The Weed Agency (14 page)

“The Inspector General’s office just called.”

“What did he want?” Humphrey asked. He almost fooled her into thinking he wasn’t unnerved by those words.

Suddenly the intercom on his desk beeped to life. His secretary, Carla, announced that it was USDA Inspector General Demetrius Palmer on the line.

Humphrey picked up the boxy receiver. “Mr. Palmer! How do you do?” The voice on the other end was not nearly so warm.

“Travel records for the past four years? Absolutely.”

Shortly after sending over the records, Humphrey asked for a meeting with the recently appointed Inspector General Palmer.

The first available meeting time was a week later. Humphrey crossed the massive building and arrived early. Humphrey didn’t know much about Palmer, but he instinctively perceived all inspectors general as potential adversaries.

Palmer was already one of President Clinton’s favorites, starting in the Department of Commerce and finding, in short order, a web of egregious contractor overcharging. He had been appointed to the Department of Agriculture IG spot a few months ago.

Humphrey had taught Wilkins to consider OIG staff the way cops considered internal affairs snoops in their precincts. He would have sneeringly labeled them the “rat squad,” but that nickname had already been taken by the agency’s invasive rodent management and abatement working group.

Palmer’s office suite was quiet, diligent, not a thing out of place. The secretary said Palmer was running late, and when the tall, black, perfectly groomed lawyer emerged from his office several minutes later, he offered Humphrey an apology that didn’t seem apologetic at all.

They entered Palmer’s office, where the walls were covered with awards, a photo of him with the president here, a photo with Janet Reno there. Palmer had already laid out a variety of documents and spreadsheets on his desk.

“I’ll get straight to it, Humphrey,” Palmer began. “The travel budget for your agency’s senior staff is … considerable.”

“Well considered, I would argue,” he said with a smile. Palmer didn’t smile back. Instead, he simply looked through a series of photocopied records where he had marked certain lines with adhesive notes.

“Last April, University of Tokyo. Spain, early May, International Organization for Biological Control of Noxious Animals and Plants. June, Victoria, British Columbia, Society for Ecological Restoration. August, International Workshop on Grapevine Trunk Diseases, Valencia, Spain. September, New Zealand Biosecurity Institute’s Seminar, Wairakei Resort Hotel, Taupo, New Zealand.”

He removed his glasses.

“I’ve seen diplomats who rack up fewer frequent flyer miles than you, Humphrey,” Palmer said, as serious as the end of happy hour.

“Mr. Palmer, I admit, I’m a bit surprised that you find this to be an issue,” Humphrey began. “The very name of our agency explains the necessity of this travel. ‘Invasive,’ as in ‘invading,’ as in ‘from somewhere else.’ If we could do all of our work from this building, we would be happy to. But our work involves weeds and pollen-spreading insects and all of God’s creation coming across our borders from somewhere else—in an era of international trade and air travel, oftentimes someplace quite far away—and thus our mission requires us to develop working relationships with experts from all around the globe.”

“I also notice that the conferences you host here in America are … pretty expensive by government standards. And I can’t
help but notice they’re in … nice destinations: Miami, Las Vegas, San Diego, Honolulu. Warm weather, winter dates. A suspicious mind might look at these conferences as taxpayer-funded vacations for you and your staff.”

Humphrey’s insincere smile dropped like a shattered window. He began to return fire, drawing his sarcasm as if it were a sheathed knife.

“We work with
farmers
, Mr. Palmer, and you’ll find that many of us do this here at the Department of
Agriculture
. Farmers tend to be
busy
in the spring, summer, and autumn months. Something about
planting
, growing, and harvesting
crops
. For some
strange
reason, they seem to have the most time to attend a conference in the winter months. Perhaps you could uncover those secrets with an extensive investigation. Besides, if you examine all of our records, you’ll see we hold regional conferences at other times of the year in plenty of other cities. We always hold one in Manchester, New Hampshire, usually in late September or early October—”

“Fall foliage season.”

“New Orleans in late winter …”

“Mardi Gras.”

“Our end-of-the-year meeting in Manhattan.”

“Christmas at Rockefeller Center.”

Palmer smelled a snow job.

“Nice hotels, too, Humphrey.”

