An ode to the remarkable people who make up the federal government

Washington Post

20-03-2025

I have a special place in my heart for the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals, known as the Sammies, the highest awards given to federal employees. I met my wife at the 2005 Sammies; that year, one of the top honors was given to Terence Lutes.
You almost certainly haven't heard of Lutes, but every year, right around now, you are probably grateful for his existence. He was the person at the Internal Revenue Service who spearheaded the adoption of electronic filing — one of the most significant changes (and improvements!) in the way that Americans interact with the government. E-filing may now seem obvious, but of course nothing just happens — someone in some meeting somewhere had to say, 'What if we used this internet thing for taxes?' And then a whole bunch of nameless someones had to also agree and then work together for years to make it happen.
Lutes does not make an appearance in 'Who Is Government?,' a new book edited by Michael Lewis, but he very well could have. The book, an outgrowth of a project led by The Washington Post's now-departed Opinions editor David Shipley, examines some of the remarkable people who make up the federal workforce — career civil servants who have accomplished the extraordinary in quiet ways, people whose jobs are normally buried layers below any partisan rancor.
Perhaps never before has there been a book better timed or more urgent.
Lewis assembled a group of notable writers — Casey Cep, Dave Eggers, John Lanchester, Geraldine Brooks, Sarah Vowell and W. Kamau Bell — and let them loose to find an interesting federal worker to write about. (I was a contributing columnist for The Washington Post last year but had nothing to do with this project.) Together, they paint a vivid and detailed portrait of the people behind the smooth day-to-day functioning of our federal government — and our lives.
These workers see themselves as being called to a higher purpose, to serve their fellow Americans and to actually make our country greater in some highly specific way. Christopher Mark of the Department of Labor, for instance, a former coal miner, helped prevent roof falls in mines by developing industry-wide preventive standards and practices. Heather Stone of the Food and Drug Administration, who tracks and compiles data about exotic diseases, helped save the life of a child whose brain was being eaten by an amoeba.
Page after page, the book breaks down the cynical caricature of the federal government that has persisted over the years and been amplified in recent months. It shows that far from being riddled with and corrupted by waste, fraud, abuse and laziness, the federal government is (or was) filled with people working hard — people painfully aware that they're stewarding government resources, doing so artfully under tight constraints, all of whom could be doing something for more money elsewhere.
Lewis's 2018 book, 'The Fifth Risk,' a clarion call of the importance of government, was a runaway success, and the 'Who Is Government?' project was meant to make the case amid an ominous election season that a second Trump presidency would pose a major threat to the basic foundations of our government.
It's no longer a hypothetical threat. Since taking office, President Donald Trump has unleashed haphazard and far-ranging cuts to the federal workforce — including an attempt to dismantle the federal institute that supports libraries, the parent of Voice of America and the nonpartisan Wilson Center think tank, as well as agencies that support minority businesses, mediate labor disputes, work to end homelessness and aid economically struggling communities.
Considering that the contributors to the book chose their subjects nearly a year ago, and that most of the pieces were published before Trump won his second term, it's incredible how much of the book feels like a not-so-subtle indictment of what's happening now — of the avarice, corruption and destruction unfolding inside the federal government at the hands of Trump, Elon Musk and their U.S. DOGE Service wrecking crew, such as the indiscriminate firings, the politicization of nonpartisan agencies, and the illegal cessation of congressionally authorized work and missions.
One of the workers highlighted in the book is employed in the National Archives, an agency now under attack from Trump. We meet the team of IRS criminal investigators who were instrumental in putting dark-web marketplace founder Ross Ulbricht behind bars. (Ulbricht was serving a life sentence for narcotics and money laundering, in a case that involved a murder-for-hire plot, only to be pardoned by Trump on his second day in office as part of a paean to the cryptocurrency world.)
The book also reminds us that while Musk and Trump grandstand about how government should learn from the private sector, government actually in some cases is better. Cep profiles the head of the National Cemetery Administration, part of the Department of Veterans Affairs, which — as its name hints — runs the nation's veterans cemeteries. In survey after survey, its customers (the families of veterans) have given it the highest satisfaction rating of any entity in the United States, public or private — 12 points higher than Costco's stunningly high rating of 85.
Lewis trumpets himself a bit more than necessary in his introduction — he is not exactly the first person to discover that the U.S. government is filled with interesting and honorable stories — but the profiles themselves serve as a balm for the chaos of our government right now. To read them — each takes about 20 minutes — is to drift into an alternate universe filled with the most thoughtful and caring people doing hard things for all the right reasons.
'Who Is Government?' will remind you why government is so important, of the thousands of small ways that it shapes and secures our lives for the better. As former IRS commissioner Danny Werfel says: 'The quality of life we have, it's all government. Government touches you a hundred times before breakfast, and you don't even know it.' The book shows — in specific ways — how much safer and more secure daily life is today than it was even a generation or two ago.
But more than that, the book is filled with a thousand reminders of why we have government: Because no one else will do these things. There is no profit motive in much of the work, no private business that will step in and spend years or decades solving these difficult challenges. As Eggers notes — in words written months ago that feel so prescient — 'No billionaires will fund work like this because there's no money in it. … If [government was] not doing it, it would not be done.'
We have government because we want our country to be a great place to live, work and play. What fills me with dread reading this book is that the next reminder we will get about the importance of government in our daily lives will come not in a laudatory, artful profile but in a crisis, when we find out that the person who should have been watching or monitoring or doing this one very specific task we've never thought about is no longer there.
Garrett M. Graff is a journalist, historian and author of nine books, including 'Watergate: A New History.'
The Untold Story of Public Service
Edited by Michael Lewis.
Riverhead. 243 pp. $30