The Big Shortcomings of Michael Lewis’s DOGE Takedown

‘Blockers: Rebels in The Deep State’By Michael LewisW. W. Norton & Company, 256 pagesIn 2022, Elon Musk took over Twitter and fired 80% of the staff. Contrary to what was reported, the company, henceforth known as X, operated more smoothly than ever. But when Mr. Musk, at the head of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), tried to do the same thing with government, the results were far more mixed.Ask a Democrat about DOGE, and you’ll provoke a tirade about rising fascism. Ask a Republican, and you’ll hear it was all toothless and that Musk didn’t go nearly far enough. However, read Michael Lewis’s new book, “Blockers: Rebels in The Deep State,” and you’ll get a story of David and Goliath: how our nation’s noble bureaucrats stood as “blockers” against the might of Donald Trump’s corrupt new establishment. But in 2026, is anyone really naive enough to believe that the 2.7 million civilians who make up our bloated federal government are either necessary or neutral? Mr. Lewis is famous for works like “The Big Short” and “Moneyball,” taking seemingly dull industry stories and sensationalizing them for general appeal. He uses conversational language to mirror how men banter — lots of F-bombs and thrilling stories of “how it went down.” It typically humanizes his real-life protagonists, making the narrative fun and relatable. In this case, however, the protagonists are a handful of federal bureaucrats across various agencies you’ve never heard of describing how they resisted the abuses DOGE sought to inflict on them. The author describes how agencies “set out finger sandwiches” awaiting DOGE, a gesture of good will that was quickly abused by the DOGE staffers who waged a hostile takeover of their buildings. He characterizes the archetypal bureaucrat as someone who is “not looking to be the life of the party,” but is simply “needed for the government to work.” Unlike the usual partisan whiplash bureaucrats were accustomed to with changing administrations, Mr. Trump waged an “assault on nonpartisanship” itself in a new type of regime where “might meant right.” Resisting him, therefore, was both neutral and necessary. Many used all the institutional mechanisms at their disposal to do so. However, even in Mr. Lewis’s own telling, the federal workforce is not as neutral as they’d like to think, and even when they are, they hardly justify their existence. “The idea of neutrality was under attack, and therefore so was he,” Mr. Lewis writes of a high-ranking official in the Office of Personnel Management — who later compared the DOGE assault to 9/11. That’s certainly no milquetoast take. Another official at the IRS, apparently suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, explains how she sold her house in Northern Virginia after 2024 expecting the housing market to crash as Mr. Trump cracked down on the bureaucracy (home prices in Arlington have gone up 5.3% year-on-year since 2024). At least the IRS is functionally necessary. Officials at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) barricaded themselves in their office as DOGE attempted to thwart their vital work of… making rural Iraq safe for liberal feminism? We learn how effective their million dollar “Youth League for Iraqis” was at deradicalization and furthering gender equality in the country. But no one bothers to justify why we should care about women’s rights in a tribal hellscape on the other side of the world, let alone whether the most deradicalizing policy might simply be to finally leave them the hell alone. We’re just supposed to take that assumption for granted — just as the federal government apparently does. Some, maybe even many, in the federal workforce do important work. But in his defense of the status quo, Mr. Lewis inadvertently shows how desperately reform is needed. The idea that institutionalism is inherently neutral gets thoroughly debunked. The protagonists never once question whether the institutionalism they defend has grown so insular as to mirror the partisanship they claim to resist. With absolute loyalty to their own little realms, the professionalized civil service hardly functions differently from a typical (albeit arguably far more powerful) political party. Mr. Lewis also explores the psychology of why they’re so self-righteously angry. These people receive massive budgets to wield with minimal oversight, and yet they still feel like David fighting Goliath. They justify their boring existence as the thriller Mr. Lewis portrays, confusing their pointless parochial interests with gripping national priorities to the extent that any competing outside concern feels not like a trade-off but an obstacle that makes their job impossible to do. That’s how you wind up with federal bloat: Bureaucrats with blinders on arguing they simply need more resources to do their job effectively. It’s also how you wind up with unprecedented resistance to a fairly standard Republican administration whose greatest sin is saying they shouldn’t exist. It’s not that Trump heads some great new establishment. If he did, federal bureaucrats wouldn’t be able to thwart him so easily. Rather, they simply can’t grapple with the idea that they might personally be unnecessary, which is perhaps the most humanizing aspect Mr. Lewis portrays. We could certainly use a post-mortem on DOGE’s brief, chaotic, and ultimately ineffective reign, but “Blockers” isn’t it. We need an honest assessment of how and why DOGE failed, and not simply a celebration of the fact that it did.

The Big Shortcomings of Michael Lewis’s DOGE Takedown

The Big Shortcomings of Michael Lewis’s DOGE Takedown

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