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Forbes
26-04-2025
- General
- Forbes
Putting A Human Face On Government
A group of people on the background of the American flag USA Sometimes, when you tell a big story, you start with a small one. That's the approach that author Michael Lewis takes as editor of Who Is Government. As Lewis writes, 'There is the stereotype of the 'government worker.' We all have in our heads this intractable picture: The nine-to-fiver living off the taxpayer who adds no value and has no energy and somehow still subverts the public will.' Lewis has gathered fellow writers to tell the stories of women and men who work in the federal government. 'The PR wing of the federal government isn't really allowed to play offense, just a grinding prevent defense,' writes Lewis. 'And the sort of people who become civil servants – the characters profiled in this book – tend not to want or seek attention.' The stories contained are inspiring because they laud the expertise of these employees and underscore the commitment they have to our nation. Without exaggeration, they are soldiers on the home front working to serve and protect our natural resources, our food supply, our healthcare system, our research sciences, and so much more. [Lewis's earlier book, The Fifth Risk, similarly addressed this topic.] Among the stories that resonate are ones that no one would ever know about unless one went looking—as Lewis and the contributors did. 'The Canary' profiles Christopher Mark, who pioneered a way to prevent mine roof collapses, the largest killer of miners. Mark, who once worked as a coal miner in his youth, went on to get a Ph.D. in engineering and wrote his thesis on ways to prevent mine roof collapses. His work has resulted in minimizing such collapses and saving many lives. 'The Sentinel' features Roland E. Waters of the National Cemetery Administration (NCA). "Perhaps the most striking thing about Ron Waters," writes Casey Cep, "His agency is one of the world's experts on death, but he is an expert on how to live." One aspect of what his agency does is repatriate the remains of service personnel who died overseas, something in which it takes pride. More broadly, these cemeteries "are designed to stir our moral imagination… on behalf, though not always, on behalf of our highest ideals." The effort the agency expends gained them the highest customer satisfaction scores of any organization, as ranked by the University of Michigan's study. On a 100-point scale, Costco scored 85, Apple 83 and Facebook 69. The average score for federal agencies is 68. NCA scored 97. 'The Equalizer" tells the story of Pamela Wright of the National Archives. A native Montanan, Wright administers the Archives, which manages the documents the government generates, including presidential records, historical documents, and Census Data. It also innovates. It was Wright who oversaw the development of a digital reference platform, the History Hub. The agency also "physically" cares for the U.S. Constitution. All employees take an oath to that Constitution. As Wright told contributor Sarah Vowell, "That oath makes you realize that what you are doing is fundamentally important to the country, no matter what capacity you are in." Other stories include ones about a team of men and women working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab looking for signs of extra-terrestrial life; another about an FDA epidemiologist who founded CURE ID, a database for registering case histories of rare diseases that in turn can generate pathways to cures; and an IRS director working to detect cases of cyber fraud – an effort that actually generates income from "criminal settlements." Streamlining government is a worthy goal. We all have been bedeviled at times by bureaucratic snafus (and snares), and so improvement is necessary. Yet, as with change, we say change is good as long as I don't have to change myself. The same is true for the government. Now, with the government under siege by cost-cutting measures that to some seem arbitrary and, in some cases, cruel, this book stands as a testament to those who represent the best of us.
Washington Post
20-03-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
An ode to the remarkable people who make up the federal government
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
The Guardian
19-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Who Is Government? by Michael Lewis review – what Doge is trying to destroy
It is a tad obnoxious for Michael Lewis, perhaps America's most consistently successful nonfiction author, to open his new book by boasting that a previous one sold half a million copies, but bear with him. The book in question was 2018's The Fifth Risk, in which Lewis smartly responded to Donald Trump's first administration with profiles of a handful of unknown federal government employees in order to valorise what Trump scorned and highlight the cost of breaking it. His point in the introduction to Who Is Government? is that you could lift the lid on any department and find a similar treasure trove of stories: people you've never heard of, doing work whose importance you've never understood. Last year, Lewis assembled a crack team of long-form writers to uncover more of these stories for the Washington Post, and those articles are collected here. The gods have yet again smiled on him, if not his country, because the timing is horrendously perfect. One of the many people who doesn't understand how the US government works has somehow been permitted to take it down to the studs in the name of 'efficiency'. Elon Musk's Doge has only been running for a few weeks but Americans will be suffering the consequences of his ignorant vandalism for many years to come, in health, national security, disaster preparation and more. It would not be surprising to learn that some of the people interviewed here have already been laid off, or their work defunded. At any rate, Musk's demolition derby makes this kind of journalism feel, more than ever, like a civic duty. Contrary to the conservative stereotype of a ballooning bureaucracy, the size of the federal workforce has not changed greatly since the 1960s. It currently numbers around 2.4m people, more than 70% of whom work for agencies related to defence and national security. No doubt some of them are mediocre or incompetent, and some systems are badly in need of reform, but this book rightly focuses on the quiet heroes who represent public service at its best. One reason we don't know who these people are is that they don't care if you know who they are. 'The best thing in the world is when no one can remember whose idea it was,' says Ronald E Waters, the humble powerhouse whose National Cemetery Administration has a record rating of 97 on the Customer Satisfaction Index. As the New Yorker's Casey Cep writes: 'He refuses to believe there's anything like a Ron Fan Club, no matter how many members I find.' Visiting Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Dave Eggers notices 'a relentless emphasis on teams and groups and predecessors' rather than individual glory. Each chapter has its own distinct flavour. Novelist Geraldine Brooks's story of an IRS cybercrime specialist who teaches jiu-jitsu when he's not thwarting drug dealers, terrorists and paedophiles could be a movie pitch, while historian Sarah Vowell's exquisitely written tour of the National Archives intertwines US history with that of her own family: 'I was looking for a country I want to live in.' John Lanchester tweaks the assignment by profiling not a person but a number: the consumer price index. He deftly explains how it works and how it falls short. Food prices constitute just 8% of the CPI but they are the main cause of sticker shock, so inflation can be technically falling but, as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris could tell you, consumers won't feel it. But that does not make CPI, as rightwing agitators claim, a lie. Lanchester's seemingly wonkish article ascends towards a stirring defence of the pursuit of objective data, however imperfect, as an expression of Enlightenment values. Lewis bookends Who Is Government? with two typically gripping stories that illustrate the limits of free market solutions. Christopher Mark, a former coal miner who revolutionised mine safety at the Department of Labor, discovered that mine operators declined to implement simple life-saving measures in order to cut costs. It took regulation, often demonised as 'red tape', to force their hand. Heather Stone, an epidemiologist at the Food and Drug Administration, investigates deadly diseases so rare that the pharmaceutical industry sees no profit in developing treatments. Put bluntly, the private sector will let people die. It does pay better though. Doge's voluntary redundancy offer perversely incentivises the most accomplished civil servants to triple their salaries by leaving and the less impressive to stay. For everyone in this book, public service is a higher calling. It is also meant to transcend partisan politics. 'There's no Republican or Democratic way to bury a veteran,' says Ron Waters. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Doge's mercenary, hyperpoliticised agenda is antithetical to these civic values. 'Move fast and break things' might work at a startup but it is a catastrophic approach to complex public institutions that have built up over decades. Musk sees federal employees as either time-serving hacks burning through taxpayer dollars or subversive enemies within. Unfortunately, civil servants' admirable humility allows such caricatures to proliferate. 'The typecasting has always been lazy and stupid, but increasingly, it's deadly,' Lewis writes. This eye-opening, multifaceted ode to public service therefore feels both urgent and moving. Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service by Michael Lewis is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at Delivery charges may apply.
