The Weed Agency: A Comic Tale of Federal Bureaucracy Without Limits

by Jim Geraghty

The spellbinding mock history of the Department of Agriculture's most secretive and vital agency.The little-known USDA Agency of Invasive Species—founded by President and humble peanut farmer Jimmy Carter—would like to reassure you that they rank among the most effective and cost-efficient offices within the sprawling federal bureaucracy. For decades, under Administrative Director Adam Humphrey and his “strategic disengagement” approach, the Agency has epitomized vigilance against the clear and present danger of noxious weeds. Humphrey’s record of triumphant inertia faces only two obstacles. The first is reality; the second is the loud critic who dares to question the magic behind the Agency’s Nicholas Bader. Formerly known as President Reagan’s “bloody right hand,” Bader is on an obsessive quest to trim the fat from the federal budget. Full of oddball characters who shed light on the daily operations of Beltway minions, The Weed Agency showcases a world in which federal budgets balloon every year, where a career can be built upon the skill of rationalizing astronomical expenses, and where the word "accountability" sends roars of laughter through DC office buildings. That’s life inside the federal Agency of Invasive Species… and it may sound suspiciously similar to your reality.

Genres: Fiction, Politics, Humor

274 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Jim Geraghty is National Review's senior political correspondent. In 2019, he made presentations about foreign disinformation campaigns on social media and tools to counter propaganda to the Austrian National Defense Academy, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the University of Vienna, and the U.S. Embassy to Austria.

Jim was named CPAC's "Journalist of the Year" in 2015 and also won the Young Conservatives Coalition's William F. Buckley award that year. He writes the "Morning Jolt" newsletter and contributes to NRO's Corner blog. He's the author of Heavy Lifting with Cam Edwards, the novel The Weed Agency (a Washington Post bestseller) and Voting to Kill.

He appears regularly on CNN, CNN International and Fox News' MediaBuzz as well as other cable news programs, and co-hosts a pop culture podcast with Mickey White.

Jim spent two years in Ankara, Turkey working as a foreign correspondent and studying anti-Americanism, democratization, Islam, Middle East politics, and U.S. diplomacy efforts, appearing in The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Sun, The Washington Times and The Washington Examiner. He covered violent protests over the Muhammad cartoons, avian flu outbreaks, and Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Ankara. He also covered national elections in Great Britain and Germany, and has reported from Egypt, Italy, Israel, Spain, and Jordan over the years.

In 2008, Best Life magazine called Jim one of "the 10 most important voices to listen to this election cycle." His "Kerry Spot" blog was awarded for having the "Best Political Dirt" by WashingtonPost.com in 2004, and the London Times praised his "killer insight" in that election cycle.

He lives in the spider-infested neighborhood nicknamed "Authenticity Woods" in Fairfax County, Virginia.

Reviews

[H. P. · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Weed Agency, a satire of a federal bureaucracy that grows like, well, weeds, tells the story of an obscure (and fake) federal agency tasks with monitoring, well, weeds and the people that populate it over the course of a few decades. The agency: The Agency of Invasive Species, an agency within the Department of Agriculture. The characters: Jack Wilkins, assistant administrative director, our straight man and cypher. Adam Humphrey, administrative director and bureaucratic in-fighter extraordinaire. Ava Summers, IT pro and wearer of fishnets. Lisa Bloom and Jaime Caro, PR and event coordinators, respectively. Nicholas Bader, Reagan Whitehouse budget hawk turned Congressional representative budget hawk.

The Agency of Invasive Species is charged with combating regular weeds, not the wacky sort (something I didn’t realize until metaphorically opening the book).

Jim Geraghty is a very good conservative political pundit and his book his aimed at that audience. They should love it, but there is something for liberals too. Republicans like Tom Delay and especially Newt Gingrich don’t escape Geraghty’s cutting pen. And the problems of the federal bureaucracy, regulatory capture in particular, are a concern on the left. Geraghty falls victim to the conservative habit of not understanding the merit of the subject of government spending. Invasive species, including weeds, can indeed cause very serious issues. This country, after all, has a great region (and I a yard) damn near choked with a damned dirty weed. It’s not that invasive weeds aren’t a problem. It’s that our leviathan federal government can’t do anything about it. Geraghty well shows why. (And it makes for great imagery.)

