'Smoke screen for a power grab': Author Michael Lewis blasts DOGE's attack on the civil service

Because they said there, he said Musk comes in and says he's going to cut two trillion dollars out of the federal budget, and he does it. He doesn't even... what he does, there was no possibility of him doing that. He didn't... wasn't going to deal with entitlements, he wasn't going to deal with the military, can't fool with interest on the debt. All that's left is like 20% of the budget. So it was never going to work. So the question is like, what was that about? And I think it's... I think it was about a power grab. It was a smokescreen for a power grab. And the Trump administration has a real problem with the idea of the civil servants serving the Constitution and serving the people. They want the two million person civil service to be essentially a weapon for the White House, like serve the narrow interests of the president. And they want the loyalty to be to Donald Trump, not to the Constitution. So, and while Doge is going on, they're doing things like eliminating the inspectors general and eliminating the various ways that the civil service is protected from partisan interference. And firing, I mean, these characters in the book, it's either fired or leave because they've been asked to do things that are against the law. So it's a... I mean, I think it's a profound moment and it's interesting. I mean, it was interesting to me that these characters, I mean, no one's ever heard of most of these people, are such great characters because they've been put in such an awkward and unpleasant situation. And they've behaved, a lot of them have behaved with such heroism. I mean, giving up careers that they love and that they really cared for. It's a gut check of a moment for the country, and I think that we should rally behind them.

My process was so different. I mean, I had a frame, and the frame was: we're going to change this thing from a nonpartisan two million person... What's going to happen to public safety? What's going to happen to the data collection and dissemination and protection? And I wouldn't cast the book... not you. I didn't really use the stuff that was in the newspaper. I had the Partnership for Public Service was my go-to place. They've been giving awards to civil servants for 25 years, and they have a database of thousands of these people who've done really interesting things. And I just... I started with the bucket. I said, like, who's in here and what's happened to them? And I started talking to people there, and most of what happened is those people led me to people, led me to people until I found the character who was the right way to tell a story. And there were probably places, I mean, I read the newspapers, and probably places where I learned stuff that was useful to me, but mainly the characters were guiding me, you know, the people were guiding me. But there was stuff, I mean, there were... I mean, the journalism was interesting in this period. There was some really great stuff like ProPublica, that broke something that when Musk went into the Institute of Peace, when Doge went into the Institute of Peace, they broke the story about how... Now, Musk outed, outed essentially a U.S. intelligence asset as he claimed that we were paying a Taliban member in Afghanistan, and in fact this was someone who was working for us. And when Musk tweeted about it, the Taliban went and arrested his cousins and brothers and all these people in Afghanistan and beat and tortured them. I mean, these things, I mean, some kind of amazing things happened, and so much of it happened that people just didn't track it. It's what happens when you allow the incompetence to run, to come in and run. I mean, look, I grew up in Washington, D.C. You can say what the hell you want about the federal government, but I damn sure bet you that there's not a person in this country who would not be able to get the... it's going to get the check, get the information, get the help, find out where to go, what to do to navigate all the courts without those civil servants, of which I was one in my early career. And so when you have a bunch of incompetents, a lot of incompetent boobs coming in, uh, spearheaded by a man who wants to control the outcome, who wants the data, who wants to get the monetary benefit from it.