Norton & Company; 256 pages; $29.99. Allen Lane; £25 Blockers. By Michael Lewis. W.W.
It was during the early months of the pandemic, and Donald Trump was vexed. He summoned Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, to put him straight. The president had compelling anecdotal evidence.
Experts had told him that hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug, was no good as a treatment for covid-19. Mr Nicklaus was an 80-year-old ex-professional golfer.
“Get me Jack Nicklaus!” he shouted to a flunkey. He had caught covid, taken hydroxychloroquine and recovered, he told Dr Collins. “There, you see!” said Mr Trump. “You see!”
When she was fired, she filed a grievance and won. To govern well requires finding accurate information and analysing it rationally. Mr Trump’s scorn for such principles has increasingly infected the federal government. During his first term, Dr Collins merely had to endure a nutty lecture from Robert F. Kennedy junior about how vaccines cause autism. In his second term RFK junior is the health secretary, Dr Collins was pushed out and measles is spreading among unvaccinated American kids. He concedes that waste in government is a real problem. Employees are too hard to sack. He tells the story of Maxine, an air force employee who parked too close to a fire hydrant, was asked to move, refused, accidentally reversed into a cop and drove off. The ensuing car chase shut down an air base during a war. When she eventually returned to work, she found that two higher-ranking officers were doing her job in addition to their own. When she found out they were paid more than her, she claimed discrimination (she was black) and sued for a raise. Reform was—and is—needed. Unfortunately, Mr Trump’s hatchet men did not understand the machine they were trying to re-engineer. So DOGE started slashing. It tried to fire all the probationary staff—the recent hires who were mostly either young or had urgently needed skills. Permanent staff were offered hefty payouts to quit. Many who could easily find other jobs accepted; the less capable ones stayed. A return-to-the-office rule was enforced mindlessly. It made it crueller, too. Mr Musk was outraged that the United States Institute of Peace was paying a former member of the Taliban. The man was supplying vital intelligence. After Mr Musk outed him on X, the informant’s family was rounded up and tortured. The Trump revolution also made government less accountable, by suppressing evidence that his policies were hurting people. After he cut food subsidies for the poor, a survey measuring hunger was scrapped.
The typical DOGE person was a 25-year-old techie “dying to breathe the same air as Elon Musk and only just now grokking the fact that the United States government had three branches. Because the only computers powerful enough for its modelling were not in a government office, dOGE killed a study of how wildfires spread into suburbs,.
In “Blockers”, Michael Lewis tells the stories of federal workers who tried to resist Mr Trump’s assault on the bureaucracy. Most are low-key, diligent and startled to be told by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that their offices are hotbeds of fraud, waste and wokery. Mr Lewis is a journalist who spins technical topics into entertaining tales; previous works have taken on Wall Street (“Liar’s Poker”) and data and baseball (“Moneyball”). They “thought in stereotypes”, writes Mr Lewis. They were mainly “white guys easily bent out of shape by…the idea of people who were not white guys having unfair advantages”. They had “a simple picture in their heads of ‘the bureaucrat’, and that person looked a lot like Maxine”.