The story of an unimportant corner of a very large government over decades threatens to be a dull affair, and unfortunately characters are not Geraghty’s strength. Wilkins is a cypher. A useful one, but a cypher. Lisa and Jamie never amount to much. Humphrey and Bader are good characters but never really pop out of their two-dimensional shell. Ava is the strongest character, perhaps because she solo stars in perhaps the book’s best segment, a break from satirizing the federal government to satirize the dot.com bubble, complete with a bizarre Super Bowl ad (albeit one that tells far more about the product than the average dot.com ad—sometimes truth is stranger than fiction).

The characters don’t do much to hold back the book. Geraghty may rather obviously be a non-fiction writer first and novelist second, but he knows government and where to aim the skewers. Early clunky prose notwithstanding, by the end of the book Geraghty shows an easy hand at the delayed punch line, delivered dry as toast.

Disclosure: I received a free copy of Weed Agency courtesy of NetGalley.

[John-Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

An enjoyable and well-informed satire of the US government over the past few decades. Worth reading by anyone interested in politics, regardless of political persuasion.

As in any good satire, the characters are cartoonish (which is to say, realistic) and the moral points are clear and yet nuanced. Geraghty shows how bloat works: it makes sense for there to be a little agency within the Dept of Agriculture that focuses on "invasive species" (i.e., weeds), but--people being what they are--it's very easy for the people running the agency to want it to get bigger every year, and for some strange reason, the people who want to grow the agency are the only people at the agency who are good at their jobs. Some of the funniest parts of the novel show how overseers--Republican and Democratic--are easily manipulated into allocating more funding. These parts are not especially original: the Reagan appointees are nutty Commie-phobes, Al Gore is robotic, etc. But, again, people are cartoons.

The best part of the novel was the way it showed the human cost of working at a sclerotic government agency: there is one smart and energetic person (a tech-savvy and idealistic young woman) and it's just crushing for her to have her ideas ignored and to work among people who don't care about anything other than punching a card and getting a check. There's also a great point later in the novel about how disappointing it is for conservatives to see how many Americans will line up for government funds they neither need nor deserve--and these "moochers" don't fit the stereotype that most conservatives have of such people.

There are a few footnotes to show that the novel really is a kind of history of DC, that just about everything you think of as preposterous actually really happened. I would have liked more of that.

[Paul Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reminded me so much of the old BBC series "Yes, Minister." Amusing read, but sad because it does so accurately describe how the federal bureaucracy fights reform of any sort and works to promote and protect itself above all other interests. Also skewers all sides evenly, pointing out their foibles and failures so it's a book for everyone.

[Rob Port · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you're going to right a novel about the federal government, what better vehicle than farce? This was an enjoyable read about bureaucratic absurdity and the futility of fighting it from the Carter era through the present.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the sort of book that I could see being the inspiration for a movie, or perhaps even more hilariously, a sitcom about an obscure federal agency whose responsibility it is to deal with weeds, and which is incompetently run to great hilarity and annoyance on the part of the reader, hilarity because it is enjoyable to see people be incompetent but with great annoyance because we are paying them to be incompetents.  I must admit that as someone who enjoys reading about bureaucracy almost as much as I am irritated at having to deal with them, this novel hit the right spot.  Its main characters are deeply funny in how they seek to find and keep a secure place in receiving federal monies and deal with the opposition of those who want to tame the swamp, and the novel has a somewhat pessimistic view of the way that the swamp tends to grow in spite of the efforts of many to beat it back.  In reading this book, I pondered why it was that we do not have the tradition of creating sitcoms about bureaucracies, as many of them are precisely the sort of places where office television would seem to thrive.

This novel is a relatively short one at a bit less than 250 pages long.  It spans in time from the early 1980's to 2010, and at its core features a small but mostly lovable set of characters.  Adam Humphrey is the Administrative Director of a a semi-fictional USDA Agency of Invasive Species, and the story begins in February 1981 when he makes a fool of one Nicholas Bader, an idealistic Reaganite with a passion for bringing the bureaucracy under control.  The increasingly personal grudge between Bader and this agency forms one of several plot lines that circle through this story, including the sheer incompetence and disinterest by the agency for dealing with invasive weeds in the first place, being more focused on feathering their nests with comfortable grifting.  Idealistic workers find themselves discouraged by the lack of progress, and only those who are comfortable with the boring routine of doing nothing but waste hundreds of millions of tax dollars in an obscure corner of the bureaucracy find themselves at home here.  The book shows, in humorous form, how people deal with the changes of politics and manage to insure that the bureaucracy states funded regardless of the political winds, and towards the end there are some humorous scenes that I will not spoil for the reader.

