“Bureaucrat” is a really loaded pejorative. There’s no flattering use of the word. No child says, “I want to be a bureaucrat when I grow up.” Government workers are saddled with a stereotype of being faceless, lazy, unaccountable, corrupt paper pushers in a vast, wasteful machine of government.
That caricature is one reason President Donald Trump has been able, so far, to get away with slashing the federal workforce with relatively little outcry from the public. It’s a brutal campaign that’s felt particularly acutely here in Washington, D.C., where so many of us know someone in the civil service. Outside the Beltway, the carnage may seem more remote (even though most federal workers live outside the D.C. area). A late January Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 61 percent of adults support Trump’s effort to downsize the federal government.
Ironically, the agencies with the largest payrolls handle some of the most popular and essential government functions—and functions that Trump claims to favor. Set aside active-duty military and postal service personnel, the Cabinet agency with the largest payroll is the Veterans Department; most are healthcare workers, according to a recent Pew Research Center report. The next largest is the Homeland Security Department, which includes Customs and Border Protection. Among independent agencies, the largest employer is the Social Security Administration.
Government layoffs, it turns out, don’t even save that much money. According to the Congressional Budget Office, it cost about $271 billion to pay civilian employees in fiscal 2022—less than 5 percent of total government spending of $6.3 trillion. If it’s corruption Trump wants to cut, it’s not likely to happen by mindlessly dumping experienced civil servants and replacing them with his political cronies.
The civil service is a fat target for Trump’s demagoguery because so many Americans are largely unaware of what people in government do for them and the country. In largely unnoticed ways, the lives of even the most affluent are affected daily, from the government-inspected bacon they eat for breakfast to the government-regulated air they breathe to the government-subsidized crops that fill their dinner plates. Some oblivious citizens say they hate the government but love Medicare. Just wait until they have benefit questions and get put on hold for hours because the public information staff has been sent packing.
Countering ignorance and hostile stereotyping by putting a human face on the federal workforce is the primary mission of Who is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service, a new volume of profiles of civil servants who have accomplished good things for the country but have gotten little notice or credit.
The book is compiled and partly written by Michael Lewis, the author of Moneyball, The Big Short, and a raft of other bestsellers, including two previous books—The Premonition and The Fifth Risk—that also take on the unglamorous task of illuminating the inner workings of the federal government. Lewis assembled other accomplished writers—including novelists Geraldine Brooks and David Eggers—to help him find and profile inspirational people in the dark corners of the bureaucracy.
The result is a surprisingly engaging read, a tribute to these writers’ talents and commitment to the book’s mission. Most of the profiles appeared in The Washington Post last fall in the Opinions section led by David Shipley, who has since left the paper after its owner, Jeff Bezos, pledged to have it champion free speech and free markets. With Trump declaring war on the civil service and the Post seeming to lurch in a different direction, now’s a good time for them to be available to a broader audience.
“We’re going to blow up the stereotype of the bureaucrat,” Lewis said at a panel discussion about the series when it ran in the newspaper. “I want to… unsettle that picture in people’s mind, so they stop a sec before they start talking about the swamp or the deep state or useless bureaucrats, because you’re talking about some of the best among us.”
The workers featured are hardly a representative sample, but they toil at a wide range of enterprises: They prevent coal mines from collapsing, digitize records in the National Archives, maintain veterans’ cemeteries, rein in corporate monopolies, help people with rare infectious diseases, crack down on cybercrime, and calculate the Consumer Price Index.
Lewis’s The Fifth Risk warned against the risks of incompetence and ignorance in the first Trump administration. By contrast, Who is Government? is more upbeat, looking for beacons of excellence. That means the book sometimes smacks of puffery and boosterism. But frankly, these days, I’m grateful for some positivity about good people whose accomplishments and service have gone unnoticed. It’s a badly needed antidote to the bureaucrat-bashing Trump and Elon Musk engage in daily.
Only the government can or will do much of these civil servants’ work. If it costs too much, mining companies won’t do all they can to keep their workers safe. Drug companies don’t bother developing treatments for rare infectious diseases. Deep space exploration of exo-planets won’t be on Musk’s commercial space agenda.
‘’No billionaires will fund work like this because there’s no money in it,” said Eggers in his profile of a team at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a federally funded research and development center in Pasadena.
Lewis’s opening essay is a tour de force of explanatory journalism and the art of the profile. He introduces us to Christopher Mark, a Mine Safety and Health Administration official who spent decades researching mine safety at the Labor Department agency and devising standards and practices to prevent roof falls in underground mines. Because of his work, 2016 was the first year in history that no underground coal workers died from falling roofs.
