Pod Save America - Deep State Rebels v. Trump (with Michael Lewis)

Episode Date: October 4, 2026

Michael Lewis, the New York Times bestselling author of "Moneyball" and "The Big Short," stops by the studio to talk to Lovett about "Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State," his latest book on the government employees who stood up to Elon Musk and Donald Trump during the heyday of DOGE. Lovett and Lewis revisit the story of Colin O'Brien, the security chief who locked DOGE out of the U.S. Institute of Peace, and break down how Howard Lutnick's takeover of the Commerce Department reveals the inner workings of Trump's government. Then, Lewis shares what essential government employees told him about working under DOGE, why he thinks DOGE may have been created in the first place, and how the next Democratic candidate should make rebuilding the government a top message following DOGE's damage.Hate listening to ads? Become a Friends of the Pod subscriber for ad-free episodes of Pod Save America, Pod Save the World, Lovett or Leave It, Runaway Country, Offline with Jon Favreau, and more—plus exclusive content, including bonus episodes of Pod Save America. Subscribe now at crooked.com/friends, on Apple Podcasts, or through the Pod Save America YouTube channel.You can request a transcript by emailing [e-mail]. Include the podcast name, episode title, and air date. Please allow 48 hours for delivery.

U.S. voters abroad. Have you got your ballot yet? All states are now sending ballots to overseas voters. So if you want to vote this year, you should request your ballot right away. Go to votefromabroad.org and click request my ballot, ask to receive it by email. Questions? Ask our support team directly. Don't miss this chance to shape the future. Don't delay. Vote fromabroad.org. Hey, everybody. Welcome to Ponsave America. I'm John Lovett. I just wrapped a great conversation with Michael Lewis. He is an author of the new book, Blocker. rebels in the deep state. It is a conversation not just about what happened when Doge tried to run roughshod over the government, but also the people inside who fought back. And there are a lot of fascinating stories and lessons and ways that we should be thinking about how not only to repair

the damage, but build something better going forward and just loved getting to talk to Michael Lewis, and I think you'll like it too. It's good to see you. John, good to see you. The book is enraging. Is it? Yeah. It was fun to write. It wasn't making me angry as I wrote it. Well, that seems sort of your quality. So I want to start with Colin O'Brien. He's the head of security for what was then known as the U.S. Institute of Peace. What happened when Doge tried to gain entry to that building? In a word, he watched, and he's at a security, and he's a more interesting character than that. He's like, he presents as like an NFL lineman just to look at him, but he's like a college professor in his head. He watched Doge basically rearrange all the guns on

their side. So that he thought, first, he thought the Institute of Peace, it's not really part of the executive branch. It's a, it's a congressionally created organization, and it has got funding from the U.S. government, but it owns its own building. It's a nonprofit. They didn't think of themselves as actually answering to the White House in any way. So it's weird when Doge shows up and says, we're taking this. It's also very small. I think, but people like, oh, it's the Institute of Peace. They associated with USAID. U.S.D.S.D. is vast compared to what the Institute of Peace is. A couple hundred people. Yeah, so $70 million. budget or something, some of it privately raised. And Colin assumed, well, he has a private security

firm that works for him. If the federal government tries to invade his building, he can call the D.C. police before he knows it. He's actually the most successful in repelling Doge because he lasted a few days. But before he knows it, the private security firm has been blackmailed by the Trump administration and turned so that they're working for the Trump administration. The D.C. police sign on. Whatever, diabolical thing they did it with the D.C. police is unclear. But I loved it as a kind of opening of the book because he was physically trying to block them from getting into the building. And in the end, like, they get the building. I mean, in the end, it's now not the U.S. Institute of Peace anymore.

It's the Donald Trump Institute of Peace. So I feel like it's such a, obviously is why you start the book with it. You're very good at this. But it's a signal example, right? because he's on solid legal ground, right? These people don't have any right. They're just do, it's like they're coming to your house to take your house. Right, they're just people off the street.

They're very aggressive. They act like they own the place, right? And he says, no, you can't come in. And they're 26 years old. Right. They're these kids, right? No, you can't come in. Then they have a, they bring an FBI guy with them.