This book, in a subtle way, reveals how it is that a federal agency can continue to grow and grow.  For one, those who are in charge in federal bureaucracies of any size can be expected to cultivate relationships with the people who are on various committees, with the hope of ensuring larger budgets every year.  Part of that is done by making sure that every dollar is spent, and the people who are in charge of the Weed Agency (which is a very passable facsimile of an actual interagency bureaucracy that really does exist in Washington DC) have the wise idea to lay low, except that a couple of times they are unable to do so, which requires the ritual of falling on the sword by the people in charge to keep the agency growing.  This book is a sobering and also entertaining look at how hard it is to get rid of a bureaucracy once it is allowed to take root and grow, and how dishonest grifters are keeping the grift coming without any concern for justifying the tax money that they spend.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Chestertonian Critique

I went into this book expecting a Michael Crichton-esque story of heroes and villains with real world charts and graphs playing the role of sizzle, or an Ayn Rand-ish series of lectures interspersed with a ridiculous plot, and was pleasantly surprised to instead find a Chestertonian critique - a great story that happens to be pretty darn close to reality, which uses the absurdity of its characters situations to make its point. Where it really works is that Mr. Geraghty uses these flashes of reality in the story to help flesh out his characters, instead of using them as crutches to fill a dozen pages or so of story. Ava's technobabble meeting with Gingrich works because anyone with a passing knowledge of the man can see he'd be the type to geek out, and it shows that she is more than another pretty face without having to resort to someone putting her down and force a "ACKSHUALLLY I HAVE X DEGREES FROM *alphabet soup names of schools*" situation. I am reminded, as the title indicates, of Chesterton's novels and stories, which he wrote firstly as good works and snuck in minor details to comment here and there. Specifically," The Man Who Was Thursday" and several of the Father Brown stories, as well as "The Ball and the Cross" come to mind.

We hear the thought that one would not be disappointed in reading a story. I hate cliches myself, but it works here. It isn't an action thriller or anything like that, but it keeps you coming back for more because you can see yourself knowing people like this and caring for what they're going through.

I loved this book and, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to get started on Geraghty's next work.

[Marvinwww · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good, but not great.

No one will mistake Jim Geraghty's writing style for that of, say, Henry James or E. M. Forster. On the other hand, his writing is not so bad as to ruin the book (as is the case for some other authors I have read).

As I was reading, I kept wondering if the entire book was a thinly veiled rewrite of the BBC TV shows "Yes, Minister" and its sequel "Yes, Prime Minister." When I got to the last chapter, I saw that it included a cryptic affirmation that, yes, the book was a rewrite of those TV shows for an American audience.

[olivia douglass · Rating 4 out of 5]

i was shocked but not surprised. if this is how the government works, then i’m not a fan. i enjoyed the story and character development. i often found myself rooting for the “bad guy”. probably because that is who you follow and get to know. if you want to know more about how corrupt the government this, pick up this satirical read. it won’t disappoint. or maybe it will. but maybe that’s the point.

[Joey K · Rating 5 out of 5]

Geraghty’s conservative view is clear, but he puts a great deal of effort into his characters and takes good clean shots at every pro and con of complex modern bureaucracies. The Administrative State gets the Parks and Rec treatment.

[Michael P. · Rating 5 out of 5]

An unfortunately realistic portrayal of the workings of bureaucracy. Simultaneously hilarious and infuriating--especially if you've ever worked in a large bureaucratic organization, private or public sector.

[Bill Leach · Rating 4 out of 5]

A convincing constructed satire of government bureaucracy. Geraghty carefully weaves events that actually happened into the story, leaving the reader uncertain as to the boundary between fiction and past history.

[Jay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elon and DOGE should read this book. A (sadly) comical look at the life of a redundant agency that depicts the unfettered growth of the bureaucracy despite the best efforts of administrations of both parties to rein it in.

[Curtis Edmonds · Rating 4 out of 5]

The main character in Jim Geraghty's THE WEED AGENCY is a federal agency, which poses a problem. The path of your typical main character in your typical book forms what is called a character arc. Huck Finn starts out in Missouri and ends up lighting out for the territories. Harry Potter starts out in the cupboard under the stairs and ends up fighting Voldemort. Hillary Clinton starts out as the impoverished wife of an ex-President and ends up as a successful author and lecturer.

