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In late 2023, as the US presidential election was heaving into view, the author Michael Lewis called up six writers he admired – five Americans and one Briton – and asked if they’d like to contribute to an urgent new series he was putting together for the Washington Post. At the time, Lewis was hearing talk that if Donald Trump got back into power, his administration would unleash a programme of cuts that would rip the federal government to shreds. Lewis decided to launch a pre-emptive strike. The series, entitled Who Is Government?, would appear in the weeks running up to the election. Its purpose, Lewis explains over a Zoom call from his book-lined study in Berkeley, California, “was to inoculate the federal workforce against really mindless attacks”. It would do this by valorising public service and, as he puts it, “jarring the stereotype people had in their heads about civil servants”.
Other writers might shrink away from the notion that they could restrain a US president with a handful of essays, but Lewis has an outsized sway. Author of such mega-bestsellers as Liar’s Poker and Flash Boys, he has a knack for writing about arcane concepts in business, finance and economics in ways that don’t just enlighten the uninitiated but whip along with the pace of an airport thriller. Hollywood loves him: Moneyball, The Blind Side and The Big Short all got turned into hit movies crammed with A-listers. So when Lewis speaks out about the forces shaping our world, even if it concerns something as seemingly unsexy as the federal government, people tend to listen.
The British writer John Lanchester, who contributed a standout piece to the series, got a glimpse of Lewis’s appeal when they first met in 2014. It was behind the stage at the London School of Economics. Lanchester had agreed to interview Lewis about Flash Boys, which plumbs the murky world of high-frequency trading. “Not only was the venue sold out,” Lanchester recalls, “but they’d had to add on another room at the theatre for people to watch, and that was sold out too. I remember thinking: ‘There’s a tube strike on, it’s absolutely pissing down, nobody’s going to come.’ But not a bit of it. The place was packed.”
Lanchester is no slouch himself when it comes to turning knotty financial matters into page-turners. An acclaimed novelist (The Debt to Pleasure, Capital) who used to review restaurants for the Guardian, in 2010 he published a book about the financial crash – Whoops!: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay – that gave a sweeping overview of the global economy while mercilessly skewering its absurdities. Now he regularly takes his filleting knife to topics ranging from Brexit to cryptocurrencies for the London Review of Books.
Since their 2014 meeting, the pair have become good friends, with an odd-couple dynamic that’s entertaining to witness. Lewis is hyper-engaged and talks in a confident New Orleans drawl about the iniquities of Trump and Elon Musk; Lanchester, joining us from his kitchen in London, seems more mild-mannered at first but his easy-going demeanour hides a biting wit. They clearly enjoy each other’s work and company. “I make a point of inviting him for dinner whenever I’m in London,” says Lewis, “and I try to get him over here whenever I can. And of course I looped him into this series …”
Who Is Government? isn’t Lewis’s first foray into the workings of the US civil service. In 2017, soon after Trump got in for the first time, Lewis had an insight into just how unprepared the new president was to take over the US government’s various branches. “The Obama administration had spent six months preparing a series of briefings for the transition,” he recalls, “but then Trump won and he just didn’t show up. So I decided to fly to Washington and find out what went on inside the government.” He wrote up his findings in three articles for Vanity Fair, later gathering them into the 2018 bestselling book The Fifth Risk. Among the people he spoke to who’d been neglected by the Trump team were officials tending the US nuclear arsenal.
As the 2024 election approached, amid warnings that Trump might do much worse than neglect the civil service if he got back into power, Lewis decided to revisit the government’s inner workings. Joining him for the ride this time was Dave Eggers, who reported on a team of scientists probing for extraterrestrial life from Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. In turn, Geraldine Brooks profiled online sleuths at the Internal Revenue Service who uncover evidence of cybercrime and child sexual abuse in the darker regions of the net, and W Kamau Bell wrote touchingly about his Black goddaughter’s work as a paralegal at the justice department.
For his part, Lewis tracked down a mining engineer at the labour department named Christopher Mark, whose research had helped prevent fatal roof falls in underground mines. He also wrote about Heather Stone, a rare-diseases expert at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), who had saved lives by fast-tracking authorisation for an experimental drug to treat potentially lethal balamuthia infections.
Lanchester, meanwhile, opted to write not about a person but a number – the consumer price index, a fiendishly complex statistic that acts as the main official measure of inflation. The lack of a human protagonist doesn’t make the piece any less absorbing, and Lanchester has fun uncovering the staggering amount of data on seemingly insignificant matters (such as the average length of the adult bedbug or the average annual income for a nuclear medicine technologist in Albany, New York) that the federal government hoovers up every year.
