Some books are timely. Michael Lewis’s Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service is urgent. The book’s stated goal is “to subvert the stereotype of the civil servant. The typecasting has always been lazy and stupid, but increasingly, it’s deadly.” It’s especially vital to get this right as the Trump administration’s unprecedented assault on federal agencies and departments shows no sign of slowing.
Lewis and his six co-contributors put names and faces on the timeworn trope of “faceless bureaucrats.” The essays in Lewis’s book originally appeared in a Washington Post series, “Who is government?” They are all revelatory and often inspiring. His subjects are dedicated to their work. They don’t ballyhoo what they do. They go about their jobs with quiet resolve. None expects attention, and few get it. It can only be hoped that these essays reach the wide audience they deserve and help turn around public perceptions.
At the moment, the prospects are daunting. A majority of Americans view government as wasteful and inefficient. The Trump administration ceaselessly advances the image of civil servants as impediments to “making America great again.” The current slash-and-burn rampage of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is driven by the illusion of agencies staffed by underworked, overpaid timeservers.
Russell Vought, architect of Project 2025, the hard right’s roadmap for the evisceration of the federal government, now serves as director of the Office of Management and Budget. In a speech last fall, he left no doubt about the incoming administration’s objectives when it comes to the civil service: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”
Vought’s toxic vision has become reality. In-your-face cruelty isn’t a byproduct of DOGE’s campaign. As journalist and TV commentator Jonathan Capehart put it, “Cruelty is no longer the point. It’s the policy.” Civil servants who’ve qualified for federal employment, been promoted, and served competently are arbitrarily dismissed. Middle-class employees who face mortgages, daycare costs, tuition, credit-card debt, car repairs—the ordinary expenses of American families—find themselves suddenly, with no reason beyond the whims of billionaires, unemployed.
“For people still in government jobs,” said a counselor working with federal employees, “what I see is mostly total fear and demoralization.” The prospects of these employees depend on their age, savings, and the state of the job market (wobbly at the moment). The fortunate will find new jobs. Some will relocate. Others will slide down the pay scale and take jobs beneath their skills. The disruptions will be widespread and, for many, painful.
The battle is half lost when free-market dogmatists succeed in depicting civil servants as villainous bureaucrats who serve the nefarious purposes of the deep state. “Bureaucrat” is the operative word: it reeks of clerks with green eye shades poring over dusty volumes as they thwart the wishes of the general public. They evoke the bloated inhabitants of Honoré Daumier’s nineteenth-century caricatures of France’s bureaucratie.
Bloat is the oft-cited companion of bureaucracy. As part of his DOGE-ing, Elon Musk has quoted free-market economist and patron saint Milton Friedman’s criticism about how unwieldy the government has become. (Some might judge Musk’s personal fortune of $364 billion on the far side of bloat.)
According to Project Democracy, the federal government’s civilian workforce numbers about 2.2 million employees. They perform all the functions of the federal government, from operating national parks to protecting national security. More than 70 percent work in defense and security-related departments, such as the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense: “The total number of federal civil servants is roughly the same as it was in the late 1960s, although the population has grown by more than 60 percent.”
Perhaps the best place to begin rooting out bloat is with the administration’s proposed tax cuts. According to the Annenberg Public Policy Center, “the top 10 percent of the income distribution receives about 56 percent of the value” under these cuts. The major beneficiaries will be corporate hierarchs who are already paid salaries bloated to a degree that would make Jay Gould and his fellow robber barons blush: Harvey Schwartz, the Carlyle Group ($186,994,098); Sue Nabi, Coty ($149,429,496); Christopher Winfrey, Charter Communications ($89,077,098); and second-tier CEOs like Bob Iger at Disney ($41,000,000). In 2023, CEO median compensation was $29 million; the ratio of CEO pay to employees earning $100,000 was 312:1. The megamansions and extravagant vacation villas that dot the country testify to the bloat.
