Who is Government?

I had the chance this week to review a new short book edited by Michael Lewis—he of “Moneyball,” “The Big Short,” and many other titanic-selling nonfiction of recent decades—that profiles some of the nation’s outstanding and fascinating federal employees. As I wrote in the Washington Post review, which just posted this morning, “Perhaps never before has there been a book better timed or more urgent.”

“Who is Government?” grew out of a project by now-departed Post Opinion Editor David Shipley last year, where he asked Lewis to dive into the federal bureaucracy. Michael Lewis collected some of the nation’s best writers—Casey Cep, Dave Eggers, John Lanchester, Geraldine Brooks, Sarah Vowell, and W. Kamau Bell—and told them to dive in somewhere and find someone interesting, far from the front pages, to write about. The result is an astonishing book. No one has ever written about the government better. The profiles are filled with beautiful words and turns of phrase that stopped me in my tracks. This is the ’27 Yankees or the ’96 Bulls of anthologies. (Seriously, if you’ve not read Casey Cep’s “Furious Hours,” you are missing out on what is for me a top-five nonfiction of all-time!) Together, they paint—as one of them might have said—a heartbreaking work of the staggering genius and hard work behind the smooth day-to-day functioning of our federal government.

As a journalist and historian, I’ve always drawn the distinction that I cover government, not politics, and I have long believed that Washington is way over-rotated and over-invested on covering the latter while the most interesting and important stories are buried in the former. There are a gazillion journalists chasing the same few stories on Capitol Hill each day while whole Cabinet departments have barely a handful full-time reporters devoted to them. When I started writing about the Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection in 2014—the nation’s largest law enforcement organization, one riddled with stunning corruption, and one that even then wildly out-of-control—there were only four reporters covering the agency across the country.

But covering politics is cheap and fast for news organizations, and covering government is really hard and time-consuming. And yet the most important stories about how our future will unfold are usually buried in the ways government is working—or not. Recent weeks have shown why it’s so important to dig into these departments and agencies and understand what they do—and who does it.

Even though all of the pieces in this book had been published before, I came to it with fresh eyes — while I have been a columnist for the Washington Post for the last year, I had nothing to do with this project and, in fact, being terrible at managing my open browser tabs, had never — as I had very much intended to do! — even read the original stories gathered together in the book.

I encourage all of you to spend some this week with the book or some of the profiles online. As I wrote, “To read them — each takes about 20 minutes — is to drift into an alternate universe filled with the most thoughtful and caring people doing hard things for all the right reasons.”

 As I write in the review:

“The typecasting has always been lazy and stupid, but increasingly it’s deadly,” Lewis writes in the book’s intro, words with particular weight as headlines start to highlight the people dying overseas because of what Musk might call the “rapid unexpected disassembly” of foreign aid. Sure, most of government work is incredibly boring—but that’s the point. We want it to be boring. That’s the sign it’s working well. I’m convinced that a fair bit of the hostility Biden faced as president from the press corps was simply because government operated smoothly without scandal, making it boring to cover. Again: That’s the way we want it. We shouldn’t as citizens have to know who the acting head of the Kennedy Center or even ever follow the work of the US Institute of Peace.

Every page in this book is a lesson is why the DOGE approach of “Move Fast and Break Things” isn’t the right way to approach government or the management of a country of 300 million people.

We’re watching right now, in real-time, the unraveling of the foundation of daily modern life in the United States in the 21st century. One of the things that really struck me reading this book was how much we take for granted how much modern life is better, safer, and more secure than it was not all that long ago — and how much of a role the government has had in making that possible.

Lewis’s profile focuses on a completely obscure mine safety employee, whose work over nearly forty years has transformed mine safety in the United States—he’s dedicated basically his entire career to working on mine roof collapses and the improvements and thinking he started on in the 1980s and 1990s resulted in 2016 being the first year in American history where no miners were killed by a roof collapse. But all of that is really recent: The government has only had the ability to regulate mining safety since the 1970s. And there are people just like Christopher Mark all over government, doing work none of us think about but that will make our lives better.

I wrote earlier this year about one of my mantras: Government works until it doesn’t. I’m sure I’ll write more about that in the coming weeks and months. But it’s impossible to read “Who is Government?” without rising fear about what is to come:

I hope you’ll check out the book or the profiles — and I hope you’ll spend some time this week thinking about how grateful we all should be for the federal government and civil servants who are facing such unnecessary turmoil and destruction right now.

America may be experiencing a “constitutional crash” but our government’s not dead yet. It’s worth fighting—hard—to keep it alive.

GMG

PS: If you haven’t gotten enough reading recommendations out of this newsletter yet, I’d encourage you to track down a copy of “Trail Fever,” which I think is Lewis’s best book — it’s his campaign reportage, a la “Boys on the Bus,” about the ’96 presidential campaign. The book’s been reissued now that he’s a famous top-tier author as “Losers.”