Elon Musk and DOGE have brought disaster to the US government. Michael Lewis’ Blockers details just how much.
Michael Lewis’ new book, Blockers: Deep State Rebelsis a roller coaster. It alternates between heartwarming stories of stellar federal civil servants, of capable people who sacrifice good-paying private-sector jobs to make their part of government work, and tales of the early destruction wrought by the Department of Government Efficiency and its phalanx of brooding, Elon-worshipping idiot boys. The highs are exactly what readers have come to expect from Lewis, a journalist whose ability to make everything from bond trading to subprime mortgages intelligible and exciting has consistently earned his books (silver ball, The blind side, The big short) on the bestseller lists. The lowest are accounts of 20-year-olds with no real work experience (as Lewis puts it, “who only just realized that the United States government has three branches”) blithely demanding access to slices of sensitive data and firing people whose work they couldn’t understand.
“Blocker” is a label Elon Musk liked to slap on anyone who tried to obstruct his ignorant, largely illegal, and completely ineffective campaign last year to cut government spending. Blockers offers six profiles of federal workers accused of such obstruction, from the head of security at the United States Institute of Peace—an independent, nonpartisan institution over which DOGE had no legal authority—to an IRS official who had to resort to locking herself in a dark conference room to avoid Gavin Kliger, a capricious little DOGE goon who wanted her to give him confidential information on 7 million taxpayers. Then, to mix things up, Lewis includes a final chapter, a wild card of sorts, suggesting what DOGE could have been if the people involved had had any decency.
By Michael Lewis. WW Norton & Company.
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Lewis deftly crafts each worker’s story as a different narrative flavor. This chapter of USIP reads like a political thriller. A later chapter introduces Alexander Maranghides, a naturalized citizen from Greece who worked for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, specializing in firefighting at the interface between nature and urban areas. The story of Maranghides is a saga of quests, the story of a man determined to understand a type of catastrophe that was relatively understudied. (Older fire protection engineers focused primarily on interior fires or wildfires.) As with the other officials profiled by Lewis, Maranghides devoted his life—including many unpaid hours—to his work, until the appointment of the insipid Howard Lutnick as Secretary of Commerce, the Cabinet position overseeing NIST. The second Trump administration cut the institute’s budget in half, and Lutnick voiced no protest, focusing instead on scrambling for face-to-face time with the president or arranging for his personal butler to “serve him a full meal at the fancy restaurant with all the silverware, while the people briefing him watched,” Lewis writes. Maranghides retired in his late 50s, taking with him a trove of expertise on the type of fire that destroyed much of the Pacific Palisades last year and also poses a growing threat to the wildly unprepared East Coast.
This butler detail is pure Lewis. He has an unfailing eye for the image that captures the emotional undercurrent of a scene, and Trump’s multitude of cowardly apparatchiks offer him plenty of that. He playfully frames his chapter on the forced retirement of Francis Collins, former director of the National Institutes of Health and perhaps the best-known public official featured in Blockers– like a badass murder mystery. Seeking to identify the Trump administration figure who caused Collins to be “hit,” Lewis complicates matters with phrases like, “The three remaining suspects rolled into Francis’ guts like last night’s undercooked chicken.” But when describing the day Collins was forced to leave the job he loved, Lewis writes that Collins called “his wife, who came to pick him up and drive him home. He left with a small cardboard box with a few photos, a spare tie, packets of ramen noodles, and a mirror made by children in NIH clinical trials, all of whom had died. He had bought it at auction to raise money for a children’s hospital.” Although personally modest, Collins has an impressive track record. He led the Human Genome Project and was instrumental in identifying the gene responsible for cystic fibrosis. The “little cardboard box,” in this light, is a particularly poignant touch at the end of an extraordinary career.
Collins’ story also highlights the appalling recklessness of the second Trump administration’s hatchet job. Russell Vought – director of the Office of Management and Budget and named by Lewis as a likely suspect in Collins’ “hits” – has a daughter with cystic fibrosis. “As he considered his child,” Lewis writes, “Vought must have known—and could have afforded to care—that he owed his life to Francis Collins and, more broadly, to the work sponsored for fifty years or more by the National Institutes of Health. » When he received the axe, Collins asked for a pass that would allow him to continue working in his NIH lab (without pay), researching a disease that causes premature aging in children. A Trump lackey, Matt Memoli, told him that if he didn’t come clean, he would be publicly accused of funding research in a lab in China where the COVID virus was allegedly “cooked up.”
Although Lewis isn’t touting it, this story is something of a scoop, as Collins has previously been circumspect about the reasons for his retirement. Likewise, his reporting reveals that Melanie Krause — the former acting IRS commissioner who was described as courageously resigning from her post when Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent signed a memorandum behind her back agreeing to illegally share the IRS date with Immigration and Customs Enforcement — was, in fact, a weak-willed collaborator. Krause granted Gavin Kliger’s request to fire the department’s human resources chief, who had refused to send an email terminating all employees on probation under the false accusation of poor performance. Krause also tried to convince another IRS official to make it easier to hand over taxpayer data to the Department of Homeland Security so she wouldn’t be responsible for it herself. That official, Kathleen Walters, the heroine of the chapter on the IRS—a tortuous tale of palace intrigue, bureaucracy-style—resigned instead.
The catastrophic waste resulting from driving such talented and committed public servants out of government will harm the United States for decades, as will their current, incompetent replacements, whose only qualification is their loyalty to Donald Trump. No sooner has Lewis lifted his readers’ spirits with a portrait of a man uncannily capable of resolving conflicts between government managers and their employees’ unions (“It’s hard to explain the connection between Tim’s job and how quickly you get your tax refund,” he quotes a source. “But there is a connection. Tim is necessary for the government to function”), than he recounts how the stupidity of Musk’s famous “five-ball” email chased the man away.
One of the few consolations in this sad spectacle is the probable success of Blockers, and the fact that the misdeeds of such DOGE toads as Kliger, Marko Elez, and Nate Cavanaugh, and the soulless officials who submitted to them, have become a matter of public record. (Plus, some of them are being prosecuted.) May their names be a curse and widely published in connection with their vandalism. As for the officials they mistreated, as Lewis writes: “Their stories were often inspiring. But these stories were rarely told.” Here is at least one book to correct that.
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