic risks—is handed over to an administration that is not only unprepared but fundamentally uninterested in how it works. The book reveals that the most dangerous threats are not always the ones we can name, like pandemics or nuclear war, but the one we fail to imagine: the risk of catastrophic mismanagement.

Narrator: Presidential transitions are not mere formalities; they are legally mandated, meticulously planned operations crucial for the stable transfer of power. The outgoing Obama administration had prepared binders of critical information for every major government role, ready to brief their successors on everything from ongoing military operations to the intricacies of the electrical grid. A non-profit called the Partnership for Public Service, led by a man named Max Stier, had spent years professionalizing this process, believing that, as he put it, "a bungled transition becomes a bungled presidency."

However, the 2016 Trump transition defied all precedent. Initially, Donald Trump resisted even forming a transition team, telling his appointee, Chris Christie, that they were smart enough to figure it out after the victory party. When Christie went ahead anyway, assembling a team and creating lists of qualified candidates, his work was abruptly thrown out after the election. On the orders of Jared Kushner, who held a grudge against Christie for prosecuting his father years earlier, Christie was fired. The binders of prepared work were discarded, and the experienced team was dismissed. What followed was a scramble. Government departments that had spent months preparing for a smooth handover found themselves waiting for landing teams that never arrived or were staffed by people with little interest in learning. This chaotic start was not just a political stumble; it was the first sign that the new administration viewed the government not as a complex instrument to be mastered, but as a hostile entity to be dismantled.

Narrator: When Rick Perry was nominated to be Secretary of Energy, he was most famous for his 2011 debate gaffe where he tried to name three federal agencies he would eliminate and, after naming two, could only say, "Oops." The third agency he forgot was the very one he was now set to lead: the Department of Energy (DOE). It soon became clear that Perry, like many Americans, had no idea what the DOE actually did. He assumed it was about oil and gas.

In reality, the DOE is the nation's steward of nuclear weapons, responsible for ensuring the safety of the U.S. arsenal and preventing accidental detonations, like the one narrowly avoided in 1961 when a B-52 bomber broke apart over North Carolina. It is also responsible for cleaning up vast nuclear waste sites like Hanford in Washington state, a project so complex and expensive that any shortcut could lead to environmental disaster. Furthermore, the DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest funder of basic research in the physical sciences in America, fueling innovation in everything from supercomputing to renewable energy. Yet, the Trump administration’s landing team at the DOE showed little interest in these functions. Instead, they sent a questionnaire that seemed designed to identify and punish employees who had worked on climate change initiatives. The message was clear: expertise was not valued, and political loyalty was paramount. This willful ignorance toward the department's most critical functions created a massive, unseen risk to national security and scientific progress.

Narrator: The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has an annual budget larger than the GDP of many countries, but its most vital work is often misunderstood. It is not just about farm subsidies; it is a lifeline for rural America. It runs food assistance programs that provide, on average, just $1.40 per meal to families with children, the elderly, and the disabled. It manages a bank with over $220 billion in assets that provides loans for rural housing and infrastructure. And its scientists conduct crucial research on everything from food safety to crop resilience.

The people who run these programs are often driven by a profound sense of mission. Kevin Concannon, who ran the food and nutrition services under Obama, was inspired to enter public service after seeing how government-funded social workers helped his family cope with his brother’s schizophrenia. He told his staff to always remember the unseen people their work benefited. Cathie Woteki, the USDA’s chief scientist, dedicated her career to using science to ensure food safety, becoming the first undersecretary for Food Safety after the deadly Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak. These were experts motivated by a desire to solve problems and help people. The risk Lewis identifies is what happens when these dedicated public servants are replaced by political appointees who either don't understand the mission or are actively hostile to it. When the Trump administration took over, it proposed eliminating the entire Rural Development office, a move that shocked Lillian Salerno, an administrator who had dedicated herself to helping the very people who had elected Trump. The "people risk" is the hollowing out of government expertise, leaving vital programs in the hands of the unqualified or the uncaring.

Narrator: The U.S. government is the world’s most prolific collector of data, and much of it is managed by the Department of Commerce and its sub-agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. This data is not an abstract resource; it is the foundation of public safety and economic prosperity. It powers the weather forecasts that warn of tornadoes and hurricanes, and it provides the raw material for entire industries. For example, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur named David Friedberg used free, publicly available government weather and soil data to create The Climate Corporation, a company that provided weather insurance to farmers and was eventually sold for over a billion dollars.

The value of this data is immense, but it depends on two things: its continued collection and its free accessibility. The Trump administration threatened both. The appointment of Barry Myers, the CEO of the private weather company AccuWeather, to run NOAA was a glaring conflict of interest. For years, Myers had lobbied to prevent the National Weather Service from communicating directly with the public, hoping to force citizens to pay for weather information that was gathered with their own tax dollars. This move signaled a shift from treating data as a public good to treating it as a private commodity. It was a war on data that threatened to leave Americans less informed and less safe, returning to the problem of the Joplin tornado on a national scale. If the government stops collecting data on climate change, or if it puts that data behind a paywall, it blinds the country to one of its most significant long-term risks.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from The Fifth Risk is that the most profound danger a country faces may not be an external enemy or a predictable disaster, but the internal decay of competence. The fifth risk is the one that emerges when a government willfully ignores evidence, scorns expertise, and fails to manage the complex systems it inherited. It is the risk of not knowing what you don't know, because you have fired the people who were paid to find out.

Michael Lewis leaves the reader with a challenging realization: the quiet, often unglamorous work of public servants is one of the most critical functions in a modern society. The book is a powerful call to look past the political theater and recognize the invisible infrastructure of governance that keeps the water clean, the food safe, and the country secure. It asks us to consider what happens when we take that infrastructure for granted and, more importantly, what we stand to lose when it falls apart.