And that person isn't really there other than to facilitate. He says, no, you can't come in. The private security firm, the reason Trump is able to, the administration is able to get this firm to be part of their efforts to take the building is the Institute of Peace has a small contract. The State Department has a contract that's a hundred times the size. Their money is at stake. So now all of a sudden, because of that contract, not for any legal reason, they're suddenly on the side of Doge. And yet still this guy, O'Brien, he locks them in the portico of the building and he physically removes. This is a shocking story. The third, about the third assault.

The third assault, he figures, Colin figures his only vulnerability is there is one lock on the building that actually a key will open that he can't shut down with a press of a button on his phone. There's one key that's out there. It's in the hands of someone who works for the private security firm. Nobody knows it's out there. He assumes that the guy at the private security firm will just keep it a secret, not use it. But they wake up one morning in the private security firm has broken in using that key to get in. And Colin watches them on the cameras and they all get into a single room in the front of the building. And he realizes he can sort of seal it hermetically shut.

So imprison the invaders. And it's a wonderful scene where they realize they're locked in and trapped. And so the Collins people call the D.C. police and say we have trespassers and come and get them. And the guys who were trapped call their bosses and resulting in a call from Ed Martin's office from, you know, I mean, it's just like it escalates inside the Trump administration. He was the U.S. attorney at the time. The U.S. attorney at the time. And in the end, D.C. police do in fact come, but they come in. They're working for the Trump administration.

And it is. So here's the bigger point of the story. Actually, this is what got me interested, kind of thinking this was a book, a book, because it was such, you know, if you think of Trump won, Trump won, the first administration. It was this signature was indifference and ignorance. Like, he didn't care at all about running the government. He'd fired his transition team right after the election. He told Chris Christie, he would take him an hour to learn how the federal government worked.

He just didn't care. And I think Trump, too, comes in. And they care more than any administration has ever cared in a funny way. They're extending their power into places that doesn't belong. They're saying we're not only going to run the stuff that we're supposed to run. We're going to take stuff that we're not supposed to run. And, you know, the Institute of Peace is set up under Reagan, and it's set up to be really at – it's not for the president to control.

It's at arm's length from the American government for a very specific reason. It's set up as a kind of instrument of soft power to be able to go out into the field and hot spots in the world and facilitate conversations between warring parties without it being the U.S. government. It's sort of quasi-government kind of thing. And it's done this very successfully. I mean, you know, it's like if you go to the Pentagon and ask them, are you glad that this place exists? They would tell you, yes, it's saved us lives and saved his money. It's stopped conflict. And it, but it only works if this isn't seen as instrument of American power.

It's a nebulous kind of thing. And legally, they own their building. You know, it's just really clear. The Trump administration's clear what it showed was not only we're going to take everything we can. We're going to show that not only we're going to run everything we're supposed to run, we're going to take everything we can and we're going to show people as a kind of statement, we can do this. And we're going to worry about the law later.

So it was, I mean, it's blat. I didn't see blatantly illegal, but it's working its way through the courts slowly. Right. That is what is this is sort of stunning about the example. There is, there's, and I do want to talk about some of the ways in which there were aspects of the Project 2025 critique that were agreed to by people within the government. But part of the reason I say that is because at a certain point, if we're not following the law, it really is about who has the keys. And the guns. And the guns in the basement.

This is right. And when the cops show up, who do they point their guns at, right? Whose side did they take it? He comes about people. It's very elemental. And here at this place, this institute created by Ronald Reagan, supported in a bipartisan way for a very long time, you have this security guard basically trying to use the physical building to keep Donald Trump out. And he can't. And he ultimately can't.

And so it is, I think because no shots were fired, I think we ignore the. importance of who has the guns. Yeah. You know, but it was, Doge was very aware. The Trump administration was very aware. We don't want these security guards with guns pointing out at us. We don't want the D.C. police.

We don't want, it's what we got to. And that just happened without anybody saying much about it. I mean, it's interesting. It's outrageous that the D.C. police turns itself into an arm of the Trump administration. It's outrageous that a private security firm turns itself into, and, but it's, it's, so So that's, I think, the very beginning of this story of transforming the presidency from one thing into another, from extending the power of the president, turning the two million person civil service into from a nonpartisan workforce that takes a oath to the constitution, not to a person,

into a sort of loyalist operation who meant to serve the personal narrow interests of a single man. Like all of that, those changes are just profound changes. And but it all starts with we have the power, like we have the guns and we're going to eliminate the law. We're going to eliminate fairness. Like we eliminate all the referees. Yeah. Yeah, and I do think there's two things happening at once in parallel that get mixed together. One is a shocking and aggressive assertion of executive power either at the edge of or in the border between legal and illegal, right?

