Bureaucracy Versus the Apocalypse

Mieke Marple reviews the new anthology “Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service,” edited by Michael Lewis.

By Mieke MarpleMay 21, 2025

• Politics

AT A TIME when the federal bureaucracy has been condemned to death, Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service—a new collection of essays by seven writers, edited by Michael Lewis—appears like a white knight intent on, if not saving the damsel, then at least defending her honor. The essays were originally published in The Washington Post in September and October 2024, at the height of election season, and each, with the exception of John Lanchester’s piece about the consumer price index, follows a different federal worker. They averaged four times the typical readership of a Post article despite being eight times the length. As we all know, this enthusiastic reception did not prove to be a bellwether of November’s election results.

It feels gratuitous to delineate the horrors of the current administration and its Department of Governmental Efficiency, like prodding a festering wound. At the end of the Biden administration, the federal workforce consisted of over three million people, including everyone from your local mail carrier to the director of the FBI. At the time of writing, at least 121,000 federal employees have been laid off or fired, with many more placed on administrative leave or taking voluntary buyouts. This ranges from 1,000 employees of the National Park Service (which caused Yosemite to delay summer campground reservations) to 70,000 from Veterans Affairs, 10 percent of the staff of the Department of Energy, half of the Department of Education, and virtually all 10,000 employees of USAID. At the beginning of March, just before tax season, DOGE slashed almost half of the IRS’s workforce.

The list of transgressions goes on and on, even as there are some signs that the assault on the federal workforce might be slowing down. Lawsuits have temporarily halted some of the reductions listed above, and in some cases, judges have ordered the government to restore fired workers to their jobs. Also, Trump has perhaps realized the dangers of alienating veterans and seniors, or that he just might need some of the laid-off employees, especially the ones in charge of maintaining and securing the country’s nuclear warheads.

Although right now the federal government is an unprecedented shit show, it would be naive to believe that it was perfect before Trump 2.0. The intentions of the Biden administration in creating green-energy jobs might have been admirable, but the execution left the country wanting. In the 2021 infrastructure bill he signed into law, over 7.5 billion dollars were earmarked for creating a nationwide EV charger network. By 2023, however, not a single charger had been built under the bill. Another 42.5 billion dollars were allotted to build a national broadband network so that all Americans would have access to reliable, affordable, high-speed internet. By September 2024, precisely zero had been connected.

To be clear, this does not mean that each EV charger cost a billion dollars. Just because funds get earmarked does not mean they get spent. Still, with the government spending trillions of dollars the public cannot feel, it is no wonder many Americans believe Trump when he says about the federal government that “we have many people that don’t work. We have many people, probably, that aren’t even living, that are getting checks.” There is, of course, no evidence supporting this claim. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that it doesn’t speak to a kind of affective truth, a widely and deeply felt experience. As Naomi Klein writes in Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, her 2023 investigation into the online realm of conspiracies and misinformation, “conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right.”

Who Is Government? might be seen as an attempt to rewire public feelings about bureaucracy by telling the stories of individual federal workers. Coming off the success of The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy, the 2018 book in which Lewis examined appointees in the first Trump administration (and surprised everyone by demonstrating a public appetite for stories about civil service), Lewis invited six of his favorite writers to air-drop into the federal government and write about whatever “made their socks go up and down.” Lewis’s dream team of writers consisted of Casey Cep, Dave Eggers, John Lanchester, Geraldine Brooks, Sarah Vowell, and W. Kamau Bell, a group diverse in age, race, gender, nationality, socioeconomic background, and writing style.

In contrast to The Fifth Risk, Lewis’s goal here, though he doesn’t come right out and say it, is to defend the federal government. Not to critique or question but to protect—at least reputationally. Lewis and his team achieve this mostly by profiling exceptional persons within the government who would never otherwise be spotlighted. And those profiled are exceptional. There is Chris Mark of the Department of Labor, who developed industry-wide standards to prevent deadly roof falls in underground mines. There is Ronald E. Walters of the National Cemetery Administration, whose exacting standards have earned the NCA an unprecedented American Consumer Satisfaction score of 97 (Costco’s score is 85, McDonald’s 71). There are Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists who are certain they’ll find extraterrestrial life on an exoplanet (a planet outside our solar system) within the next 25 years. There is—my personal favorite—Jarod Koopman of the IRS, whose team returned over four billion dollars to American taxpayers by cracking down on cryptocurrency criminals. There is Pamela Wright of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), whose office helped transcribe over three million pages of federal documents to be made available online. And, finally, there is Olivia Rynberg-Going—a 24-year-old paralegal in the Department of Justice—who is an exceptional person in the making.

