The ‘blockers’ who stood up to Elon Musk’s Doge

0:00This is The Guardian. Today, Michael Lewis on the damage of Trump Term 2 so far. Hey, this is Penn and Kim Holderness from Laugh Lines. Some travelers want the charm of an independent hotel. Others want the confidence of a trusted global brand. With Ceres by Marriott, you get both. Each property is uniquely connected to its destination, delivering local experiences and memorable stays while being backed by the quality, reliability, and Marriott Bonvoy benefits that travelers know and trust. Experience the destination without the compromise. Series by Marriott is part of Marriott Bonvoy. Book direct at Marriott.com or on the Marriott Bonvoy app. It was a cool, cloudy March morning in Washington, D.C. last year

1:05when Colin O'Brien sent a memo to all staff telling them not to come into work that day. If you saw him, if you met him, you'd think I'm meeting an American football player. He looks like that. He looks like a lineman on an American football team. He's big and burly. If you talk to him, you think, this sounds like a political scientist. O'Brien was chief of security at the Institute of Peace. It's an organization trying to mitigate violence around the world. Basically, squashing conflicts before they can even happen. George Washington proposed it. He said, we need an institute of war and an institute of peace. And historically, hundreds of people have worked there at any given time, doing quiet but life-saving work. And historically, hundreds of people have worked there at any given time,

1:47doing quiet but life-saving work. The HQ is a really grand building, all curved glass and steel that's supposed to symbolise American transparency and openness. But that morning, O'Brien was locking it down. He was kind of preparing for war. Almost instantly after the inauguration, Doge rolls in to take control of the building. Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency headed by Elon Musk, planned for a hostile takeover. They were going to strip the building, they say, of wasteful spending, of pointless hires, of contracts they didn't see any value in. But O'Brien wasn't going without a fight. So first Doge comes. He looks at these young men with contempt, turns them away, probably frightens them. They go away.

2:41Doge didn't back down. The second time they showed up, they had armed security guards on their side. They physically invaded the building. They had the guns and they come in the building. Colin notices that they're all in one. They've got themselves, not wisely, in one kind of atrium area. And he can hit a button on his phone and lock them in. He hermetically seals them in. They realize what's happened. They can't get in or out. They're prisoners. He's taking them prisoners. And he thinks then that I've got them. I'm going to call the D.C. cops. They're independent. And this is trespassing. What happens next throws O'Brien for a loop. He's been a cop. He's served in the Army. He knows the law.

3:23So he calls the Washington, D.C. police. And the Washington, D.C. police show up. And they've been flipped by the army. He knows the law. So he calls the Washington, D.C. police, and the Washington, D.C. police show up, and they've been flipped by the Trump administration. And this is kind of shocking. Instead of arresting the private security people, they march out Colin O'Brien, and they hand the building over to the Trump administration. O'Brien was fired. The Institute of Peace, which within months was renamed the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, was one of the first on the list of targets attacked by the administration. And it was far from the last. What is happening is a massive power grab, an assertion of raw power, just the raw elemental power.

4:03In his blockbuster new book, one of America's most celebrated writers, Michael Lewis, reveals how Trump has completely reshaped the government, the unseen myriad departments and organizations that do everything from making sure tap water is safe to protecting national parks and processing tax returns. One of the dramatic seizures of power that this administration is engaged in is turning the nonpartisan civil service, the two-million-person workforce, into a loyalist operation that serves the narrow interests of the president, whoever happens to be president. What does that mean for how we govern ourselves? From The Guardian, I'm Narsheen Iqbal. Today in Focus, the blockers. How public servants try to push back against Trump.

4:53Michael Lewis, what a pleasure to have you here. A pleasure to be here. Now, for anyone not familiar with your work, it is not an overestimation to say that your books are something of an event, not just for publishing, but also they're made into massive films like The Big Short, Moneyball. The whole housing market is propped up on these bad loans. They will fail. The housing market is rock solid. And you take, I guess, what seem like complex, unsexy subjects and make them accessible and gripping. And now you've turned your eye to the civil service. And your new book is called Blockers. It profiles about six people. Michael, what first drew you to the story? It is not an obvious subject. You're right.

