All That Effort
Three stories from one week — a $4.7B U.S. military campaign against drug boats that hasn't dented cocaine flows, a federal lawyer exodus leaving the administration unable to defend its own agenda, and Iran refusing to sign anything without 'tangible results' — all rhyme. Lots of motion, lots of expense, lots of confident verbs, and downstream the thing isn't getting done. Being busy without being sure what you're doing turns out to be expensive.
A 59-year-old fisherman in Jaramijó, Ecuador, named Johnny Valencia has stopped fishing. He picks up plastic bottles on the beach now and sells them to recyclers. He eats once a day, sometimes twice. The reason he stopped is that the United States military has spent the last year and a half blowing up small boats off the Pacific and Caribbean coasts of South America, and from the air, the boat of a fisherman and the boat of a drug smuggler look exactly the same.
The campaign has now killed at least 202 people in roughly sixty strikes. Brown University puts the cost at $4.7 billion. Narcotics experts say cocaine is still reaching the United States from South America at the same rate it was before any of this began. Southern Command describes the operation, in a phrase used in nearly every press release, as “applying total systemic friction on the cartels”. That is military for this is costing them. What it does not capture is that it is also costing fishermen who have abandoned their boats, coastal towns whose young men have left to drive motorcycle taxis, and the United States, which is paying $4.7 billion for a number — the cocaine number — that hasn’t budged.
This week happened to also be the week the New York Times published its tally of who is leaving the federal government. More than ten thousand lawyers have walked out since the start of 2025 — roughly one in five. The Department of Education has lost 53% of its attorneys. Housing, 40%. The EPA, about a quarter. The Office of Personnel Management opened a fancy new legal talent recruiting network to fix the problem; so far it has drawn the interest of 300 people. Meanwhile Phil Weiser, Colorado’s attorney general — and one of the people now hiring the lawyers the federal government is shedding — has brought 22 of them onto his staff in the last year alone.
The funny part, if you stand at the right angle, is that the administration is now short of the very lawyers it would need to defend its agenda in court. A former HUD attorney named Erik Heins put it simply: there are a lot of things that just can’t get done without lawyers. A former EPA lawyer named Brandon Jones-Cobb left the agency last summer, went to a nonprofit, and is now suing the EPA for the work he used to do inside it. The lever was pulled hard. The dial moved, but not in the direction the people pulling the lever wanted it to.
And then, on Sunday, in Tehran, Iran’s lead negotiator Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf — sworn in as Parliament speaker for another term — said Iran would not sign anything with the United States until it saw, in his words, “tangible results.” “There is no trust in the enemy’s words and promises,” he added. “Our only criterion is achieving tangible results before fulfilling our commitments in return.”
This is the kind of sentence you produce when you have been negotiating with someone for a while and you have noticed that things keep getting announced and very little keeps getting done. It is also, accidentally, a pretty good description of the whole week.
The pattern, if you squint, is the same in all three: a lot of motion, a lot of expense, a lot of confident press-release verbs — systemic friction, fast-tracking applications, dramatic step — and somewhere downstream, the actual thing the verbs were supposed to accomplish isn’t accomplished. Cocaine still moves. Cases still don’t get filed. Deals still don’t get signed. Johnny Valencia still picks up bottles.
It is expensive, it turns out, to be very busy without being very sure what you’re doing.