The overall effect of the series, just published as a book –Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service – is to transform civil servants from faceless bureaucrats into selfless superheroes. It’s a cracking read but sadly, contrary to Lewis’s hopes, it did nothing to prevent the flurry of devastating cuts that Trump and Musk, via his “department of government efficiency” (Doge), have inflicted on the government over the past couple of months. Of the 3 million-plus federal workers, it’s estimated that more than 20,000 have already been fired. Many of the subjects of the book are at risk of losing their jobs.
“Maybe we’re in early stages in the war, but it’s amazing how little effect the series has had,” Lewis says ruefully. “Not only have I not heard a peep from Doge, but I haven’t had any sense that they were worried about what I might write. Though I did send Elon Musk an email asking if I can move in and watch what he was doing. He didn’t respond.”
Musk isn’t the only tech billionaire behaving erratically. From conception to publication, the Washington Post series had the full support of the newspaper’s owner. “Jeff Bezos was very excited to be covering the government in any way you could,” says Lewis. “Every piece, he’d call [then opinion editor] David Shipley, and Shipley would call me, saying: ‘Bezos loves this thing.’ But things have changed.” The day before our conversation, in a move widely interpreted as a knee-bend to Trump, Bezos announced that the newspaper’s opinion section would now be dedicated to supporting “personal liberties and free markets”. Shipley resigned before the announcement.
Now Lewis and Lanchester are looking back at a collection of essays conceived in a more hopeful time and wondering what will become of the departments they wrote about – and the country that relies on them. They are not optimistic. Over the course of our 90-minute conversation towards the end of last month, they talked about the motivation behind Trump and Musk’s war on the civil service, its probable effects on the US and the lessons the UK should be taking.
You say in the intro to Who Is Government? that “the sort of people who become civil servants tend not to want or seek attention”. Was it hard to find interesting people to write about?
ML: It took about a nanosecond. And I think there’s a reason for that: there are just a lot of great subjects [in the federal government], and the minute they face existential risk, they become really interesting. They’re weird and different. They’re not interested in money, for a start. They’ve got some purpose in their lives.
Was the entire series written before Trump’s re-election?
ML: All except for the last piece [about rare diseases expert Heather Stone], which was conceived before, but I didn’t write it until after. What I’m doing now is getting all the writers to go back to their characters to ask what’s happening to them. Both my characters look like they’re about to be fired. Heather has been told that the whole enterprise of dealing with infectious disease is going to be axed from the FDA. And [mining engineer] Chris Mark texted me the other day to say: “They’ve cut our purchasing authority and they want us to hand in our credit cards.” So if they’re not gone, most of our characters are disabled. It’s like watching a toddler loose inside of a nuclear reactor pushing buttons.
You two are watching from afar. Are you watching the end of our democracy? Or are you watching some kind of false jeopardy situation?
JL: Well, we had an exchange over email about this, and I’ve been thinking about what you said, Michael, that we’ll probably muddle through but we are playing Russian roulette with democracy. That image lodged in my head. And the thing that is deeply shocking and surprising is that nobody seems to give a shit about [the government cuts].
The cuts are being made in the name of efficiency but it looks more like an ideological purge. Is that how you see it?
ML: I don’t think it’s one person’s will being exerted; it’s a combination of Trump, Musk and Russell Vought, who’s now the director of the office of management and budget. He was the architect of that Project 2025 book and he’s a Christian nationalist-slash-libertarian, whatever that is. Trump is the easiest to grok. He’s a trust-destroying machine. He needs chaos where nobody trusts anybody and then there’s a weird level playing field, and he excels in that environment.
My simple view of Musk is that he’s like an addict. He’s addicted to the attention, the drama – he’s stuck his finger in the social media socket and his brain is fried. He’s probably got cheerleaders, his little Silicon Valley crowd, telling him he’s doing a great thing, but most of them don’t know anything about it or the consequences. Vought’s the only one, I think, with a clear vision, but it’s a weird vision – really drastically minimum government. Those are the threads I see of what’s going on, and the backdrop is that they can do anything and the polls don’t move – people here don’t seem to care.
But isn’t it only a matter of time before people do start to care… once the effects of the cuts kick in?
