Best-selling author Michael Lewis discusses his new book, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service. As Americans’ distrust in the government continues to grow, Lewis’ book examines how the government works, who works for it, and why their contributions continue to matter. Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, moderates.
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Michael Lewis is a journalist and bestselling author, known for his books on topics ranging from politics to Wall Street. His most recent works include Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story, The Fifth Risk, and The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds. His books, The Big Short, The Blind Side, and Moneyball, were adapted into blockbuster films. He is the creator and host of the podcast Against the Rules and his latest edited volume is Who is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
Additional Resources
- Michael Lewis, ed., Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service (2025)
- Michael Lewis, “The free‑living bureaucrat,” The Washington Post (March 2025)
- Michael Lewis, “Directions to a journalistic gold mine,” The Washington Post (Nov. 2024)
- Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story (2022)
- Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk (2018)
- CURE ID
Excerpt from interview: Michael Lewis highlights the overlooked value of government workers and the importance of recognizing their dedication.
Michael Lewis: This is where it gets even more interesting. It's not like the industry's upset with his work. They're grateful for the work. Everybody conformed to his standards. And it's funny, the reason he knew who I was was because of Moneyball. And the reason he knew Moneyball was he thought of himself as Moneyballing minds that was gathering data and looking at the data in a different way about past mines. That is what the government had done without knowing quite why it collected over decades really detailed information on disasters in mines or roof falls in mines. So he could go and see the conditions in which the roof held and the conditions in which it fell. But you're absolutely right. It wasn't like, oh, the oppressive bureaucracy. In this case it was this guy who really helped us and it saved us money and it worked. But the industry wasn't going to do it itself. And so this gets back to just the quality of the stories, all the writers. My fear when I sold them all ongoing and writing about the government was they weren't going to have the luck I had in finding stories that it was just.
Maybe it was just me and my interest in it. And it took about a nanosecond for that to not be true. That every one of them found something almost right away and sometimes more than one thing. And they were like, do I do this or I do this? And could not believe the quality of the untold story. It was like there were all these stories that just don't get told. And I think it's not just this is not a trivial thing. Part of what we're living through right now is a consequence of the disconnect between society and its government. And people don't know where their taxpayer dollars are going. People don't know these people. There's no face on these people. It's very easy to stoke an ugly stereotype and very easy to attack them because they don't defend themselves. They don't describe themselves and they don't defend themselves. And they live in a culture that we've created for them where all attention is usually bad attention. So they avoid it. It's just like nothing good comes from recognition usually. And that seems shrewd politically, maybe to the communications people who are running the various agencies and certainly to the White House, who's there temporarily, the administration that's there temporarily.
But we pay a huge price for this, this lack of felt understanding of the value of government. And it's. And so the whole thing, I mean, to the extent there was a social purpose, to me, it was principally a literary exercise. I just thought, this is fun. Like, I love these stories. But to the extent there's a social purpose, it's like, it's like trying to break up this logjam in understanding, trying to introduce the idea into people's minds that government is not just essential, but kind of admirable. And the kind of people who go into it, the best of them are the best among us, that they are the givers, not takers, they're not money people, they're kind of they're the kind of people. This and this, this is one of the things that just pops out from between the lines of every story. But no one ever says it. They're the kind of people who figured out how to lead life, like, like how to lead a meaningful life. Like, I think it's true of all the people in the book, when they're on their deathbeds, their lives, they'll think I served a really important purpose here on earth. They're not going to think, oh, I made 100 million billion. And what was that about? They're going to think I did something that was really important.
Excerpt from interview: Michael Lewis's explains how The Fifth Risk highlights the vital yet overlooked roles of federal government workers.
Michael Lewis: So I didn't set out to write positive stories about the federal government. I got interested in the first place when Trump fired his transition team right after he was elected the first time. And I learned that by law, the Obama administration had been required to prepare for the transition and that there were a thousand people waiting to give briefings across the federal government. And I just thought. Actually, I thought it started as a comic enterprise. I thought it would be really cool to take a reader in and. And the reader would know, because no one had showed up for the briefing, that the reader knew more than the president did about how the government functioned. And indeed, I could do things like wander into the Energy Department and get the briefing about how the nuclear stockpile was managed and have them say, like, nobody's come in to hear this before. So it started that way. And then something happened. First, we ran it as a series in Vanity Fair and got stapled together into The Fifth Risk. It was three long magazine pieces about three previously mostly ignored departments of government, commerce, agriculture, and energy. And I'd purposely taken the ones that I thought nobody knew anything about, like my neighbors in Berkeley.
I would canvass them and I'd say, all I do is talk about politics, but tell me what goes on in the Department of Commerce. No idea. Know, business, you know. And it was. And it was just like, oh, it was very clear that. That we just. We aren't really getting our civics lessons. Like, we don't really know what our own government does. Even very intelligent, educated people. But the moment for me, and you stop me if I'm monologuing, but there was a. There was a moment after the book came out. So the book was more about the functions of government. It was me wandering around a travel book after the book came out, kind of nine months into it, after the book came out, there was the famous government shutdown that lasted for a very long time. And the government furloughed 2/3 of its employees, describing them to themselves as inessential. And while working on the book, I had been struck by just the quality of the people I was meeting. I wasn't writing profiles. I was writing about what they were doing. But I just got kind of shocked by how.
Mission driven, committed, expert, definitely not lazy, definitely not abusive or fraudulent. I mean, wildly interesting people. And I kind of backgrounded them. And so I had to write an afterword for the paperback. And I thought, let's just pick one of these characters and see how far you can go with it. Like, how is that going to feel as a literary exercise? Again, it's just like, it's exciting material. And so I went to an outfit called the Partnership for Public Service, which gives away awards every year to people who've done something great in civil service. No one pays it much attention, but it's an attempt to encourage a culture of recognition in what is usually just a culture of punishment. And I asked for the list of anybody who'd ever been nominated for their awards and then cross referenced it with everybody who'd been furloughed. And there were thousands of names on this list. And I literally just picked one out of a jar. Actually, what I did is it was alphabetized. I picked the first name on the list, Arthur A. Allen, and called him up and went and spent some time with this guy and the story, like, the emotional content.
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