5:39And I would say what gets me excited and thinking that, oh, this is something worth doing is precisely what you just described. It's like, oh, nobody's interested in this, but I am. And if there's a gap, the gap is big enough, Chris Christian, says, we don't need to know about the government. We don't need these people teaching us anything. It'll take us an hour to learn about the federal government. I saw it in the newspaper and I thought, there's at least some fun journalism to do here. We're going to go learn about the United States government and the reader will know more than the president of the United States because he doesn't care to know. I was thinking, what does the Department of Energy even do? Is it as irrelevant as they say?

6:29And you wander in and, oh my God, they're running the nuclear arsenal. And the people who were trying to brief the Trump administration are just dying to tell someone how you run the nuclear arsenal. Because he's not listening. He's not listening. And in the course of that, I kept meeting these characters who were so clearly literary characters, and they were civil servants. And their stories just don't get told. They don't tell their stories. They've learned from hard experience that you don't stick your head up. It gets chopped off. They aren't the kind of people, the kind of people who go into public service, who are really looking to be famous or rich. I mean, these aren't unsung heroes in this book. Well, they're certainly unsung. Now, if you think of the civil servant as someone

7:09comes in, punches a clock and works 40 hours a week and was waiting to retire. Which is the cliche, which is the stereotype. But I kept meeting these people who worked 80 hour weeks, who didn't have families because they were so obsessed with, I don't know, stopping coal mine ruse falling on the head of coal miners or figuring out how objects drift at sea so the Coast Guard can rescue Americans who go overboard. One thing like that after another. It was existentially important. The life-saving was going on left, right, and center. I did also think that if anything ever happened in the government again that was as interesting as what happened in Trump 1, where there was just kind of radical neglect, that I would come and actually create the big narrative about them.

7:53And then something happened. Yeah, well, you've taken us very neatly to Trump term 2, where you essentially had this massive attack on the civil service, which is made up of about two million public servants, in which there was a creation of Doge. And to that end, I have created the brand new Department of Government Efficiency. Doge. Which was promised and delivered by Elon Musk to radically reduce waste in spending and inefficiency. Which is headed by Elon Musk, who is in the gallery tonight. And, you know, I think I started with this quite bonkers scene of Musk wielding this chainsaw. Behaving in very erratic ways. The chainsaw for bureaucracy. Chainsaw. Michael, first of all, just how did he set about installing this department?

8:52What was he going to do? Well, what he was going to do, he said, was cut $2 trillion out of the federal budget. $2 trillion out of a $7 trillion budget. The government is not efficient, and there's a lot of waste and fraud, so we feel confident that a 15% reduction can be done without affecting any of the critical government services. How he was going to do it was to attract people who were attracted to him. A random collection of people who were basically a social network. Young people who had worked at one of his companies. People who were friends of friends. It was that kind of thing. I heard about it at a drinks party. I'm 25 years old, and I have a degree in computer science, and this is my way to spend time with Elon Musk.

9:39Wow. What it wasn't was a collection of people who had any knowledge about the government, any experience in the government. I mean, there was this feeling that it was a horde of 19 to 28 year old men who were just learning there were three branches of government. to me that they got there and were surprised to discover, because they'd been brought in to cut things, that Congress controlled spending. Yeah. Now, that's something you kind of learn in sixth grade if you're paying attention in civics. So it was that level of ignorance. And yet they had super access and superpower. Oh, no, no. Power beyond power that no one has had, I don't think, in my lifetime in going into government agencies and just doing radical stuff.

10:30Elon Musk holed up in a government building called the General Services Administration at the top floor. He bunked there as if it were a startup. A dozen of these young men bunked there with him. So it's like a sweaty, smelly dorm for boys and laptops. It's all boys. It is all white men, basically. And how many people? I think we still don't actually know the exact count, but a couple of hundred. The people in Doge, I interviewed a dozen of them. They didn't know exactly how many there were. What they did say is that Doge wasn't one thing. There were circles within circles within circles. And the inner circle were these very young men who were sleeping on the floor with Elon Musk. They go out

11:15every day and are told, like, bring back scalps. Come back having fired people and having cut contracts. The way they do both of them, I can give you like glimpses. At the Department of Veterans Affairs, it's got a budget of hundreds of billions of dollars. It's doing lots of things for veterans. The things that weren't dreamed up by civil servants, the civil servants just carrying it out. Congress authorized the spending. The young man who was sent there had no experience. I mean, he didn't know where the building was. He gets there, he has a pass, he has total authority where the building was. He gets there. He has a pass. He has total authority. The Trump administration gave him total authority to do whatever he wants to do.

