Hey everybody, welcome to Pod Save America. I'm John Lovett. I just wrapped a great conversation with Michael Lewis. He is the author of the new book, Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State. It is a conversation not just about what happened when DOGE tried to run roughshod over the government, but also the people inside who fought back. And there are a lot of fascinating stories and lessons and ways that we should be thinking about how not only to repair the damage, but build something better going forward. And I just loved getting to talk to Michael Lewis, and I think you'll like it too.
It's good to see you, John.
Good to see you. The book is enraging.
Is it? Yeah, it was fun to write. It wasn't making me angry as I wrote it.
Well, that seems sort of your quality. So I want to start with Colin O'Brien. He's the head of security for what was then known as the US Institute of Peace. What happened when DOGE tried to gain entry to that building?
In a word, he watched. And he's head of security, and he's a more interesting character than that. He presents as like an NFL lineman just to look at him, but he's like a college professor in his head. He watched DOGE basically rearrange all the guns on their side. So he thought first, he thought the Institute of Peace, it's not really part of the executive branch. It's a congressionally created organization, and it has got funding from the US government, but it owns its own building. It's a nonprofit. They didn't think of themselves as actually answering to the White House in any way. So it's weird when DOGE shows up and says, 'We're taking this.' It's also very small. I think people are like, 'Oh, it's the Institute of Peace.' They associate it with USAID. USAID is vast compared to what the Institute of Peace is. A couple hundred people.
Yeah, it's a $70 million budget or something, some of it privately raised.
And Colin assumed, well, he has a private security firm that works for him. If the federal government tries to invade his building, he can call the DC police. Before he knows it, he's actually the most successful in repelling DOGE because he lasted a few days. But before he knows it, the private security firm has been blackmailed by the Trump administration and turned so that they're working for the Trump administration. The DC police sign on. Whatever diabolical thing they did with the DC police is unclear, but I loved it as a kind of opening of the book because he was physically trying to block them from getting into the building. And in the end, they get the building. I mean, in the end, it's now not the US Institute of Peace anymore. It's the Donald Trump Institute of Peace.
So I feel like it's such an obvious reason why you start the book with it. You're very good at this, but it's a signal example, right? Because he's on solid legal ground, right? These people don't have any right. They're just... it's like they're coming to your house to take your house, right? They're just people off the street. They're very aggressive. They act like they own the place, right? And he says, 'No, you can't come in.' And they're 26 years old, right? They're these kids, right? 'No, you can't come in.' Then they bring an FBI guy with them. And that person isn't really there other than to facilitate. He says, 'No, you can't come in.' The private security firm, the reason the Trump administration is able to get this firm to be part of their efforts to take the building is the Institute of Peace has a very small contract. The State Department has a contract that's a hundred times the size. Their money is at stake. So now all of a sudden, because of that contract, not for any legal reason, they're suddenly on the side of DOGE. And yet still this guy O'Brien, he locks them in the portico of the building and he physically removes them. This is a shocking story.
About the third assault. The third assault, Colin figures his only vulnerability is there is one lock on the building that actually a key will open that he can't shut down with a press of a button on his phone. There's one key that's out there. It's in the hands of someone who works for the private security firm. Nobody knows it's out there. He assumes that the guy at the private security firm will just keep it a secret, not use it. But they wake up one morning and the private security firm has broken in using that key to get in. And Colin watches them on the cameras and they all get into a single room in the front of the building and he realizes he can sort of seal it hermetically shut. So imprison the invaders. And there's a wonderful scene where they realize they're locked in and trapped. So Colin's people call the DC police and say, 'We have trespassers, come and get them.' And the guys who were trapped call their bosses, resulting in a call from Ed Martin's office. I mean, it's just like it escalates inside the Trump administration.
He was the US attorney at the time.