Just trying to push executive power in new ways or ways that haven't been used in a very long time because of kind of norms and institutional prerogatives and deference, right? And then on the other side, you have just lawlessness and just we're going to go in and do what we want. and the faster we go, the harder will be for you to catch up to us with the courts and all the rest. And those things, I think, both are playing out here and playing out across the government. But I think it's interesting. You talk about this difference between the first term and the second term. So in the first term, Chris Christie puts together this transition team. Trump fires them, doesn't need them.

It's neglect. It's indifference. It's ignorance. Fundamentally different in the second term. And you say in the book, you know, the Trump team blames bureaucracy for their failures when in reality, their agenda was undermined by their own ineptitude, right? They chose people with little management experience to run these agencies and then were dumbfounded by their failure to be able to kind of yoke the machine, get the machine to do their

bidding. Were you in the White House when they came in the first time? No, no, I was out here. I was hosting and posting. I see, okay. Because there are people in the White House who'll tell you that I can remember stories from the fifth risk. I wrote a book about the Trump one.

Like Jared Christian is bewildered that everybody's leaving the White House. They thought they just stayed. You know, that they did the level of, they just, I don't know what they thought. It was just ran on autopilot or something. But the level of indifference the first time was incredible. I mean, that I went and got the first briefing to be got about how the nuclear arsenal was run because they didn't go bother to do it, that kind of thing. And so this time, and the subsequent complaint that like whatever, Trump didn't have any great

policy plans. It's not like he came in with a great plan and that it didn't get executed. He came in without any particular interest in doing anything except, you know, the dog caught the bus. He got to be president and surprised him, but he wasn't there for any particular purpose. And so the idea that, like, there's this deep state that undermined him was insane. But that that's, and it's a line they started to pedal very hard towards the end. And it is true that when he broke the law or when he sought to do things that were that that that were illegal, that there were people, there were mechanisms inside the civil service to get in his way. And he didn't like that.

But that's a, that's a, that's kind of a separate thing. But you, but you see this playing out in all kinds of ways, right? He says, like, if you don't let me put my name on the Kennedy Center, well, it's just going to go to pot and then we'll have to tear it down, right? And no one's saying that the president can't, uh, institute a plan to repair the Kennedy Center. just you have to do it competently and legally according to the rules, right? The frustration of the kind of shambolic, lawless effort leading to roadblocks, and therefore the deep state is stopping us becomes a lot of the basis for what Doge does. Yes.

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and Technology NIST, the place you go to find out what time it is exactly. Yes. So NIST is one of those agencies every American should know about just because it's fascinating. It's established in the early 19th century or late 19th century to. to just make it, to create, it's called the Bureau of Standards. Like, there are arguments about what a yard is or what a pound is. And if you traveled America in 1902 and you tried to buy a pound of butter, you'd found that the pound was not a pound anywhere.

And so it starts that way. The character in the book who is, who carries the water for the story, is a fellow named Alex Maranguities who invented an entire fire science inside of NIST. He was, he was, he invented the science of wildland, urban interface fires, you know, palisades. The fires that are the fires we're all talking about. That's exactly right. He is, he's like, how do you study these things? How, and how do we defend ourselves against them?

Getting quickly, just to set this up. So NIST, why is NIST doing that? In 1904, there is a, the Great Baltimore Fire, which becomes the Great Baltimore Fire because when a fire starts in a warehouse and fire trucks come from surrounding areas, the threads on their hoses don't match the fire hydrants in Baltimore, so they can't put out the fire and it just spreads. It's kicked to NIST to create a standard for a fire hydrant in a hose. So that's how they get into fire. The reason your smoke detectors are where they are and they work the way they work, the

reason your sprinklers are where they are and they work, the reason buildings are designed with the exits where they all came out and NIST did a lot of the original research. It's filled with these tinker types. It's kind of a, I mean, in a twist the dial on the kind of person who works at NIST and they end up in some academic science department. But they like to, they're handsy. They do stuff. Yeah, yeah.