11:50He demands the file that contains all the contracts. There are 90,000 contracts. And he, I mean, it would be bewildering. You kind of feel for him, right? Like, what is he going to do? And he starts plugging in words that he knows Elon will disapprove of. Bias, gender, woman, where he thinks that he's going to find woke things that if he cuts them, Elon will say, good job, young man, and cuts the contracts based on the words. So I know about the story because one of the characters in my book walks in two weeks later and the young Doge guy looks up and says, I'm so glad you're here because I don't, because I'm not sure I should be doing this. And yet he was doing it. And arbitrarily just, young men will do any young men will do things,

12:33but they found out pretty quickly when you go into their civil service protections, they see how hard it is to actually cut like a civil servant who's been there for 20 years. There are actual protections. And it takes them a little while to do that. But there are a group of people, and there are tens of thousands of them, called probationary workers. And they're the young people. They're the people who've only been there 18 months. They're the future of the government. If you can get someone to sign a letter saying that you're fired for cause, that they have been doing a bad job, they can all just be wiped out. And they wiped out tens of thousands of people this way. And God knows at what cost, but that's the kind of thing

13:10they did. So Michael, as you've described it, Doge is staffed by these young men, mostly these, well, basically these musk acolytes, call themselves the muskrats. I call them the muskrats. You call them, sorry, you call them the muskrats. And they're willing to do his bidding in, it takes fashion, no matter the consequence for the workers that they're firing, no matter the protocol they're breaking, the employment law that they've upturned. So let's look at one department. And it wasn't even actually a government department, as we'll go on to learn in your book, that they took aim at, which is the U.S. Institute of Peace, which we've heard about a little bit at the beginning of this episode. Michael, can you explain a bit more about

13:49that organization and how it came to collide with Doge? I'd never heard of the U.S. Institute of Peace until Doge invaded it. Our Congress, the U.S. Congress, has a long history of chartering these kind of quasi-government organizations and funding them. I think the first was the Red Cross, the Smithsonian, the Kennedy Center, public broadcasting company. There are all these things that they reside in the executive branch, but they're designed to be outside the control of the president. So they're private public. They're sort of private companies. They're private public. And in this case, it's a really interesting organization. It's small. It's a little nebulous. You could argue, if you didn't know very much about it, this might be a waste of a few millions of taxpayer dollars.

14:28But if you go to, I don't know, David Petraeus, the general, he would tell you that this little organization, it had this odd effect, particularly in the Iraq War, where there were Iraqi tribal elders who didn't want to be seen to be dealing directly with the American government, but were willing to be organized by people who had connections to the American government, who came in and actually shut down, the Institute of Peace organized the talks that quelled the violence in the so-called triangle of death. And Petraeus wrote a letter saying, the billions you've saved us and the lives you've saved us in just this incident is worth whatever millions we paid for this thing. But it's like a soft power. It's a soft power

15:10thing. And you could argue, you know, the other argument you make is it's an intelligence agency. There are people they employed in, say, Afghanistan, who the United States government would not want anyone knowing they were employing them kind of thing. So the character I tell the story through is Colin O'Brien, who was the chief security officer. I love this guy, by the way. I mean, the way he tells his story. What do you like about him? Well, just his, I mean, like all those characters that you've picked upon in the book, the pure dedication, the fact that, you know, he joined the army. He was a sniper in the army. But he wanted to be a cop, but he promised his mom that he'd go to college and he'd do that first.

15:46And it's just like dedicated to a cause, let's say. And it comes out in the story. Yeah, he's dedicated because he knows who he is. So at the beginning of this episode, we describe this almost farcical scene of Doge coming into the Institute of Peace, trying to take the building and in the, being locked by Colin in an atrium until the cops arrive. The Doge guys have even talked about it. We've suddenly had some battles. Battles? Yeah, yeah. I mean, who should talk about Yusuf? A small agency called the United States Institute of Peace is definitely the agency we had the most fight at. We actually went into the agency and found they had loaded guns inside of their headquarters. Institute for Peace.

