‘Someone needs to punch the bully': What it will take to save the American Empire from ruin
The Big Short author Michael Lewis is, as one interviewer put it recently, 'a kind of guru of our age'. He has, after all, chronicled some of the big social and economic sea changes of our time – and, in the case of Donald Trump and Elon Musk's DOGE saga, he even seems to anticipate the sea changes.
Speaking with Samantha Selinger-Morris on The Morning Edition podcast, Lewis discusses the catastrophic risks that could come from decimating the US federal government, and whether he thinks Trump's presidency will be the end of the American Empire.
Click the player or watch the video below to listen to the full episode, or read on for an edited extract of the conversation.
Selinger-Morris: I have to start by asking you what civil servants in the American federal government actually do, and what is the risk if they're fired… your latest book was actually mostly written last year before Trump returned to office. It seemed to predict Musk's gutting of the federal workforce. So what happens if they're fired?
Lewis: Well, it depends on which ones you fire, but for starters, if you think about the federal government, there are several frames that are useful, but one is, it just manages a portfolio of risks and problems that the free markets don't want to manage or deal with, and it's all the hardest problems... everything from like, how you keep nuclear weapons from exploding when they shouldn't, to cleaning up horrible waste to forecasting hurricanes.
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If you move from agency to agency in the US federal government, inside each one, you will find spine-tingling risks being dealt with and the way they've gone about... supposedly addressing the waste, fraud and abuse that they say existed in the government, was just to cut arbitrarily, whoever they could, rather than subjecting them to any kind of relevancy test or competency test. And so God knows what happens... It's very hard to predict where this leads.
Selinger-Morris: So in your estimation, does that mean the United States is perhaps closer to experiencing another pandemic or a nuclear accident now than, say, before all of these DOGE cuts?
Lewis: Of course. Yes. All of the above. Name your risk. I don't think there's a single risk it's less likely to have to deal with.
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