The point is that characters in works of fiction generally undergo some sort of transformative change during the course of the work. But federal agencies, generally speaking, don't undergo transformative change. As P.J. O'Rourke observed, federal agencies have the ethos of suburban lawns: growth for the sake of growth. Geraghty faithfully charts the rise in the budget line item of his fictional agency, but otherwise fails to provide a coherent story line, much less a plot.

This is partly by design, for two separate reasons. First is that Geraghty is intentionally aping the structure of the classic BBC television series, "Yes Minister," which is similarly episodic in nature, and similarly devoted to the continuation of the growth of the administrative state at the expense of all other considerations. (Geraghty goes so far as to air-drop a thinly-disguised and Americanized version of the Sir Humphrey Appleby character into his book, which is lazy of him.)

Second is that Geraghty is intentionally writing a conservative polemic; unlike the relentlessly non-partisan "Yes Minister," Geraghty intends his satire to be an indictment of left-leaning partisans hiding under the cloak of administrative neutrality. He's certainly accomplished that, if he hasn't accomplished anything else. THE WEED AGENCY reads much better as a roman à clef than it does as contemporary fiction.

THE WEED AGENCY is enjoyable from a conservative perspective, and intermittently funny, but it is ultimately a frustrating read. Using government incompetence as a comic target (again, to paraphrase O'Rourke) is like shooting dairy cows with a high-powered rifle. Geraghty hits all his intended targets, but doesn't do so with any real effort at comic marksmanship. This is partly due to the thirty-year scope of the book (starting in the Carter years). One of Geraghty's funniest scenes takes place during early 1995, at the height of Newt Gingrich's popularity--but getting the humor depends on understanding Gingrich's unique worldview, and the scene comes off as more dated than anything else.

The most annoying feature about THE WEED AGENCY is Geraghty's clumsy attempts at characterization. Time after time, Geraghty introduces us to a new character by providing three pages of background data about them, and then drops that character out of the scene and has somebody else do something else. This may be an attempt to make the bureaucrats in the story more faceless than anything else, and it works to that extent, but none of the characters (even the Republicans!) come off as compelling or likeable or even interesting.

Geraghty is a talented journalist and a fine writer and a very clear thinker, and THE WEED AGENCY is a very convincing complaint about the excesses of the federal bureaucracy. To the extent that is all it is trying to be, it is a profound success. But as a novel, it has obvious deficiencies that--like the mission of Geraghty's agency itself--ought to have been addressed, but were not.

[Ronald J. · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is by Jim Geraghty, an editor of National Review. I enjoy his work, and he’s written many fiction books that I’ve never read, except for this one. It seemed relevant, especially in light of the formation of DOGE in 2024, led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to cut waste in the federal government. This book was published in 2014, but I’m afraid it foresaw the same fate that DOGE will meet a decade later. As Geraghty says: “three waves of Republicans came to Washington pledging to cut red tape and eliminate waste—the Reagan wave, the Gingrich wave, and the Bush wave—and all of them largely failed.” The story revolves around the Weed Agency that “President Jimmy Carter established the agency, dedicated to protecting American agriculture and gardens from the menace of invasive weeds, just four years earlier, and it stood out as a most likely target for cuts.” The story begins when this agency having a budget of $20.2 million. You already know the ending, which is November 2012, when the budget for the USDA Agency of Invasive Species is $493.58 million. In between is the story of how the bureaucracy is self-perpetuating, with an endless appetite for growth. The book is funny, but only because, in a sad way, it’s the truth. I thought it a bit too long, but it’s certainly timely in this time of the incoming Trump administration (2025) and the DOGE. It will lower your expectations, then at least you can be delightfully surprised is DOGE does have any successes.

[Todd · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is veteran journalist Geraghty's first work of fiction, and as such, is pretty good. Geraghty understands not only the workings of beltway politics, but has a great understanding for the way the bureaucrats function, interacting with senior elected and appointed officials and one another. He provides insight into Washington's culture of "spend more" as the solution to every problem, and its own total lack of anything approaching accountability, and does so in a very readable and entertaining manner. The actions and dialogues of the characters in their work roles is convincing, engaging, and enlightening. As the book progressed, Geraghty seemed to loosen up a bit with his style and his characters became less stiff and two-dimensional. From a purely literature point of view, the characters themselves became more entertaining in the middle and end of the story. Geraghty's own local knowledge of Washington hang-outs over the years was on display and well utilized. Also entertaining was Geraghty's incorporation of current pop culture over the years, making this something of a Forrest Gump of the 80s, 90s, and 00s. While there's no doubt about Geraghty's own politics, he has an understanding of the other side and gives them a fair shake through his characters.