16:29In the end, despite Colin's fight, they do take over the Institute of Peace, which is just extraordinary, isn't it? Well, Colin's take on this is so extraordinary, too. He says, you know, why? The question is, like, why us? Nobody even knows we exist. I think, and Colin thinks, that what they were doing is identifying the institutions that were furthest removed, that were within the executive branch, kind of, but furthest removed from legal presidential control, and seizing it so that they could show they could take anything. They were testing the limits of their power right away. By far the least peaceful agency that we've worked with, ironically. Of course. Additionally, we found that they were spending money on things like private jets,

17:18and they even had a $130,000 contract with a former member of the Taliban. Let's look at how that power then translates, because in a public-facing way, obviously, you know, Musk is tweeting hundreds of times a day during this period. The department, or Doge rather, they're also, they have their own account. And when they took over the Institute of Peace, they were basically, what did they publicly post? That they'd revealed and cancelled the Institute's funding to various things, including $133,000 paid to an ex-Taliban member and more than $600,000 wasted on private planes. Which, on the face of it, if you're reading this, you know, as a member of the American public, potentially sounds like righteous savings to make.

18:00But what did the reality of those decisions look like? This is where it goes from being kind of a shocking but amusing story to being kind of dark, really dark. And part of a pattern of Doge and Musk just saying stuff that aren't exaggerations or hyperbole It was actually an American, effectively an American intelligence asset who had worked in person with the State Department in its negotiations with the Taliban, had flipped, was an enemy of the Taliban, and so was actually at risk of his life inside of Afghanistan. He was living in Germany or somewhere, who when Musk publishes his name on Twitter, on X, the Taliban read that name and they realize how involved this guy's been in helping the United States.

18:52And they round up his relatives in Afghanistan and torture and beat them. Now, in any other time in American history, people would be throwing around words like treason, that you have just exposed an American intelligence asset and people are being punished brutally because of it. And nobody said a word. The $600,000 private plane, there was one flight and it was getting their assets, the people, a couple hundred people, out of Afghanistan when we pulled out. So it was just saving, they're all people who had been killed. And what did Elon Musk have to say about all of this? I didn't talk to Elon Musk. He didn't want to talk to me. I think he's embarrassed a little bit by Doge at this point.

19:44Is he capable of embarrassment? I don't know. Do you think he's embarrassed? As much as he has that emotion, I think that's right. I think it's like he doesn't want to talk about it. And he said he's announced it's a failure. But his circle of friends I did was able to talk to. And what they would say kind of routinely in defense of Elon Musk was, what you have to understand about Elon is that he never lies. He thinks what he's saying is true. Then the question is, what's more frightening? Does he believe what he's saying or is he a cynical person? And I don't know. They were so convicted about this. It was like, he thinks this is true. I don't, I can't honestly say that as he's tweeting these out where there

20:25really lies. If he's living in a world where that's his reality and he thinks that he actually believes them. I don't know whether he believes it or not, but if he, if he actually knew what he'd done and had any kind of conscience, he'd be so ashamed. I guess one of the points at which people may have really paid attention, because I think this story, I remember it made global headlines, is when late on a Friday evening, someone from Doge sends out this email to around, again, those two million civil servants, asking them blithely to reply with five bullet points of things they'd achieved that week. The clock is quickly ticking for federal workers to respond to that email. The deadline is tonight at 11.59 p.m. Eastern time.

21:12And Elon Musk had warned that if employees failed to respond, he would take it as their resignation. The email asked employees not to send any classified information, links or attachments in their response. Michael, how on earth did the civil service respond to this? Dutifully, basically. I mean, that's the amazing thing. Now, it is true that if you work in a small private company, you might say, good on Elon Musk. I get asked what I did last week all the time. I have to explain what I achieved. These civil servants aren't doing anything in there. Let's hold them accountable. But the problem is the level of ignorance about what those people are doing that's required to send that email out is breathtaking. He's sending it to spies. He's sending it to people who are

21:55auditing people at the IRS. He's sending it to a lot of people who, if they put stuff in an email, they could go to jail. Absolutely. And so just for starters, that. FBI Director Kash Patel has told his employees to pause any responses to the email. State Department employees have also been told not to respond. Many of those 2 million people, surprisingly, maybe surprisingly, don't have computers at work. People are doing all kinds of things. They're in the Forest Service. Then the second thing is you're sending it to 2 million people. Who's going to read this stuff? How are they going to audit with this information, not having the expertise thing is, you're sending it to 2 million people. Who's going to read this stuff?

