Michael Lewis has returned with a book that lands squarely in the middle of the fight over the federal work force. Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State, published by W. W. Norton & Company, moves between stories of civil servants and the early destruction wrought by the Department of Government Efficiency.
The timing is part of the point. Lewis, who wrote Moneyball, The Blind Side and The Big Short, is looking at a moment when the federal work force is being squeezed while DOGE is still defined by its first moves: pushing for access to sensitive data, firing people whose jobs it could not understand, and treating government as something to be broken before it can be examined.
Inside the book are six portraits of federal workers accused of obstruction, and the people Lewis chooses do not read like bureaucratic holdouts. One is the head of security at the United States Institute of Peace. Another is an IRS official who locked herself in a darkened conference room to keep away Gavin Kliger, who wanted confidential information on 7 million taxpayers. Those scenes give the book its charge because they turn a political slogan into a workplace dispute over what is private, what is legal and what happens when power arrives without patience.
Lewis also makes the case through Alexander Maranghides, a naturalized citizen originally from Greece who worked for the National Institute of Standards and Technology and specialized in firefighting in the wildland–urban interface. He devoted his life, including many unpaid hours, to that job and retired in his late 50s. That matters because the book presents people like him as the opposite of the caricature that DOGE seems to prefer: competent, steady and willing to give more to public service than they would have ever been asked to give in private industry.
The friction in the book comes from that contrast. Lewis depicts federal civil servants as experienced and committed, often people who gave up higher-paying private-sector work to do something harder and less rewarded. DOGE, by contrast, comes off as careless, inexperienced and ineffective. Lewis has said he was struck by people in the government who seemed only just now grokking the fact that the United States government had three branches, and that lack of understanding is part of what gives the book its edge.
That criticism is sharpened by the example of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, whose budget was cut by half under the second Trump administration while Howard Lutnick oversaw the agency as secretary of commerce and made no protest. Lewis writes that Lutnick’s personal butler served him a full-on fancy restaurant meal complete with all the silverware while people briefed him, a detail that underlines the distance between the people making decisions and the work being lost beneath them.
The book’s final chapter pushes the argument one step further, imagining what DOGE might have been if the people involved had had any decency at all. That is the real question left hanging by Blockers: whether the damage it describes was the product of bad strategy, bad judgment or something simpler, and more alarming, a refusal to value the public institutions being torn apart.
