Michael Lewis: DOGE’s Young Men Led With Cruelty and Contempt

They led with cruelty and contempt rather than curiosity. They were sure they were the smartest person in the room before they entered the room. They had a kind of chip on their shoulders. So, however bad you imagined Doge to be, like however irresponsible, however callous, however uninformed, it was worse, and it's going to be really interesting to watch Congress go back over this and see what they actually did.

A hotel room in Los Angeles, but only briefly. It's like a different city every night. And it's been... it's...

And I just sort of gave into it. It went from... the local media has been gutted. In ancient times, you would go to Chicago and you'd do five shows or four shows and you'd get to Chicago. Those shows don't exist anymore. The national shows have gotten... it's harder and harder to do long form to a national audience. They just kind of... these shows have vanished. And what has stepped in and replaced it is these big theatrical events. So like 1,500 people in a theater in Pittsburgh or Miami or Nashville or Chicago or Portland or Seattle. And I sort of leaned into it this time and it's been so cool connecting in a kind of face-to-face, warm way. And I know you do live performances of your pod. But instead of doing the usual thing of just sitting on a stage and being interviewed by somebody, I've gotten so into it that they've kind of turned it into a little performance, and people and the audience responds like it's... I mean, I can see that the book tour going forward is going to be this. It's going to be doing what you're doing right now and what I'm doing right now. It's going to be live audiences, you know, going to the cities, less media, which is strange. I mean, maybe the media takes a different form. Maybe the people are there taking, making little clips and putting on social media, but mainly it's like this personal interaction with the audience.

I feel exactly the same way, and that people just behave differently face to face than they do online, and it is very encouraging. But it's forced me... I don't know how you feel about being on a stage with 1,500 people in the audience. 20 years ago, I would have been... paralyzed isn't the right word, it would have been nerve-wracking to do it, and I had to just force my way through it. And now it's become very comfortable to just walk out on the stage and talk to people. And thank God, because I do think this is the way. It's just a really healthy form of interaction. I found it completely energizing. And I'm surprised, because normally, you know, the old book tour, after two weeks, I was sick of the book. Like I hated my own book after talking about it 50 times. And I just wanted to be off the road. I've been on the road for five weeks with this thing, and the actual interaction with the crowds has me feeling almost as fresh today as I felt five weeks ago, and I'm still really interested in my book. So it's been a curious experience.

It's a really good question. I can't always put my finger on why I got interested in a thing. And I would never have expected to be like the Bard of Bureaucrats. But I mean, Trump clearly electrified the material, and it starts... I can tell you how it starts. It was really pretty simple. When he was elected the first time, when he fired his transition team and turned to Chris Christie and said, 'We don't need to do a transition with the Obama administration. We don't need to go and figure out what the federal government's doing because,' he said, 'you and I are so smart we can figure it out in an hour.' And I heard that from Christie's lips and I thought, oh my God, I mean, one, this is kind of existential peril. You all of a sudden feel this dread because he's supposed to run the federal government. He clearly doesn't know anything about it and he's not going to learn about it. So that was there, but there was this pure literary opportunism. It's like, oh, this is kind of cool. I can go and do the transition. I can go into, you know, the Energy Department and hear how they're managing the nuclear stockpile, and the reader will know they know more about this than the President of the United States because he hasn't bothered to figure it out. And that's what got me into it in the first place, and where it jumped the shark. And I wouldn't have come back. I don't think I'd have come back again if he hadn't gotten reelected and approached his government in an entirely different way. But what got me really energized about the material was the quality of the characters. Like you, I don't know what you thought if someone said bureaucrat, civil servant, public servant before I went in there in the first place, I'd have said, no, no, thank you. Like I just assumed it was kind of risk-averse, clock-punching automatons that were not characters. And I just kept finding characters, like people I know could light up a page, and they might not want to be on the page. They might not want to be my characters. They weren't the kind of people who want fame and fortune, but they were great characters. And so I knew that if the situation warranted it, if something happened in the federal government that made it interesting, I knew that there was a cast of characters I could draw on to write about it.