22:25How are they going to audit with this information, not having the expertise of knowing, okay, what does this even mean? What does it even mean? And there was a lot of hand-wavy stuff about, oh, we're going to use AI to analyze it. They never did. Nothing was ever done with this. It was just trolling the federal workforce. Now, in what world is it sound management practice to just insult your workforce like that every week? It's insane. So what is he doing? He's performing for the American public. Yeah, Elon. This is how Elon manages. Yeah, we're going to club the civil service like this. And Elon knows what he's doing because he's rich. I think it's as simple as that. The people who are actually trying to manage conflicts within

23:05the civil service or performance, we're pulling their hair out. I'm spending hours of my day trying to explain to the 200 people who report to me what they can and can't put in that email. What a waste. I mean, talk about creating waste. Well, one of the key examples, actually, and you mentioned the IRS, I mean, where you can literally go to prison for looking at tax records that you're not authorized to do so. That was one department that came under particular fire with Doge, and they were under immense pressure to share their data. Michael, to what end and how did that play out? move from Colin O'Brien to Kathleen Walters, who was the chief privacy officer at the IRS. And which means, I mean, basically she was a human being between my tax return and someone

23:49who would weaponize it against me. Had a spotless record, nonpartisan, been in the job, been in jobs in the IRS for 20 years. And right after the inauguration, she starts to get pressured every which way to release to the Department of Homeland Security and ICE, the immigration people, the cops, a database that had 7 million names in it, 7 million tax returns. And it was the tax returns of undocumented workers because those tax returns had the most recent home address of those people. And ICE was having trouble finding the people. Just for starters, it was illegal to release those tax returns. And it's funny, I didn't know until this that undocumented workers were paying taxes. Well, yeah. I mean, that's one of the surprises

24:37in the book. It's not an obvious thing, right? I mean, you find non-obvious thing after non-obvious thing. But the United States Treasury has gathered since the 1990s when they created this program over $100 billion from this community. And they've done it by saying to them, look, you're not a citizen. We know you're here. If you file your tax return, you will be essentially demonstrating good faith. And if you apply for citizenship, it will help your case. It's the definition of the good immigrant myth, right? I mean, they're doing their best. That's exactly right. And we have the IRS, the Internal Revenue, our Inland Revenue, has for 30 years told this population, your data is safe with us.

25:18So what Kathleen would say is, one, it's against the law to hand over this database. Two, it's a huge violation of trust. And who will trust us ever again if we do it? And three, it's brutal. And she's basically driven out of her job. And in fact, the tax returns are handed over. I think at this point, a lot of listeners will be wondering, well, just how on earth did they get away with it? How did they intimidate sort of these veterans of the civil service and hustle them to break the rules? Why wasn't anyone able to stop them? Because the state was supposedly such a deep state, was actually quite a shallow state, that once you're prepared to break the law and fire or harass people who aren't willing to break the law, you run out the blockers.

26:14That's what Musk called them, right? The blockers. Right, the blockers. So they're there to get rid of the blockers and find whoever they can find to obey their orders who would actually say yes to the bad things. Because you can find there's a kind of a character in almost every agency who was like 13 levels down, but happened to be a Trump fan, who they would surface to sign the memo. They'd surface and say, you're now head of the agency. The Trump administration was very good at finding people who were not nonpartisan, people who were loyalists, and thrusting them into positions of authority. So what they were doing right away was politicizing what was a not very political workforce. That's how they got away with it. And Congress was supposed to protect these people in

26:57many ways. Well, quite. And the courts, I mean, they just seemed to not be able to catch up, not be able to play fast enough. Michael, within four months of the department being created, Musk was out. Trump called him a drug addict. He then alleged that Trump was suppressing the Epstein files because he was in them and that he should be impeached. Now, they've made up again. He's back in heading this or co-heading this workforce on warfare. Don't need to come on to that. But in terms of Doge, it ceased operations, I believe, in July 2026 as scheduled. Now, the impression that I'd largely had was that once its ideals made contact with reality, that it just absolutely crashed and burned, it imploded.

