On the wall directly in front of me, four large-screen Samsungs were set permanently to the four major networks. Smaller monitors were mounted above the offices along the side walls. They were set to various cable stations, including BBC America. There were twelve screens in all—four in front, four along each wall—enough monitors to enable us to simultaneously watch an entire season of the newest Star Trek series. Each monitor was numbered, and headphones enabled us to select the channel we wanted to hear.

The fact that twelve TV sets were required to enable us to produce digital stories did not escape my somewhat overdeveloped sense of irony.

I was developing several stories. I had the reporter’s itch, a feeling that deep below the placid waters of the administration the waters were roiling. The Wrightman administration had failed completely to fulfill any election promises and seemed bogged down. The nation remained so politically divided that any kind of progress was almost impossible.

Unlike Trump, who had governed with the stealth of Inspector Clouseau, or the befuddled Democrats, who had raced around trying to quench an erupting volcano with fire extinguishers, the Wrightman people were tunneling into the bureaucracy. Its appointees were quietly consolidating power, taking esoteric but legal steps to harness and control the remnants of the legislative process. Their actions were too subtle to raise any alarms and too complicated for anyone other than policy wonks to understand, but in some ways they portended far more danger. Obviously these people knew what they were doing. The question nobody seemed to be able to answer was what did they want to do?

I spent that morning investigating dry ditches. I had a nice off-the-record lunch with the Director of Befuddlement at the Department of Bureaucracy, as the Pythons might have identified him. He actually was the second assistant to an assistant ($85,000 annually) at Interior, a seemingly decent guy who actually had a roving eye. (I don’t mean he liked to scope out women; I mean he had a floating blue iris that wobbled like a duck in a bathtub.) The secretary had just spent several hundred million taxpayer dollars refurbishing the Stewart Lee Udall building, including the installation of Neo Deco murals, so I told him I intended to write a wry feature about the new interior of the Interior.

In fact, the secretary had quietly proposed amending several regulations and codes that would give the department considerably more oversight of state spending on public projects like roads, buildings, even airports. While on the surface it didn’t seem like much more than bookkeeping, in actuality these changes granted to the federal government approval power over significant portions of state budgets. Several governors had complained about it, but there was little fuss. After the sins of the past administrations, this story raised about as much interest as a pothole on the highway of life. I thought there might be a good story there, but the most I got out of this lunch was an off-the-record hamburger.