“After a career spent getting readers excited about credit-default swaps (‘The Big Short’) and sabermetrics (‘Moneyball’)”, the American journalist Michael Lewis “decided to try to help people understand the importance of civil servants”, said Sam Freedman in The Guardian.
He did this first in “The Fifth Risk”, his 2018 book about the damage caused by the first Trump administration’s “almost complete lack of interest” in the workings of government. Now, he has written a “loose sequel” dealing with Donald Trump’s return to office and, “this time around, the problem is not indifference but malicious intent to destroy”.
“Blockers” is an account of the vandalistic work of Elon Musk’s Doge and “other agents of chaos”, notably Republican operative Russell Vought, who essentially became Trump’s cost-cutter-in-chief when Musk fell out with the president. At the same time, it shines a light on the “blockers” – Musk’s derisive term for the “dedicated officials” who did their best to hinder his reforms.
The book is a “rollercoaster”, said Laura Miller on Slate. It alternates between “heartening stories of stellar federal civil servants” and “blood-pressure-spiking accounts” of the “Elon-worshipping idiot boys” sent to slash their budgets or hound them from their jobs. In one chapter, we see an IRS official “locking herself in a darkened conference room” to avoid a “capricious Doge goon who wanted her to give him confidential information on seven million taxpayers”.
Another is focused on Francis Collins, who was sacked from his senior role at the National Institutes of Health. Among a host of distinguished achievements, Collins was “instrumental in identifying the gene responsible for cystic fibrosis”. Yet he was forced to leave at short notice, carrying his possessions in “a small cardboard box”. Lewis suggests that, ironically, the person ultimately responsible for his dismissal was Vought, whose own daughter has cystic fibrosis.
Such stories aren’t just personal tragedies, said Tim Adams in The Observer; they are calamitous for America. The cuts carried out by Musk and others led to “vast institutional knowledge” being removed at a stroke, “to be replaced by venal incompetence”.
The aim was to “dispose of and humiliate” an entire class of people who cared about the good that government could do, and about following legal due process. Nor did Doge’s reforms even succeed on their own terms: despite Musk’s boast that he would cut $2 trillion from the government’s $7 trillion budget, this year’s federal spend is estimated to be $7.4 trillion. Lewis has produced an “essential record” of a dismal episode in American history.