27:38Maybe that's not quite the story you tell, but how successful would you say Doge was given its original premise? Well, failed utterly to cut costs, failed utterly to find much waste, fraud and abuse. If Elon Musk was here, he might try to tell you and you'd have fun arguing with him that they cut $100 billion in contracts or costs. However, independent analysis of it, the GAO, the General Accounting Office, has only been able to verify 4% of it. It's fair to say like effectively zero cuts and some large number of costs by eliminating very useful people and functions that will have to be restored. So I need to say like, didn't work, but maybe Doge was successful on other terms that we have not

28:24really, we have not really taken into account. There was actually a big piece in the Washington Post just last week saying that what's become of some of my characters, what's become of the 25-year-old who went into the IRS? Oh my God, he's got a new company worth a billion dollars and it's all based on federal contracts. Oh, wow. Oh, the sweet ironies. The sweet ironies. So I suppose in some ways, Doge was a success for the people who participated in Doge. Coming up, how the legacy of Doge lives on in Britain. Some travelers want the charm of an independent hotel. Others want the confidence of a trusted global brand. With Series by Marriott, you get both. Each property is uniquely connected to its destination,

29:31delivering local experiences and memorable stays, while being backed by the quality, reliability, and Marriott Bonvoy benefits travelers know and trust. Experience the destination without the compromise. Series by Marriott is part of Marriott Bonvoy. Book direct at Marriott.com or on the Marriott Bonvoy app. When you're running a growing business, the right systems can unlock your full sales potential and make fulfilling every order effortless. Switch to ShipStation before peak season so you're prepped and ready before the rush hits. ShipStation connects Shopify, Amazon, TikTok shop, and over 200 more marketplaces with one platform that does it all. You can manage orders, sync inventory, track returns, all automatically.

30:09Everything your operation needs, all in one place. Upgrade your shipping operations to stress-proof your biggest sales days and capture every bit of potential revenue. Go to ShipStation.com and use code AUDIO and get 30 days free. NASA is the new award-winning documentary produced by The Guardian that the Israeli government doesn't want you to see. Directed by two of the Oscar-winning directors of No Other Land, NASA reveals the secret systems used by the Israeli military in the mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Time Out says, As a work of journalism, it is inarguable. As a work of cinema, it is exemplary. New York Magazine has called it one of the most important films of our time.

31:02Nasa, the most critically acclaimed documentary of this year, is available in cinemas now. Well, I wonder how much you know about how its influence has actually travelled. I mean, looking at one of our most right-wing parties in the country, Reform, led by Nigel Farage, they promised to doge the hell out of local government. We need some pretty big cuts in the administrative state in this country, which has grown out of all proportion. We need a British form of doge, as Elon Musk has got. And, of course, you know, once reform took control of some of these councils in the May elections, they found out that, you know, as Doge in America did, it's very hard to find savings and instead they had to raise council tax.

31:55And so I wonder how much does the demonization of the civil service known as, you know, the blob, how much do you think it taps into this sort of conspiratorial thinking about the deep state that sort of just swept the world? You couldn't sell politically the idea that you're going to go make massive cuts in the government and it's going to make everybody better off if people actually knew what the government did. If people paid more attention to what your civil servant was doing, they would realize that actually, mostly you want it done. And yeah, there are things you could do to make it more efficient, but it isn't this. It isn't coming in with hostility and contempt. I mean, did that ever work anywhere?

32:37Coming in with curiosity and understanding and trying to fix it, that, you know, there is a version of Doge in the States that could have worked. And it's something like, I, Elon Musk, understand that I've never been in government. However, I do understand technology, and I do understand the government's very slow to sort of upgrade and find cost cutting that can be done by introducing new technology. I can attract all these very bright young people who understand how to work a computer to go and, I don't know, create an app at the IRS so that people can pay their taxes on their phone. I would say that the general rule of our doge was nobody bothered to figure out why things were there in the first place.