The US attorney at the time. And in the end, DC police do in fact come, but they come in, they're working for the Trump administration. And it is... So, here's the bigger point of the story. Actually, this is what got me interested in thinking this was a book, because it was such... you know, if you think of Trump one, Trump won the first administration, its signature was indifference and ignorance. Like, he didn't care at all about running the government. He'd fired his transition team right after the election. He told Chris Christie it would take him an hour to learn how the federal government worked. He just didn't care. And I think Trump two comes in and they care more than any administration has ever cared. In a funny way, they're extending their power into places that it doesn't belong. They're saying, 'We're not only going to run the stuff that we're supposed to run, we're going to take stuff that we're not supposed to run.' And you know, the Institute of Peace is set up under Reagan and it's set up to be really... it's not for the president to control. It's at arm's length from the American government for a very specific reason. It's set up as a kind of instrument of soft power to be able to go out into the field in hot spots in the world and facilitate conversations between warring parties without it being the US government. Sort of a quasi-government kind of thing. And it's done this very successfully over... I mean, you know, it's like if you go to the Pentagon and ask them, 'Are you glad that this place exists?' they would tell you yes, it saved us lives and saved us money, it's stopped conflict. But it only works if this isn't seen as an instrument of American power. It's a nebulous kind of thing. And legally, they own their building. You know, it's just really clear. What it showed was not only are we going to take everything we can, we're going to show that not only are we going to run everything we're supposed to run, we're going to take everything we can and we're going to show people as a kind of statement, we can do this and we're going to worry about the law later. So it was, I mean, it's blatantly illegal.
But it's working its way through the courts slowly, right? That is what is sort of stunning about the example. And I do want to talk about some of the ways in which there were aspects of the Project 2025 critique that were agreed to by people within the government. But part of the reason I say that is because at a certain point, if we're not following the law, it really is about who has the keys and the guns in the basement. And when the cops show up, who do they point their guns at, right? Whose side do they take? It becomes about...
It's very elemental. It's very elemental.
And here at this place, this institute created by Ronald Reagan, supported in a bipartisan way for a very long time, you have this security guard basically trying to use the physical building to keep Donald Trump out, and he ultimately can't.
And he can't. And so it is, I think, because no shots were fired, I think we ignore the importance of who has the guns. But DOGE was very aware. The Trump administration was very aware. 'We don't want these security guards with guns pointing out at us. We don't want the DC police.' We don't want... it's... we got to... And that just happened without anybody saying much about it. It's interesting. It's outrageous that the DC police turns itself into an arm of the Trump administration. It's outrageous that a private security firm turns itself into an... but it's... so that's, I think, the very beginning of the story of transforming the presidency from one thing into another, from extending the power of the president to turning the two million person civil service from a nonpartisan workforce that takes an oath to the constitution, not to a person, into a sort of loyalist operation meant to serve the personal narrow interests of a single man. Like all of those changes are just profound changes. But it all starts with, 'We have the power, like we have the guns, and we're going to eliminate the law. We're going to eliminate... and we eliminate fairness, like we eliminate all the referees.'
Yeah, and I do think there's two things happening at once in parallel that get mixed together. One is a shocking and aggressive assertion of executive power either at the edge of or in the border between legal and illegal, right? Just trying to push executive power in new ways or ways that haven't been used in a very long time because of norms and institutional prerogatives and deference, right? And then on the other, you have just lawlessness and just, 'We're going to go in and do what we want and the faster we go, the harder it will be for you to catch up to us with the courts and all the rest.' And those things, I think, both are playing out here and playing out across the government. But I think it's interesting you talk about this difference between the first term and the second term. So in the first term, Chris Christie puts together this transition team. Trump fires him, doesn't need him. It's neglect. It's indifference. It's ignorance. Fundamentally different in the second term. And you say in the book, you know, the Trump team blames bureaucracy for their failures when in reality their agenda was undermined by their own ineptitude, right? That they chose people with little management experience to run these agencies and then were dumbfounded by their failure to be able to kind of yoke the machine, get the machine to do their bidding.
Were you in the White House when they came in the first time?
No. No, I was out here hosting and podding.
