The unsung heroes who stood up to Elon Musk and Doge

Given three of Michael Lewis’s books – The Big Short, Moneyball and The Blind Side – have been adapted for the big screen, and featured ensemble casts of some of the biggest names in Hollywood, it’s hard to read his latest non-fiction novel Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State without imagining who might play his central characters.

But unlike The Big Short, which starred Brad Pitt, Ryan Gosling, Steve Carell and several cameos (memorably Margot Robbie in a bubble bath) and chronicled high-rolling traders on Wall Street, Blockers is about a decidedly unglamorous but essential institution – the federal civil service of the United States.

Specifically, they’re the public servants who stood up to Elon Musk’s army of young “Muskrats” who invaded offices of the US government in 2025, shortly after Donald Trump was elected for the second time.

Who could forget Musk standing on stage, revving a chainsaw and promising his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) would weed out two trillion dollars worth of waste, fraud and corruption?

What followed was an unholy mess of ignorance and testosterone-fuelled bravado which terrorised the federal workforce and purged it of some of the smartest minds in America – all while failing miserably at finding fraud and saving only a fraction of what Musk had claimed it would.

“But this book isn’t really about Doge,” Lewis tells the In the News podcast. “It’s about the people he ran into.” People who Musk called “Blockers”. Individuals he believed stood in the way of his chainsaw.

They were either fired or forced to resign: people such as Francis Collins, the scientist who discovered the gene responsible for cystic fibrosis and whose work led to the groundbreaking drug Trikafta, which has dramatically increased the lifespan of sufferers.

Another is Kathleen Walters, the chief privacy officer of the Inland Revenue Service, who refused to hand over the addresses of 7 million undocumented migrants for the purposes of ICE raids.

Then there’s Alexander Maranghides, a fire scientist whose work included figuring out how and why the twin towers collapsed following the 9/11 terror attacks.

In this new Saturday episode of In the News, I admit I have cast who I think should play all the parts in the movie.

“So have I,” Lewis responds, before adding he can’t say who has signalled their interest in the forthcoming feature film. He admits he shares a desire for Tom Hanks to play the aforementioned scientist, Collins.

Collins’s story is emblematic of the Trump administration’s attempts to attack institutions through individuals; to politicise the non-partisan permanent government; to rid the civil service of expertise in a crude power grab.

While there couldn’t be more at stake in this story, Lewis finds the humour in it all with his trademark writing style – including some eye-popping anecdotes that hint at Robert F Kennedy jnr’s darker side. Did you know RFK jnr strapped a whale’s head to his car roof after coming across it beached and dead? Or that he pulled over to cut the penis off a raccoon that had lost its life to a car bumper? No, neither did we.

Russell Vought emerges as a key antagonist. The leading figure within the Project 2025 movement (which aims to reshape federal agencies around a radically conservative agenda) is the most likely person to have ordered Collins’s dismissal.

“But the wild thing about Russell Vought is, he has a child with cystic fibrosis,” Lewis says.

He laments Vought’s radical hostility to the institution that saved his child’s life, and how that relates to the manner in which tribalism has bled American politics of its humanity: “That there isn’t an ounce of gratitude or interest or whatever in the process or the person who saved his child’s life,” says Lewis – “it just didn’t get any darker than that.”

You can listen to this conversation on the player above or search for In the News wherever you get your podcasts.

Presented by Aideen Finnegan. Produced by Declan Conlon.

Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State is published by Penguin Ireland and is available now.