Who is Government?: Book Review

Who Is Government: The Untold Story of Public Service, Michael Lewis, 2025. This is something of a follow-up of Lewis’s book The Fifth Risk about what the federal government (mainly Civil Service) does and why it’s so important. This book, at the time of Trump’s second term, focuses mainly on outstanding individuals working for the federal government, with different writers telling the various stories.

[From a video discussion of Michael Lewis and Jon Stewart]: Key points on the government: it is risk averse and lacks necessary resources. Lewis noted that rich people are admired, and the stereotype is “If you’re good enough, you wouldn’t work for government.” Government “solves all the problems the private sector can’t (or won’t) solve.” [That means public goods.] View of Trump: “Trust destroyer, faith enabler.”

Introduction: Directions to a Journalistic Gold Mine. Transition teams of federal employees are ready to describe their jobs to the transition team to educate the new appointed positions. Trump fired the entire transition team. Consequently, the new people had not a clue what their departments or agencies did. Lewis spent the time during 2017 in the Commerce Department. “Any journalist who turns up inside the federal bureaucracy asking simple if open-ended questions … becomes an object of suspicion, which is maybe why you read so few case studies about them” (p. 221).

The Canary: Michael Lewis on Christopher Mark of the Department of Labor. Sammies were created in 2002 to honor extraordinary deeds in the federal government. Civil servants who screw up can get dragged before Congress and into the news. No one says a word when they go great. No one nominated themselves for the award. Consider a CDC doctor running a program delivering a billion vaccinations and eradicated polio in India. An agriculture department woman found a way to create produce from misshapen fruits and vegetables, reducing food waste by $400 billion. These were narrow, difficult problems to solve. Others included disposing of chemical weapons, rural high-speed internet, extracting Americans from Gaza.

Robert Mark was an engineer who created a plastic model to simulate Chartres Cathedral to understand structural strengths and weaknesses of Gothic cathedrals. He was able to predict this and determined the weak points, where damage to the stone and mortar would take place. He determined what was functional and what was decorative, a process done by trial and error in the Middle Ages. Son Chris Mark rebelled against dad’s academic status and, among other things, worked as a coal miner, a risky job that killed hundreds each year. He became interested in worker rights and, therefore, miner safety. The industry considered the injuries and deaths a cost of doing business, with little consideration of the miners.

Mark knew from experience that coal mine roofs collapsed and became determined to solve the problem. He went back to school to get the expertise to find a solution. He joined the Bureau of Mines after he had a Ph.D. in engineering: “Engineers are trained to see the world in terms of load and deformation, where failure is simply a matter of stress exceeding stress. … Statistics are the tools that science has developed to deal with uncertainty and probability. ... The impulse to collect data preceded the ability to make sense of it. People facing a complicated problem measure whatever they can easily measure” (p. 26).

Measuring loads on pillars in coal mines he developed equations he called the “stability factor.” They were used to increase mine safety. Then he developed a checklist that engineers could access to determine how much support was needed. Mark had started by asking “what killed people?” The data were available as required by law. For every miner that died, 100 were injured, caused by rocks falling. Rook bolts worked, they just needed more of them. Mine death fell when the Bureau of Mines was given enforcement power to regulate. The free market failed to protect workers.

Both father working on Gothic cathedrals and son on coal mines learned to understand why roofs collapse. The father became famous, the son did not. The son just saved lives.

The Sentinel, by Casey Cep, about Ronald Walters of the National Cemetery Administration. “Walters and his 2,300 colleagues bury more than 140,000 veterans and their family members every year, and they tend to the perpetual memory of nearly 4 million other veterans, interred in 155 national cemeteries around the US. … The NCA has received the highest rating of any entity, public or private, in the American Customer Satisfaction Index. … The average ACSI score for federal agencies is 68, but the NCA most recently scored 97—the highest rating in the survey’s history” (p. 46). National cemeteries started during the Civil War, with Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, the most famous speech related to cemeteries, and starting the tradition of gathering war dead for reburial. The ceremonies are the same for every person buried. Walters broke down every job into discrete, measurable tasks, resulting in standardization to ensure consistency.

The Searchers: Dave Eggers, about several people at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. The JPL started in 1936 by Caltech engineers in Pasadena to research rockets around the time of World War II. That continued and they built the satellite Explorers 1 in 1958, Pioneer, Voyager, Mars Opportunity Rover, James Webb and Hubble. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is next to get a better look at the universe and especially the search for planets on other stars (exoplanets). Romans was an astronomer who used radio astronomy to map the Milky Way and became NASA’s first chief of astronomy. She’s the one pushing for a space-based telescope and a coronagraph to detect planets.

The Number by John Lanchester on the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Consumer Price Index. “Statistics—numbers created by the state to help it understand itself and ultimately to govern itself—are … a central part of what government does” (p. 103). A key point is to use them correctly. In World War II, Allied bombers shot up over Europe had bullet holes in wings and fuselages; therefore, strengthen them. They saw no damage to the engines because those planes were shot down. Correct solution: reinforce what you didn’t see, the engines.