On the down side, Geraghty's characters' social interactions tended to be stiff and unconvincing, especially at the outset. His narrative lacked any vivid descriptions. Most readers of fiction would expect at least a couple of juicy parts; while Geraghty didn't shy away from stating that a couple of the characters had sex with one another, it wasn't like he described it in any way. While Geraghty tossed in a few personal details about most of his characters, these were mainly window dressing and not substantially developed in any way.

The book had the potential of perhaps being the Atlas Shrugged of our time, but the flaws above clearly keep it from reaching that level. To be fair, even Rand needed The Fountainhead to work up to her later work, so maybe if Geraghty continues to blossom as a fiction writer, he can harness his incredible knowledge and understanding of Washington politics and bureaucracy to produce a truly outstanding work that would become a reference point for generations. Even with its flaws, it is well worth reading, both entertaining and educational. I would especially recommend it for college students or young graduates thinking about work in the federal government, it is certainly a cautionary tale.

[Brett T · Rating 3 out of 5]

Given that federal and state agencies may often be compared to unkillable weeds like kudzu, Jim Geraghty may have betrayed his presuppositions by writing a satire about a fictional United States Department of Agriculture agency directed to observe and respond to their growth (That he writes for National Review probably betrays them as well). Although based on some actual federal departments, Geraghty's titular bureau in The Weed Agency is fiction. Several of the things he writes about it, though, aren't, as he indicates several real-world bureaucratic nightmares he adapted to the story of the USDA Agency of Invasive Species.

Alan Humphrey is the skilled bureaucrat who guides the agency, first created by the Jimmy Carter administration, and does so with little or no input from the actual agency director, whomever that may happen to be. We meet him as he begins to train Jack Wilkins, a young Carter White House aide who leaves the political world for the bureaucratic one. We watch as Humphrey skillfully fends off Reagan budget-cutters, Al Gore-era "fix the broken government" reformers and "Contract With America" small-government disciples. At each turn Humphrey employs a kind of bureaucracy-jitsu to demonstrate why the AIS should not only not be cut, it might even be better off expanded.

Agency follows in the path of Christopher Buckley's 1986 The White House Mess, although it's neither as broad in some of its satire or as arch in its tone. The real-world anecdotes, plus the chapter headings that display the US federal deficit and the AIS budget (hint: Neither ever shrinks), give the book some immediacy, especially as we read in actual headlines these days about the Internal Revenue Service offering an excuse for lost records that it would never accept from a taxpayer.

As the book starts, it has a tone of Humphrey revealing the secrets of his trade, so to speak, to Wilkins, and almost feels like a bureaucracy-centered version of The Screwtape Letter, wherein a senior demon explains to his rookie nephew how to tempt human beings. Geraghty doesn't stay with that theme, and Agency suffers when it wanders off as well as when it spends several pages making fun of the dot-com boom and bust. It's still funny enough and still dead on target in its mockery, but it had the potential to be more if it hadn't gotten lost in the middle and muddled around at the end.

Original available here.

[Paul Sand · Rating 4 out of 5]

[Imported automatically from my blog. Some formatting there may not have translated here.]

It is somewhat bad news that my book-picking algorithm's randomness brought up Jim Geraghty's new book The Weed Agency immediately after I'd read Dave Barry's hilarious Insane City. Now (don't get me wrong) Mr. Geraghty's book is funny. But Dave is a tough act to follow, humor-wise.

Mr. Geraghty's book is also kind of sad for those of us who would prefer smaller and limited government. For it is a tale of a truly worthless money-down-the-rathole federal agency, established more or less on a whim by Jimmy Carter and a Democratic Congress in the 70s, the USDA's Agency of Invasive Species. While this entity does not exist in the real world, it is emblematic of a host of others that actually do.

We follow the Agency from 1981 until roughly the present day, as it navigates the budgetary waters to survive and even thrive. Its head, Adam Humphrey, is a gifted bureaucrat, employing an array of tools to guarantee the dollars keep coming. He knows which fear/flattery/ego-stroking buttons to push: for the 80's Reaganauts, he notes (without any real evidence) that the Commies might be readying a biological attack using invading weeds and/or critters; for Al Gore in the 90's, he makes the Global Warming connection. Later in the decade, for Newt Gingrich, a whizbang web-based red-tape-cutting Federal clearinghouse for all things Weedy is proposed. And worst of all, post-9/11, Humphrey tries to market his agency as fighting the menace of terrorist crop-dusters.

