There is an old saying in the nuclear industry: Measure with a micrometer, mark with a grease pencil, and cut with a chainsaw.

It describes a particular kind of failure — the kind where the analysis is sophisticated but the execution is brutal, where the precision of the diagnosis bears no relationship to the bluntness of the instrument. It's a warning about what happens when an organization values decisiveness over competence, when the people making the cuts have never had to live with the tolerances.

I've been thinking about that saying a lot lately. Not because I disagree with every stated policy objective of this administration — I don't. But because the pattern of execution has become so consistent, so reliably destructive, that it demands examination on its own terms. The what is one conversation. The how is another. And the how is where the damage lives.

The Pattern

Consider the chain of events that produced the current crisis at American airports.

In January, the administration launched Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis — what DHS described as its largest immigration enforcement operation ever. Thousands of armed federal agents deployed into residential neighborhoods. The stated objective was enforcement of immigration law, a legitimate function of government. What followed was not precision enforcement. It was a military-style operation that ensnared US citizens, legal residents with work authorization, asylum seekers, restaurant workers, Target employees, and students. Federal agents killed two American citizens — Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, and Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse. Video evidence in both cases contradicted the administration's self-defense narratives. UN human rights experts warned the shootings may constitute extrajudicial killings. A federal judge found that ICE had violated at least 96 court orders in Minnesota since January 1 alone.

The political fallout led Democrats to refuse to fund DHS without ICE reforms. DHS funding lapsed on February 14. TSA workers — roughly 61,000 of them — began working without pay. Over 500 quit. Thousands called out. Acting TSA Administrator Ha Nguyen McNeill testified that airports were experiencing "the highest wait times in TSA history, with some wait times greater than four and a half hours." TSA workers reported sleeping in their cars, selling plasma, and skipping meals to feed their children.

The administration's solution: deploy ICE agents — the very agency at the center of the crisis — to airports to manage security lines. And announce that TSA workers would be paid by executive order, drawing on funds from last year's legislation, a move of debatable legality that bypasses the congressional appropriations process entirely.

Each step in this sequence follows from the one before it. The aggressive, unaccountable enforcement operation produced the killings. The killings produced the political standoff. The standoff produced the funding lapse. The funding lapse produced the airport crisis. And the airport crisis produced an expansion of executive authority. If you trace the thread back to its origin, the problem the administration is now heroically solving is a problem the administration created.

This is not an isolated case. It is the pattern.

The Iran Sequence

I wrote last week about the deepening contradictions of the Iran war. The short version: the administration launched strikes on February 28, hours after the Omani mediator announced that Iran had agreed to never stockpile enriched uranium, to full IAEA verification, and to irreversibly downgrade its existing stockpile. The Arms Control Association assessed that the decision to strike had likely already been made before the final round of talks concluded. The special envoy leading the U.S. delegation lacked the technical expertise for nuclear diplomacy. A Trump-appointed intelligence official resigned and compared the intelligence environment to the Iraq War runup.

Three weeks later, Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz — an entirely predictable response — created an energy crisis severe enough to force the administration to begin lifting sanctions on Iranian oil. The United States is now financing the regime it is fighting, to manage the economic consequences of the fight it chose, over a threat its own Pentagon could not substantiate as imminent, while a diplomatic breakthrough sat on the table.

The micrometer was there. Iran's nuclear program is a real concern. Enrichment levels were a real problem. The measurement was accurate. But the response — the grease pencil, the chainsaw — bore no relationship to the precision of the diagnosis. And the consequences, as always, flow downhill. To energy prices. To families at the gas pump. To the troops now positioned within range of Iranian missiles.

The Epstein Files

Even in matters with no direct policy stakes, the pattern of technical incompetence repeats.

When the DOJ released Epstein-related files under the Transparency Act, the redactions applied to protect sensitive information were not actual redactions. Someone placed black overlays on text in PDF documents without removing the underlying data. Anyone could copy the text, paste it into a blank document, and read what was supposed to be hidden. A second batch of files contained video recordings disguised as PDFs — the file extensions had simply been changed. Rename the file, and you have hours of jail cell camera footage. Meanwhile, several Epstein survivors whose identities had been previously protected discovered their names were left unredacted in the released documents.