Lewis’s skill at explaining complicated things to lay people is put to a grueling test as he walks us through what it took for Mark to make his breakthrough. It’s a crash course in arcana, like stability factors, roof bolts, and long wall mines—more than some readers may want. But it’s wrapped in a fascinating narrative about what brought Mark to his niche in the bureaucracy.
He’s the son of a Princeton engineer who figured out what kept Gothic cathedrals from collapsing. He was a 1960s radical who shunned college, got involved in the labor movement, and went to West Virginia mine country to organize. His interest in worker rights turned to worker safety when he went to college and graduate school, where he wrote a thesis on mine roof collapses. Launched on a life mission to keep miners safe, he figured out that the only place to do that was in the federal government.
“The federal government has long been a natural home for such characters: people with their noses buried in some particular problem from which they feel no need to look up,” Lewis writes.
That also describes Heather Stone, a policy analyst at the Food and Drug Administration whose youthful experience with immune diseases inspired a lifelong obsession with treating rare ailments. Joining two narrative strands, Lewis tells how she was the savior of a family whose daughter came down with a rare brain disease.
“An amoeba that on very rare occasions enters and eats the human brain isn’t a problem the free market is likely to solve,” Lewis writes.
Another canard about federal workers is that the private sector will consistently outperform them. Casey Cep, a New Yorker staff writer, challenges that in a profile of Ronald Walters, a Department of Veterans Affairs official who leads the National Cemetery Administration, overseeing the maintenance of 155 national cemeteries that are the burial grounds for nearly 4 million veterans.
Cep documents the care and precision that Walters puts into maintaining those cemeteries. He’s got a 40-page manual of standards and metrics for cemeteries that covers everything from how low the grass should be trimmed to how level gravesites should be to how quickly headstones are installed after a burial. The goal is to leave families and mourners well-tended and veterans well-honored, which seems to work. Cep found that Walters’ operation gets the highest rating of any organization, public or private, from the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index, besting even consumer favorites like Apple and Costco.
Others featured here point to some little-known functions of government. Who knew that you could ask historical questions of the National Archives and get answers free of charge? You can learn from “History Hub,” a public service devised by Pamela Wright, an archivist in charge of digitizing the Archives’ holdings.
Geraldine Brooks tracked down a guy in the Internal Revenue Service’s cybercrimes division. Who knew the IRS even had such a division? He’s delivered for the taxpayer big time: he’s arrested pedophiles, seized cryptocurrency destined for international terrorists, and helped bust cryptocurrency giant Binance.
Another problem facing the civil service is the dearth of young people in its ranks—a challenge spotlighted in a profile by W. Kamau Bell, the comedian and author of his 20-something goddaughter, a paralegal in the Justice Department’s antitrust division.
Only 7 percent of the federal workforce is under 30, compared with 20 percent in the private sector. It’s going to get worse with Trump’s layoffs of thousands of probationary workers. According to March 2024 data, 27 percent of probationary workers were under 30.
“We need a new generation in public service,” said Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a non-profit that works to improve the civil service. “Right now, our federal government is missing that next generation.”
John Lanchester, a British journalist and novelist, found a wide window into how much the government touches our lives by profiling not a person but a number: the Consumer Price Index. It’s the familiar measure of changes in the cost of living, but it shapes political and economic debates. It is also used in various public and private calculations: Social Security checks, food stamps, pensions, tax brackets, divorce settlements, business contracts, and labor agreements.
Why do we know so little about our civil servants, and why do they get so little recognition? Part of the problem is the bureaucracy’s institutional caution about publicity. Most of these writers had difficulty getting to their subjects and met efforts to deflect them to government spokespeople or higher-ups. Government officials instinctively fear that if a reporter shows up, it is to expose bad things, not highlight good ones.
As a result, the government doesn’t do much to combat the negative stereotypes that burden its workers. As one VA official told Cep, joining the civil service is like being in the Witness Protection Program: “No one ever knows about the good you do.”
Maybe the civil service attracts shy people, or the bureaucracy crushes their self-promotional instincts. When Egger went to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he struggled to identify someone willing to be singled out.
“No one at JPL—no one I met, at least—was willing to take credit for anything,” he said. “There was such a relentless emphasis on teams and groups and predecessors, and such a deep unwillingness from anyone to put themselves forward, or to talk too much, or above all take credit for anything.”
Giving people credit and paying more attention to the good things being done by good people may be the start of countering the propaganda being peddled by Trump and his team.
Lewis writes: “The next time a politician or a pundit traduces the IRS, or JD Vance suggests firing half the civil service and putting in ‘our people,’ consider whether a system that filled out its ranks with a new batch of political loyalists every four years would have the expertise of these dedicated, lifelong civil servants.”
