Michael Lewis on the Civil Servants Who Tried to Stop DOGE

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Alexis Madrigal (0:18)

Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal.

Those first few weeks of the Trump administration really were something. Perhaps the strangest episode was the creation of Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, which claimed it would slash $2 trillion from the federal budget. They did not do that. In fact, most independent analyses have found DOGE might have saved the government some billions of dollars maybe or on the order of a thousand times less than the stated goal. But when you add in the disruption costs and hits to revenue from cuts to the IRS, DOGE probably left the federal government in a worse financial position.

And DOGE's tactics, its mass firings and general chaos monkey approach did serious damage to federal workers who found themselves in the unlucky position to be targeted. These are the people who star in Michael Lewis' new book, Blockers, Rebels in the Deep State, and they provide a perfect opportunity for Lewis to show the kind of people who end up career civil servants and what those people actually do. Michael Lewis joins us this morning. Welcome.

Michael Lewis (1:21)

Thank you.

Alexis Madrigal (1:22)

Can we just start with a compare and contrast of Trump 1 and Trump 2, these administrations, and which one of them had more of an impact on the actual functioning of government?

Michael Lewis (1:35)

All right. That's easy because I wrote a book about Trump 1, the fifth risk.

So Trump 1, it was defined by indifference, that Trump is elected right after he's elected, he fires his transition team. And that's what got me interested. Chris Christie had built for him a 500 something person team to go in and meet with the thousand person something team the Obama administration assembled to explain what goes on in the federal government to the new administration. And if you look at that, you just think about it, like Donald Trump, he was sort of the dog who caught the bus, right? When he's running, he's not really thinking he's going to win, and then all of a sudden he wins, and he doesn't have any experience in government. He probably knows less about it than you or I would have known, and he's going to be running it. And you might think that that would cause him to want to know. Instead, he fires the mechanism for finding out, and tells Chris Christie that, actually the quote what Christie told me was like, Chris, we're so smart, it'll take an hour, we'll figure it out.

So I remember having this sensation, have you ever been in a car, like on a highway, with you're in the passenger seat and the person is going 80 miles an hour, and they got one hand on the wheel, and they're looking at you while they're driving, and you start to, your hands start to sweat, and my reaction to that is like, you're pressing the pedals with your feet, you know, and you don't have any. That's right. And you're staring at the road really hard, like to show them what they're supposed to do. And I had this feeling, I started staring at the government really hard, hoping that if I stared hard enough, like it wouldn't crash. And so, but the truth is that, you know, the government sort of has an autopilot feature. I mean, it's...

Rich (3:25)

A certain momentum.

Michael Lewis (3:26)

A certain momentum. And what isn't true is that like Trump rolled in with some vast, complicated agenda that was stymied by a deep state. What was true is this quarter, like ignorance, mismanagement, a little chaos, but it wasn't catastrophic. It wasn't an assault on the federal workforce in the same way. But I got to say, just how weird this was, my journalistic approach, what I thought was fun was, because it was not fun, why would I bother? But what was, oh my God, the Obama administration had been really grateful to the Bush administration for the handoff. They had really thrown themselves into creating this course in how the federal government works. I'll go take the course. The reader will be with me. The reader will know more than the president about what he's running. It was so preposterous that go to the Department of Energy, and I could get much of the briefing of how the nuclear arsenal was run.

You walk in and they say, I'm glad someone came because we really wanted to explain. That's Trump 1