Finance First
I have always preferred Lewis when he is writing about finance. His best work—Liar’s Poker, The Big Short, Flash Boys—has always been about systems of capital, about the ways in which markets operate not as rational mechanisms but as sites of chaos, grift, and self-dealing. Michael Lewis has made a career out of writing about institutions in crisis. But this book is different. Rather than writing it alone, he has brought in a collection of writers to produce essays on the state of government, offering a broader and more fragmented picture of the crisis at hand. Who Is Government? follows his earlier book, The Fifth Risk, in documenting the slow, grinding destruction of the American administrative state. But this time, he has brought reinforcements: a collection of writers—Casey Cep, Dave Eggers, John Lanchester, Geraldine Brooks, Sarah Vowell, and W. Kamau Bell, each taking a different angle on the same theme. The book reads as an extended obituary for the civil service, a eulogy for the bureaucrats still trying to keep the state functioning even as it is actively being dismantled around them.
Bureaucratic Ruins
As a Marxist, should I really be mourning the collapse of the administrative state? The bureaucracy, after all, has always been a tool of the dominant class, managing the contradictions of capitalism, smoothing out its crises, and ensuring the state functions as the executive committee of the bourgeoisie. Max Weber saw bureaucracy as a rationalising force, a means of organising power in the modern era. Marxists have seen it differently: as a layer of state functionaries whose job is to maintain the conditions necessary for capital accumulation. The public sector worker is not the enemy, but neither are they neutral. The bureaucrat, historically, has administered the state in ways that have served the capitalist order, whether in overseeing economic regulation, managing social services, or suppressing radical movements when necessary.
Yet, it is difficult not to see what is happening now as something qualitatively different. The destruction of the administrative state is not the revolutionary abolition of an oppressive system; it is its replacement with something worse. The gutting of government does not herald workers’ control or the dismantling of capitalist hierarchy. Instead, it marks the shift from one mode of governance to another, from an era of state-managed capitalism to one where the state is merely an instrument for capital’s most extreme and authoritarian tendencies. The old bureaucratic class, flawed as it was, at least mediated power. What replaces it is not liberation but the unrestrained rule of oligarchs.
The gutting of government does not herald workers’ control or the dismantling of capitalist hierarchy. Instead, it marks the shift from one mode of governance to another, from an era of state-managed capitalism to one where the state is merely an instrument for capital’s most extreme and authoritarian tendencies.
It would be a mistake, though, to think of Who Is Government? as a book about Trump, or even about the Republican Party. The rot in public administration is not a question of political ideology but of class power. The systematic destruction of the state is not just a project of the right; it is a shared ambition of the American dominant class, facilitated by decades of neoliberal restructuring. If anything, the stories told here suggest that the current crisis is not a failure of governance but a success of counter-governance, the replacement of public administration with a permanent state of emergency, managed by an unaccountable oligarchy.
Lewis, in The Canary, opens with a familiar scene: the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 victory, when his transition team, meticulously prepared to take over the machinery of the federal government, was summarily fired. It was a clear sign that the Trump project was not about governance, but about destruction. What follows is an investigation into what was lost, departments left to rot, expertise discarded, regulatory agencies turned into rubber stamps for corporate power. It is easy, in this framework, to see Trump as the great villain of the piece. But Lewis is careful to show that this process was well underway before him, and has accelerated since.
Casey Cep’s The Sentinel and Sarah Vowell’s The Equalizer look at the National Archives and the quiet bureaucratic wars being fought over history. In a country where official records are under constant attack, from Trump’s classified document hoarding to Republican state governments rewriting school curriculums, archivists and historians have become the last defenders of reality. Their job, Cep and Vowell suggest, is not just preservation but resistance. The fight over the past is ultimately a fight over who gets to determine the future.
“The first time I felt a real sense of government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people’ was when we started working with the public,” Wright recalled. “There are citizens who have great knowledge and care deeply for the records and are willing to provide their time and talents to provide greater access to the records.”