Yes, you got to be prepared to be bored for about three minutes. So amen, because the boring part is the important part for me with the books. It's like, what the frame is. What is this book about? And I decided this book, that this administration was about a power grab, that never mind the details from day to day, that what was going on was a radical seizure of powers for the president that the president normally didn't have. And it ranged from grabbing institutions that normally the president didn't run, to grabbing the power of the purse from Congress in really important ways, to grabbing a nonpartisan civil service and trying to turn it into a loyalist operation that served the personal interests of a single person. And once I had that as the beginning of the story, then I thought, oh, all right, never mind whether you're for it or against it. You've got this government. It's got two million people in it. These two million civil servants take an oath to the Constitution. They don't take an oath to Donald Trump. They take an oath to the Constitution. They're supposed to uphold the law. Mostly they're doing stuff that's nonpartisan, very nonpartisan. What happens when you turn it into a partisan, politicized workforce? Like what happens in the various functions of the government? So then I... so it's all this, I'm not even thinking about who the characters are at this point. I'm thinking about who are the kind of people that need to be in this story. And I realized, well, I need people who cover the government like it was... like The Big Short, very similar as a literary exercise. No one person... it was a hairball of a story, like financial crisis, Trump government. No one person had the story. It was an ensemble piece by nature. And in this case, the ensemble in The Big Short was one thing, and I cast that. In this case, the ensemble was finding people in the different functions of the government who could tell the whole story of their function, whether it's long-term scientific research or data collection or public safety. And so that was the... that's the boring bit, like I had that frame. So then I went and wandered. I just like went and wandered. It's pretty haphazard. Like I meet people who introduce me to people who introduce me to people, and I had a rolodex because of The Fifth Risk, and I knew people in various agencies, and I just wanted... and it was basically, I realized at one point that really what I was looking for were people who had been extremely good at their jobs, like elite level, who had been in them for a while so they were experts in what they did, and who had been run out, like that all of a sudden they couldn't do their job even though everybody agreed they were really good at their job in each of these functions. And then it was just a matter of... I was spoiled for choice. There were so many. For each one of these people I wrote about, there were five others in the wings. I had a deep bench. And it was just like, you know, at that point, and this is really going to bore you, I know, but this is in the weeds of my process. At that point I'm thinking like, they're like a choir. You need different voices. At that point I'm kind of like, I'm picking them for how they're going to sound on the page, so they go together in an interesting way. But there were so many different ways. The basic premise of the book was strong enough: like lots and lots of extremely talented public servants who were there for the right reasons got run out because they just couldn't function in what was becoming a politicized, partisan workforce, and they couldn't take... they wouldn't do things that were illegal. They wouldn't weaponize the government against the citizens, all that stuff. And it was just a matter of picking the ones that I thought I could make swing on the page.

Yeah, we hit... I hope that was the bottom.

Yeah. You're pretty closely in touch with your 23-year-old self, I sense. Like you're very... yes. And you were a boy, and you're sensitive to what it was like to be a young man. And I remember what I was like when I was 23, too. So I felt some sympathy for what happened. I try to put myself in their shoes, and the world's richest man is telling me to go do stuff, and it's someone who I really admire, and I know nothing. All I know is what they tell me. So that's the caveat to what I'm about to say.

