It turns out it's easier to fire the good people than the bad people, or get the good people to leave, because good people can have options in the private sector. So what they did is they chased out a lot of talent and left all the dead weight. Who does that? Like, who can do that and not think about it? You got to come in just believing that all these people are wasteful. Otherwise, you go shoot yourself.
Welcome to Stay Tuned. I'm Preet Bharara. My guest this week is Michael Lewis. He's a writer and financial journalist who wrote The Big Short, which later became an Oscar-winning film. He joins me now to discuss his latest book. It's called Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State, by the downfall of the Department of Government Efficiency, among other things. That's coming up. Stay tuned.
Michael Lewis, welcome back to the show.
I'm shocked that you have another book.
No, I'm not. That was sarcasm. That's what you do. I'm going to hold it up for the YouTube audience. Michael Lewis, Blockers. Apparently there's a subtitle, not on the cover, because one might wonder in the bookstore or in the library what it's about. The subtitle is Rebels in the Deep State. So I was going to start by asking you the question: who are the blockers we're talking about, and why are you writing about them?
Blockers is a term that Elon Musk and lots of tech people like to use. It's the people who were like the crusty old people who won't change when you go into an organization, and they try to stop you from implementing change. And when he created Doge and invited lots of twenty-somethings to go in and wreak havoc in the government, he told them to find the blockers and get rid of them. And I actually learned of the term through the people who he got rid of. I mean, I was kicking around the government thinking about what it meant, what they were doing, and I kept finding these people who had been extremely good at their jobs, nonpartisan people in critical places in the government, who got told they were blockers and were kind of either removed or encouraged to leave. So that's where the title came from. I thought we're going to turn what Elon Musk thinks is an insult into a compliment, into a badge of honor.
But how I got kind of interested in writing about it, I mean, Trump electrifies the material he touches. Trump is kind of in here some, and he's not the main character, but he's turned the federal government into a really interesting subject, and he's done it by trying to change its very nature. Instead of a two-million-person nonpartisan workforce that takes an oath to the Constitution and serves no man, it's been turned into this loyalist operation that serves his narrow interests. And I just thought, like, there is a story in this. What does it mean for the various things that the government does when you change its nature?
You know, I often think that the words people use to describe some folks in their jobs not only doesn't do the job justice, but also is undermining of what the job is really about. They're sort of pejorative terms, or they've come to be pejorative because of people's, you know, biases. And you know, so one word that you didn't name in the book is bureaucrat.
Which is the most pejorative of the following: blocker, bureaucrat, or unelected bureaucrat?
Unelected bureaucrat. I would guess that's the most.
People use that a lot. They use unelected to describe bureaucrat, but that's not what a bureaucrat is. A bureaucrat's always unelected. So that's, I know, it's redundant.
But they're all pejorative. You're right. And they're all, what they all are, interestingly, is they're all a false stereotype. I think when you tell them government worker or civil servant or bureaucrat, or whatever word or phrase you use, I think an image pops into most Americans' heads that is just very different from how they are. And why that is, is interesting, but why that is, is also a literary opportunity. I mean, that's where I get excited, is when I walk into a place and I can see the reality is different than the perception.
And expertise, which you know is something we used to like as a majority. Is it a conscious part of your effort here? It sounds like maybe it is, both in this book and in The Fifth Risk and in some other things you've written, to kind of change the reputation and the stereotype of the unelected bureaucrat, the rebel in the deep state. Or is that a byproduct of...
It's more of a byproduct of the reporting, because when I got into this subject, it's such an odd subject for me in some ways, the federal government. But what got me into it in the first place was Trump, when he walked in the day after the election and fired his transition team, the 550 people who were supposed to teach him what's going on inside his government. And you know that this is a uniquely uninformed president. He has never been in the government, and he had no real interest in knowing, and he told Chris Christie that we can learn everything we need to know in an hour about the government, and he's supposed to be running it. That got me interested. It was like, what the hell is this thing? I mean, you know what it's like. And I had this feeling, this sensation, this feeling that you ever been in a car with a bad driver, and the driver is going too fast, and not only are they going too fast, they're looking at you when they're driving. And my reaction when they do that is to look at the road even more intently. It's like, if I pay attention really hard, maybe we won't get in a crash, even though... I had that sensation with the federal government, like if I pay attention to it, maybe a disaster won't happen. And that's what got me into it in the first place.
