Blockers by Michael Lewis review, the quiet heroes who tried to stop Doge

The author of Moneyball author brings his exceptional narrative skills to bear on Musk’s anti-government crusade

D onald Trump’s catastrophic errors get so much attention that his systemic ones can easily be missed. While the world looks on in dismay at his farcical war in Iran, the thuggery of Ice agents or clownish attacks on erstwhile allies like Canada and Denmark, the core functions of the American government are slowly disintegrating.

It is harder to get people to focus on the machinery of the state because the effects are often slow and hard to pin down. Outbreaks of disease, such as the recent wave of explosive diarrhoea across the US, might have happened anyway, but were probably made worse by lay-offs at the Centers for Disease Control. Likewise, Trump is not directly responsible for natural disasters, but response times in the past year may have been hampered by mass redundancies at the National Weather Service. Cuts to tax collection also seem to have reduced revenue by multiple billions, though we cannot be sure of the causal relationship.

The other problem is that bureaucracies are hard to make interesting. Their work is technical and complicated, and most officials are taught to avoid saying anything engaging in public. By the time a journalist has explained what an agency does and why it is important, the reader may well have clicked on to the next thing.

So there are few better suited to the challenge of telling this story than Michael Lewis, one of the world’s bestselling nonfiction writers, who has a knack for finding an angle that cuts through the complexity. After a career spent getting readers excited about credit default swaps (The Big Short) and sabermetrics (Moneyball) he has decided to try to help people understand the importance of civil servants.

Blockers is a loose sequel to the The Fifth Risk, in which Lewis focused on the transition from the Obama to the Trump administration and the disruption caused by the new team’s almost complete lack of interest in their jobs. It focused heavily on what different departments and agencies do and why they matter. This time around the problem is not indifference but malicious intent to destroy. The “blockers” are the dedicated officials who try to stop the wanton and often illegal destruction of their life’s work by Elon Musk’s Doge or other agents of chaos. They range from a researcher working on preventing wildfires to a security guard trying to block Musk’s goons from entering his building, and a lawyer attempting to keep personal tax data from being used to deport undocumented migrants.

In truth, they don’t do much blocking, since they all either end up resigning when they’re asked to do something illegal, or are fired. The title refers more to the assumption by Musk and his fellow travellers that these are the people who are stopping progress and need removing. Much of the book is taken up with descriptions of the valuable work they did before being turfed out.

It would have been good to have a bit more on the villains, whose motivations for participating in Doge are varied. They range from the addled young coders with limited social skills deployed by Musk, to turncoat bureaucrats looking for any easy life, and some very strange characters such as health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, with his bizarre obsession with dead animal parts. Trump’s absurd commerce secretary Howard Lutnick also makes a brief cameo, deciding he needs to personally sign off any cheque for more than $100,000. It feels as if there is more to say about the personal journeys that lead people to behave this way.

This is the particularly true of the boss baddie Russell Vought, the Republican operative central to developing the Project 2025 plans for Trump’s second term. Musk causes havoc, but quickly gets bored of Doge and heads back to Silicon Valley. Vought is the real deal, quietly and systematically deconstructing the state while keeping out of the spotlight and getting others to do his dirty work for him.

He appears in one of the book’s most engaging chapters, which zooms in on Francis Collins, a scientist who helped discover a successful treatment for cystic fibrosis, allowing those with the condition to live much longer. Collins ended up at the head of the National Institutes of Health under Obama, continued through Trump’s first term and part of Biden’s, before stepping down to run an NIH research lab. After Trump’s re-election he was effectively forced out, saying that his position had become “untenable”. Lewis runs through a series of possible culprits, of which Vought’s cost-cutting is one. What makes this particularly remarkable is that Vought’s own daughter has cystic fibrosis. Ideology is a powerful drug.

But perhaps the most interesting character of all is Sahil Lavingia. A successful software engineer, he bought into Musk’s vision and went to work for Doge in the Department of Veterans Affairs. He only lasted 55 days before giving an on-the-record interview in which he noted that “it’s kind of fine, because the government works. It’s not as inefficient as I was expecting, to be honest. I was hoping for more easy wins.” This was not on-message and he was shown the door.

A few months later, though, once Doge had fallen apart, he was invited back by one of the few survivors, who had stayed on at the Treasury department. Lavingia was tasked with improving the Internal Revenue Service’s computer systems, and despite not needing the money, seems genuinely committed to the task of making things work better. Through Lavingia, Lewis gives us a taste of what serious work to enhance the state might have looked like.

There are real problems with the way the government operates, both in the UK and the US, caused by poor resourcing, dysfunctional systems, or low pay for technical staff compared with the private sector. Alongside Lewis’s star civil servants, there are people who have checked out or become institutionalised. Lavingia’s lengthy battle to get a water cooler replaced reminded me of how difficult it was to get the lifts working when I was at the Department for Education.

One of the most irritating aspects of Doge’s brief existence was the stream of op-eds from people who really should have known better celebrating that someone was finally trying to enact reform, even if was being done in a clumsy and aggressive manner. In reality, Musk’s overweening arrogance, glibness and total lack of preparation have seriously harmed the case for proper reform. Not just due to the mess he and the likes of Vought caused, but also because they brought the very idea of making the state more efficient into disrepute.

Lewis is great at finding incredible civil servants and telling their stories. But agencies and departments should not have to rely on unsung heroes, battling failing systems, and doing 90-hour weeks for little money because of their intense devotion to public service. Most people employed by large organisations are not like that. Effective government needs processes that work when used by a regular person doing a nine-to-five job. Rather than trying to replicate the “blockers”, we need to understand what these superstars are doing and embed it in the fabric of our institutions.