Yeah. Yes, that's right. But that's the caveat to what I'm about to say. And what I'm about to say is that there was a pattern to these guys, these young guys. They led with cruelty and contempt rather than curiosity. Like they were sure they were the smartest person in the room before they entered the room. And they had a kind of chip on their shoulders. And it was, you know, the stereotype to me of this young Doge person is the person who didn't get into Harvard. He thinks he should have gotten into Harvard, and he's telling himself a story he didn't get into Harvard because of, you know, DEI admissions policies, kind of thing, affirmative action, and that. So he's been not properly appreciated his whole life. Never really played team sports or sports of any kind. Never really been punched in the mouth or punched anybody in the mouth. Has hid behind a computer screen for much of his childhood. Is bright, like, and bright in a certain way. Bright in the way that someone who programs, writes software is bright, but probably couldn't tell you the difference between Picasso and Matisse, or knows much about history, or cares at all about the government. Not broad. And they were so... they're all very like each other. They're all almost all white, almost all young men. Very self-reinforcing, like they all thought the others were smart like them. And then they're sent off. They treat the government like a startup. They move into the General Services Administration's headquarters with Musk, and they all sleep on the floor there, and they're sent off every day and told to come back with scalps, come back with people you fired, come back with contracts you've cut. And when you're on the receiving... when you see them roll into... if you're an excellent civil servant who's trying to do your job, what it looks like is insanity. 26-year-old, 25-year-old showing up with a badge demanding access to the computers, going about kind of cutting the government in the most insanely arbitrary ways, like just looking at an org chart and circling stuff that sounds bad. I mean, I'll draw you one little picture, and it's seen through the eyes of a Doge guy who actually kind of was uneasy about what he was being asked to do. His name was Sahil Lavingia. Sahil, he's a little older, early 30s. He's different in that he'd actually made his fortune. Most of these guys had not made their fortune. He comes and joins Doge because he actually has a purpose. So he's unusual that way, too. He joins Doge because he's obsessed with the fact that the IRS is still sending him paper. He says, 'Why don't I have an app? I can just do my taxes.' So he thinks he's going to come and fix that problem. Instead, they send him to the Department of Veterans Affairs. He walks in and finds another Doge guy already there who's got sweat on his brow and is saying, 'God, thank God you showed up because I don't know if I know what I'm doing.' And what this first Doge guy is doing is cutting vet contracts for veterans. So money that Congress has allocated to go to various veterans causes. People have thought about it. People think this is a good use of money. There have been discussions about this. And this kid has got a file of 45,000 VA contracts, and he's just plugging in keywords like bias or gender or woman or trans that he thinks might flag woke spending. And without even knowing what the contracts are, when he finds the word in the title of the contracts, he just cuts the contracts. So it's that kind of stuff. And I think it's sort of like, so however bad you imagined Doge to be, like however irresponsible, however callous, however uninformed, it was worse. And it's going to be really interesting to watch Congress go back over this and see what they actually did. But because only bits and pieces have leaked into the public, I only got bits and pieces of the story.

I think that's... I think you nailed it. And I think the central feature of the cult was that the only thing you can't do is express any kind of disloyalty to the cause. So this kid I was talking about, he's not a kid, a young man, Sahil Lavingia, he got fired from Doge. It was so hard to get fired from Doge. That you could... Doge members... there were people in Doge who fabricated the college they went to on their resume, and they were excused for that. There were people in Doge who were like tweeting all kinds of white nationalist stuff, and they were excused for that. There were people in Doge who were exposed to have a history of sexual assaults. They were excused for that. The cult rallies around them when they get in trouble. So what Sahil did to get fired was, after wandering around the VA for a couple of weeks and actually learning about it, he made the mistake of picking up a call from a reporter from Fast Company magazine, and he said to the reporter, you know, I've only been here a few weeks, but the government's not as inefficient as I thought it was. And that's the one thing you couldn't do, that you couldn't break with the... you couldn't question the premise of the cult in any way. And so I think that's right. I don't know if right now those young men are questioning what they did. I suspect they're feeling very defensive, and they still probably want to be very close. They probably are cultivating whatever relationship they had with Elon Musk. They're probably worried they're going to be in legal trouble. They maybe can't afford to think the thoughts they should be thinking about what they did. But one day they will. One day they'll look back and say, I shouldn't have done that. And there is a story to do. I don't know when the time is to do it. It's... but it's, you know, a year from now or more, where you go back to those young men and you have them reflect on what they did and why they did it, and it's going to make an interesting documentary. Because I think the stories are... I think there's so many shocking stories that are going to come out, but also just how they process this, how they got themselves in this situation. And the great irony, I mean, there are all kinds of ironies here. I mean, one of the ironies is they call themselves the Department of Government Efficiency, and like all they did was create inefficiency everywhere they went. But the other great irony is they all think of themselves... like their self-identification is kind of lone wolves. They're kind of like, I'm the Ayn Rand hero kind of thing. That I'm, as you say, I'm responsible for my success and no one else is kind of thing. No. And ignoring all the helping hands and the role the government plays and all that in their lives. And yet they gave themselves over entirely to an organization like they...

showed no capacity for critical thinking, for independence. They were exactly the opposite of their ideal of themselves, and I thought that was curious.