And then I certainly was not conscious. I found myself crawfishing towards the characters because the characters I was running across were so good that it became clear that there were people to write about whose stories were never going to get told, doing things that were amazing and interesting that just deserved to be aired in a larger narrative. And so I got to that with the first book at the very end. I kind of figured it out. In this case, since the characters were the ones who were under assault, it became very natural to kind of put them front and center.
Let's talk about Doge. Doge no longer exists as an entity, which we were discussing before we hit the record button, I think. To figure out whether or not that could be one plaintiff against you in some defamation. I take it from your book and from all the things you say, notwithstanding the good things you say about the government, I served the federal government for 17 years, I think there are, you know, a million or more, maybe multiple millions of really dedicated, devoted, helpful government servants. I just want to be clear that you're not suggesting that there's not waste, fraud, and abuse in the government.
No, well, no, certainly not. These things all get tossed into one pile, and I think they're different. I think whatever abuse is, abuse sounds, I don't know what that is, but waste, of course there's waste, but it's sort of like there's systematically designed waste that isn't waste. A person comes in and behaves in a really wasteful way with government resources. Fraud, there's fraud. Obviously there's fraud. You know, the common kind of fraud is an ordinary American citizen who's not a government worker trying to defraud the government, cheating on their taxes or stealing from Medicare or all that. I think there's very, I'd be surprised if there's much, and Elon Musk didn't find much of actual government employees like stealing, that kind of thing. That's not the thing. What there is, is a lot of inefficiency. Some of it's built in, and some of it is just necessary, like the government's not really, no government is really designed to maximize for efficiency. It's sort of like trying to prevent bad things from happening, and sometimes there's a lot of redundancy in that. So there are real problems with the government. I mean, well before Trump, there were real problems with the way we govern ourselves, and it's, you know, like beyond time to have the conversation about how to structure the thing. But so I'm not saying no, it was all perfect. No, there were none of these problems. I am saying that Doge wildly exaggerated all of this.
Right. No, I'm just trying to establish at the outset that there's a universe in which a Republican president or a Democratic president, and I think there's a good example of a Democratic president actually doing this, coming into office and saying, whether it's waste, fraud, and abuse, or inefficiency, or an overlap of those two things, to say we're going to try to make things more efficient, like a new CEO might, and that's done in good faith, and it can be done in good faith, right, to make the country better and to spend less money, and to make sure that, you know, where there are not enough resources, you can move resources that are being spent inefficiently to things that need more spending, like cyber threat or AI or disease or whatever the case may be. So the question to you is, at its outset, or in the minds of the progenitors of Doge, was it good faith or not?
It was bad. It was clearly bad faith from the start. And you know, here's the tell: what they said they were doing was so obviously different from what they were actually doing. Unless you're willing to believe that Elon Musk is just a complete idiot, and it just seems highly unlikely he's a complete idiot. But he said he was coming in to cut the deficit. He was going to cut two trillion dollars out of a seven-trillion-dollar deficit. He then proceeds to take a wrecking ball to a really narrow sliver of the government. Like, he's not trying to touch entitlements. He's not trying to touch military spending. He's not touching interest on the debt. That's like three-quarters of the government. So right from the beginning, they can't do what they say they're going to do. Then they lie about what they've done. They claim to have cut a hundred billion dollars or several hundred billion dollars of stuff, which is actually not that great in the grand scheme of things. But when the GAO goes in and analyzes what they actually cut, it's like four percent of what they claim they can verify. Like ninety-six percent they can't verify. The New York Times did an investigation of this. So they are... And then when you look at the constant tweeting by Elon Musk and you start to parse it, fact-check it, it isn't just exaggeration. It's like bold-faced lie after lie after lie. And what's odd about this, especially when you compare him to Trump, like Trump lies all the time, right? He just, like, when he says something that's true, you're shocked. It's like he just does it. It's just strategy. It's a feature, not a bug. But Musk, if you talk to Musk's friends, like the people who really admire him and work in his companies, one of the first things they'll say about him is, you know, Elon doesn't lie. Elon believes everything he says is true. And I'm having trouble with that. But I don't know what's scarier, the thought that he is just lying all the time, or that he thinks this stuff is true. But it's just, there was so much falseness in it all. And so the question was, let's assume he's, I think the best case, let's assume he's not a dummy. Let's assume he was there for some reason other than the reason he says, because the reason he says, he wasn't even trying to really do the thing he said. What is it now?
