The Rookie: A Gen-Z Paralegal at the DOJ Who Actually Loves Her Government Job

This is part 9 of my series on Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service by Michael Lewis.

Most of the chapters in this book are written by journalists profiling strangers. This one is different. W. Kamau Bell, the comedian and TV host, writes about his own goddaughter. Her name is Olivia Rynberg-Going, and she’s a paralegal at the Department of Justice antitrust division. She’s in her early twenties. She loves her job.

That last part, Bell makes clear, is not something he expected.

The Question at Kwanzaa

The chapter starts at a family gathering. Bell is in the kitchen with Olivia, helping get dinner ready. He asks her, almost casually, if she likes working for the DOJ. She says yes, immediately and cheerfully. No hesitation.

Here’s the thing about that. Bell knows Olivia well enough to know she doesn’t fake enthusiasm. She’s direct. She doesn’t suffer fools. If she said she liked it, she meant it.

So he decided to write about her.

Getting approval from the DOJ took a while. Detailed emails. Follow-up phone calls. Bell gets why. Nobody working in the federal government wants to end up in a headline about the “deep state” or the “swamp.” But once it was cleared, he sat down with Olivia in her DC apartment in the NoMa neighborhood, a sunny place she shares with a Smith College roommate, with Washington Spirit stickers on the fridge and a big lesbian-pride flag on the wall.

What She Actually Does

Olivia’s title is paralegal specialist. She’s in something called the Litigation Program, which is relatively new to the DOJ. Most paralegals are assigned to one case or one subsection. Olivia’s team gets outsourced across many cases at once. She attends meetings with attorneys, takes notes, preps for depositions, sometimes goes to depositions, and digs through evidence that will eventually be used at trial.

She also, apparently, uses the word “whereas” in casual conversation. Bell noticed.

The antitrust division wasn’t her first choice. She applied for the civil rights division and the U.S. Sentencing Commission. She wanted what felt like a more obvious path to making things more equitable. But the more she worked in antitrust, the more she saw it the same way.

Her Background Makes Total Sense Here

Bell spends a good chunk of the chapter on who Olivia is and where she came from, and it matters. She was born in Florida. Her mom Mary, a White lesbian, adopted her there in 1999. At the time, Florida required Mary to sign paperwork saying she was not gay, had never been gay, and promised to not be gay, just to take her daughter home.

Florida, 1999.

Olivia grew up in Portland, Maine, first. But she became a minor local celebrity there because she was one of very few Black kids in the city. There’s an actual flyer from 2004 promoting downtown Portland that features a 5-year-old Olivia’s face. Her moms saw it for what it was, built a detailed spreadsheet weighing cities on cost of living, Black population, queer population, and school quality, and moved the family to Oakland.

That’s the kind of family she has.

Oakland meant growing up in the middle of LGBTQ+ activism, the fight for marriage equality, Black Lives Matter, and the legacy of the Black Panther Party. At age 8, Olivia was phone-banking voters against Prop 8. She marched in an American-flag dress holding a sign. Her moms got married during the brief window same-sex marriage was legal in California in 2008, before Prop 8 passed and made it illegal again. Bell was at that wedding. He gave a speech.

By the time the Supreme Court finally made marriage equality the law of the land in 2015, Olivia was a teenager who had already watched the legal status of her family flip back and forth her entire life. She and Martha slow-danced on a rainbow crosswalk in downtown Oakland while music played and people cried around them.

So when she says she’s interested in the law because of how it touches her family, that is not abstract.

Antitrust, Explained

Bell admits he knew basically nothing about antitrust before this chapter. His honest framing of it is part of what makes the writing work. He asks Olivia to explain it simply.

Her answer: antitrust laws exist to protect consumers when companies get too much market share and start calling all the shots. A monopoly means you own so much of a market that you can charge whatever you want. And as Olivia puts it, “The American Dream shouldn’t impede on other people’s American Dream.”

Bell also talks to Kathy O’Neill, a former DOJ lawyer who now works at the law firm Cooley, and she gives the full legal version. The Sherman Act. The Clayton Act. The FTC Act. But the plain-English version is simpler: monopolies kill competition, and competition is what keeps prices reasonable and products from being garbage.

The AT&T breakup in the early 1980s is the example that lands best. Before the DOJ sued and won, AT&T owned basically the entire phone market. You rented their phones. Long-distance calls were a big deal, something you budgeted for. After the breakup, prices dropped, choices multiplied, and innovation exploded. Kathy credits antitrust law for making the football phone possible. Yes, that was a real thing that existed.

Bell also brings in Luke Thomas, a combat sports analyst, to talk about the UFC antitrust case. UFC fighters get about 20 percent of revenue. The NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL all split around 50 percent with their players. A class-action lawsuit that took 10 years finally settled for $335 million, but the judge kept rejecting the settlement because he thought it wasn’t enough, and because he seemed to believe the UFC is operating as an illegal monopoly.

Here’s the problem. The UFC makes 90 cents of every dollar in the entire MMA industry. That’s what an unchecked monopoly looks like in practice.

The Person Behind the Program

The most unexpected moment in the chapter is when Bell talks to Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, and tells him about Olivia. Max’s eyes go wide. Not just because he’s excited about young people in government. But because Max is the person who started the paralegal program at the antitrust division in the first place.

It was 1993. Max was a brand-new lawyer. His boss, Anne Bingaman, told him to start the program, because the antitrust division was converting secretaries into paralegals instead of recruiting motivated recent college graduates the way every law firm in the country was already doing. Max built the program. It took off. And now, thirty-some years later, his goddaughter’s goddaughter is in it.

Only 7 percent of federal workers are under 30. Max wants more young people in government, not for their sake alone but because the government needs them. “Our country needs it. Our future depends on that talent making this choice.”

But Here’s the Problem

Bell ends the chapter on an honest note. Olivia is close to finishing her time as a paralegal and thinking about law school. And law school might cost her $400,000 in debt.

That changes everything about what jobs feel possible afterward. Public service doesn’t pay what Big Law pays. If Olivia graduates owing that kind of money, the math may not work out for staying in government, no matter how much she wants to.

And that’s the tension Bell leaves you with. The system produces people like Olivia, people who actually want to fix things, and then prices them out of doing it. That’s not Olivia’s failure. That’s a design flaw.

Bell writes: “If our system can’t figure out how to keep Olivia or even how to make it irresistible to her, then the system is wrong and it needs to be rebuilt.”

It’s a good line. It’s also just true.

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

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