33:15So when they started tearing things down, there were all these unintended consequences. For a moment, I will do the whole devil's advocate thing. Because in your book, you tell. Without a whole lot of conviction. I'm going to do it. Go ahead, go do your bit. In your book, you tell the story of an IRS employee having to spend weeks sending countless emails trying to get a water fountain repaired, which sort of suggests exactly the kind of mindless levels of waste and bureaucracy that people associate with the civil service. So Michael, if one multiplied that kind of efficiency across so many departments and millions of people, why shouldn't the government be run like a private company? There's a reason why the book is laced with examples of idiocy in the way the government

34:00runs. All the examples pointed to a pretty clear interpretation. And it wasn't that the individual civil servants who were behaving possibly in kind of dumb ways were doing it because they were dumb or they were inept or they were obstructionist. It was that there were all these rules that were imposed on them from Congress. It's definitely true that every place in the government, there are people who are not good at their jobs, who are too hard to fire. But you can't run it as a private business because they're not... Precisely because there's no... Because profit's the imperative. It's not public safety. It's not standards. That's right. You're not trying just to make... You're doing the things that don't make money.

34:40You're not going to measure these things by profit loss. The market is not going to eliminate failure. You have to dismantle what doesn't work. And that's hard when the market's not doing it for you. And you're not going to be able to see it when it's successful because so much of it is prevention. You have an enterprise that everybody needs to just chill about that is going to be inherently a little wasteful, a little inefficient. It's not designed for efficiency. It's designed for, like, safety. And that, yes, it should be managed better. Michael, given everything that you've said, how much damage has been done in this Trump second term to the civil service? Is it reversible? And what is the impact on the American people?

35:20It's a very big question. If you froze the picture now, it's a depressing picture. But we're not a depressing people. People really care. And it's very easy to fix. I mean, in the sense that Congress created this nonpartisan civil service in the first place. They can go and do things. After the midterms, it may be a completely different environment in which to operate. There's so many ways forward that are positive ways forward, and it's possible. This is good. You're giving us hope. No, let me just tell you, it's a silver lining. It's possible that they've created so much damage, and it's so obvious, and it's so counterproductive, that there will be a stronger and opposite reaction. Essentially, what they've done is created an interest in civics again.

36:03And Trump has electrified this material. He's made people interested in the government by putting it like an existential peril. So we're just waiting for that pendulum to swing the other way. I think it's swinging the other way. All right. Michael, thank you so much for your time. What a pleasure to talk to you. I love talking to you. That was Michael Lewis. His book, Blockers, is out now. And that's it for today. If you enjoyed this episode, would you please consider leaving us a review? We love to hear what you think of the show, and it also helps other listeners find us. If you'd prefer to write to us in private, then you can now do that at tiff.questions, that's t-i-f.questions at theguardian.com. Send us an idea for a new show,

36:47tell us who you want us to talk to, or just ask us a question. This episode was presented by me, Noshi Nikbal. It was produced by Saskia Kalet, sound designers by Ross Burns. The executive producers were Humar Khalili and Sammy Kent. We'll be back in your feeds this afternoon with the latest. This is The Guardian. Hey, this is Penn and Kim Holderness from Laugh Lines. Some travelers want the charm of an independent hotel. Others want the confidence of an independent hotel. Others want the confidence of a trusted global brand. With Ceres by Marriott, you get both. Each property is uniquely connected to its destination, delivering local experiences and memorable stays while being backed by the

37:37quality, reliability, and Marriott Bonvoy benefits that travelers know and trust. Experience the destination without the compromise. Series by Marriott is part of Marriott Bonvoy. Book direct at Marriott.com or on the Marriott Bonvoy app. You save, you invest, you keep an eye on spending. So why do your finances still feel so complicated? Quicken helps you put the whole picture together and make sense of what to do next. Connect accounts from more than 14,000 financial institutions and see how all the different pieces of your financial life fit together. With Quicken, you can make sense of your options and decide what to do next. Quicken. Know what to do next. See how at Quicken.com. Why can't we get AI to production?

38:19Our competitors are already... How do we keep data secure? AWS AI cuts through the noise. With ready-to-use agents and the broadest set of AI tools, stop overthinking, start building. AWS AI is how.