It is a tad obnoxious for Michael Lewis, perhaps America’s most consistently successful nonfiction author, to open his new book by boasting that a previous one sold half a million copies, but bear with him. The book in question was 2018’s The Fifth Risk, in which Lewis smartly responded to Donald Trump’s first administration with profiles of a handful of unknown federal government employees in order to valorise what Trump scorned and highlight the cost of breaking it. His point in the introduction to Who Is Government? is that you could lift the lid on any department and find a similar treasure trove of stories: people you’ve never heard of, doing work whose importance you’ve never understood.
Last year, Lewis assembled a crack team of long-form writers to uncover more of these stories for the Washington Post, and those articles are collected here. The gods have yet again smiled on him, if not his country, because the timing is horrendously perfect. One of the many people who doesn’t understand how the US government works has somehow been permitted to take it down to the studs in the name of “efficiency”. Elon Musk’s Doge has only been running for a few weeks but Americans will be suffering the consequences of his ignorant vandalism for many years to come, in health, national security, disaster preparation and more. It would not be surprising to learn that some of the people interviewed here have already been laid off, or their work defunded. At any rate, Musk’s demolition derby makes this kind of journalism feel, more than ever, like a civic duty.
Contrary to the conservative stereotype of a ballooning bureaucracy, the size of the federal workforce has not changed greatly since the 1960s. It currently numbers around 2.4m people, more than 70% of whom work for agencies related to defence and national security. No doubt some of them are mediocre or incompetent, and some systems are badly in need of reform, but this book rightly focuses on the quiet heroes who represent public service at its best.
One reason we don’t know who these people are is that they don’t care if you know who they are. “The best thing in the world is when no one can remember whose idea it was,” says Ronald E Waters, the humble powerhouse whose National Cemetery Administration has a record rating of 97 on the Customer Satisfaction Index. As the New Yorker’s Casey Cep writes: “He refuses to believe there’s anything like a Ron Fan Club, no matter how many members I find.” Visiting Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Dave Eggers notices “a relentless emphasis on teams and groups and predecessors” rather than individual glory.
Each chapter has its own distinct flavour. Novelist Geraldine Brooks’s story of an IRS cybercrime specialist who teaches jiu-jitsu when he’s not thwarting drug dealers, terrorists and paedophiles could be a movie pitch, while historian Sarah Vowell’s exquisitely written tour of the National Archives intertwines US history with that of her own family: “I was looking for a country I want to live in.”
John Lanchester tweaks the assignment by profiling not a person but a number: the consumer price index. He deftly explains how it works and how it falls short. Food prices constitute just 8% of the CPI but they are the main cause of sticker shock, so inflation can be technically falling but, as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris could tell you, consumers won’t feel it. But that does not make CPI, as rightwing agitators claim, a lie. Lanchester’s seemingly wonkish article ascends towards a stirring defence of the pursuit of objective data, however imperfect, as an expression of Enlightenment values.
Lewis bookends Who Is Government? with two typically gripping stories that illustrate the limits of free market solutions. Christopher Mark, a former coal miner who revolutionised mine safety at the Department of Labor, discovered that mine operators declined to implement simple life-saving measures in order to cut costs. It took regulation, often demonised as “red tape”, to force their hand. Heather Stone, an epidemiologist at the Food and Drug Administration, investigates deadly diseases so rare that the pharmaceutical industry sees no profit in developing treatments. Put bluntly, the private sector will let people die.
It does pay better though. Doge’s voluntary redundancy offer perversely incentivises the most accomplished civil servants to triple their salaries by leaving and the less impressive to stay. For everyone in this book, public service is a higher calling. It is also meant to transcend partisan politics. “There’s no Republican or Democratic way to bury a veteran,” says Ron Waters.
Doge’s mercenary, hyperpoliticised agenda is antithetical to these civic values. “Move fast and break things” might work at a startup but it is a catastrophic approach to complex public institutions that have built up over decades. Musk sees federal employees as either time-serving hacks burning through taxpayer dollars or subversive enemies within. Unfortunately, civil servants’ admirable humility allows such caricatures to proliferate. “The typecasting has always been lazy and stupid, but increasingly, it’s deadly,” Lewis writes. This eye-opening, multifaceted ode to public service therefore feels both urgent and moving.
• Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service by Michael Lewis is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