ML: The pessimistic response is that, when things go wrong, there’ll be a war of narratives. The Trump narrative will inevitably say something like: “These bureaucrats screwed it up,” and it creates even more mistrust in the thing that you actually need to repair. I do think we’re going to muddle through. But I don’t think Trump’s ever going to get blamed in the ways he ought to. And whoever comes and fixes it is never going to get the credit they should.
JL: When you look at the historical analogies to this kind of collective delusion, it’s quite hard to think of a way of recovering from losing a sense of an agreed consensus reality. The only historical examples I can think of is, basically, you lose a catastrophic war. You know, the Germans lose and they wake up and they have a reckoning with their past. But that’s historically quite rare and hard to imagine … But maybe that’s too dark. Maybe what happens is specific impacts arise from specific programmes being cut that make people think: “Oh, actually, that’s not such a great idea.”
A clip just circulated of Musk talking about the US Agency for International Development (USAid) and he said something like: “Oh yeah, we made a couple little mistakes, like we briefly cut Ebola prevention there for just a second, then we brought it back again.”
And then I saw someone who ran the USAid Ebola response during one of the outbreaks saying: “That’s flatly not true [that Musk restored the Ebola response].” Musk talks loudly about fraud and theft in government, but these things aren’t fraud and theft – they’re just programmes they don’t like. In fact I haven’t actually seen anything that you could with a straight face categorise as fraud – have you, Michael?
ML: There’s almost no worse place to be trying to engage in fraud or theft than the US government, because there are so many eyes on you. When you take a federal employee out to lunch, they won’t let you pay for their sandwich – they’re so terrified. In fact it’s far easier to engage in fraud and theft in a Wall Street bank or a Silicon Valley startup, and there’s probably much more waste too.
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Has either of you met Musk?
ML: I have not. I have lots of one degree of separations. Walter Isaacson, who wrote Musk’s biography, is an old friend. I basically watched him do that project – I followed it blow by blow.
JL: Isaacson basically lived with Musk for, what, nine months, and there’s not a single commentary on politics at any point in the whole book. In 2022, Musk was still a Democrat. It’s just utterly bizarre. And I think part of the frenzy and vehemence comes from an extraordinary naivety about [government]. He actually doesn’t know anything about it, and he didn’t care about it until about 10 minutes ago.
One thing that strikes me about Doge is how adversarial it is without it having to be. You could run a project like this, unleashing a roomful of 20-year-olds on the systems of government, without saying that everyone who works in federal government is a criminal. You could just ask: “How could the systems be made to work better?” Because $7tn [the approximate annual budget of the federal government] is quite a lot of money to spend and it’d be astonishing if there wasn’t some waste in there. But you could do it without making people frightened.
And it worries me, because lots of things that happen in the US come back over the Atlantic. It happened with Reagan and Thatcher. It happened with Clinton providing the template for New Labour. So I suspect a version of this is going to come back over here.
What lessons should the UK be taking from this?
JL: Well, that’s one of them. If we were going to do what they call a zero-based review of government spending, let’s do it without framing them as the enemy, because it’s deeply unhelpful. Also, I wouldn’t be astonished if this attack on DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion in companies and organisations] came over. I think we should brace for impact on that one.
For your essay, John, why did you decide to write about a number instead of a human being?
JL: It’s partly intellectual vanity, but I really like the challenge in writing about structures and systems. We’re hardwired to like stories about people, but a lot of the most important stories in the world don’t have individual people as their central character. We’re very resistant to the idea that we don’t have agency as individuals.
Your writing on economics arose from the research you did for your novel Capital, didn’t it?
JL: Yeah, that’s right. I’d been following the financial crisis and ended up knowing a lot about it, so I wrote a nonfiction book [Whoops!] in order to quarantine that information, because one of the problems with research from the fiction point of view is that you end up having to use it. It’s very difficult to research a topic and then say: “You know what, that doesn’t really belong in the book.” But finance is difficult to dramatise because of the level of detail involved. It’s kind of anti-erotic in fiction to just explain things.
Michael, in the other direction, have you ever come upon a story that didn’t quite work as reportage and you wished you had a novelist’s toolkit to turn it into fiction?
ML: No, but I have had moments where I thought: “This story is not mine because I’m just not equipped to write it.” And I wrote one of them – a book about Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, the two Israeli psychologists [2016’s The Undoing Project]. I had that story land in my lap, with privileged access, and I spent eight years arguing with myself [about whether] I was the person to do it. I was sure that someone else better equipped – a subject-matter specialist – would come along and write the book. Then the people I had interviewed started dying off and I realised that no one was.