They do stuff. And Alex, the character in the book, came to Nist because he had been one of the world's great big fire experimenters. He worked for the Navy, set big fires on ships to see, to, test various retardants and how you would put them out. So he'd had the experience with, with setting huge fires and getting information out of them. When the World Trade Center, in 9-11, when the World Trade Center falls, NIST is assigned to figure out like, why did it fall? Like, why do those towers fall? They weren't supposed to fall. And the arguments were that the fire

could never have gotten so hot that it melted the steel beams. And Alex has brought it, and he recreates, he rebuilds floors of the World Trade Center and sets them on fire. And he's the reason we know, is one of the part of the reason we know why the towers fell. Because the Jews. Yes. Because. No, God. Sorry.

You just had to say that. Yeah, I got to get a... You just had to say that. So this is all backstory. Because you need to know this. Howard Lutnik is... I mean, it's kind of a downstage voice in the book. But Alex, you know, and the point of the story of Alex is...

So he comes to NIST in 2002, thereabouts. And he has enough flexibility to invent. like he knew he wanted to invent this new science. He knew he wanted to go and go study big, big fires and wiped out communities and see if he could create new standards of how you built communities or design communities to make them more defensible. So just one example that comes from the book. Just like a small, like this is the kind of thing where no one has to be doing this work.

Exactly. It's just good that they are. So for example, where should people clear things that can burn from their houses? Well, clear it away from the house. How far away? How far away? Well, it turns out that actually those rules, which are common sense, you're moving stuff away from your house, but towards your neighbor's house. That's right. That's like a small example from the book of just a smart guy thinking things through on our behalf. When you walk through his suburban Maryland neighborhood with him, and by the way, what he would

tell you is like, we spend a lot of time talking about West fire fires out here. He said the east is what's the tender box. He said that all it takes is six weeks of dry and this of no rain. and the East, the East Coast is waiting to go up. So he says, you walk through one of these neighborhoods and you see it in a completely different way through his eyes. You'll see a wooden fence that runs the length of a block. He'll go, that's how the fire is going to travel from that house to that house.

That fence is a really dangerous thing. And it's all falling out of this research he's done basically by himself, very small team, at very little expense. And he's been doing it. The point of his story is that, and this is, I don't want to undermine your point. But the point of a story is that it isn't just Trump. It's that it's that we have that the way we run our government

has made it harder and harder for people like Alex to do what they do. When he starts, he's able to use the NIST fire lab just on the side when it's open to just throw it, throw some trees in and burn them and see what happens kind of thing. He creates this science sort of like in his spare time. That's how it begins until people start to see how valid. valuable it's going to be, and then he gets some proper funding. But five years in, this is an example, this is an example of government gets kind of kludgy. Five years in, at a NIST lab in Colorado, someone has an accident with plutonium. It triggers a congressional investigation, which triggers

all these new rules about experiments. And Alex then, you know, when this downtime in the NIST lab, which happens, you know, when he happens in the spur of the moment, he now needs to get six signatures to get, to run an experiment. So his life had gotten a little harder and harder and harder until you get to trump to. He was able to keep doing his work until he gets to Trump to. And he gets to Trump to. He's already kind of tired and worn out. And Howard Lucknick comes in and NIST is inside the Department of Commerce.

And by the way, Howard Lucknick lost his whole firm in 9-11. One floor up from the building, the floors that Alex... Just floor is up from, yes. That he modeled. Alex actually explained why Howard Lucknings. whole firm died. Howard Luckin doesn't see this connection, but there is a connection between these two people. You would think, you know, a perfect world, Howard Lucknick would know exactly about this research.

He would know all about the Department of Commerce. He'd go in and shake Alex's hand and say, what do we need to do to help you? Or at least when he gets the job, you'd think you're excited to go meet the people that work for you because it's a job. You're going to go do your fucking job. Yes. So Howard Luckner is the reductio ad absurdum of a bigger problem. It is that we stopped asking what qualifications should a person have to run one of these federal

agencies. They, that there's sort of, it's very weird what, what they get tested for. Did they know Jeffrey Epstein? Not, not, that's, that's sort of, I mean, you don't want them to know Jeffrey Epstein, but you really want to know that they know what's inside the Department of Commerce. And you really want to know that they can run this sort of organization. Some felt experience with the things the Department of Commerce does, the weather service or whatever is.

