Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service
Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service
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Michael Lewis on Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A jar of names and a man who tracks driftThe book’s origin is almost accidental. Lewis needed an afterword for the paperback edition of ‘The Fifth Risk,’ his 2018 investigation into federal risk management, and used the occasion to cross-reference Partnership for Public Service award nominees against the list of workers furloughed during the government shutdown. The exercise left him with thousands of names. He narrowed the field by going alphabetical.
I literally just picked one out of a jar. Actually, what I did is it was alphabetized. I picked the first name on the list, Arthur A. Allen, and called him up and went and spent some time with this guy and the story, like, the emotional content.
Allen turned out to be the sole oceanographer in the Coast Guard’s search-and-rescue division, a man who had spent decades working out, largely on his own, how different objects drift at sea so rescue teams would know where to look for people lost in the water. The accident of alphabetization sent Lewis to someone who had no idea he was literary material.
Lewis originally framed ‘The Fifth Risk’ as something closer to satire: he would attend the briefings the Obama administration had prepared for incoming officials after the 2016 election, since no one from the incoming team had bothered to show up. That earlier project focused on what government manages and what it neglects. The people doing the managing were almost beside the point. What shifted Lewis toward ‘Who Is Government?’ was the discovery, repeated across profile after profile, that the workers themselves were the story.
These weren’t opinion pieces. These were just writers I love, and I wanted to drop them into the government and see if they had the same excitement about the material I did.
The political urgency sharpened the literary one. Lewis argues that the public’s inability to picture a federal worker as a person, rather than a category, is what makes the stereotype so durable and so easy to weaponize.
People don’t know where their taxpayer dollars are going. People don’t know these people. There’s no face on these people. It’s very easy to stoke an ugly stereotype and very easy to attack them because they don’t defend themselves. They don’t describe themselves and they don’t defend themselves.
Still, Lewis insists the political argument was secondary. His first stated motivation was simpler: ‘To me, it was principally a literary exercise. I just thought, this is fun.’
How he wrote it
Six writers, a vanishing magazine world, and subjects who hideLewis assembled six writers, including novelists, journalists, and the comedian and documentarian W. Kamau Bell, and gave each the same assignment: find one person doing an interesting job inside the federal government and write about it. His private anxiety before the pieces came in was that the richness of what he had found during ‘The Fifth Risk’ reporting might be a product of his own particular sensibility, not the material itself.
My fear when I sold them all ongoing and writing about the government was they weren’t going to have the luck I had in finding stories that it was just. Maybe it was just me and my interest in it. And it took about a nanosecond for that to not be true. That every one of them found something almost right away and sometimes more than one thing.
The series ran first in the Washington Post, and Lewis paid for the reporting out of his own pocket. He connected that decision to the collapse of the magazine infrastructure that once made sustained immersive journalism economically possible for writers who weren’t already wealthy.
I can do it because I’m rich, you know, I can just go pay for it. That’s what I did with this, you know, I basically I’m just funding my own reporting. [paraphrased from audio]
Across all seven profiles, the single consistent obstacle was not finding the story but getting the subject to acknowledge they were in one. Civil servants had spent careers learning that visibility inside government carried risk, not reward, and that instinct did not switch off when a friendly writer arrived.
The kind of person who goes to work in the government is not a self-promoting person. Like if you want attention, if you want fame and fortune, it’s not where you go. And in fact, we have a culture now in this country for quite a long time that if you receive attention in the federal government, it’s usually because you’re being hauled before Congress and it’s not good. So they’ve gotten used to hiding. [paraphrased from audio]
The timing of the project added a dimension that Lewis had not planned for. All seven profiles were complete before the 2024 election, before the entity calling itself the Department of Government Efficiency began its cuts. By the time the book reached readers, the people in it had become current news.
All the chapters were written but one—the one at the end—before the [2024 presidential] election. This is before the Department of Government Efficiency, which isn’t a department…started coming with chainsaws…Half the people in the book have either already left their jobs or are under threat.
On what the book is wrestling with
What markets ignore and government quietly absorbsThe methodological choice Lewis made for ‘The Fifth Risk,’ deliberately targeting the departments that sounded least compelling, carried into his thinking about ‘Who Is Government?’ His argument was that the stories were not exceptional to certain corners of the bureaucracy. They were everywhere, waiting for someone to look.
I actually purposefully chose the departments I thought would be least interesting: energy and agriculture and commerce. I avoided defence and treasury and state. I wanted to show you could drop people into any part of American government and find hundreds of stories that are of potentially earth-shattering importance. I wanted the reader to have the sense: ‘My God, even here there are things I need to know and worry about.’
The profiles in the book share a structural feature: every subject is solving a problem that the free market has no financial incentive to address. Christopher Mark spent 25 years developing roof-bolt standards that eliminated roof-fall deaths in American coal mines. Heather Stone built an app called CURE ID to share rare-disease treatment data between doctors worldwide. These are problems too diffuse, too long-horizon, and too unprofitable for private investment. Lewis keeps returning to what it means that the people solving them receive no market signal and no cultural credit for doing so.
They’re other-directed. They’re kind of, I mean, they’re giver types. They aren’t taker types. And they’re not about themselves. One of the things that just like jumps off, off the pages from between the lines of all the stories is you get a feeling that all these people have sort of figured out how to lead a meaningful life, that they’ve all figured out that when the purpose is outside yourself, when it’s not about you, it’s enriching. [paraphrased from audio]
What he wants us to sit with
A reckoning at the deathbedLewis is careful to separate the literary project from the political one, but he does not pretend they are unconnected. The literary argument is that these people are extraordinary characters who have been invisible because nobody told their stories. The political consequence is that their invisibility has made them easy targets. Lewis frames the book as an attempt to break that logjam.
To me, it was principally a literary exercise. I just thought, this is fun. Like, I love these stories. But to the extent there’s a social purpose, it’s like, it’s like trying to break up this logjam in understanding, trying to introduce the idea into people’s minds that government is not just essential, but kind of admirable.
The measure Lewis keeps reaching for is not productivity or policy impact. It is what a person will think the work was worth when the work is finished. He puts this in terms of the civil servants in the book against the lawyers and bankers he also knows, half of whom wish they were somewhere else.
I think it’s true of all the people in the book, when they’re on their deathbeds, their lives, they’ll think I served a really important purpose here on earth. They’re not going to think, oh, I made 100 million billion. And what was that about? They’re going to think I did something that was really important.