When an actual crisis occurs involving an invasive Mexican weed devastating southwest agriculture, the agency is seemingly caught with its pants down: its incompetence threatens its raison d'être. But, after a symbolic resignation, this fact is cynically used to (once again) increase the funding of the agency. Gee, that sounds "ripped from the headlines", doesn't it?

Humphrey and a number of other characters inside and outside the agency are, pretty much, set-up to illustrate Geraghty's thesis and historical events. So when one of the characters quits the agency to go to work for a dot-com in the late 90s… well, we pretty much know the broad outlines of what's gonna happen there.

Recommended, of course. You can read a tome on public choice theory, and you probably should, but this is more fun, and you'll get the basic idea.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Satire can be tricky. It's one thing for satire to lampoon existing issues, another for it to be just existing in itself.

What happens when a satire is too realistic and not biting enough? That's where The Weed Agency comes in, telling a tale of a government agency as it grows and changes to adapt in order to not perish. It's a very straightforward, often journalistic approach, that ends in present day with things as one might expect.

The book has a conservative point of view, which is fine. The tale is realistic enough to a fault, mixing in the satirical (the environmental agency putting in a website that doesn't work, the agency being an inspiration to Al Gore) with the real (Gore, people like Newt Gingrich) to craft a fairly short tale designed to remind us all about the ever-growing, often unnecessary federal government.

So why rated so low? Really, it's just too one-note. There's no real dynamic here, the joke is given away pretty early and ultimately often, and would have benefited from some growth. The concept behind it is ultimately that the truth is ridiculous enough, but I just don't feel like it worked.

I like Jim Geraghty's writing at National Review, which might have impacted my expectations a bit. As a novel, though, it's just okay, filled with a lot of unrealized potential. Closer to a 2.5.

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel turns the gimlet eye on Washington, in the style of YES, MINISTER. In fact, is it coincidence that the author named his anti-villain HUMPHREY? And is HE related to Sir Humphrey Appleby.

To be more precise, this romp through the fictional (but not too fictional) Agency of [not "For"?] Invasive Species is what YES, MINISTER might be like if the "minister" was entirely off stage, while Humphrey deals directly with obstreperous MPs.... in this case, including a representative of the successive waves of Republicans who came to town vowing to cut the bloated federal establishment, but never managing to do it.

Like Jay and Lynn, Geraghty uses included "documents" and "news stories" for verisimilitude. Sometimes to the point of confusion. I had to look up to find that Halogeton really exists (as does "cheatgrass") and is really native to Russia-and-China.

The Civil Service (the "opposition in residence", as Hacker says) is not the only target. He also flays the Silicon Valley wonders, and does not spare the farmers (in a sequence where the Blue Ribbon Panel of investigators tries inviting them, and is barraged with demands that the guvmint "compensate" for losses which keep getting higher... and higher.

Recommended for YM/YPM fans.

[Katy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is definitely an inside the beltway read, and since I live within that hallowed realm, it rang true to my experience. It is funny and depressing: funny because the situations and characters seem so true to life; depressing, because the situations and characters seem so true to life. It is a parable of sorts about the federal bureaucracy and how it survives no matter what elected officials of either party try to do to curb its insatiable, unending growth. One touch that I particularly liked was the statistical note at the beginning of each chapter: FEBRUARY 1981 US NATIONAL DEBT: $950 billion; BUDGET, USDA AGENCY OF INVASIVE SPECIES: $20.2 million. By the last chapter, the note reads: NOVEMBER 2012 U.S. NATIONAL DEBT: $16.3 trillion; BUDGET USDA AGENCY OF INVASIVE SPECIES: $493.58 million. You might well ask, how is this possible? Because, In the game of government, bureaucracy always wins.

[Joshua · Rating 1 out of 5]

The book starts with the assumption that all federal regulations are designed as make-work jobs for liberals, who are of course completely self-serving, if not quite evil. Deluded, too. Saint Reagan and his cabinet of heroes tries to save the world, but the fictional agency is far too entrenched, thanks to the evil liberals. Oh, OK, I guess the liberals are evil. So are conservatives occasionally, but he all but calls these conservatives RINOs.
I have no problem with political writing/novels that are conservative (or liberal), but it's such a yawner. It's like a little morality play, except you know the moral: one group is always right, and the other is always wrong. Yeah, 'cause that's how the world works. If you want an amusing and conservative take on the world of American politics, read P. J. O'Rourke.