That would help. It's remarkable how we install people to be the temporary heads of these places with enormous power over them without knowing anything about them. So Howard Lutnik really knows nothing about the Department of Commerce, and he doesn't care. So what he does is he arrives, doesn't really show in his office much. He's in the White House all the time because he wants to be with Donald Trump. But at the same time, insists on micromanaging what's going on in commerce by approving checks. It's just like anything over $10,000 I have to sign, which just shuts things down because he's not there to sign them. They're like lines of people. He shows up in the evening for an hour and there are lines of people outside his door waiting to please, could you just look at this and sign the check?

Alex's credit card is taken away. He can't buy supplies for his lab. It basically grinds him to a halt. And he was already at a point where they're making it so hard. I'm exhausted. I can't. I can't do the work. And so he leaves. He leaves. And funny enough, I can tell you, quoted to this. So Alex left about a year ago. But he was so worried about the research. The research is research that will save our lives.

It will, it will, it's the research that will help us defend against this coming threat, this growing risk. And he says, like, that knowledge that we created is one person deep. Alex had a young assistant. He's trying to kind of jam into the young assistant's brain all he needs to know. kind of needs to be there. So for the last year, he's worked for free just before he leaves and goes back to Greece where he came from. And he said to me, he just read the 20,000 words in the book about his fire science. And he said, nice job. He said, but I'm now going to have to go turn in my

laptop because I'm sure they're coming for me now. And it was, it was, it was, he's afraid that he's afraid that just the public exposure of the consequence, of the way they're running this thing in the person of him is going to cause trouble for Nist in him. When it really should, it's caused someone to come and get rid of Howard Lutnik and get someone in there and run the place. But it's incredible. And I don't know what your like just broad view of the government is as opposed to politics.

But whenever you kick around the government, you find all these Alex Maranguities. You find all these people who've got some weird expertise who are doing something that you might think in the back of your mind the market would do. Like, you might think, like, the insurance industry would be doing this, and they kind of do a little bit of it. But, in fact, no, that they're, they're, there, these whole, the market, the market, especially with public safety stuff, the market is terrible. And the government does all this great stuff. And it's usually someone like Alex, who has just an obsession with the problem, and he sees how big the effects are going to be if he can solve the problem. and he goes down the rabbit hole and he works 100 hours a week and he doesn't get paid very much and he could be being paid way more in the private sector and doesn't even expect you to cheer for him.

He doesn't even want attention. He just wants the freedom to solve the problem and that we as a society have created these obstacles and that the Trump administration comes in and sees it says like, oh, that's deep state. It's insane. It's insane. You look at the moments where there are these innovations or discoveries or discoveries. or sort of promising research that produces results like this. And it is these are moments of small groups of people with the freedom to maneuver, try things, right?

You can talk about DARPA. You could talk about the Manhattan Project. But startups that make incredible things. Talk about Facebook at the beginning, whatever. And it's a group of people with a passion and a freedom to explore their ideas. and no one kind of watching every, you know, you don't want to waste money, but no one watching every dollar and every little penny that goes out the door, whether that's because they're

independent or that there's leadership that has enough trust and respect for what they're doing, trust in and respect for what they're doing to give them the space to operate. And, you know, one example you have in the book is that long before Trump shows up, there used to be a travel agent. I've forgotten about that. used to be a travel agent. Yes. And the travel agent worked for this department.

For NIST. For NIST. And so when you wanted to go look at a forest fire or go to a research lab or whatever, you would call this person and say, hey, I need to do this trip. And that person would say, all right, let me get you the information, right? And so in order to quote unquote save money, they cut that department. And now these scientists have to book their own travel and they have to go to seminars where they learn about how to save money on airplane tickets, right?

And you may be able to show on a ledger somewhere that some money was saved. Right. But in the end result, the government is less efficient and less effective and the the people that you have presumably hired to do to provide their comparative advantage now have to spend more time doing administrative tasks. And you see that fucking everywhere. You see it everywhere. And at the bottom of it, there's probably something at the bottom of what I'm about to say. But at the bottom of it, it's this, it's so, once you start generating mistrust of government, it's so easy to distort what's going on inside of it for political gain, to point. to it and go look at, look at how outrageous it is. They have a travel agent inside of NIST. You don't have a travel agent. Yeah, they have a travel agent. Yeah, and the fact is, you want them to have a travel agent because you want them doing the science.

