Blockers | A Preview of Michael Lewis's New Audiobook

Jacob Goldstein (0:00)

Hey, it's Jacob. I am here today with a preview from a new book by Michael Lewis. You probably know Michael Lewis is one of the greatest non-fiction writers around. He wrote Liars Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short, among many others. The new book is called Blockers. It's about a handful of civil servants who dedicated their careers to government work until the Department of Government Efficiency, aka DOJ, came along.

The book is called Blockers. I hope you like the excerpt, and if you want to buy the whole audiobook, you can do so at blockers.fm.

Again, blockers.fm. Here's the preview.

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I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. That I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same.

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That I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion.

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And that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I'm about to enter.

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So help me, God.

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Civil Service Oath of Office, Title 5, US. Code, Section 3331

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From at MUS., Doge.

The Doge team fought for days to gain access to the United States Institute of Peace. Eventually, with help from the FBI and Metro Police, Doge was able to access the agency and discovered massive fraud, waste and abuse, including payments to Taliban and Iraq.

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Elon Musk. Any government institution is most likely to be the opposite of its name. Elon Musk.

They deleted a terabyte of financial data to cover their crimes. But they don't understand technology, so we recovered it.

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Prologue The Guns and the Fires of the United States Colin O'Brien was the chief security officer at the United States Institute of Peace. Mostly that meant keeping the Institute's 400 employees scattered across 28 difficult countries safe from harm. Mostly it succeeded. There had been close calls in Haiti, and Colin himself had been with a group that had come under rocket fire in Kyiv. But no one had been killed.

No new doves to add to the five already on the wall of the fallen. Now, on this late afternoon of March 14, 2025, the threat was right here in Washington, DC.

Three young men from the Department of Government Efficiency were trying to argue their way into the Institute building.

Once inside, it was game over. Just as it had been at the US. Agency for International Development, USAID, and the African Development Foundation and a bunch of other places. During the presidential campaign, he hadn't taken Doge seriously. Trump's promise to create a Department of Government Efficiency, run by Elon Musk, felt to Colin like his promise to make Mexico pay for the wall or to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. It was not something that would ever survive contact with reality, said Colin. Watching Musk do various weird things on various political stages only reinforced his sense that Doge was pure theater. His views had changed only after they'd busted into federal agencies to shut them down and Congress had failed to respond. If that could happen in broad daylight with no response, then no organization was safe, he said. He'd left work early on the 14th, a Friday. His daughter needed help with her math homework and assumed nothing would happen late in the afternoon before a holiday weekend. Then came the call from one of his guys, saying that these Doge kids were out on the sidewalk and asking to be let in. Colin immediately sent a text to his IT people that said simply, shut it down. And they'd instantly thrown the building into lockdown. After the magnetic lock snapped shut, no one on the inside could get out and no one on the outside could get in.

By the time Colin arrived to spring the staff from the building, the three Doge guys had given up and left. Two hours later they returned with reinforcements, a rare Doge female and two FBI agents.

This time Colin went out to meet them. He'd been tracking Doge's movements through the Federal bureaucracy. He'd created files on each member. The security guys who had called Colin had spotted them from the photos Colin had provided. But this was the first time Colin had seen any of them in the flesh.

Skinny jeans, T-shirts and little backpacks, tech-bro wear. The FBI agents, like Colin, wore suits to work and were clearly uneasy in their new role as Doge Muscle. The Doge trio didn't have a warrant or a court order or really anything else except attitudes. One of the FBI men told Colin that he was just hoping to facilitate a cordial conversation, but the lead Doge guy, Nate Kavanaugh, was not cordial. He was expecting me to jump too, said Colin.