Right, that was my next question. So what was the aim? These are busy people, right?
Well, one way of answering that question is to ask, what did he get?
Like maybe he got what he was after.
Well, he definitely got his friend put in the job of running NASA. Like, he got that.
I don't know if SpaceX is your big business. I don't know.
Right. You're doing the whole Doge thing to get the one guy.
That one guy, that seems like not enough. I agree.
And also it didn't end well. I don't want to put the cart before the horse.
Yeah, so Doge didn't end well for some folks. Correct.
Well, I don't think it ended well for anybody.
It did. But the people who were the Doge people, it did not end well.
The muskrats, the people who came in to help him.
No, no, it didn't end well with them. It was like the fall of Hanoi when...
So right. So, and they weren't trying to get someone into NASA. So why were they there?
So they were there. That's...
I guess I'm asking all the questions at once.
Yeah. So why they were there is different from what they were there for. Because Elon was there, people wanted to be near him.
They wanted to follow. They wanted to be near him. They thought that, like, you know, if you stay close enough, some money will fall out of his pockets, or jobs, or you worship him and you want to be near your idol. There were all kinds of reasons like that for them to be there.
It couldn't be, I'm going to say this and don't laugh. You know, there are various reasons, like, you know, one of the reasons why blockers are in their jobs is they're interested in public service. Some people do public service in their jobs, some people like to serve from the private sector and serve on commissions and those sorts of things. In the interest of completeness, I want to ask you, is there any argument in favor of that reason?
Oh, yeah. Not Elon. Not Elon. I don't know about Elon. I, you know, he...
But they thought, they were told, 'Look, we're going to cut waste. We're going to make it more efficient.'
I think in the case of some of the people who came to Washington, their motives were mixed. But I think there were some who really came. In fact, I feature one of them. He gets a lot of airtime in my book and ends the book. I mean, some of them came because they had a very specific thing they wanted to fix in the government that they actually did think, 'Oh, I have these technical skills, the government doesn't, it can use them, I can be a useful citizen.' There were people who thought that, for sure. So yes, and it was not all one thing. And it wasn't all one thing in the way a party is not all one thing. It was a party, it was a social network. Like, people were not exactly recruited to Doge. They just kind of showed up, and it was like a friend of a friend of a friend told me that you needed this. Can I come and help?
But so, okay. So the people who showed up and thought they were serving some cause to fix government or whatever, do you have any insight into whether or not that was based on ideology? You know, sort of a long-standing ideology of the right that, you know, as Reagan said, that the most dangerous sentence in the English language is 'I'm from the government, I'm here to help.' The demonizing of government workers that we've seen for decades upon decades. Was it that, or was any of it in the spirit that I understand that Bill Clinton and Al Gore had their efficiency-increasing project, which was more modest but also, I think, more fair? And you want to comment on that, you should. But were these people driven by ideology or something else, if at all?
I think the ideology was a necessary but possibly not sufficient condition. So, and if you just have to look at how they did what they did. So a twenty-six-year-old shows up who knows somebody who knows somebody who knows Elon, shows up, is given credentials to go into some agency, Veterans Affairs, pick your agency, but let's take Veterans Affairs because I had eyes on that, and is told, get rid of people and get rid of contracts. This person has never set foot into the Office of Veterans Affairs, knows nothing about it. He's twenty-six years old. So he does two things. He pulls up all the contracts of the Department of Veterans Affairs, like ninety thousand contracts, and they don't mean anything to him, but he just starts plugging in keywords like, I don't know, gender, bias, women, whatever, and just cuts the contracts that he assumes are wasteful by the titles on the contracts.
