Reading the essay collection Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service inspires something of that same haunting dissonance. Edited by long-form megastar journalist Michael Lewis, the book draws together seven portraits of heroic individual federal bureaucrats—along with one essay about a particularly heroic statistic, the Consumer Price Index—that first ran as a series in The Washington Post. Two of the pieces are Lewis’s, while the remaining six come from a roster of non-wonky, literary-leaning essayists: Geraldine Brooks, W. Kamau Bell, Dave Eggers, John Lanchester, Casey Cep, and Sarah Vowell. These are good writers, and the book is a fun read. Indeed, the fun is what’s strange. The contributions vary in quality as narrative and analysis, but what unites them is a deliberately light, human interest-y, ingratiatingly accessible tone—“wouldja look at these geeky do-gooders go?” That tone is the source of the dissonance. As substance, the book is timely in an extraordinarily urgent way; as vibe, it’s a disconcerting fit for that very topicality. The plucky, unheralded bureaucrats get their day in the sun in this book, their song finally sung at the exact moment that their work and the institutional scaffold supporting it fall victim to a mad paroxysm of destruction. Cue the power ballad: Don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.
As it happens, the Partnership for Public Service gets credit for leading Lewis to the subject of the book’s first profile—a quietly intense engineer named Chris Mark, who spent multiple decades solving the problem of collapsing roofs in coal mines. Mark was nominated for an annual award the partnership gives out for extraordinary achievement in the federal civil service. Having written a bestselling book on the first Trump administration’s mismanagement of the executive branch, The Fifth Risk, Lewis has made a habit of reading through the partnership’s nominees each year. It’s a way to remind himself “how many weird problems the United States government deals with at any one time.” Coal mine roof collapses turn out to be just such a problem—centuries-spanning, chronic, and extraordinarily deadly. In Lewis’s hands, Mark’s lifelong engagement with the issue across multiple agencies, and its resonance with his engineer father’s scholarly preoccupation with the structural functions of Gothic cathedrals, become a fascinating story of governance as puzzle-solving and public commitment.
If Lewis is throwing fastballs, his collaborators vary their pitches. Eggers mixes wonder and drollery in his fun account of visiting with the uber-earnest geniuses (and one charming absent-minded professor type) at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or JPL. Bell interviews his own goddaughter about her entry-level job as a paralegal in the Department of Justice’s antitrust division. Vowell does her argument-via-tart-historical-digression thing in profiling the National Archives official tasked with building out the agency’s public online services.
Law enforcement inside the IRS is shared enemy territory for virtually the entire GOP coalition, triggering as it does the party’s long-standing hostility to tax enforcement with Trump’s more specific preoccupation with strongman subversion of the rule of law. So it’s little surprise to see Koopman’s achievements suffering reversals. It was probably less expected that Cep’s encomium to Ronald E. Walters, the hypercompetent leader of the National Cemetery Administration within the Department of Veterans Affairs, would read quite so poignantly amid the chaos unleashed by the first wave of DOGE-spurred firings and mass contract cancellations in the VA. “Our government is designed to change,” Cep quotes a former colleague of Walters, Stephen Shih, as saying, “so there will necessarily be these periods of transition, and Ron has navigated that masterfully, finding a balance between providing continuity and moving the government forward.” More winces: Shih made these reassuring remarks about Walters’s survival prospects while serving as director of the Office of Civil Rights at USAID.
Democracy is a double delegation game. Voters delegate the task of actually making laws to the politicians they elect to represent them. The politicians then delegate the task of executing those laws to bureaucrats. At their most effective, the grounded portraits of individual bureaucrats in Who Is Government? take us, in their hyperspecificity, all the way back to the first step of that game—the question prior to “who is government?” of “why have government?” Across the book’s accounts, we see bureaucrats engaging with problems for which free markets and private action would not be able to generate solutions on their own. “No one coal mining company was likely to fund the [safety] research that would benefit all coal companies,” Lewis notes, and in fact the market even incentivized those companies to neglect implementation of safety features for years after bureaucrats like Chris Mark had developed them—until new laws passed by Congress finally added enforcement teeth to the regulations. The FDA’s Stone created a reliable mechanism for making important information about discoveries in the treatment of rare diseases accessible to doctors when no such mechanism had earlier existed—the rareness of the diseases means “it doesn’t really pay anyone to do it,” as one biochemist remarked to Lewis. Eggers describes the work of space nerds at Caltech: “This is government-funded research to determine how the universe was created and whether we are alone in it. If NASA and JPL were not doing it, it would not be done.”
