Blockers

Michael Lewis, author of The Fifth Risk, structures this work of narrative nonfiction around portraits of federal civil servants whose careers collided with the second Trump administration's campaign to dismantle the U.S. government from within. Where The Fifth Risk chronicled the dangers of presidential neglect, this book examines the opposite: An administration that paid aggressive attention to the federal bureaucracy, trying to seize control of even the institutions it was never meant to run.

The book opens with Colin O'Brien, chief security officer of the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), a congressionally chartered corporation dedicated to peacemaking. On March 14, 2025, operatives from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a cost-cutting initiative led by Elon Musk, arrived at the institute and demanded entry. DOGE officially occupied the renamed U.S. Digital Service but functioned as Musk's informal operation. Colin locked the building down and turned away their leader, Nate Cavanaugh, a college dropout who presented a forged document claiming to fire the institute's acting president, George Moose. DOGE escalated: A Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent told Colin he was under investigation. On St. Patrick's Day, guards from Inter-Con, the institute's private security contractor, entered the building using a key, and Colin trapped them in the portico. After Inter-Con's CEO and the acting U.S. attorney for DC pressured Moose, Colin released them, but DC police arrived and escorted Colin out while Cavanaugh streamed in. DOGE installed Cavanaugh as president, transferred the building to the General Services Administration (GSA), the federal agency that manages government property, and fired nearly all staff. Musk posted alleged findings on X. Lewis debunks each claim: The "private aviation" was a charter flight evacuating 256 employees from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, and the alleged Taliban payment went to a U.S. asset whose relatives the Taliban rounded up after Musk's post exposed him. A federal judge ordered the building returned; Trump-appointed appellate judges issued a stay.

Lewis introduces Tim Curry, a career official at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) who spent three decades refereeing disputes between federal workers and political appointees. Tim was trusted by every side because no one could determine his politics. Through Tim's career, Lewis traces the nonpartisan civil service from its 1883 creation to replace the spoils system through the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, a response to Nixon's abuses. The act created due process protections, whistleblower safeguards, and the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), which adjudicates civil-service appeals. When DOGE occupied OPM in January 2025, they fired probationary workers en masse, offered buyouts that drained the workforce of young talent, stripped union rights, and politicized the MSPB. On February 21, Tim learned from an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) contact that OPM planned to demand every federal employee justify their existence by email. The unsigned message arrived after midnight on February 22, with Musk warning on X that failure to respond would count as resignation. Tim recognized it as the kind of reckless action he had spent his career preventing. When colleagues called as if he were responsible, and he felt no desire to respond for the first time, he decided to resign.

The same email reached Kathleen Walters, the IRS's chief privacy officer, who was simultaneously managing a cancer scare, selling her home, and raising her daughter alone. Lewis follows her confrontation with Gavin Kliger, a young DOGE operative nicknamed "the Chaos Agent," who arrived demanding access to IRS systems while ignorant of the privacy laws governing taxpayer data. On February 28, Kathleen discovered that Melanie Krause, installed just an hour earlier as acting IRS commissioner, had directed staff to pull address data on roughly seven hundred thousand undocumented workers who filed taxes using Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers, to share with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for immigration enforcement. The request was plainly illegal. When Kathleen blocked it, Kliger tried to fire her for being "the blocker," Musk's term for anyone who resisted DOGE. She hid in a dark conference room until evening and escaped through a basement elevator. Weeks later, she discovered that Melanie had secretly ordered young lawyers to draft a data-sharing agreement without telling Kathleen. Kathleen resigned. In February 2026, The Washington Post reported that the IRS had shared data on roughly forty-seven thousand undocumented workers, and a federal judge found the agency violated the Internal Revenue Code approximately 42,695 times.

Lewis profiles Alexander Maranghides, a Greek-born fire scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) who pioneered the study of wildland-urban interface (WUI) fire, the zone where communities meet wild vegetation. After developing fire suppressants for the Navy and leading the investigation into why the World Trade Center towers collapsed, Alex turned to how wildfires destroy suburban communities. With mathematician Ruddy Mell, he built predictive models and proved through fieldwork at the 2007 Witch Fire near San Diego that embers, not direct flames, caused two-thirds of home ignitions. Their research showed that fire risk was collective: A neighbor's wooden fence or toolshed could carry fire to a home regardless of how well its owner prepared. Lewis uses Alex's story to illustrate NIST's role as the government's neutral scientific authority, first created in 1901 to standardize weights and measures. When Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick arrived in the second Trump administration, he insisted on signing every check over $100,000 but rarely visited his office, causing cybersecurity contracts to lapse. Ruddy quit after the return-to-office mandate separated him from his computers. Alex quit in April 2025, leaving the wildfire research program staffed by a single person.

The final chapter is structured as a forensic investigation into who forced Francis Collins, former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and discoverer of the cystic fibrosis gene, out of his lab. On February 27, 2025, Trump's acting NIH director, Matt Memoli, called Collins and gave him until the next day to leave, threatening to accuse him of funding the research that created COVID. Lewis presents five suspects, dismissing Memoli as a messenger and Roger Severino, who wrote the NIH section of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's plan to overhaul government, as lacking power. The primary suspect is Jay Bhattacharya, Trump's NIH nominee, a Stanford health economist whose flawed COVID study underestimated the virus's lethality. When criticized, Bhattacharya entered right-wing media rather than correcting course, and Collins's private email calling him a "fringe epidemiologist" became a lasting grievance. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as secretary of health and human services, attempted to fund an experiment withholding hepatitis B vaccines from seven thousand newborns in Guinea-Bissau. The final suspect is Russell Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), a self-described Christian nationalist who controlled federal spending and required personal approval of all NIH grants. Lewis argues Vought is the most likely orchestrator because his method of leaving no fingerprints explains why Collins still cannot identify who ordered his removal. In a closing irony, Lewis reveals that Collins's cystic fibrosis research led to Trikafta, which in 2021 effectively cured Vought's own daughter.

The book ends with Sahil Lavingia, the only DOGE member fired for publicly questioning the operation, returning to the IRS as a full-time employee. Alone in a nearly empty Manhattan office, he rebuilds the agency's phone app and spends months trying to fix a broken water fountain. Lewis closes with Sahil's insistence that America needs a nonpartisan civil service protecting workers from political bias.