Based on ideology, right? Not based on any kind of analysis of the value of the contract. So that is an ideologically driven action. And it's also premised on, like, you can't do that if you think government has value, because you'd be worried you would be cutting something that was valuable. So that happens. Then the second thing they do across the agencies is they cut people in the only way they can cut people. You can't, the permanent civil service has these protections and it's hard to get rid of them. It is a problem, actually, how hard it is to get rid of them. But there's a reason it's hard to get rid of them. You don't want people being fired for political reasons. Anyway, the group of people who are fireable easily are the so-called probationary workers. Were you ever one of those?
Yeah. I forget what the time period is, but every federal prosecutor, every assistant U.S. attorney is probationary for, you know, eighteen months. Someone will look, like eighteen months or twenty-four months. And it was something that we would joke about, right? Like, oh, you're going to be thrown out. But I was not aware of anybody who ever... And then after that, it's very, very... I mean, I thought too difficult when I ran a government office of, you know, four hundred and fifty people. You don't want to do it on a regular, you know, but there are people in any institution you need to move jobs.
That's right. So, but the probationary workers didn't have the same protections. And so what they could do to just get the headcount up of who they fired is fire all of them. Now, who are they firing when they fire those people? They're firing the young you. They're firing young people. And they're firing people who've been brought in to deal with some immediate problem. So they're not firing people because they're bad. They're firing them because they can fire them. So they end up having this very perverse effect. If you were going in and what you wanted to do was get rid of the dead weight, you would go about it almost exactly the opposite. What they got...
You'd fire the people who have been there the longest.
You know, you'd be... Yes. And they also, based on the government pay scale, I presume, also paid the most.
Yes. It turns out it's easier to fire the good people than the bad people, or get the good people to leave, because good people can have options in the private sector. So what they did is they chased out a lot of talent and left all the dead weight. Who does that? Like, who can do that and not think about it? You got to come in just believing that all these people are wasteful. Otherwise, you go shoot yourself. And some of the kids, to their credit, some of them actually kind of had misgivings afterwards. That, you know, there's not been a whole lot of public about this, but I interviewed a bunch of them. It's like, I'm not sure what we did was a good thing. And so, as I say, the ideology, what does ideology do? What does real partisanship do? It blinds you. Like, you don't look at facts. You don't look at what's going on under your nose. You come in, you already know the answer. Your ideology gives you the answer. Your religion gives you the answer. So you're not actually responding to the facts on the ground. And I think that blindness was absolutely necessary for them to do what they did, because anybody who was actually looking and sensing and paying attention would say, we shouldn't do this.
I think it's the first one you talk about, the first agency you talk about, the U.S. Institute of Peace, which I will admit, you can see this in your book, I've been a creature of government for a very, very long time, as I said, seventeen years, and I have a lot of friends in government, and I cover government, and I read the papers, and like you, I never heard of the U.S. Institute of Peace either. You say not so much as a faint whisper about it. And then there's, I mean, what's great about this, I don't mean to pander to the guest, but you know, if we describe the book as a book about unelected bureaucrats, which is pejorative and also boring-sounding, you would think this is, you know, how can you make that interesting? But you have all these reveals, and you revealed, it's a small one, that the U.S. Institute of Peace was a private corporation.
What the hell? What the hell's going on with that?
Well, Congress for one hundred and fifty years, I think the first one was the Red Cross. Actually, charters are these kind of quasi-government institutions. Maybe some, they may get some congressional funding, but they're designed to be independent from the government. And I don't know, the Kennedy Center is probably this, the Smithsonian's probably this, where the government has some money in it, has some of, you know, the president may point people asynchronously to his term to benefit, has no, the whole point is he doesn't control it, and the law, the charter is written that way. And the U.S. Institute of Peace was created, and like you, I had never heard of it. This is what got me really, actually, this is what caught my attention, because I had in my head, oh, Trump doesn't care about government. Like, he didn't even try to run it the first time. And then the second time they come in and they're running not only the government, but all this stuff that's not, they're trying to seize all this stuff that's not the government. It was like the most enthusiastic act of management I'd ever seen. And this thing that I never heard of, that was a private nonprofit that owned its own building, finds itself invaded by like some combination of FBI, Doge, D.C. police, and private security firms. I thought, what is this? It's like they come into your house, take your house. That kind of woke me up to the possibility this was something completely different.