[Aileen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fun, interesting, and occasionally mind-boggling book. It's sad that this fiction book has so much in common with reality. It's a great humorous tale of Washington and how the bureaucracy works. It's also a story of friends who come to Washington with big dreams of changing the world, and how they face reality. My favorite part of reading the book is when I'd read some ridiculous sounding quote or event that couldn't possibly be real, and then find a footnote after it - that it really happened.
I recommend this book to everyone regardless of political leanings - the book is not a right vs left book - it's a book of the federal bureaucracy - you'll enjoy it (or cry a little!) no matter what side of the aisle you're on.

[Melanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Weed Agency is everything a book should be: smart, well-researched, entertaining, insightful, and laugh-out-loud funny (as long as you don't think about it to hard - you'll still laugh out loud, but you'll get a little depressed, too). The book is historical fiction, and when you get to something that's just a little too outlandish, stretches credulity just a little too far, you find yourself facing a footnote, explaining that it actually did happen and any circumstances that differ from the presentation in the book, and citing a reputable source. If you are looking for a book that is diverting, engaging, and uproariously funny - but also thought-provoking and deeply meaningful - then add this to your list.

[Bob Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A humorous novel about a government agency who manages to avoid any attempts to cut its growth over several decades. The parallels between this fiction and real life are too close for the book not to believable, at times. The author sprinkles the book with quotes and references to real documents or quotes from public officials. Geraghty takes an opportunity to stick an elbow into a number of institutions on the political left and right. The book climaxes with an unexpected battle of good versus evil with a bureaucratic ending.

Not as funny as a Carl Hiassen story, but not bad at a first attempt at humor

[Carly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really 4.5 stars. Loses half a star for weak characterization(I know you wrote about this in a Morning Jolt a while back, Jim, and I'm sorry), but that weakness doesn't greatly harm the rest of the book, which is a tremendously funny and clever read that made this poll sci major want to run far away from Washington. Cameos from Newt Gingrich, Al Gore, and Bobby Jindal made me laugh out loud. And for what it's worth- I actually think this book would make a great movie. Any conservative producers out there?

[E · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a difficult book to rate. As a send-up of what's wrong with federal bureaucracy, it's right on. As a novel? Ehh. Geraghty's not a novelist, really (and that's not a personal knock--I love the guy, even if I can't figure out how that NRO blog of his is a full-time job).

Sometimes I felt like I was reading a non-fiction narrative instead of a novel (a novel should never, never have footnotes; sorry, all you fans of those "serious" writers that write 900 page books with footnotes). The plot is quite predictable. But its skewering of bureaucracy is, as I said, painfully good.

[Cassandra]

Started 8/2/16 but ultimately couldn't get into it. I admittedly didn't get past like 50 pages, but it felt like it beats you over the head with the fact that bureaucracy sucks and we ignore a lot of reckless spending that gets hidden away. It's like ugh I GET IT! Probably a better read for people who like to get ranted at, but I'm not about that life. I will say that it was written in a semi-interesting way. I mean, writing it in a narrative is not a bad way to go about it and it wasn't even poorly written. It just moved way too slow for me and I would much rather read like anything else.

[Ken Grzymalski · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fairly amusing book, and amazingly accurate. I have experienced some of the bureaucratic inertia Jim Geraghty so accurately describes at my job with a major Systems Command in the DoD. The remarks on the budgeting process and the skewed Congressional priorities really hit home. A solid, quick summer read that will leave you only slightly more dispirited about the direction of our federal government.

[Chuck · Rating 3 out of 5]

entertaining but creates frustration and sadness to think about the billions being wasted each year by non-motovated and non-accountable bureaucrats in our federal, state and local agencies.

I listen to Geraghty's 3 martini podcast and read his national review writings. Humor in this book is fairly subtle, I expected more laugh out loud humor based on my previous knowledge of his style.

[Mark Eickhoff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not bad for a comedy novel. The commentary on the federal bureaucracy is all too true. Much of the book reminded me very much of the old British TV series, "Yes, Minister." The character of Humphrey was, no doubt, a tribute to Sir Humphrey from that series.