The DOJ failed in both directions simultaneously. It exposed victims while incompetently concealing information about powerful people. This is not a matter of policy disagreement. It is a matter of basic technical competence — the kind of competence that a functioning Department of Justice should possess by default.

The Root

The incompetence is real. But incompetence alone doesn't explain the pattern. Incompetent people can learn. They can hire expertise. They can adjust course when the data changes.

What prevents course correction is something deeper: the conviction that expertise itself is the problem. When an administration builds its identity around the idea that the professionals dithered, the diplomats stalled, the bureaucrats obstructed — and that what was needed all along was someone willing to act — then the very people who could prevent the failures become adversaries. The intelligence analyst who says the threat isn't imminent. The negotiator who says the other side is making concessions. The IT professional who knows how PDF redaction actually works. The general who says 17,000 troops can't hold a coastline.

Each of these voices represents the micrometer. And each one gets overruled by someone holding a chainsaw.

This is not a new phenomenon. The distance between confidence and competence has been a theme in human governance for as long as there has been human governance. But it has a particular character when it is combined with the belief that dissent is disloyalty. When the person who raises a concern is treated not as a corrective voice but as an obstacle — or worse, an enemy — then the feedback loop that every functional organization depends on is severed. And once that loop is severed, the only direction available is forward, regardless of what's ahead.

I want to be precise about what I'm not saying. I am not saying that every policy objective is wrong. Illegal immigration is a real problem. Nations have the right and the obligation to enforce their borders. Iran's nuclear ambitions are a legitimate security concern. Government transparency about the Epstein case is important and overdue. The measurements are often accurate. The problems are often real.

But recognizing the problem correctly is the beginning of governance, not the end of it. The distance between diagnosis and execution is where competence lives. And competence requires something that this administration has systematically rejected: the willingness to be told that your plan has a flaw, that the situation is more complex than the briefing suggested, that the instrument you've chosen doesn't match the tolerance required.

The Proverb

There is a line in Proverbs that I keep returning to: The way of the fool is right in his own eyes, but a wise person listens to counsel (Proverbs 12:15).

I don't deploy this as a label. I deploy it as a diagnostic, the same way the nuclear industry saying is a diagnostic. Both describe the same failure mode — the gap between certainty and understanding, between the conviction that you are right and the discipline required to act rightly.

The wisdom literature of scripture is not partisan. It does not map onto modern political categories. What it does is describe patterns of human behavior that produce predictable outcomes. The leader who surrounds himself with agreement and treats correction as betrayal. The ruler who mistakes boldness for wisdom. The powerful who let the consequences of their decisions fall on the vulnerable while they remain untouched. These are not modern observations. They are ancient ones, repeated because the pattern keeps recurring.

Proverbs 29:2 — When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice; but when the wicked rule, the people groan. The groaning doesn't always look like oppression in the dramatic sense. Sometimes it looks like a TSA worker selling plasma to feed her kids because the agency that was supposed to protect borders killed two citizens instead. Sometimes it looks like a sailor on a destroyer sixteen miles from the Iranian coast, positioned there because a diplomat who didn't understand centrifuges told the President the talks had failed. Sometimes it looks like an Epstein survivor discovering her name in a government document because no one at the DOJ knew how to use a PDF editor.

The consequences always flow downhill. The people making the decisions never bear them. That is what the prophets meant when they spoke of leaders who devour the flock they were given to shepherd. Not always with malice. Sometimes just with the confident, uncorrectable ignorance of someone who has never been told — or has never accepted — that they might be wrong.

I don't know what the corrective looks like. I'm not sure one is available in the current political structure, where both parties are more invested in the performance of opposition than in the mechanics of governance. But I know this: the thread that connects Minneapolis to the airports to the Strait of Hormuz to a mislabeled video file on a government server is not ideology. It is a way of operating that treats precision as weakness, expertise as threat, and consequences as someone else's problem.

Measure with a micrometer. Mark with a grease pencil. Cut with a chainsaw. And when the cut goes wrong, blame the material.

Sources: American Immigration Council, CNN, CNBC, OHCHR, Time, Arms Control Association, CBC News, IBTimes UK, The Daily Beast, Wikipedia.