Michael Lewis, the bestselling author of Moneyball and The Big Short, has turned his narrative talents to the quiet heroes who tried to stop Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (Doge). In his new book Blockers, Lewis focuses on the dedicated officials who attempted to prevent the wanton and often illegal destruction of their life's work by Musk's Doge or other agents of chaos.
The quiet crisis in American government
While Donald Trump's catastrophic errors get much attention, the core functions of the American government are slowly disintegrating. Outbreaks of disease, such as the recent wave of explosive diarrhoea across the US, might have happened anyway, but were probably made worse by lay-offs at the Centers for Disease Control. Response times to natural disasters may have been hampered by mass redundancies at the National Weather Service. Cuts to tax collection also seem to have reduced revenue by multiple billions.
Bureaucracies are hard to make interesting, but Lewis has a knack for finding an angle that cuts through the complexity. Blockers is a loose sequel to The Fifth Risk, which focused on the transition from the Obama to the Trump administration. This time around the problem is not indifference but malicious intent to destroy.
The blockers and their stories
The "blockers" range from a researcher working on preventing wildfires to a security guard trying to block Musk's goons from entering his building, and a lawyer attempting to keep personal tax data from being used to deport undocumented migrants. In truth, they don't do much blocking – since they all either end up resigning when they're asked to do something illegal, or are fired.
The book's most engaging chapter zooms in on Francis Collins, a scientist who helped discover a successful treatment for cystic fibrosis. Collins ended up at the head of the National Institutes of Health under Obama, continued through Trump's first term and part of Biden's, before stepping down to run an NIH research lab. After Trump's re-election he was effectively forced out, saying that his position had become "untenable". What makes this particularly remarkable is that Russell Vought, the Republican operative central to developing the Project 2025 plans, has a daughter with cystic fibrosis.
A glimpse of what could have been
Perhaps the most interesting character is Sahil Lavingia, a successful software engineer who bought into Musk's vision and went to work for Doge in the Department of Veterans Affairs. He only lasted 55 days before giving an on-the-record interview in which he noted that "it's kind of fine – because the government works. It's not as inefficient as I was expecting, to be honest. I was hoping for more easy wins." A few months later, once Doge had fallen apart, he was invited back to the Treasury department, tasked with improving the Internal Revenue Service's computer systems.
Lewis is great at finding incredible civil servants and telling their stories. But agencies and departments should not have to rely on unsung heroes, battling failing systems, and doing 90-hour weeks for little money. Effective government needs processes that work when used by a regular person doing a nine-to-five job. Rather than trying to replicate the "blockers", we need to understand what these superstars are doing and embed it in the fabric of our institutions.
