Who Is Government by Michael Lewis: Why This Book About Bureaucrats Is Worth Your Time
I just finished reading Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service by Michael Lewis, and I want to walk you through it chapter by chapter.
Here’s the basic idea: we spend a huge amount of time talking about politicians. Who’s up, who’s down, who said what on TV. But the actual government, the 2 million or so federal employees who do the real work? We know almost nothing about them. And that’s a problem.
Michael Lewis noticed this gap after the 2016 election. The Trump transition team basically ignored all the briefings that Obama officials had spent months preparing. Rick Perry got appointed to run the Energy Department without knowing it managed nuclear weapons. And Lewis realized: it’s not just politicians who don’t know what the government does. None of us do.
So he started writing about it. And then he recruited six other writers to do the same. The result is this book: eight essays, each profiling a different federal employee doing work that most people have never heard of.
What’s in the book
The essays cover a wild range of government work:
- A former coal miner who figured out how to prevent mine roof collapses
- A forensic investigator who identifies the remains of soldiers lost decades ago
- NASA scientists searching for life on other planets
- The people who calculate the consumer price index (more interesting than it sounds, I promise)
- An IRS agent who tracks cybercriminals and terrorist financing through cryptocurrency
- A National Archives chief working to make government records accessible to everyone
- A young paralegal at the Department of Justice fighting monopolies
- An FDA scientist whose personal story intersects with the opioid crisis
Why I’m doing this series
Each post in this series covers one chapter. I’ll retell the story, share what I found interesting, and give you my honest take on what works and what doesn’t.
The book makes a simple but important argument: the people who work in government are not the lazy bureaucrats from the stereotype. They’re often brilliant, dedicated people doing work that nobody else can or will do. And right now, that work is under threat.
Whether you agree with that framing or not, the individual stories are genuinely fascinating. A guy who uses aerospace engineering techniques to study medieval cathedrals and then applies that knowledge to coal mines? That’s just a good story.
Book details:
- Title: Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service
- Editor: Michael Lewis
- Contributors: Casey Cep, Dave Eggers, John Lanchester, Geraldine Brooks, Sarah Vowell, W. Kamau Bell
- Publisher: Riverhead Books (Penguin Random House)
- ISBN: 9798217047802