I see. Okay. Because there are people in the White House who tell you that... I can remember stories from The Fifth Risk. I wrote a book about Trump one where like Jared Kushner is bewildered that everybody's leaving the White House. They thought they just stayed. You know, the level of... they just... I don't know what they thought, it would just run on autopilot or something. But the level of indifference the first time was incredible. I mean, I went and got the first briefing to be got about how the nuclear arsenal was run because they didn't bother to do it. That kind of thing. And so this time, and the subsequent complaint that like whatever, Trump didn't have any great policy plans. It's not like he came in with a great plan and then it didn't get executed. He came in without any particular interest in doing anything except, you know, the dog caught the bus. He got to be president and it surprised him, but he wasn't there for any particular purpose. And so the idea that like there's this deep state that undermined him was insane. But that's a line they started to peddle very hard towards the end. And it is true that when he broke the law or when he sought to do things that were illegal, that there were people, there were mechanisms inside the civil service to get in his way and he didn't like that. But that's kind of a separate thing. But you see this playing out in all kinds of ways, right? He says like, 'If you don't let me put my name on the Kennedy Center, well, it's just going to go to pot and then we'll have to tear it down.' Right? And no one's saying that the president can't institute a plan to repair the Kennedy Center. Just have to do it competently and legally according to the rules, right? The frustration of the kind of shambolic lawless effort leading to roadblocks and therefore 'the deep state is stopping us' becomes a lot of the basis for what DOGE does.
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So I want to talk about Howard Lutnick because I think with Howard Lutnick you see both the neglect and ignorance and the kind of aggressive destruction that sort of marries the two. What happens when Howard Lutnick takes over at Commerce and how did that impact an agency that has very rarely been seen as sort of political, which is the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST, the place you go to find out what time it is exactly?
Yes, so NIST. NIST is one of those agencies every American should know about because it's fascinating. Established in the late 19th century to create... it's called the Bureau of Standards. Like, there are arguments about what a yard is or what a pound is, and if you traveled America in 1902 and you tried to buy a pound of butter, you'd find that the pound was not a pound anywhere. And so it starts that way. The character in the book who carries the water for the story is a fellow named Alex Marangidis who invented an entire fire science inside of NIST. He invented the science of wildland-urban interface fires, you know, Palisades...
The fires that are the fires we're all talking about.
That's exactly right. He's like, 'How do you study these things? And how do we defend ourselves against them?'
Getting quickly just to set this up. So NIST, why is NIST doing that? In 1904, there is the Great Baltimore Fire, which becomes the Great Baltimore Fire because when a fire starts in a warehouse and fire trucks come from surrounding areas, the threads on their hoses don't match the fire hydrants in Baltimore. So they can't put out the fire and it just spreads. It's kicked to NIST to create a standard for a fire hydrant and a hose. So that's how they get into fire. The reason your smoke detectors are where they are and they work the way they work, the reason your sprinklers are where they are and they work the way they work, the reason buildings are designed with the exits where they are, all came out of NIST doing a lot of the original research.
It's filled with these tinkerer types. It's kind of a... I mean, if you twist the dial on the kind of person who works at NIST, they end up in some academic science department. But they're hands-on. They do stuff. And Alex, the character in the book, came to NIST because he had been one of the world's great big fire experimenters. He worked for the Navy, set big fires on ships to test various retardants and how you would put them out. So he had experience with setting huge fires and getting information out of them. When the World Trade Center on 9/11, when the World Trade Center falls, NIST is assigned to figure out why did it fall? Why did those towers fall? They weren't supposed to fall. And the arguments were that the fire could never have gotten so hot that it melted the steel beams. And Alex is brought in. He recreates, he rebuilds floors of the World Trade Center and sets them on fire. And he's part of the reason we know why the towers fell, because the Jews...
Yes. Because... Oh, God. [laughter] Sorry. You just had to say that. You just had to say that.
So this is all backstory because you need to know this. Howard Lutnick is, I mean, it's kind of a downstage voice in the book, but Alex, you know, and the point of the story of Alex is, so he comes to NIST in 2002 thereabouts and he has enough flexibility to invent. Like, he knew he wanted to invent this new science. He knew he wanted to go study big fires that wiped out communities and see if he could create new standards of how you build communities or design communities to make them more defensible.
So just one example that comes from the book, that there's like a small... like this is the kind of thing where no one has to be doing this work. It's good that they are. So for example, where should people clear things that can burn from their houses? Well, clear it away from the houses. How far away?
How far away? Well, it turns out that actually those rules, which are common sense, you're moving stuff away from your house but towards your neighbor's house.
That's right. That's like a small example from the book of like just a smart guy thinking things through on our behalf.