“Mr. Palmer, just who do you think we invite to these conferences? Our ability to achieve our mission depends greatly upon the quality of the expertise we draw upon. If I’m going to ask the top biologists and agricultural science professors from Oxford University, Kyoto University, McGill, Edinburgh, Australian National, or Singapore to get on a plane for ten hours and spend time briefing and updating our top agricultural minds on their latest findings, I had better put them up at a
nice hotel with fun things to do after hours. Otherwise, they won’t come. Perhaps you would prefer I hold it at the Holiday Inn outside Dulles Airport?”

Palmer was unmoved. “Of course, in the process, you and your senior staff end up staying at the government per diem rate at these luxury resorts.”

“You will find every figure in order, every
i
dotted, every
t
crossed,” Humphrey hissed indignantly.

“It’s not just the figures, Mr. Humphrey, it’s the frequency of the travel and the overall expense of the conferences. Look, my job is not just to sniff out misconduct, fraud, theft, waste, and so on. It’s also to flag circumstances that could become problems down the road. If any of this ended up on the front page of the
Washington Post
, you would be getting a lot of grief. And at that point, it might be too late to do anything.”

Humphrey detected a not-so-veiled threat.

“Will you be assembling an official report on this?”

“Would that … worry you, Mr. Humphrey?”

“I would merely like time to assemble … all of the relevant information. To help give you a full picture of our work,” his insincere smile returned.

Humphrey immediately summoned Wilkins and Jamie to his office, and instructed Carla they were not to be disturbed.

Within the office, Wilkins had gone from his usual trepidation to anger.

“I cannot believe this!” Wilkins fumed again, holding a Diet Coke against his forehead. “We finally get the Hill calmed down, and now our own IG is breathing down our necks?”

“Think of all the hours we wasted in this effort to sniff out wastes of money,” Humphrey sighed.

“You’re sure he was threatening to leak it to the
Washington Post
?” Jamie asked.

Humphrey reviewed the notes he had written down immediately after the meeting.

“He had marked the conference spending that interested him in his spreadsheets with adhesive notes, but did not have anything written down. That, my dear Ms. Caro, is the key moment in all this. Perhaps that or the moment his fingertip hits the button to ‘save document.’ Once it gets written down on paper—or screen—it can get printed, photocopied, passed around, shown, read, repeated … at that point, we’re chasing paper airplanes all around any possible connection between this Department and anyone with access to a printing press. Inspectors General exist to expose problems. If they don’t expose problems, they don’t feel like they’re doing their job.” He looked over his own copy of the travel records. “This is the choke point, the moment where we can deter all manner of headaches from this. If we can somehow instantly persuade him that all of this travel is so justified, so natural, so needed, that questioning it would be stirring up a hornet’s nest for himself …”

Wilkins drank down his soda. “Let’s find some other office to distract him. Find some other juicier example of potential waste for him to shine a spotlight on.”

“No good comes from federal agencies and offices turning on each other,” Humphrey said curtly. “No, we need to get him to see what we do as absolutely imperative …”

He thought for several moments, then burst into activity: “Wilkins, this agency has been tracking and mitigating weed outbreaks in just about every state for nearly twenty years. It is time we laid out for him every detail of every action we’ve taken that has ever required travel.”

For nine straight days, Agency of Invasive Species staff appeared in the doorway of the Inspector General’s office, pulling handcarts full of cardboard boxes, packed to the gills with photocopied documents and receipts and records and every other conceivable piece of paperwork. They came several times during a day. Palmer’s secretary faced the increasingly frequent question, “Where do you want these?” with steadily increasing dread.

Throughout the Department of Agriculture’s offices, staffers wondered why their previous extra copier and printer toner had disappeared. The agency had actually worn out its photocopier, and staffers were now wandering into other offices just to use their photocopier.

Palmer noticed that document boxes were starting to line the walkways between cubicles. “There must be some mistake,” he told the hapless intern lugging the boxes around. “I’m only reviewing travel for the past four years.”

The intern checked a note. “Yeah, Mr. Humphrey said you might ask that. He said, let me see here—these are records for trips that were planned within the preceding physical year—”

“Fiscal year,” Palmer corrected.

“Oh yeah. Previous fisk-able year, but occurred in the period under review. Also, he said some of the trips from four years ago were follow-up investigations to events in the years before those, so he’s sending the records for those, too.”

“I don’t need those records,” Palmer sighed.

“He told me that if I didn’t get these to you I could get in big trouble.”

Palmer sighed. “Fine.”