Michael Lewis drills into the early days of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, as told by public servants it targeted and one of America’s best storytellers.
In the new Washington, it was the worst thing you could be- especially if you worked in the federal government and wanted to keep your job. A Blocker was a holdover, an impediment someone who didn’t get the message- and most of all, someone who didn’t belong.
Blockers is the story of people who believed they had a calling, who are convinced they were doing something the country could not do without, and then discovered they were no longer wanted. One kept American’s most sensitive tax data out of the wrong hands and another made sure that politicians and civil servants played by the rules. One figured out how to stop wildfires from destroying suburban neighborhoods, another helped uncover the mysteries of cystic fibrosis.
It should come as a surprise that the writer who made subprime mortgages gripping (The Big Short) and who turned baseball statistics into poetry (Moneyball) could transform the first two years of the second Trump administration into a thriller about federal employees by putting before us a clear question: If these public servants can’t survive in government today, then what does that say about us?
Early on into Elon Musk’s chainsaw massacre of the US government last year, he appeared on TV to share the progress of “Department of Government Efficiency” and his goal of cutting $2tn in federal spending.
He cited the US Institute of Peace- a quasi-government body on a modest $55mn yearly grant. Having stormed USIP’s building with the help of police and FBI agents, and then scoured its databases, Doge staff had exposed several cases of alleged waste, fraud and abuse. A £675,000 for “private aviation services”, a cost of an emergency charter plane to extract more than 200 Afghan staff and their families from Kabul as it was falling to the Taliban and £132,000 payment to an ex-Taliban member, for on-the-ground Afghanistan intelligence. Musk outed him, which led to the Taliban rounding up and arresting dozens of his relatives. Doge’s other three citations were also small and misrepresented.
The book’s title comes from Musk’s moniker for career civil servants who balked at Doge’s often lawbreaking demands. Lewis writes “The Blocker was the person who didn’t understand progress. The person without vision. The person who did not want to live on Mars or possibly even care if anyone ever got there”. The typical Doge employee, was a “25-year-old tech guy dying to breathe the same air as Elon Musk and only just now grokking the fact the United States government has three branches”.
One of those, Jermey Lewin (28) who got a job because he had a friend at Musk’s company Tesla, was put in charge of shutting down USAID. Having mothballed that agency, Lewin was appointed by Marco Rubio to run the US state department’s policy planning unit, a job once held by George Kennan, the godfather of US cold war strategy. Lewis’ story ought to have a happy ending, when Musk fell out with Trump, who called him a big-time drug addict”, his part of latter-day Vikings vanished overnight from DC along with him. “It felt like the fall of Saigon” on recalled. Trump’s White House budget director Russell Vought’s aim is to so badly demoralise federal bureaucrats that he put them “in Trauma”.
Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State by Michael Lewis, WW Norton & Company $29.99, 256 pages.