The individuals covered by Lewis and his team are so admirable, they could be in their own superhero movie. All of them are achievers of great deeds despite perpetual underfunding, bureaucratic sluggishness, and the knowledge that their good work will likely never be acknowledged. In Sarah Vowell’s telling, Pamela Wright, the chief innovation officer of NARA, is a nobody from nowhere who has become a somebody. Like Vowell, she’s from Montana, where she knitted her own mittens and canned her own vegetables as a child. She brought the same resourcefulness to the creation of the Citizen Archivist program, which uses volunteers to transcribe material from federal archives in order to make them available online—including “all 374 ratified Indian treaties in NARA’s collections.” Vowell wept reading the 1835 Treaty of New Echota, which allowed the US government to march members of the Cherokee Nation (including Vowell’s ancestors) “cross-country at gunpoint on the Trail of Tears” and resulted in the deaths of 4,000 Indigenous people; “I […] chided myself,” she reports, “that I was writing for a newspaper that is supposed to make federal employees cry and not the other way around.”

While Lewis and his writerly comrades make a good case for the federal government by humanizing a few employees, the problem is that their essays don’t match most people’s lived experience of “the government”—whether getting a building permit for their homes, waiting in line at the DMV, or trying to find work in an economy that’s designed to serve the interests of the wealthy. The disconnect between what is reported by or about the federal government and what Americans experience as true in their day-to-day lives is mentioned in Lanchester’s essay about the consumer price index. When the Bureau of Labor Statistics says the rate of inflation is falling—as was the case in 2022–24—Lanchester notes that what people sometimes hear is that prices are falling, which they aren’t: “The rate of increase of the price is falling, but the number on the sticker is continuing to go up.” The end result is that people are “prone to think they are being lied to.” I’m not saying readers of Who Is Government? will feel lied to, only that, in these rosy profiles of talented, mission-driven people, some will smell the ideological equivalent of a car air freshener covering up the scent of moldy dog hair.

The collection’s final essay, Lewis’s “The Free-Living Bureaucrat,” which paints a picture of middling government efficiency, is the piece that shines the brightest. Not only in terms of storytelling—the stakes are high, and the writing is heart-wrenching—but also in terms of relevance to our current moment. The essay—which, unlike the other chapters, was published in The Post in March 2025 (just before the book’s publication)—opens with a marriage on the brink: an alcoholic, workaholic husband in a silent war with his wife, the mother of their four young kids. One day, their five-year-old daughter, Alaina, has a seizure. She’s diagnosed with epilepsy, but the prescribed medication doesn’t work. An MRI reveals something like a tumor in her brain, except that, when the mass is removed by surgeons at Children’s Medical Center Dallas, they see that it’s not a tumor. It’s balamuthia, a free-living amoeba that has reportedly infected fewer than 200 people worldwide. The doctors beg the parents not to google the term because they would discover that balamuthia kills 95 percent of the people it infects.

Enter Heather Stone, a bureaucrat in the FDA who has made it her mission to help cure rare diseases, which will never be tackled by pharmaceutical companies because there’s simply no financial incentive. Along with infectious disease doctor Leonard Sacks, from South Africa, Stone created CURE ID, a website for doctors to share case studies and information about rare diseases, much of it anecdotal—what worked and what didn’t—since clinical trials for such diseases are so rare. The problem, according to Lewis, is that no one uses CURE ID. The FDA didn’t market it or provide any incentive for busy doctors to use it. Since 2019, when the platform launched, “CURE ID received from doctors a grand total of two hundred rare infectious disease case reports.”

Stone was so desperate for entries that she asked her mother, an infectious disease doctor, to report her old case studies, the first of which involved balamuthia. What happened next is somewhat convoluted. A doctor at UC San Francisco, Joe DeRisi, heard about an older woman who had died of balamuthia at San Francisco General Hospital. He then tackled the amoeba with his graduate students, growing balamuthia in a lab and hitting it with the 2,177 drugs already in use in the United States and Europe. One worked: nitroxoline, an antibiotic used for urinary tract infections outside the US but not approved for use by the FDA. DeRisi and his graduate students wrote a peer-reviewed academic paper on the subject, which caught Stone’s attention. She attended one of DeRisi’s presentations and the two formed a friendship, such that DeRisi called Stone on behalf of another doctor with a patient with balamuthia to request emergency approval to use nitroxoline inside the United States. The patient survived, and the doctor ended up thanking Stone in a paper she wrote about it, though she never entered the case study into CURE ID.