The Census is done every ten years, by order of the Constitution, Article I, Section 2. Census data determine the allocation of the House of Representatives. People are moving out of New York and into Texas: House seats then move from New York, given Texas more power.

The CPI is a measure that’s used to determine the inflation rate. It is used to set Social Security payments, SNAP payments, and tax thresholds. It is a basket of goods and services determined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and changes over time (it’s complicated). People feel price changes, like the price of eggs, and it is a factor in how they view the economy. (It felt “bad” at the end of the Biden presidency although the economy was doing okay, a “vibecession”. The majority of people surveyed thought the US was in recession and equally clueless on other economic factors.)

The biggest category is shelter (measured by owners’ equivalent rent), which seems to be a continuing problem area. It’s a middle-class measure. Poor people do worse, rich people better. An index I use is the “misery index,” adding the CPI to the unemployment rate. In really bad times (called stagflation) this can be a big number: it hit a high of 21.98 when Jimmy Carter was president. It is cumulative: “By 1984, two decades of inflation meant that a 1964 dollar was worth 30 cents” (p. 119). This became a political weapon on the right (included in Project 2025): “The CPI number is a fake number to fool Americans into thinking things are not as bad as they feel” (p. 122).

The Cyber Sleuth by Geraldine Brooks, about Jarod Koopman of the Internal Revenue Service (“iconically unpopular”), which accounts for 96% of federal revenue. The IRS suffers budget cuts although the number of tax returns goes up. “There was no money to update failing technology, or even the software that ran it. The result was a pileup of paper returns” (p. 132). That was the goal of the anti-taxers and super-rich. Three percent of the IRS personnel are involved in criminal investigations. Koopman was successful and went through accelerated leadership training. He specialized in bitcoin and other crypto cybercrimes given the fraud potential. Bitcoin handles $65 billion a day. Unfortunately, bitcoin works great for money launderers and other illegal money transfers. The IRS taxes crypto profits as capital gains. The IRS broke into the Silk Road on the dark web and the IRS continued to prosecute dark web crimes. Money recovered goes to the government and to those hurt by the crimes. Even Hamas and North Korea were on bitcoin. Another crypto catch was binance.

The Equalizer by Sarah Vowell, about Pamela Wright of the National Archives. FDR established the National Archives in 1934 to store federal documents. Wright is Chief Innovation Officer: “to find the most efficient and effective ways to share the records of the National Archives with the public online” (p. 155). Some 300 million of 13 billion records have been scanned and posted online. Wright started working in the archives of the University of Montana. Then her first job was tracking down federal documents like tribal agreements with the US. There are 374 Indian treaties in the collection.

She worked with Wikipedia to post digital records on their website. When original documents were illegible, volunteer typists are used to present a typed copy along with the original, like the records of the Buffalo Soldiers and Indian Scout after the Civil War. There is a reference platform called History Hub, which also allows access to archivists and others to help. The National Archives manages the US census records. Summaries are included, then the entire

records (for everyone) are released after 70 years. The 1870 Census was the first to list all African Americans by name.

The Rookie by K. Kamau Bell about Olivia Rynberg-Going on the Department of Justice. Olivia  was a paralegal. The problem was Bell told stories that were irrelevant to the Department of Justice. Consequently, I learned almost nothing about Olivia or the department. The Sherman and Clayton Acts were mentioned, both antitrust laws. The FTC was part of the Clayton Act to prevent unfair competition and deceptive practices. AT&T was sued for antitrust and split into regional operating companies, for example. Max Stier started the paralegal program in the antitrust department. Trump has tried to make the department political.

The Free-Living Bureaucrat by Michael Lewis about Heather Stone of the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA “sets the rules for just about every food, liquid, drug, vaccine or medical device people might voluntarily put inside themselves or their animals” (p. 227).

Stone’s job at the FDA was “to help doctors find new treatments for rare deadly diseases. … Her mother worked as an infectious disease doctor” (p. 221). She studied epidemiology and then had a fellowship at the FDA. “All over the world, tens of thousands of times a year, some doctor was trying to improve on some unsatisfying treatment for some deadly affliction. And no one was recording what had worked and what had not. … There exists 10,000 known rare diseased, and more than 2,000 drugs approved for use in Europe and the US” (p. 227).

She became a science policy analyst, running CURE ID for rare diseases and what treatments might work and those that did not. It was released in 2019. “The point was to collect the stories that weren’t collected in medicine because they were stories, not science. … For rare diseases, these anecdotes were all you had to go on, and some of them certainly had value” (p. 228). The site was not advertised and there was little response. “With her mother’s help, Heather entered CURE ID’s very first clinical case: Balamuthia” (p. 230). This was an amoeba that could enter and eat the brain. Heather was involved in a specific case that saved a young girl, both with the web site and directly facilitating getting the drug (from India) and FDA approval to use it.