Profiles in Service
Who is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service by Michael Lewis et. al (Riverhead Books, 2025)
Reviewed by Elizabeth Stice
Michael Lewis is, at present, one of the most prolific authors of enjoyable non-fiction prose. If you read (or watched) The Big Short or Moneyball, that was him. He is exceptionally good at taking something seemingly complicated and demystifying it. He approaches everything with a healthy skepticism that stays shy of cynicism. Like Malcolm Gladwell, he is not averse to bringing in some scholarship—typically from economics—but Lewis mostly relies on commonsense observations and first-hand accounts.
A book by Michael Lewis is often built around some current event or figure, but goes deeper than the headlines. In many ways, his books and podcast (Against the Rules) are filling in the gap left by the absence of longform journalism. Lewis broke onto the scene in 1989 with Liar’s Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street, which was all about being a bond trader and built from his own experience. In 2023, he wrote a book titled Going Infinite, about Sam Bankman-Fried and effective altruism. His newest book is Who is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service.
Even if you are living under a rock, you are aware that right now people are deeply skeptical about government and downright anti-bureaucracy. Many of the national departments and agencies are seemingly under siege. Michael Lewis thinks that one reason for this is that we know so little about what government does. He isn’t getting at the high school civics side of government—the electoral college, separation of powers, etc. What do people in the Justice Department do all day? What about the Department of Agriculture? There’s a really good chance that you have no earthly idea.
As Penguin Random House explains, “The government is a vast, complex system that Americans pay for, rebel against, rely upon, dismiss, and celebrate. It’s also our shared resource for addressing the biggest problems of society. And it’s made up of people, mostly unrecognized and uncelebrated, doing work that can be deeply consequential and beneficial to everyone.” Who is Government? is an introduction to a handful of people who work in government. It explains what they do all day and why it is so worthwhile.
Like government, Who is Government? is a group project. Michael Lewis is an editor and contributor to this book, but it also has chapters from other writers: Casey Cep, Dave Eggers, John Lanchester, Geraldine Brooks, Sarah Vowell, and W. Kamau Bell. If you listen to the audiobook, they read their own chapters. These profiles of public servants come from pieces each author wrote for The Washington Post. Many read like something by John McPhee. In each chapter, we are introduced to an interesting person—in most cases that person is quite remarkable, and in all cases, that person is quiet about their own achievements.
Some of the chapters are exceptional. Michael Lewis’ chapter “The Canary,” about Chris Mark, a Department of Labor engineer is one. You probably do not know anything about Chris Mark, a former miner, who is himself largely responsible for the precipitous decline in mining deaths in our country. Mark’s work not only reflects his intelligence and dedication, it has been offered up to mining companies for free—it is a big part of why 2016 had no mining fatalities, something which would be unbelievable to earlier generations. Another strong chapter is “The Cyber Sleuth” by Geraldine Brooks, about Jarod Koopman. He works for the IRS. You might think that means you hate him, but you probably don’t understand that IRS cybercrime takes down crypto scammers and pedophiles. When you want to gut the IRS, this is one of the things you will be going after.
Not all chapters in Who is Government? are equally good. For example, W. Kamau Bell’s chapter, “The Rookie,” is a good look at a newly minted civil servant, but you have to enjoy the author’s significant presence in the narrative to fully enjoy the chapter. But none of the chapters are bad, all of them are interesting. The people profiled are all compelling. The book is a bestseller, so it is clear that there is an audience for this kind of work and writing, not just in defense of civil servants, but looking at government and its operations in depth.
Who is Government? rests on the conviction that if we better understood government, we would be better at evaluating it and less likely to automatically reject it. If we knew anything about the actual public servants in the trenches, we’d probably be less likely to consider them all worthless. That may be true, but it seems to be more of a bet than a sure thing to believe that awareness is the main obstacle between us and clarity.
In some ways, this book is a nice companion piece to explanatory works which are not at all about individuals, like The Rise and Fall of American Growth (2016) by Robert J Gordon. That book highlights the ways in which technological advances and innovation helped improve American quality of life and grow our economy, alongside government programs like Rural Free Delivery. Government and economic growth are not always opposed. People who think government doesn’t make anything better are good at manufacturing quotes but they would leave you a country filled with potholes and without rural electrification.
This book reflects the funny way that Americans evaluate worth. We seem unable to consider that someone might be important if we do not know their name. We need celebrity and fame to be sure. If someone tells us they are important, we are inclined to at least consider it. A good government employee is quiet about it, as nearly invisible as the best referee in a sporting event. Michael Lewis thinks that perhaps speaking up about the significance of the public servants profiled in this book is a good way to get people to consider that they might be important, even if they aren’t all self-important. This is the kind of book that introverts have been asking for, for a long time.
Beyond the good and bad possibilities of government, this book can be put into a wider conversation about the good and bad possibilities of people. One of the largest debates in the last fifty years is over the possibility of altruism. Are humans capable of unselfish acts, or are we both designed and destined to always act selfishly? This is one of the two main questions behind the Tom Stoppard play, The Hard Problem. As Stoppard points out, it makes a great deal of difference if people believe that altruism is impossible, with that possibility goes the obligation to sometimes act unselfishly, or at least not be dominated solely by selfish interests. Many people complain about “virtue signaling” these days, but some people seem to be attacking the very idea of virtue. If it is impossible, there is no need to pretend or attempt to have it. This is cynicism, but it is helpful cynicism if conscience is an obstruction to some aim.
In its approach, Who is Government? argues that people are sometimes capable of good and there may even be good people among us. No one is perfect, but there are at least reasonable role models. Again, there are many parallels with some of the profiles written by John McPhee, such as The Headmaster, about Frank Boyden, a legendary headmaster of Deerfield Academy. The entirety of The Headmaster is a portrayal of Frank Boyden as interesting, upright, and absolutely committed to Deerfield. He puts the school and students above himself. He rules firmly, for the common good. McPhee writes, “His school evolved naturally, gradually, and surprisingly. He had no plan and no theory, but he proved himself to be an educator by intuition. College professors and college presidents became aware of his work and sent their sons to him. By the late nineteen-thirties, it had become clear that he was one of the greatest headmasters in history, and for many years he has stood alone as, in all probability, the last of his kind” (7). Readers learn about the headmaster’s quirks, but we are never led to believe that he is in any way inferior to his legend or secretly lacking in virtue. McPhee takes a similar approach in A Sense of Where You Are, his book about Bill Bradley at Princeton. Who is Government? shares the perspective that there is some value in profiling people who try to live virtuously and/or contribute to the common good.
Michael Lewis and his co-authors are hardly the only people concerned about the attacks on the notion of public service (and on actual public servants). And there are always attempts to help Americans better understand their government. In 2004, Jon Stewart had a hit with his book, America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction. That book was focused on the civics side of things. It attempted to combat ignorance and indifference with satire. In contrast Who is Government? is an attempt to combat ignorance and cynicism with information and sincerity. Whether or not Who is Government? changes many minds, it suggests the presence of virtue, not stated or signaled, but quietly at work. The question of the possibility of good deeds matters even beyond the question of good government.
Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history and assistant director of the honors program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. When she can, she reads and writes about World War I and she is the author of Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War (2023).