JL: With quite a lot of these stories, the subject-matter expert is precisely the person who can’t tell the story.
ML: That’s right. They don’t have the childlike wonder about it all. They don’t ask the simple questions. because they’re too deep in it … But no, I’ve never been frustrated by my lack of novelistic flair, and I never had a strong desire to write a novel. My literary frustration is all in screenwriting. I’ve had a very successful career as a failed screenwriter. I’ve been paid over and over to do these things, and they never got made.
The world of screenwriting is a profound mystery, because you see all the shit they make. What’s the process? You’re turning down these things and making that? I worked on an adaptation of my last novel, The Wall, but then Apple said: “Really sorry, we have a competing project.” The competing project was called Extrapolations and I’ll give you a cash prize if you can get through a single episode. They spent tens and tens of millions on it. And it’s off-the-scale, unbelievably, face-meltingly bad.
One problem for writers now is that there’s just such a blizzard of extraordinary news. How do you get a foothold and decide what to write about?
JL: Perhaps this is more a matter of temperament than anything else, but I’m feeling that I have to step back a bit until it’s clear what the shape of it is, because my hunch would be some form of horrific implosion and the wheels falling off and chaos ensuing. But I thought that last time that Trump was president.
ML: I’m going to Washington for much of April, and I have a character in mind, but I want to test it. It’s kind of a dark, funny book that I want to write, and I’ve got to see if this character can sustain that. Generally, I’m with John in that I like to wait and see. I feel like my role in the war is sniper. Don’t give away your position. You’re going to get one shot at this. Wait until you get the clean shot and take it. But I don’t think we’re far away from having the clean shot.
JL: Given that you were on to [the possibility of Trump getting re-elected and gutting the federal government] when we spoke 18 months ago, Michael, are you surprised by how this has played out? Is it basically what you imagined, or is it weirder, more extreme?
ML: I’d never have predicted this. I know Trump said that he could go out on Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and the supporters would still be with him …
JL: I believe that.
ML: But I didn’t think he’d do what he’s doing materially to his own base. I mean, two days ago he partially gutted the veterans’ healthcare system. This is the healthcare system in a lot of the rural US. That’s his base. And who would have predicted the alliance with Musk? Not me. I would have thought they’d have a falling out after three days, that there just isn’t enough oxygen in the room for both of them. If you’re looking for the simplest explanation for what’s going on, if Trump was a Russian asset, I don’t know if he’d behave any differently from how he’s behaving. I’m not saying he is, but it isn’t the behaviour of someone who is maximising his political future – it’s someone who’s maximising the damage to society. And why would you do that? He was supposed to get rid of illegal immigrants, stop inflation, cut taxes, whatever. But [gutting the civil service] has become the central feature of his administration. I just didn’t think he cared that much about it.
Which is the real Bezos; the one who was supportive of this series celebrating public service or the one who’s now dedicating the Washington Post’s opinion pages to championing free markets?
ML: I feel some sympathy towards Bezos. I really like him, personally. He’s fun to talk to. He seems to be basically sane. He’s not obviously megalomaniacal or even that self-absorbed. He’s really interested in the world around him. He makes sense on a lot of subjects. So I think the real Bezos is not a bad guy.
But he’s done a bad thing. And it’s curious why. You would think, if you had $200bn, that you’d have some fuck-you money. I mean, how much do you have to have to be able to live by your principles? There’s some curve that bends, and at some point, when you have so much money, you’re back to being as vulnerable as someone who has almost nothing. He’s behaving like someone who has nothing, like he’s just scared of Trump. I think if you were with him and watching every step, you’d be watching an interesting psychological process where he’s persuaded himself that what he’s doing is good. He’s rationalised his behaviour, but his behaviour is really appalling.
JL: How fucking craven do you have to be, if you can lose 99% of your net worth and still be worth $2bn and you can’t say “fuck you” to proto-fascists? The thing that is frightening is that people like him, men like him, are looking into the future and basically assuming that the US is going to become a kind of fascist state. Because, I mean, $2bn is enough to say “fuck you”. But if the US is now going to become a Maga [Make America Great Again] theocracy, and we just had the last election we’re ever going to have, then maybe he’s positioning for that. I don’t know that to be true, but that’s my darkest version.
Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service, edited by Michael Lewis, is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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