The Guy Behind The Big Short and Moneyball Is Back to Take On Elon Musk and DOGE. It’s a Roller Coaster.

Books In his latest book, The Big Short and Moneyball author Michael Lewis details the catastrophe that was DOGE. By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Laura Miller? Oct 04, 20265:40 AM Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Aaron Schwartz/Getty Images, Oliver Contreras/AFP via Getty Images, Cinefootage Visuals/Getty Images Plus, and Papadomus/Adobe Stock. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Michael Lewis’ new book, Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State, is a roller coaster. It alternates between the heartening stories of stellar federal civil servants, competent people who sacrifice high-paying jobs in the private sector to make their corner of the government work, and accounts of the early destruction wrought by the Department of Government Efficiency and its phalanx of sullen, Elon-worshipping idiot boys. The highs are very much what readers expect from Lewis, a journalist whose ability to make everything from bond trading to subprime mortgages both intelligible and exciting has routinely landed his books (Moneyball, The Blind Side, The Big Short) on the bestseller lists. The lows are blood-pressure-spiking accounts of 20-year-olds with no professional experience to speak of (as Lewis puts it, “only just now grokking the fact that the United States government had three branches”) blithely demanding access to tranches of sensitive data and firing people whose jobs they couldn’t begin to understand. “Blocker” is a label Elon Musk liked to slap on anyone attempting to stand in the way of his clueless, largely illegal, and entirely ineffective campaign last year to cut government spending. Blockers offers six portraits of federal workers accused of such obstruction, from the head of security at the United States Institute of Peace—an independent, nonpartisan institution over which DOGE had no legal authority—to an official at the IRS who had to resort to locking herself in a darkened conference room to avoid Gavin Kliger, a diminutive, capricious DOGE goon who wanted her to give him confidential information on 7 million taxpayers. Then, to mix it up, Lewis includes a final chapter, a wild card of sorts, suggesting what DOGE might have been if the people involved had had any decency at all. Slate receives a commission when you purchase items using the links on this page. Thank you for your support. Lewis adroitly fashions each worker’s story as a different flavor of narrative. That USIP chapter reads like a political thriller. A later chapter profiles Alexander Maranghides, a naturalized citizen originally from Greece who worked for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, specializing in firefighting in the wildland–urban interface. Maranghides’ story is a quest saga, the tale of a man determined to understand a type of disaster that had gone relatively unstudied. (Previous fire-protection engineers mostly concentrated on either fires inside buildings or wildfires.) As with the other civil servants Lewis profiles, Maranghides devoted his life—including many unpaid hours—to his job, until the appointment of the vapid Howard Lutnick as secretary of commerce, the Cabinet position overseeing the NIST. The second Trump administration cut the institute’s budget by half, and Lutnick made no protest, focusing instead on jostling for face time with the president or arranging for his personal butler “to serve him a full-on fancy restaurant meal complete with all the silverware, while the people briefing him looked on,” Lewis writes. Maranghides retired in his late 50s, taking with him a treasure trove of expertise on the kind of fire that destroyed much of the Pacific Palisades last year and that increasingly poses a threat to the wholly unprepared East Coast, as well. That butler detail is pure Lewis. He has an unfailing eye for the image that nails the emotional undercurrent of a scene, and Trump’s host of craven apparatchiks offers him plenty of those. He playfully frames his chapter on the forced retirement of Francis Collins—former head of the National Institutes of Health and perhaps the best-known public official profiled in Blockers—as a hard-boiled murder mystery. Seeking to identify the Trump administration figure who had Collins “whacked,” Lewis hams it up with lines like “The remaining three suspects rolled around Francis’s insides like last night’s undercooked chicken.” But when he describes the day Collins was compelled to leave the job he loved, Lewis writes that Collins called “his wife, who picked him up to drive him home. He left carrying a small cardboard box with a few pictures, a spare necktie, some ramen noodle packages, and a mirror made by children in NIH clinical trials, all of whom had died. He’d bought it at an auction to raise money for a children’s hospital.” Although personally modest, Collins has an impressive record. He headed the Human Genome Project and was instrumental in identifying the gene responsible for cystic fibrosis. The “small cardboard box,” in this light, makes for an especially poignant touch at the end of an extraordinary career. Collins’ story also underlines the appalling reckless of the second Trump administration’s hatchet work. Russell Vought—director of the Office of Management and Budget and fingered by Lewis as a likely suspect in Collins’ “whacking”—has a daughter with cystic fibrosis. “As he considered his child,” Lewis writes, “Vought had to know—and might have allowed himself to care—that he owed her life to Francis Collins and, more broadly, to work sponsored for fifty or more years by the National Institutes of Health.” When he got the ax, Collins asked for a pass that would allow him to continue working at his lab at the NIH (without pay), researching a disease that causes premature aging in children. He was told by a Trump flunkey named Matt Memoli that if he didn’t clear out entirely, he’d be publicly blamed for funding research at a lab in China where the COVID virus was allegedly “cooked up.” Although Lewis doesn’t tout it, this story is something of a scoop, as Collins has previously been circumspect about his reasons for retiring. Similarly, his reporting reveals that Melanie Krause—the former acting IRS commissioner who has been portrayed as courageously resigning from her post when Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went behind her back to sign a memorandum agreeing to unlawfully share IRS date with Immigration and Customs Enforcement—was, in fact, a weak-willed quisling. Krause complied with Gavin Kliger’s demand that she fire the service’s head of human resources, who had refused to send an email terminating all probationary employees under the false accusation of poor performance. Krause also tried to get another IRS official to facilitate the handover of taxpayer data to the Department of Homeland Security so that she wouldn’t be responsible for it herself. That official, Kathleen Walters, the hero of the IRS chapter—a twisty tale of palace intrigue, bureaucracy-style—resigned instead. The catastrophic waste of driving such gifted and committed civil servants out of the government will hurt the United States for decades to come, as will their current, incompetent replacements, whose sole qualification is their loyalty to Donald Trump. No sooner does Lewis buoy his readers’ spirits with a portrait of a man uncannily capable of resolving disputes between government managers and their employees’ unions (“It’s hard to explain the connection between Tim’s job and the speed with which you get your tax refund,” he quotes one source saying. “But there is a connection. Tim is needed for the government to work”), than he recounts how the stupidity of Musk’s infamous “five bullets” email drove the guy out. One of the few consolations in this sorry spectacle is the likely success of Blockers, and the fact that the misdeeds of such DOGE toadies as Kliger, Marko Elez, and Nate Cavanaugh, as well as the spineless officials who submitted to them, have become a matter of more public record. (Additionally, some of them are being sued.) Let their names be a curse, and widely published in connection with their vandalism. As for the public servants they mistreated, as Lewis writes, “Their stories were often inspiring. But those stories were seldom told.” Here’s one book, at least, to correct that. Books Donald Trump Politics Slate Book Review Elon Musk