BLOCKERS: Rebels in the Deep State, by Michael Lewis
In 1922, the journalist Walter Lippmann published “Public Opinion,” an account of how societies develop a simplified version of reality that people depend on to elect leaders and spend money. Based in part on his time working as a bureaucrat in the Woodrow Wilson administration, “Public Opinion” was marked by its author’s obsession with the intricacy of democratic government and the challenge of managing the limited attention spans of its citizens. Lippmann gave the term “stereotype” its modern meaning and warned his readers against relying too much on superficial understandings — fictions, essentially — about government and other complex systems.
That difference between a fictional idea of what the state does and its more complex realities is the main theme of Michael Lewis’s “Blockers,” an engrossing and enraging new book. Told from the perspective of federal employees, “Blockers” covers the brief but damaging onslaught on Washington’s bureaucracy that started with Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency.
“Blockers” is a spiritual sequel to “The Fifth Risk,” which centered on what Lewis saw as the apathy and ineptitude of the first Trump administration. The officials who made up the president’s second administration and, especially, the people behind DOGE, in contrast, were not apathetic, Lewis suggests, but something worse: They were driven and ultimately trapped by their stereotyped view of how the federal government works, leading to an exodus of devoted public servants and eventually the demise of DOGE itself.
The book begins at the little-known United States Institute of Peace. First proposed by George Washington in 1796 as a national academy, it was finally created in 1984, in the aftermath of Vietnam, Lewis writes, based on “the conviction that the best war was the war that never happened.”
The Institute of Peace relies on just “0.0007857 percent of the federal budget,” Lewis explains. It is also an independent nonprofit, not a federal agency. Nevertheless, in March of last year, DOGE staffers, with the help of the D.C. police, overwhelmed the institute’s security and made their case for gutting the organization with posts on X. They portrayed the institute as an unaccountable and treasonous spender of public money, guilty of offenses like wasting $675,000 on private aviation services and sending $132,000 to an ex-Taliban member.
“The bits that were interesting weren’t true,” Lewis writes, “and the bits that were true weren’t interesting.” That treasonous $132,000 turned out to be payments to an ex-Taliban turncoat serving as an American ally, a man whom the Taliban had tried to assassinate at least three times. The “private aviation” services turned out to be the evacuation of the institute’s staff members from Afghanistan during the fall of Kabul in 2021.
Had DOGE looked more closely at how the Institute of Peace works, they might have uncovered, as Lewis does, the role it has played again and again in quietly saving American money and lives. In 2007, for instance, it organized successful peace talks in the “triangle of death,” a region of Iraq that “the U.S. Army had been spending $150 million a month to pacify.”
“Blockers” deviates in some ways from a typical Michael Lewis story. In books like “Moneyball” and “The Big Short,” Lewis delved into esoteric topics like advanced baseball statistics and collateralized debt obligations and displayed an almost magical ability to bring obscure figures and organizations to life. People who pay patient attention to exceedingly difficult problems eventually gain vindication and some measure of reward.
But “Blockers” is mainly about the triumph of ignorance over curiosity. In episode after episode, Musk and his staffers truly believe that they’ll open up agencies and find trillions in waste and fraud. When they don’t, instead of trying to learn more, they destroy things anyhow. Even when they’re not directly involved, the people with arcane skills who appear in “Blockers” are pushed out rather than rewarded. It is painful, for instance, to read a chapter describing how the United States loses much of its wildfire research capacity through the indifference and arbitrary austerity measures of the commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick.
As such, the book is mostly a tragedy, one whose true shape can be seen in the story Lewis tells about the DOGE engineer Sahil Lavingia. In a Fast Company article that appeared in May last year, Lavingia made the mistake of admitting that the Department of Veterans Affairs worked better than he thought. He was quickly fired. “As a DOGE member, you could get away with saying — or having said — almost anything,” Lewis writes. “What you couldn’t say is that the government actually sort of worked.”
By then, DOGE itself had already begun to unravel, especially as brazen attempts to access millions of private tax records led to mounting internal crises. In April 2025, senior I.R.S. officials resigned to avoid being complicit in illegal data transfers, Lewis reports; DOGE appointed its own people to replace them, infurating Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. After that, in the words of one anonymous DOGE member, the top brass at Musk’s group had “successfully alienated virtually every important person in every agency and in the White House.” The next month, Musk and DOGE parted ways.
“Just like that, DOGE went poof,” Lewis explains, “its bold young men slithered off into the shadows, and the other forces coming for civil servants took over.”
Lewis does offer a glimmer of light. He concludes “Blockers” with Lavingia, that honest DOGE engineer, and details his improbable return to government in the winter of 2026 to join the I.R.S., where he uses his coding skills to improve the tax department’s software. Lavingia tells Lewis that he finds joy in improving public infrastructure and trying to “dramatically affect the quality of life for millions of people.”
In the end, despite all the havoc, “Blockers” yields insights for those involved in public policy and even administrative law. In a democracy, there is a necessary tension between publicly elected officials, including the president, and the permanent Civil Service. As Lewis makes clear, this tension is one of the many checks and balances that help keep tyranny at bay. “Blockers” is a warning that our politicization of everything is a tremendous curse and a reminder that, especially in a country of the size and complexity and power of the United States, there is much that government does, or should do, that ought to be quietly nonpartisan.
“Traumatizing the federal work force,” Lewis explains, was more than a cruel, pointless and self-defeating exercise. It was also a challenge to what makes America great.
BLOCKERS: Rebels in the Deep State | By Michael Lewis | Norton | 237 pp. | $29.99
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