Blockers by Michael Lewis: A page-turner about civil servants, and Trump’s war on them

Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State

Author: Michael Lewis

ISBN-13: 978-0241807781

Publisher: Allen Lane

Guideline Price: £25; 256pp

Michael Lewis didn’t set out to become a famous journalist with an easily imitable style. In fact, he began his career on Wall Street. But he discovered he excelled at long-form writing. Talking to people and telling their stories came naturally to him. He owed his success – several of his books have been best-sellers and three have been turned into movies – to his ability to use those stories to dramatise some new development in finance, sport or politics.

Lewis had written about the US federal government before, so when he saw how Donald Trump and Elon Musk were wrecking the civil service, he knew he had the subject for his next book.

Lewis has a style that’s easy to parody, and it can grate at times. But it is also what allows him to perform the miraculous feat of turning a book about civil servants into a page-turner. Blockers chronicles the impact of Trump’s reckless war on the US federal government. Convinced that his first presidency was undermined by a “deep state” and with no consideration for legality, Trump returned to office determined to bend the civil service to his will. Aided in his early months by Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Trump has laid off or forced into retirement about a tenth of the federal workforce (about 300,000 people). Entire agencies have been eliminated or shrunk beyond recognition.

Blockers explores this story from the standpoint of individual civil servants who were affected: the chief security officer at the US Institute for Peace; a fixer in the Office of Personnel Management; a senior administrator in the Internal Revenue Service (IRS); a fire researcher at the National Institute for Standards and Technology; and a medical researcher at the National Institutes of Health.

Lewis makes you understand their selfless devotion to public service and see the important social contributions they made – most of them in parts of the government that few even know existed. The US federal government, Lewis claims, is “arguably the most complex machine ever designed by man”, and he has a clear admiration for it and for its workers.

Because you come to care about these individuals and to understand their significance, the cavalier way they were dismissed is infuriating. They typical DOGE agent was a “twenty-five-year-old tech guy dying to breathe the same air as Elon Musk and only just now grokking the fact that the United States government had three branches”.

Wilfully ignorant DOGE agents didn’t try to understand what government departments and their employees did; they just wrecked them. In other cases, people were forced out for refusing to carry out illegal orders. IRS chief privacy officer Kathleen Waters, for example, resigned rather than share the tax returns of undocumented immigrants. That request was not only illegal, it was a betrayal of trust because the IRS had promised never to share that data. Acquiring these addresses allowed the Trump administration to raid and deport thousands of undocumented immigrants.

Blockers is brilliant at showing you the consequences of Trump administration actions but limited in explaining the reasons behind them. From the perspective of many of those affected, the assault seems irrational if not insane. The one explanation that Lewis gives of DOGE’s motivations – that Musk simply wanted to secure his own business interests – makes little sense because Musk could easily have done this without DOGE.

Lewis shows how the powerful right-wing functionary Russell Vought – architect of the infamous Project 2025 – was probably responsible for firing the medical researcher who had found the cure to his daughter’s cystic fibrosis. But Lewis has little to say about where Vought’s ideas came from. To really understand why this happened, you need to grasp that Republicans have been attacking the federal civil service for half a century. Ronald Reagan took office in 1981 declaring “government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem”.

While much of Blockers is riveting and illuminating, Lewis at times gets sidetracked. Over the course of an hour, I read an entire chapter portion that was only about the mechanics of fire suppression and never touched on Trump’s assault on the civil service. Towards the end of the book, the writing even gets a bit loopy. One chapter is framed as a murder mystery: a “whacking” with one person rendered as speaking in Mafia dialect. The book concludes with a bizarre analogy likening the US federal government to a broken water fountain.

Yet reading Blockers makes abundantly clear the gravity of Trump’s damage to the US civil service. It will be extremely difficult to repair and unlikely that those responsible are ever held accountable. Most of those civil servants forced out won’t ever be coming back and with them the US has lost their knowledge, experience and passion. Lewis might be the only writer out there who could truly capture this tragedy.

Daniel Geary is Mark Pigott professor in US history at Trinity College Dublin