You don't want them learning how to book airline tickets. And it's, it's, we have paid an enormous price for people just not understanding what the government does. And this, this cyclone of mistrust that has spun up and that it just gets, and ends up like running through the government and hitting whatever, it hits willingness. And it creates this, I mean, one, it creates the travel, the elimination of the travel agent. But in the minds of the people who are working there, if you're there, I mean, not everybody in the two million person civil service is great.

I'm sure there is waste. Of course, there's waste. There's not a lot of fraud because they get watched. It's so close. It may be fraud perpetrated on the government by American citizens, but the idea that people in the government are like stealing a lot of money from the government, that's probably unlikely. it is inefficient in ways. Contractors are making money.

That's, yeah, but that's why, I mean, it's a fair question, like why we subcontracts so much, why we don't have the capabilities inside. But the over and over in these things I've written about the government, I didn't go looking for like the rare person who was doing something good. They're all over the place. People who bust their ass, who have, who really have a. a sense that like they want their lives to mean more than just like they made money for themselves or they got famous they want to do they want to serve they care a lot about the democracy they care a lot

about about whatever thing they're doing inside the government whatever specialty they're practicing and they really just want to keep their heads down and do their work and the idea that whenever they look up they're seeing a more and more hostile gaze like a like it's so it's it's like It's like we have, the best of them are the best among us. And if you treat them with this kind of cynicism, you're driving out something that's just essential to the society. It's like, like, why should I bother? You know, we're going to become Greece.

Why should I bother, like, throwing my weight into something that's going to help the collective if I'm going to be punished for it? It's a, you know, doing, doing work that might make more in the private sector or with the skills and talent that could get a much more high-paying job, but instead choosing to do this, maybe one of the perks is, yeah, there's somebody that helps you with the travel so that you can right. There are advantages to working for the government that come with like some prestige and some respect, if not money, especially when the rounding error that is NIST, the rounding error that is the U.S. Institute of Peace compared to like what when when people talk about where our tax

dollars goes, right? It's interest, Pentagon, healthcare, and social security. Can we talk about this for a minute because it is interesting to me. It's interesting to me what the difference between what Doge and the Trump administration this time around said they were doing and what they are doing. Because what they said they were doing in the very beginning was we're coming to cut the deficit, right? Elon Musk said we're going to cut $2 trillion out of a $7 trillion deficit. But then he ignores interest payments on the debt, military, and entitlements, which is about 75% of the budget. So it's mathematically impossible to have cut two trillion dollars out of this last little slice he's attacking. What he's attacking is a nonpartisan civil service. It does lots of other things.

And then doing it in a kind of very haphazard way, cutting things willy-nilly, firing people willingly, not really for cause, just because fire whoever you can kind of thing. And so clearly, this is not a stupid person. Clearly, the way he went about it was not going to achieve what he said he wanted. to achieve. So either he is a stupid person. He just really didn't know. And he was like an attention, star, drug addled attempt to do something and he didn't, he wasn't thinking about it. Or he was actually trying to do something else. And that's the, and what is the something else then? Like, what did they actually assume, assume for a minute they got what they were after as opposed to it was one

giant failure. And I think that what they have done is so, they've traumatized the workforce, the government workforce. They have eliminated a lot of the checks on presidential power, firing inspectors general, the referees are all gone. Also, culturally shifting what is acceptable for a president to do. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. It's sort of like, if we can do that, we've established we can do this so we can do anything. And, And they've created what it really is, where the preconditions for a big power grab. That was what it was.

And I'm not sure they were smart enough to think that way, but it's possible that's just what this was. And all the noise about we're going to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse. That was just noise. It actually never thought they were going to do that in the first place. Positive America is brought to you by Trees.com. If you're a regular listener of this show, you've heard us talk about fast-growing trees, but now they are Trees.com, the same trusted online

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Trump is, at times he's talked about cutting entitlements, the times he said he won't. There is obviously not a lot of good politics in the Paul Ryan style of entitlement reform. Right. He's made all kinds of claims about cutting taxes, which he's done, right, and about cutting the debt, which he has, of course, not done. By the way, you know how much the debt has grown in his first two years? Three and a half trillion dollars. Of course. And by the way, any big gains you would have potentially gotten right. Like, there's, there's some debate as to where there is going to be legitimate savings from Doge, legitimate, meaning, like, actual long-term reductions in what they're spending, which is going to be dwarfed by, not just payouts to the people that were fired in the first year. Fine, that's one year. the IRS has been gutted. Yeah. We're not able to do the auditing.