The net worth of the civil servants that Lewis profiles fades into insignificance compared with that of the bloviating private-sector plutocrats who masquerade as defenders of fiscal virtue: the real-estate developer turned politician (estimated net worth $4.2 billion) who occupies the Oval Office and depends for advice and direction on the prancing, chainsaw-wielding South African immigrant, the galaxy’s richest man, Elon Musk; Fox News sock-puppet Sean Hannity (net worth $300 million) who parrots White House press releases for an annual salary of $25 million; his Australian immigrant boss, Rupert Murdoch (net worth $21 billion), who, undiscouraged by the $787.5 million fine his network paid for the election lies it spewed—the largest media defamation settlement in U.S. history—has turned Fox News into the administration’s recruiting agency, cheerleader, and echo chamber. Fox is the closest the country has come to a ministry of (dis)information.
Musk and company are the top tier of the wrecking crew bullying and slashing through government departments, cutting away the women and men who, Lewis makes clear, work to ensure our water is clean, our drugs are safe, our skyways and airports are guarded against collisions and crashes, our roadways and bridges repaired, our national parks safe for campers and hikers, our stocks and savings protected against fraudsters, on and on. These everyday civil servants of the kind Lewis and his co-contributors bring to life are not some mystical cabal of scheming, power-mad operatives of the “deep state.” They provide critical services Americans routinely rely on.
Bureaucratic obstructionism and inertia isn’t a chimera. Charles Dickens’s satirical Circumlocution Office, dedicated to delay, inefficiency, and obstructionism, does sometimes get close to reality. But as Lewis makes clear, it’s far from the rule. Waste is something to guard against and prune, but random mass firings and the erasure of entire departments, which punish civil servants and disrupt crucial government programs and essential services, are blatantly unfair, patently counterproductive, and deeply disturbing. It’s as possible to have too little government as it is to have too much. The ramifications of these cuts will be with us for decades to come.
Rather than serving a small elite, the civil servants profiled in Who Is Government? are aware of the role they play in making government work in the interests of the American public.
Contributor Geraldine Brooks’s revelatory profile of IRS agent Jarod Koopman, a wrestler and gun enthusiast who’s spent his career putting embezzlers, drug traffickers, and child pornographers out of business, is a case in point. Koopman is about as dedicated a civil servant as can be found, and he’s inured to the obloquy directed at him and his colleagues by ideologues and political opportunists. Two-thirds of IRS staff reductions are scheduled in the enforcement category. How Koopman and his colleagues will survive DOGE’s gutting of the agency—presuming any survive at all—is an open question.
Pamela Wright, the energetic chief innovation officer at the National Archives, profiled by Sarah Vogel, sees her work as “fundamentally important to the country.” She maintains that “no matter what capacity you are in while working for the federal government—your work and how you conduct yourself matters, and you need to be aware of the significance of it.”
The dedication and achievements of civil servants run the gamut: from Christopher Mark, Princeton-graduate-turned-coal-miner and Bureau of Mines official, whose work has protected the lives of hundreds of miners; to Ronald Walter, director of the National Cemetery Association, who sees to it that veterans are buried with dignity in surroundings worthy of their service and sacrifices; to Heather Stone’s lifesaving work at the Food and Drug Administration.
The Pothole Principle almost always pertains: as long as the road is smooth, government is out of mind; once the car runs over a pothole and blows a tire, government is to blame. Says former IRS commissioner Daniel Werfel, “The quality of life we have, it’s all government. Government touches you a hundred times before breakfast, and you don’t even know it.”
Once upon a time, faith in government’s ability to make a difference was bipartisan. As Margaret Spellings, secretary of education under George W. Bush, asserted, “We believe in leveling the playing field, that ZIP code or geography shouldn’t determine opportunity, and that the federal government has a stake in that.”
The GOP and its supporters have almost uniformly fallen in line behind the administration’s shambolic blitzkrieg against the federal civil service. The lineup of leading universities, law firms, and media companies that have hurried to meet Trump’s demands, in Finley Peter Dunne’s phrase, “as fast as their hands and knees can carry them,” is long and growing—The Washington Post, ABC, CBS, and Columbia University, as well as law firms Paul, Weiss and Skadden, Arps. Harvard has finally broken from the pack and refused to put its academic independence into federal receivership. The school has an endowment of $53 billion. It remains to be seen how many other institutions can afford to show some spine.
