A Work In Progress

For John, BLUF:  Even in hidebound bureaucracies it is possible to foster innovation and creative thinking.  We should encourage such aberrant behavior.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Inside the Secretive Government Unit Saving American Lives Around the World

Here is the sub-headline:

A little-known team of medics and miracle workers—hidden deep within the U.S. Department of State—opens its doors to Vanity Fair.

From Vanity Fair, by Reporter Adam Ciralsky, 6 MAY 2021.

Here is the lede plus two:

In a concrete hangar in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, Katrina Mayes is working with precision and purpose.  Wisps of smoke surround her, wafting off the dry ice she is using to jerry-rig a cardboard vaccine carrier.  Her task:  to create a vapor phase vent to moderate the temperature of the cooling container from around minus 80 degrees Celsius (for storing Pfizer’s COVID-19 vials) to minus 15 degrees Celsius (to accommodate supplies of the Moderna vaccine).

At 29, the biochemist and virologist has spent much of her professional life indoors, where the U.S. government has entrusted her to handle some of the world’s most lethal pathogens—including Ebola, Lassa fever, and Nipah viruses—at top-secret Biosafety Level Four facilities.  “I shower six times a day,” she tells me.  “I’m the cleanest person you’ll ever meet.”  Her winning smile and gallows humor mask the gravity of her work, which has involved diffusing poison-laced letters that have been mailed to federal buildings.

On a Tuesday in March, her mission was just as urgent but more life-affirming. Dubbed “Operation Icebox,” Mayes was helping deliver nearly 200,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccine to American embassies, consulates, and other overseas posts scattered across six continents.  It is a complex affair involving two dozen jets that are big enough to fly long distances—carrying ultra-low temperature (ULT) freezers—yet nimble enough to land on a variety of runways.  Mayes’s colleague Taundria Cappel, a Guyanese émigré who began her government career as a secretary, oversees the entire operation—at age 30.  “We are the MacGyvers of the State Department,” she explains.  “People come to us with crises and we develop solutions.”

That our Department of State has a specialized unit, ready to go anywhere to medically treat and evacuate American Citizens is an encouraging sign.  It shows innovation alive and well within the bureaucracy.  It gives me a good feeling.

After a few paragraphs on the lack of diversity of race and ethnicity within the Department of State—there is no diversity—we come to this set of sentences:

“Diversity of opinion and diversity of options,” Walters responded when I asked about the net effect of his hiring practices.  “There’s no groupthink.  There’s not enough people that are similar to create groupthink.”

This is how diverity pays off for America.  "Diversity of opinion and diversity of options" is greatly to be desired.  It generates its own rewards for those who would encourage innovation.

We forget that the clash of ideas has been important since the Europeans came to these shores.  We may think of our Founding Fathers as all cut from the same mold, but a hundred years before they gathered in Philadelphia they would have been running their conferees out of town for holding different and diverse views on issues such as religion  Yet, gathered in Philly in 1776 they were able to come up with some innovative ideas of governance.  Not perfect, but trail breaking.  They hadn't grown alike, but they had learned to get along.  President George Washington, yes, a slave holder, managed to break through some barriers, to give room for Catholics and Jews in the new nation.  A work in progress, which we should further.

Regards  —  Cliff