Let's just back to the previous thing we were talking about, like why, what are they doing, or why are they allowed to do it? Is Doge allowed to do what it does? So I think my theory of the case here, and you just tell me if you think I'm wrong. My theory of the case is that the Trump administration came in this time and it was a massive power grab. It was, we're going to grab as much power as we can. We're going to seize the power of the purse from Congress. We're going to ignore a law. We are going to make this president more powerful than any president's ever been. And then when you do that, you just transform the habitat. You transform the executive branch. And this character in this chapter you're talking about, the security guard, even he said, like, he asked, why the hell are they coming for us? Nobody even knows we exist. And then he decided, you know, they're coming for us to show that they can. They're taking our building to show they can.
Well, but can I, so I agree generally, except where I think about this, even though you have a lot of implicit, explicit, legitimate criticism of these guys, I worry that part of this conversation gives them too much credit.
That they thought at all about it.
That like, you know, they were just utterly thoughtless about where they were going, what they were doing. Um, you know, did six guys sign up for the U.S. Institute of Peace, or were they randomly assigned?
They randomly assigned the Doge-ign, but they were assigned by somebody, like somebody said, 'Go get that.' I mean, it goes to a question I want to ask you before we come back to the subject of the theory of the case. Did any humans do any planning whatsoever with respect to any of this? I mean, if you had to guess how many meetings happened by and among the Doge personnel before going into an agency, do you think it would be more or less than how much I prepared for this interview?
Probably about the same. Yeah. And it would be, but however, there are people, so Russell Vought at the Office of Management and Budget and co-author of Project 2025, those people thought a lot about what they wanted to do, and I think...
But then what they wanted to do was unleash like massive numbers of termites into agencies to eat at the wood.
Yes, and yes, and so they didn't need the soldiers to be thinking.
They didn't, that's exactly right. No, the kids don't know, that's right.
The kids who are rolling into the Institute of Peace probably don't even know that it's a private corporation.
So that was a design. You think that was a design?
Yeah, I think that ignorance is really... the ignorance is also a feature here, that you only do this stuff if you don't know anything about it.
And you don't really care. I mean, that's why I don't know if termites is the right metaphor. But if locusts, I don't know what it would be. But if your goal is just to sort of destroy and disrupt, and if you believe... let me ask you a different question about what Trump and others believe, or what Elon believes. Do you think the people at the top, meaning the sitting president of the United States, either thought about, or if he did think about it, believed that DOGE could cut $2 trillion?
If he cared about that, we wouldn't get his budget. The national debt has gone up $3.5 trillion in Trump's first two years. He doesn't care about that. Why isn't the explanation for Trump just, you know, it's disruptive, it sounds good, it's got a cool name. This cool guy who's the richest man in the world is being pressed into service to do it. I can tell people that we're cutting all this waste. I mean, it doesn't matter if he does or not. I mean, he tells people we have the best economy in the history of the world, right?
You know, inflation doesn't exist.
Well, I think this is the truth of the Trump presidency, is that that's probably close to the story Trump tells himself, but that's not the story that the people who are orchestrating the work on behalf of Trump tell themselves.
Who would you identify as the mastermind of DOGE?
Russell Vought is the person who made the most practical use of it. It starts with a guy named Paul Dans, but Vought is the spider in the web. And Stephen... I think he... and yes, he's deep state. It's very funny. He has created the very thing that he bandies around, the idea that there really is a deep state now. It's Stephen Miller and Russell Vought, and his fingerprints are never on anything. It's kind of... it's very impressive. It's a very impressive performance. He's a Shakespearean character.