The autonomy of unelected government actors is precisely what makes people nervous—if the frontline agents in democracy’s delegation game go rogue against their principals, democracy breaks down. But for the right, this is specifically dangerous because it views the left as dominating the bureaucracy in the same way it dominates media, major cultural institutions, and higher education—the deep state is rogue on behalf of the right’s enemies. When JD Vance said in 2021 that the next Republican president should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” this was what he was getting at. For all the hype about inefficiency and waste, Musk got closer to the heart of what’s motivating the new assault when he declared USAID “a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.”
Once on the job, as one former EPA employee described, employees undergo so-called cultural climatization, where they learn from supervisors and colleagues that to be a public servant means upholding the duties and norms of nonpartisanship and collaborative dialogue with supervisors and other stakeholders across the government. Decision making is grounded in collective deliberation, reason, and expert knowledge. They also learn emotional forbearance and discretion. This employee described “a lot of groupthink,” at the EPA. “That’s part of what makes it work.”
The pressures American civil servants face also stem from the fact that, contrary to the right’s nightmare, the U.S. bureaucracy is distinctively nonautonomous—uniquely permeable by and subject to the influence of outside political forces and organized interests. (This is true even under normal circumstances, when a world-historically rich tech oligarch isn’t empowered to wander agency to agency yanking out wires.) It is a truism of scholarship on U.S. political development, but of no less momentous importance for being so, that the United States democratized before it bureaucratized. Whereas, through the crucible of continual warfare, Western European nations developed powerful and professionalized administrative states long before they transitioned to mass democracy, the United States across the nineteenth century grew as a sprawling democratic polity and economic juggernaut without building out a proportionally large and powerful central administration in government. (What the national state did in the nineteenth century—and it did plenty—it typically did indirectly and invisibly, delegating to states, civil society actors, and private individuals the task of carrying out major state projects like continental expansion and capitalist development.) The preexistence of a precocious and robust democratic polity meant that once Congress finally began, piece by piece, to construct new bureaucratic institutions staffed by large merit-based cadres of experts, it was compelled continually to ensure that this new administrative state would be reined in, watched over, and suffused by political forces.
In comparative perspective, the American civil service is lean, and leaned on.As a trope about government, “waste, fraud, and abuse” is a hardy perennial, and it’s no surprise to see it now utilized in service of a right-wing government’s assault on perceived enemies burrowed in the organs of state. And just the thing that makes the bureaucratic hagiography in Who Is Government? such a novelty—the pervasive stereotype of government workers as nonentities pushing pencils on the people’s dime—would seem likely to make DOGE and the broader assault on bureaucracy good politics as well. But, remarkably, the sheer scale and careening recklessness of what the Trump administration has already executed are generating public blowback that only promises to swell as the rolling effects of service disruptions, benefit interruptions, and job terminations are felt in every congressional district in the country. In his classic account of the development of federal administrative capacity in the United States, Building a New American State, political scientist Stephen Skowronek described nineteenth-century Americans as lacking a “sense of the state”—a felt connection to a visible and pervasive government exercising power. Whether or not they’ve consciously thought about it in this way, the gambit currently being carried out by Trump, Vought, and Musk amounts to a kind of bet that Americans in the twenty-first century still lack that sense of a state—of day-to-day connections to the federal government that they’ll miss when they’re destroyed. As constituents flood town halls and congressional inboxes with complaints about lapses in VA health services, skyrocketing wait times at the Social Security phone lines, and friends and neighbors tossed out of work, that bet looks less and less likely to pay off.
In announcing its report on the FEVS survey results this year, the Partnership for Public Service went ahead and noted the rampaging elephant in the room: “Against the backdrop of a new presidential administration and dozens of executive orders that seek to downsize and politicize our nonpartisan, merit-based civil service, this new data could not come at a more critical time.” Critical, perhaps—but also a bit late to be heeded: Just one week earlier, the Office of Personnel Management had announced that it would be delaying the administration of this year’s FEVS survey, typically done in May, to an unspecified later date.
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