Silicon Valley’s willingness to toe the line has been rewarded. Soon after “Liberation Day” began a trade war with China, the president lifted tariffs on smartphones, computers, semiconductors and other electronics. Chiefs of intelligence agencies, foreign and domestic, make no secret of their personal fealty to the president and their intent to punish his enemies. The Supreme Court wavers. A sycophantic Senate lies supine at Trump’s feet. Steve Bannon, the gnomish, populist guru and self-appointed, megaphonic foe of DEI—the MAGA bête noire—has succeeded in provoking hysteria reminiscent of the Red Scare. Here, and not in the ranks of the civil service, are the moving parts of a deep state.
The destruction goes on. USAID has been shut down, its employees summarily dismissed, its role in the global fight against hunger ended, its involvement in disaster relief terminated or, in shrunken form, switched to the State Department, which is also scheduled for significant cuts. The Department of Education, led by a former wrestling executive, has fired half its workforce. The rest will soon follow. The administration’s ideological inquisition has excised mention of climate change from federal documents and rid the military academies of any book smacking of the dreaded DEI virus. The White House proposes eliminating funding for the UN and the humanitarian aid it provides to poor and developing countries.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, whose flirtations with medical quackery and vaccine denial are a matter of record (and a matter for concern), has made his first order of business the firing of ten thousand full-time employees and 5,200 probationary ones. Their expertise, experience, and knowledge will follow them out the door.
When it comes to the role of the federal government in the lives of American citizens, Michael Lewis has become, if not a voice crying out in the wilderness, at least the leading frontline defender of fundamental truths about government, its functions and policies, and those who carry them out—truths that have been obscured and ignored. “Just getting civil servants to come forward to talk about themselves,” Lewis writes, “turns out to be a full-time job.”
Who Is Government? continues the examination of the federal civil service that Lewis began in his 2018 bestseller, The Fifth Risk. Author of bestselling inquiries into the great American pastimes of playing ball and making money, Lewis laid out how, far from being a stumbling block to progress, government has played an important role in funding innovation. It was the Department of Energy (DOE) that lent Tesla the funds to build its factory in Fremont, California. The Department of Defense was responsible for the GPS and the internet.
“I’m routinely appalled by how profoundly ignorant even highly educated people are when it comes to the structure and function of our government,” says Dr. Kathryn Sullivan, geologist, oceanographer, Navy officer, NASA astronaut, and former undersecretary of commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere.
Rick Perry, former Republican governor of Texas, took over the Department of Energy in the first Trump administration promising to shut it down. He was unaware that the department had nothing to do with controlling gas prices and everything to do with managing the country’s nuclear resources and weapon programs. “Knowledge makes life messier,” Lewis observes. “It makes it a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a worldview.”
Americans have an inherited distrust of government dating back to the country’s founding. The Pilgrims came to escape a monarchy and its established church. Generations of immigrants—Irish, Poles, Jews—fled arbitrary systems of government designed to deny them basic civil rights and keep them in line. The country’s founders put in place a government with limited powers. The secret to its success was its fundamental clarity on the people’s rights and, at the same time, the flexibility it offered to adjust to sweeping changes in social and economic circumstances.
A thinly populated country perched on the continent’s eastern edge expanded to the western shore and became a nation of 330 million, an economic colossus, a military behemoth, and the world’s dominant superpower. But with success has come enormous problems: industrial pollution, an enduring legacy of racism, the glaring and growing gap between the privileged and unprivileged, millions unable to work because of age or disability, entire regions facing economic headwinds beyond their control, present and future challenges of want, waste, and climate change.
Among the functions of the federal government listed in the preamble to the constitution is “promoting the general welfare.” Through civil war, world wars, cold war, stock-market crashes, epidemics, depressions, urban unrest, dust bowls, the response of the federal government has been integral and indispensable to finding answers. No amount of rugged individualism or free-market magic or DOGE-driven demagoguery can meet the communal problems we face.
Lewis brings long-needed attention to the ordinary and extraordinary ways in which the federal civil service supports the country’s success and steers it away from catastrophe. “One day,” he writes, “someone will write the history of the strange relationship between the United States and its citizens. It would need at least a chapter on the government’s attempts to save the citizens from the things that might kill them.”
Who Is Government?
The Untold Story of Public Service
Edited by Michael Lewis
Riverhead Books
$30 | 272 pp.
