Michael Lewis Found a Journalistic Gold Mine Inside the Federal Government

This is part 2 of my series on Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service by Michael Lewis.

The introduction to this book is Lewis explaining how he stumbled into what he calls a “journalistic gold mine.” And his framing is interesting because he talks about it like a Wall Street trade.

The setup

After Trump won in 2016, something weird happened. Both candidates had built massive transition teams, hundreds of people ready to enter federal agencies and learn what was going on inside them. Obama officials had spent six months preparing briefings. But Trump fired his entire transition team days after winning. He told Chris Christie they were both smart enough to handle the transition themselves over a couple of hours.

Then he appointed Rick Perry to run the Energy Department. Perry had previously called for eliminating it. At his Senate confirmation hearing, he admitted he had no idea what the department actually did. Turns out, among other things, it manages the country’s nuclear weapons.

And here’s the thing that Lewis found most striking: Perry wasn’t alone in his ignorance. Lewis didn’t know what the Energy Department did either. Nobody did. People who could argue about politics all day long couldn’t answer basic questions like “What do the people in the Agriculture Department actually do all day?”

The arbitrage

Lewis frames this as a market opportunity. He went and got the briefings that the Trump team had skipped. He wandered around the Energy Department, the Commerce Department, the Agriculture Department. And everywhere he looked, he found incredible characters doing critical work.

He wrote it up as magazine pieces, then collected them into The Fifth Risk. The book sold about ten times more copies than anyone expected. A book where the central character is the Agriculture Department moved more than half a million copies.

So Lewis figured the market would “correct.” Other writers would rush in to cover this territory. The supply of government stories would expand to meet the obvious demand.

But it didn’t happen.

Why the stories stay untold

Lewis offers a few theories for why the federal government remains a journalistic blind spot:

Media economics. These stories take time, money, and space. Long-form storytelling is expensive, and media companies are less and less able to fund it.

Government PR plays defense. The communications people sitting on top of federal agencies aren’t there to highlight the good work happening below them. They’re there to prevent employees from embarrassing the president. No offense, just “grinding prevent defense.”

Civil servants don’t want attention. The people profiled in this book tend to be humble almost to a fault. They do extraordinary things and then say “I just managed the project” when you ask about it.

The stereotype. We all carry this image of the government worker: the nine-to-fiver living off the taxpayer who adds no value. Lewis says that stereotype has always been “lazy and stupid” but now it’s becoming dangerous.

My take

This introduction does something clever. Lewis is basically telling you: “Look, I found free money lying on the ground. I picked it up. It’s still there. Here are six more writers who picked some up too.” It’s an invitation framed as a market anomaly.

The essays in the Washington Post series that became this book averaged four times the typical readership despite being eight times the average length. People want these stories. They just don’t know where to find them.

What I appreciate about Lewis’s framing is that he doesn’t make it political in the usual sense. He’s not arguing for bigger or smaller government. He’s saying: there are 2 million federal employees, and you should probably know what some of them do before deciding whether to fire them all.

Book: Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service by Michael Lewis | ISBN: 9798217047802

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