Pam Wright, NARA Chief Innovation Officer
What Cep does not cover, but what is now undeniable, is that this erasure has become systemic. The Trump administration’s aggressive rollback of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives has led to the outright deletion of records of people of colour from the federal archives. The Pentagon, under the guise of ‘depoliticising’ military history, has erased official profiles of Black and Latino veterans, including General Colin Powell and the Tuskegee Airmen, from its websites. Elsewhere, civil rights histories, census records, and Indigenous land claims have been quietly scrubbed from government databases. The Department of Defense, under pressure, has occasionally reversed these deletions after public outcry, restoring, for instance, references to Navajo Code Talkers and the Jackie Robinson tribute. But the broader trajectory is clear: the state is engaged in an active erasure of those histories that do not fit the reactionary mould of the new regime.
This is not an incidental by-product of bureaucratic neglect; it is a deliberate act of historical vandalism. The effort to scrub these records coincides with the broader war on federal institutions, a campaign waged not only in budget cuts and staff reductions but in the ideological cleansing of the state’s official memory. The logic is straightforward: erase the record, erase the claim. If no official history acknowledges Black veterans, then the arguments for equity and reparations become weaker; if Indigenous land claims cannot be substantiated in government files, then they can be more easily dismissed.
John Lanchester’s The Number and Eggers’s The Searchers both track the erosion of state capacity in more technical fields, economic regulation, climate science, public research. These essays outline the transition from a state that once managed collective goods to one that now serves private interests almost exclusively. It is not just that agencies are being defunded, but that their remaining power is being redirected. Inflation, once a neutral economic measurement, has become a political weapon wielded against the public sector; climate policy is handed over to corporate partnerships that exist only to greenwash their own destruction.
The New Order
Trump 2.0 has returned to power with a clearer and more focused programme of dismantling the state than ever before. The Environmental Protection Agency has been stripped of its ability to enforce pollution controls; the Department of Education has seen funding slashed in favour of private school vouchers; the National Labor Relations Board, once the last weak barrier between corporations and their workers, has been further hollowed out. Where the first Trump administration was marked by chaos and incompetence, this time, the wrecking is methodical. The machinery of governance is being dismantled piece by piece, not just by executive order but by a more fundamental shift in how government itself is conceived.
Brooks’s The Cyber Sleuth offers one of the book’s more compelling character studies, following a cybercrime investigator at the IRS. The contradictions of state power are laid bare here: the agency tasked with hunting down billionaire tax cheats is the one most despised by the very people who claim to want a functioning government. But as Brooks shows, the war on the IRS is not really about tax efficiency, it is about ensuring that the wealthy never face consequences.
as Brooks shows, the war on the IRS is not really about tax efficiency, it is about ensuring that the wealthy never face consequences.
W. Kamau Bell’s The Rookie shifts to a more personal register, tracing the experiences of a young federal worker trying to make sense of their role in a system designed to fail. Bell captures a kind of existential exhaustion, the sense of working in an institution that no longer believes in itself, where every reform effort is quietly undermined by political inertia and outright sabotage.
And then there is Lewis’s final essay, The Free-Living Bureaucrat, which brings the book full circle. Here, he profiles one of the last civil servants still fighting to maintain some semblance of public responsibility. It is an individual story, but the real weight of it lies in what is implied: that this is the last generation of people who will see government as a vocation rather than an obstacle.
“Let the public service be a proud and lively career. And let every man and woman who works in any area of our national government, in any branch, at any level, be able to say with pride and with honor in future years: ‘I served the United States Government in that hour of our nation’s need.’”
President John F. Kennedy, quoted in the introduction
The Trump administration is not simply tearing down government; it is replacing it. This is not the small-state vision of Reaganite conservatives but something far more extreme. A state built by Elon Musk, managed by his Grok AI, run not for the benefit of the people but for the tech elite and their capitalist backers. The administrative state is not being shrunk; it is being hollowed out, its core functions outsourced to private hands while its remaining mechanisms exist only to serve the new order. The dream is not deregulation but total capture, a system in which power is no longer even accountable to capital’s old intermediaries, but instead flows directly to the unelected oligarchy of the digital age.
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