When you walk through his suburban Maryland neighborhood with him, and by the way, what he would tell you is like, we spend a lot of time talking about West fires out here. He said the East is a tinderbox. He said that all it takes is six weeks of no rain and the East Coast is just waiting to go up. So he says, 'You walk through one of these neighborhoods and you see it in a completely different way through his eyes. You'll see a wooden fence that runs the length of a block. He'll go, that's how the fire is going to travel from that house to that house. That fence is a really dangerous thing.' And it's all fallen out of this research he's done basically by himself, very small team at very little expense. And he's been doing it. The point of his story is that, and this is, I don't want to undermine your point, but...
The point of the story is that it isn't just Trump. It's that the way we run our government has made it harder and harder for people like Alex to do what they do. When he starts, he's able to use the NIST fire lab just on the side when it's open to just throw some trees in and burn them and see what happens, kind of thing. He creates this science sort of like in his spare time. That's how it begins until people start to see how valuable it's going to be and then he gets some proper funding. But five years in, this is an example of how government gets kind of kludgy. Five years in, at a NIST lab in Colorado, someone has an accident with plutonium. It triggers a congressional investigation, which triggers all these new rules about experiments. And Alex then, you know, when there's downtime in the NIST lab, which happens, you know, when he needs it in the spur of the moment, he now needs to get six signatures to run an experiment. So his life had gotten a little harder and harder and harder until you get to Trump two. He was able to keep doing his work until he gets to Trump two. And he gets to Trump two, he's already kind of tired and worn out. And Howard Lutnick comes in, and NIST is inside the Department of Commerce. And by the way, Howard Lutnick lost his whole firm on 9/11.
The floors up from the building that Alex...
The floors up from. Yes. Alex actually explained why Howard Lutnick's whole firm died. Howard Lutnick doesn't see this connection, but there is a connection between these two people. You would think, in a perfect world, Howard Lutnick would know exactly about this research. He would know all about the Department of Commerce. He'd go in and shake Alex's hand and say, 'What do we need to do to help you?'
Well, at least when he gets the job, you'd think you're excited to go meet the people that work for you because it's a job. You have a job now. You're going to go do your job.
Yes. So Howard Lutnick is the reductio ad absurdum of a bigger problem, and it is that we stopped asking what qualifications should a person have to run one of these federal agencies. It's very weird what they get tested for. Did they know Jeffrey Epstein? Not that... that's sort of... I mean, you don't want them to know Jeffrey Epstein, but you really want to know that they know what's inside the Department of Commerce and you really want them to know that they can run this sort of organization. Some felt experience with the things the Department of Commerce does, the Weather Service or whatever it is, that would help. It's remarkable how we install people to be the temporary heads of these places with enormous power over them without knowing anything about them. So Howard Lutnick really knows nothing about the Department of Commerce and he doesn't care. So what he does is he arrives, doesn't really show in his office much. He's in the White House all the time because he wants to be with Donald Trump, but at the same time insists on micromanaging what's going on in Commerce by...
It's just like anything over $10,000 I have to sign, which just shuts things down because he's not there to sign them. There are lines of people. He shows up in the evening for an hour and there are lines of people outside his door waiting to, 'Please, could you just look at this and sign the check.' Alex's credit card is taken away. He can't buy supplies for his lab. It basically grinds him to a halt. And he was already at a point where they're making it so hard. 'I'm exhausted. I can't do the work.' And so he leaves. He leaves. And funny enough, I'll tell you a coda to this. So Alex left about a year ago, but he was so worried about the research. The research is research that will save our lives. It's the research that will help us defend against this coming threat, this growing risk. And he says, that knowledge that we created, it's one person deep. Alex had a young assistant, he's trying to kind of jam into the young assistant's brain all he needs to know, but Alex kind of needs to be there. So for the last year, he's worked for free just before he leaves and goes back to Greece where he came from. And he said to me, he just read the 20,000 words in the book about his fire science, and he said, 'Nice job.' He said, 'But I now have to go turn in my laptop because I'm sure they're coming for me now.' And it was... he's afraid that just the public exposure of the consequences of the way they're running this thing in the person of him is going to cause trouble for NIST and him when it really shouldn't. It should cause someone to come in and get rid of Howard Lutnick, get someone in there, go run the place. But it's incredible. And I don't know what your broad view of the government is as opposed to politics, but whenever you kick around the government, you find all these Alex Marangidises. You find all these people who've got some weird expertise who are doing something that you might think in the back of your mind the market would do. Like you might think the insurance industry would be doing this, and they kind of do a little bit of it, but in fact, no. They're...
