USDA Rebuts Author’s Critique of Trump Transition

Celebrity author Michael Lewis, whose ongoing book project explores the Trump administration’s rocky transition to governance, has butted heads with his latest target: the Agriculture Department. Lewis’s Nov. 2 piece in Vanity Fair is a scathing narrative based on interviews with former department officials who criticized Trump’s temporary appointees for arriving weeks late, showing little interest in the elaborate scientific orientation materials prepared by career staff, and focusing inordinately on the contentious issue of climate change.