That “thank you” is what Alaina’s family found when they did end up googling balamuthia, prompting a tearful message on Stone’s answering machine at the FDA, and she, in turn, not only approved the use of nitroxoline but also secured the unused portion of the drug from a surviving balamuthia patient. Within two months, Alaina—who had undergone two brain surgeries and almost a year’s worth of drug treatments that nearly killed her—was symptom-free. During this journey to hell and back, fighting for the life of his child, Alaina’s father turned to God and vowed to become a better man. He stopped drinking, stopped avoiding his wife—and, for this, his prayers were answered, thanks in no small part to Heather Stone of the FDA.

A happy ending, right? Not so fast. Shortly after Alaina was saved, a four-year-old girl in Northern California who contracted balamuthia died because her doctors—who clearly were not using CURE ID—learned about nitroxoline too late. And CURE ID played zero role in Alaina’s miracle. It was DeRisi’s doctor friend’s paper that led Alaina to Stone. If Alaina’s doctors had simply looked up balamuthia on CURE ID and the other doctors had entered their findings about the amoeba, Stone wouldn’t have needed to swoop in to save the day. As Lewis notes, “if all our systems had worked the way they should work there’d have been no need for miracles.”

It’s hard to know where to place blame in Stone’s story. Does the fault lie with Stone and the FDA for not properly marketing CURE ID and incentivizing doctors to participate? Does it lie with the doctors, overtaxed by insurance regulations and fears of malpractice lawsuits, who will not participate in an effort that does not immediately benefit them? Does it lie with our privatized healthcare system? Or is the problem a culture of government mistrust and competitive individualism that we cannot seem to outrun, even though such a culture will be our undoing?

CURE ID’s story, as told by Lewis, is tragic—but it’s a tragedy worth contemplating because it resembles the tragedy of so many well-intentioned government programs that fail. Ezra Klein, co-author with Derek Thompson of Abundance, a 2025 book that addresses—among other things—the failures of liberal governance, has stated that Democrats tend to treat the structure of government as too settled, stopping at the first sign of bureaucratic resistance. Klein abhors what is currently happening under Trump; still, he sees some hope there—a precedent to treat federal bureaucracy with less preciousness, to break some eggs, piss off some judges, for the sake of something bigger. He believes that this precedent could get redirected from dangerous and chaotic under Trump to paradigm-shifting under liberal leadership. Maybe he is right. What matters is that, when talking about the government, we should be as honest about the wins as we are about the losses—as well as those events that don’t cleanly fit into one box or the other.

I recently visited CURE ID’s website, and it didn’t strike me as such a failure. Not only was it well designed; it also boasted much more material than cited in Lewis’s essay: 120,000 case reports, 20,000 clinical trials, 3,300 news items and articles, 250 discussion posts. Partners include the World Health Organization, Johns Hopkins University, and the Mayo Clinic. The site lists pilot projects and collaborations with patient and clinician advocacy groups to identify cases that can demonstrate the value of the platform, including in the treatment of long COVID, sarcoma (a rare cancer originating in connective tissue), RASopathies (a set of genetic developmental syndromes), and, of course, balamuthia. Perhaps the site found some momentum after people learned that it would become the subject of a Michael Lewis article. Either way, it seemed to me that CURE ID might make it after all.

Yet I couldn’t ignore the small type at the very top of the website that read: “This repository is under review for potential modification in compliance with Administration directives.” Some quick googling led me to discover that this ominous bureaucratic line had been slapped onto dozens (hundreds?) of government websites, everything from the National Institute of Mental Health Data Archive to the National Alzheimer’s Coordinating Center. Sigh. A noble effort to save lives could be written about by a New York Times best-selling author and show late-stage success and still be on the chopping block (or whatever “modification” euphemistically means) under Trump. There is no moral here. No insights or answers. Just a jumble of conflicting feelings with no adequate outlet.

In the intro to the book, Lewis attributes reader interest in inspiring stories about civil service to the existential threat hanging over the institutions we’ve long taken for granted. “My vague sense,” he writes, “is that most readers of these stories have come away with feelings both of hope (these civic-minded people are still among us) and dread (we’re letting something precious slip away).” There is another feeling I suspect many have felt reading this book: powerlessness. Certainly, that is how I felt reading this compilation of essays, and over the past few months generally: powerless as I watch the evisceration of a civil service that has struggled to execute its vision.

On April 1, 2025—two weeks after the launch of Who Is Government?—an entry titled “The free-living bureaucrat” was submitted to CURE ID. Its affiliate disease: balamuthia. Its author: Michael Lewis. The entry included a link to Lewis’s essay in The Washington Post, along with a short summary. Whether or not Lewis personally wrote this or simply okayed it, seeing this entry gave me hope. Lewis is a master of PR, but this entry was not that. It was an act of integrity, of genuine care. Lewis wants CURE ID to succeed, even as he reports about its failings.