The market, especially with public safety stuff, the market is terrible. And the government does all this great stuff, and it's usually someone like Alex who has just an obsession with the problem and he sees how big the effects are going to be if he can solve the problem and he goes down the rabbit hole and he works 100 hours a week and he doesn't get paid very much and he could be being paid way more in the private sector and doesn't even expect you to cheer for him. He doesn't even want attention. He just wants the freedom to solve the problem. And that we as a society have created these obstacles and that the Trump administration comes in and says like, 'Oh, that's deep state.' It's insane. It's insane.
You look at the moments where there are these innovations or discoveries or sort of promising research that produces results like this. And it is these sort of moments of small groups of people with the freedom to maneuver, try things, right? You can talk about DARPA, you could talk about the Manhattan Project, but you talk about startups that make incredible things. You talk about Facebook at the beginning, whatever. And it's a group of people with a passion and a freedom to explore their ideas and no one kind of watching every... you know, you don't want to waste money, but no one watching every dollar and every little penny that goes out the door.
Whether that's because they're independent or that there's leadership that has enough trust and respect for what they're doing to give them the space to operate. And you know, one example you have in the book is that long before Trump shows up, there used to be a travel agent.
[laughter] There used to be...
I've forgotten about that.
There used to be a travel agent, and the travel agent worked for this department, for NIST. And so when you wanted to go look at a forest fire or go to a research lab or whatever, you would call this person and say, 'Hey, I need to do this trip.' And that person would say, 'All right, let me get you the information.' Right? And so in order to, quote-unquote, save money, they cut that department. And now these scientists have to book their own travel and they have to go to seminars where they learn about how to save money on airplane tickets, right? And you may be able to show on a ledger somewhere that some money was saved, right? But in the end result, the government is less efficient and less effective and the people that you have presumably hired to provide their comparative advantage now have to spend more time doing administrative tasks. And you see that everywhere.
You see it everywhere. And at the bottom of it, there's probably something at the bottom of what I'm about to say, but at the bottom of it, it's this: once you start generating mistrust of government, it's so easy to distort what's going on inside of it for political gain, to point to it and go, 'Look at how outrageous it is. They have a travel agent inside of NIST. You don't have a travel agent. They have a travel agent.'
They have a travel agent. Yeah. And the fact is, you want them to have a travel agent because you want them doing the science. You don't want them learning how to book airline tickets.
And we have paid an enormous price for people just not understanding what the government does. And this cyclone of mistrust that is spun up and that just ends up running through the government and hitting whatever it hits willy-nilly. It creates the elimination of the travel agent. But in the minds of the people who are working there, if you're there... I mean, not everybody in the two million person civil service is great. I'm sure there is waste. Of course there's waste. There's not a lot of fraud because they get watched so close. It may be fraud perpetrated on the government by American citizens, but the idea that people in the government are like stealing a lot of money from the government, that's probably unlikely. It is inefficient in ways.
Contractors are making money.
That's... yeah, but that's why. I mean, so it's a fair question, like why we subcontract so much, why we don't have the capabilities inside. But over and over in these things I've written about the government, I didn't go looking for the rare person who was doing something good. They're all over the place. People who bust their ass, who really have a sense that they want their lives to mean more than just that they made money for themselves or they got famous. They want to serve. They care a lot about the democracy. They care a lot about whatever thing they're doing inside the government, whatever specialty they're practicing. And they really just want to keep their heads down and do their work. And the idea that whenever they look up, they're seeing a more and more hostile gaze... it's like we have... the best of them are the best among us. And if you treat them with this kind of cynicism, you're driving out something that's just essential to the society. It's like, why should I bother? You know, we're going to become Greece. Why should I bother throwing my weight into something that's going to help the collective if I'm going to be punished for it? It's...
Right, and you're doing work that might make more in the private sector, or with the skills and talent that could get a much more high-paying job, but instead choosing to do this. Maybe one of the perks is, yeah, there's somebody that helps you with the travel so that you can focus. Right? There are advantages to working for the government that come with some prestige and some respect, if not money, especially when...
