Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [99]
Work itself was becoming bogged down in the bureaucratic swamps that had replaced the physical ones. The actual bogs had been drained but somehow remained as ghosts, dragging down each generation of trespassers in turn; the federal capital thus retained the psychic nature of the original swamp, and its function too, as all the toxins of the national life were dumped there to be stirred together and broken down in its burbling pits.
Trying to hack her way through this wilderness was beginning to get Diane both results and resistance. She spent about fourteen hours a day, Frank reckoned, in meetings up on the eleventh floor at NSF and elsewhere in the area. Many of these meetings he did not attend and only heard about, usually from Edgardo, who as director of the math division and a long-time colleague of Diane’s took part in quite a few. Some agencies were interested in joining the cause, Edgardo reported, and others resented the suggestion that things be done differently, considering it an attack on turf. In general the farther removed from making policy, the more interested they were to help. A fair number of agencies with regulatory power were fully turned by the industries they were supposed to regulate, and thus usually agents of the enemies of change; among these were the Department of Energy (nuclear and oil industry), the FDA (food and drug), the U.S. Forest Service and other parts of the Department of Agriculture (timber and ag), and the EPA (a curious mix, depending on division, but some of them bound to the pesticide industry and all under the thumb of the president). Republican administrations had regularly staffed these agencies with people chosen from the industries being regulated, and these people had then written regulations with the industries’ profits in mind. Now these agencies were not just toothless but actively dangerous, no matter how good their people were at the technocrat level. They were turned at the top, their potential good suborned.
Thus it was that Diane had to work around and against several of these agencies, particularly Energy. Not that nuclear wasn’t arguably a valid part of some mid-range clean energy solution, as Edgardo often argued; but the Energy leadership took this to mean also trying to cripple other, less dangerous alternatives. It was becoming clear that part of NSF’s project had to include making efforts to get leadership of the captive agencies changed, for the good of the environment and the long-term health of the country; but that implied involvement in presidential politics. For the turned agencies were now out to do the same to NSF, working on the administration to remove the director and upper management and replace them with people more sympathetic to the economy.
So, on top of everything else: war of the agencies.
The first manifestation of this new realm of conflict was the appointment of a new NSF Inspector General, who turned out to be a man who had most recently been Inspector General in the Department of Energy; before that he had worked for Southern California Edison, and had been a major contributor to the president’s campaign.
No accident, of course, Edgardo said. It was a first shot, aimed by OMB itself. That was bad, very bad. Edgardo went on a long paranoid aria during one of their runs, detailing just how bad it could be, and all the ways Diane was going