Who Is Government?

The central argument of Who Is Government? is that the United States is sustained, more than its citizens realize, by an extraordinary and largely anonymous group of public employees who solve problems markets cannot or will not address. From mine safety to rare-disease treatment, from the integrity of inflation statistics to the dignity of veterans' burials, from blockchain forensics to the preservation of the national documentary record, the work in question requires technical depth, decades of sustained effort, and a willingness to accept lower pay and less recognition than the private sector offers. The people who choose this life are unusually committed to their missions and unusually uncomfortable with self-promotion, which is precisely what makes them so good at what they do and so vulnerable when politics turns against them.

That vulnerability is the second half of the book's message. The same invisibility that lets civil servants concentrate on hard problems also strips them of any constituency when their funding is slashed or their jobs are eliminated. The cost of cuts is usually measured in lost expertise, lost institutional memory, and harms that surface only years later, by which point reversal is no longer possible. The contributors argue that the antidote is sustained storytelling: putting names and faces and concrete stakes alongside the abstract concept of "the federal workforce" so that voters and policymakers can see what is actually being dismantled. Their hope is that an informed public will come to value humility, maintenance, and patient institution-building as much as it values novelty, charisma, and disruption, since the country's quiet, daily functioning depends on the former far more than on the latter.

Michael Lewis is one of the most widely read nonfiction writers in the United States. After working for several years as a bond salesman at Salomon Brothers in the 1980s, he turned that experience into his first book, Liar's Poker, which drew a reading public into the inner workings of Wall Street with sharp prose and unforgettable characters. He has gone on to publish a long string of bestsellers about the people and institutions behind major economic, political, and sporting phenomena, including Moneyball, which followed the Oakland Athletics' use of statistical analysis in baseball; The Blind Side, about offensive line play in football and the foster son of an affluent Memphis family; The Big Short, about a handful of investors who saw the 2008 financial crisis coming; Flash Boys, about high-frequency trading; and The Undoing Project, about the friendship and intellectual partnership of psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.

In 2018 Lewis turned his attention to the federal government with The Fifth Risk, a book that examined how the Trump administration's transition handled (or failed to handle) the work of federal agencies. Who Is Government? is in some sense the sequel, expanding that earlier inquiry into a series of intimate profiles. Lewis also hosts a podcast titled Against the Rules, which explores fairness in modern American institutions. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, the journalist and former MTV News correspondent Tabitha Soren, and their family. His combination of narrative skill, financial literacy, and curiosity about institutional systems has made him one of the most influential interpreters of how complex organizations shape the lives of ordinary people.