The rounding error that is NIST, the rounding error that is the US Institute of Peace, compared to like what... when people talk about where our tax dollars go, right? It's interest, Pentagon, healthcare, and Social Security.
Can we talk about this for a minute? Because it is interesting to me. It's interesting to me what the difference between what DOGE and the Trump administration this time around said they were doing and what they are doing. Because what they said they were doing in the very beginning was, 'We're coming to cut the deficit.' Right? Elon Musk said we're going to cut $2 trillion out of a $7 trillion deficit. But then he ignores interest payments on the debt, military, and entitlements, which is about 75% of the budget. So it's mathematically impossible to cut $2 trillion out of this last little slice he's attacking. What he's attacking is a nonpartisan civil service that does lots of other things. And then doing it in a kind of very haphazard way, cutting things willy-nilly, firing people willy-nilly, not really for cause, just because. Fire whoever you can, kind of thing. And so clearly, this is not a stupid person. Clearly the way he went about it was not going to achieve what he said he wanted to achieve. So either he is a stupid person, he just really didn't know and he was like in an attention-starved, drug-addled attempt to do something and he wasn't thinking about it, or he was actually...
trying to do something else. And that's
the and what is the something else then?
Like what did they actually assume? Assume for a minute they got what they were after, as opposed to it was one giant failure. And I think that what they have done is they've traumatized the workforce, the government workforce. They have eliminated a lot of the checks on presidential power, firing inspectors general. You know, the referees are all gone.
Also culturally shifting what is acceptable for a president to do.
That's exactly right. That's exactly right. It's sort of like if we can do that, we've established we can do this, so we can do anything. And what they've created, what it really was, were the preconditions for a big power grab. That was what it was. And I'm not sure they were smart enough to think that way, but it's possible that's just what this was. And all the noise about we're going to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse was just noise. They actually never thought they were going to do that in the first place.
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I do think a little bit of this is looking for your keys where the light is shining. You know, this is where they can make trouble, right? It's actually very difficult. Trump has at times talked about cutting entitlements, at times he said he won't. There's obviously not a lot of good politics in the Paul Ryan style of entitlement reform, right? He's made all kinds of claims about cutting taxes, which he's done, right? And about cutting the debt, which he has, of course, not done.
By the way, you know how much the debt has grown in his first two years? $3.5 trillion.
Of course. And by the way, any big gains you would have potentially gotten, right? Like there's some debate as to whether there is going to be legitimate savings from DOGE. Legitimate meaning like actual long-term reductions in what they're spending, which is going to be dwarfed by not just payouts to the people that were fired in the first year. Fine. That's one year.
The IRS has been gutted. Yeah. We are not able to do the auditing. And by the way, you know, people say, 'Oh, like, well, this is the amount that was coming in on audits and that's gone down.' What about all the people that are taking a flyer on a risky tax scheme because they're pretty sure they're not going to get caught.
That's right. That's money we... It's hard to measure what that cost is. So I want to talk about...
It does get measured. I mean when they came in it was already like $600 billion. It's not insignificant, right? So it's... you're right. It's just going to grow. All I mean by that, so there's... what I'm saying is there's the actual amount coming in because of audits and that's going down, but then there's the kind of amorphous number of how many people are just paying less in tax, right? And they can take a guesstimate of that, but we'll never fully know exactly how much has been lost because somewhere there's a person who's like, I don't think anybody's going to read this thing.
Here's another tax loss. It's an interesting one. So, one of the things they did, and it was a sin, is DHS, ICE, asked the IRS for the tax returns of undocumented workers. There's a separate file of about 7 million people, and it's got the most... it's got the best information on their most recent home address. It's supposed to be sacred and private. It's supposed to be as private as you as citizens' tax data. We've been telling that population for 30 years that file your taxes and it will help if you decide you want to become a citizen one day and no one will ever use any of this information against you. It's generated hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes that people have paid. We now know that they actually took this data and went and used it to grab people in their homes. If you're an undocumented worker, what are the chances that you're going to pay taxes now? You know, it's just... it creates a climate of such mistrust. It's so poisonous. And once the mistrust starts, I mean, I keep thinking of Greece. It's like the Greeks don't pay their taxes. Once you start to lose the sense of the collective purpose, it's amazing how quickly it can unravel. Why should I pay my taxes?
