Reform for Results, Not Chaos
A new book puts a human face on bureaucracy just when we need it most.
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With government agencies being stripped of personnel daily, without regard for qualifications or mission, a book appears that makes us realize how important civil servants are and how much the public depends on them. In Who Is The Government: The Untold Story of Public Service, Michael Lewis and six distinguished colleagues show, through stories of individual civil servants, why government is not a faceless bureaucracy, but an institution staffed by talented, if sometimes slightly odd, characters who deliver indispensable services to the public.
This book puts a human face on bureaucracy at exactly the time we need to “subvert the stereotype of the civil servant,” as Lewis says in his introduction. He spotlights Christopher Mark, a brilliant civil servant who works at the Bureau of Mines in the Department of Labor. Mark has saved hundreds of lives by making roofs of mines safer through technology he created. There are others with comparable skills and achievements who also grace our agency halls. Each person highlighted could easily make much more money in the private sector, but they quietly serve the public instead. Together, these stories give voice to those who are reluctant to do so themselves.
In effect, this book is a companion to Lewis’ earlier work, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy, which examined the transition to the first Trump administration and its political appointments. That work showed how Trump botched the transition and appointed leaders with no concept of how the government works. The titular “Fifth Risk” is the danger society runs when it responds to long-term risks with short-term solutions, producing a massive failure of public management which leads to government failure. The book was a bestseller, serialized in The Guardian, and produced a documentary comedy, “The G Word with Adam Conover,” in 2022. Everyone read it, it seems, except the two who needed it most—Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
If Trump’s first term cabinet was deficient, his second term group makes them look like profiles in courage. Try a few comparisons: FBI, Kash Patel for Christopher Wray; Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem for General John Kelly; Department of Defense, Pete Hegseth for General James Mattis; and Attorney General, Pam Bondi for Bill Barr. To be fair, the public is entitled to see how they perform, but I’m laying odds that that same public would, by the end of 2025, gratefully swap the current cabinet for most of the first-termers. This is government management by chaos—short-term thinking that can only lead to failure. There is no theory behind this chaos.
Michael Lewis must be aware of the paradox behind his “Fifth Risk” formulation, i.e. that efforts to “fix” the government produced the opposite effect. His latest book tells us about the wonderful people who are trying to prevent the government from failing. But it is not enough. I am presumptuously suggesting he needs a third book. It should tell two sets of stories.
The first set should reinterview the characters in Who is the Government, along with others drawn from the Partnership of Public Service’s “Sammie” award winners from which Lewis’ list was drawn. The question would be: “What is it like working in the second Trump administration and how does this affect your agency’s mission?” These interviews may have to be off the record for obvious reasons.
The second set of interviews should be conducted with some of those civil servants who Trump and Musk/DOGE have fired for no sensible reason. USAID leaders and nuclear safety experts come immediately to mind, especially those who have been rehired. Again, anonymity may be required. This is a big assignment and Lewis is a busy guy, but he could do the public an even greater service by following up.
The tragedy of all this is that DOGE could have been a real force for government reform, since the use of AI could yield significant organizational successes. If, instead of taking a “move fast and break things” approach as he did with Twitter, Musk had recognized that government failure is different from corporate failure, reform would have been possible. He has so far failed to appreciate that many civil servants, like Christopher Mark, agree with him that the government is broken and would gladly help him fix it. Instead, indiscriminate firings are leaving agencies powerless to function, let alone improving their performances.
This is where a group called Reform for Results (RfR), of which I am a member, comes in. Our motto is “move fast and fix things,” because we firmly believe that government can be made to function better, and there is no time to waste. To succeed, we need to partner with the type of people Lewis’s book identifies and give them more authority to fix things. Our job would be made infinitely easier if we could count on DOGE as a partner as well. Unfortunately, that may not happen until it fails in its scorched earth approach and realizes how many good people want to help, in and out of government.
We can only hope that happens before government itself is brought down.
Who Is The Government: The Untold Story of Public Service, edited by Michael Lewis, is available now.
Paul Verkuil is an administrative law scholar who served as Chairman of the Administrative Conference of the United States from 2010 to 2015.
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 | A guest post by
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I'm a retired federal civil servant. I think the theme of the post is valid. Yes, there's plenty that's admirable about civil service and yes, it could be improved, if done in a thoughtful, constructive way.