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.