Right. And by the way, you know, people say, oh, like, well, this is the amount that was coming in an audits and that's gone down. What about all the people that are taking a flyer on a risky tax scheme because they're pretty sure they're not going to get caught? That's right. That's money. It's hard to measure what that cost is. So I want to talk about it does get measured. I mean, when they came in, it was already like $600 billion.

It's not insignificant, right? So you're right. It's just going to grow. Oh, I mean by that. So what I'm saying is there's the actual amount coming in because of audits, and that's going down. Yep. But then there's the kind of amorphous number of how many people are just paying less in tax, right? And they can take a estimate of that, but we'll never fully know exactly how much has been lost because somewhere there's a person who's like, I don't think anybody's going to read this thing.

Here's another tax loss. It's an interesting one. So one of the things they did, and it was a sin, is DHS, ICE, asked the IRS for the tax returns of undocumented workers. There's a separate file, it's about 7 million people, and it's got the best information on their most recent home address. It's supposed to be sacred and private. It's supposed to be as private as citizens' tax data. We've been telling that population for 30 years that file your taxes, and it will help. if you decide you want to become a citizen one day, and no one will ever use any of this information

against you. It's generated hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes that people have paid. We now know that they actually took this data and went and used it to grab people in their homes. If you're an undocumented worker, what are the chances that you're going to pay taxes now? You know, it's just it creates a kind of such mistrust. It's so poisonous. this. And once the mistrust starts, I mean, I keep thinking of Greece. It's like the Greeks don't pay their taxes. Once you start to lose the sense of the collective purpose, it's amazing how how quickly it can unravel. Why should I pay my taxes? Yes, it is a nobody else is paying their taxes. It's the going from a high trust to a low trust society. Right. And that's his MO.

It's so Trump that when I think about, I mean, Trump is not a huge part of this book, but he's hovering in the background. He's like this gas everywhere. And when I think about it's, how he, like, if you're going to try to kind of predict what he's going to do, he's going to find where there's trust and try to destroy it. And he might not think quite this way, but his blizzard brain operates this way. He knows at some deep level that if he, if he doesn't do well in a high trust environment, because he's so untrustworthy, right? So if there are eight of us in a room when we all trust each other, we'll quickly realize that this is the guy, this guy's just lying all the time and we won't want to deal with him. If we,

If he can somehow get us all to mistrust each other, as much as we mistrust him, he's on a level playing field and he's ruthless in his ability to operate in an untrustworthy way. He has an advantage. So he's sort of like instinctively hostile to places where there's trust. And you know what's odd is people, if you said to people like, do you trust the government, they'll say, oh, no, I don't trust the government. People trust the government every which way still. Of course. In their revealed behavior, they drink the water, they eat the food, they hold the dollar, they invest in treasury bonds. There's that people still basically trust the government, even if they say they don't.

And they act as if they do, he's coming for the trust. And it's, and you feel it. You feel it right through the book. Like you feel it. Every section has that feel like, oh, he's just undermined some, something I just, I used to just take for granted. I used to just take for granted that my tax return wouldn't be weaponized against me. Yeah, there's a, there's a, there's a name for this. Is there?

There's a name for this idea that before you eliminate a rule, even if you can't... Chesterton's fence. Yes, Chesterton's fence. Are you impressed? That was crazy. I am impressed. But basically... Can you explain Chester's fence?

Yeah. So... The Chester's idea is that I think is G.K. Chesterson, it was in response to some numb nut, probably doge-like movement inside the British government. But someone comes in and tears down a fence and the fence actually served a purpose. And Chesterner said, it's okay to come down and tear down the fence. But before you can tear down the fence, you need to know why the fence was put there in the first place. Yes. Then you can tear it down. Because even if you can't tell why it's there, even if it's not

blocking anything today, there was a reason this fence was built. And it may still be, have a purpose. Right. And so why is it that we have a rule where you can file your taxes, even if your income is from breaking the law? It's because we want the revenue. Yes. And we want people to file their taxes and pay taxes, even on illicit gains. And by protecting that, that brings in more revenue. There's a function to it. There's a value to it. And when you play with those fundamental things without enough understanding or care, you do real damage. And that is what they do over and over and over again. Either by ignorance or ideology, they don't care what the rule is. They don't trust that the rule was made in good purpose. And so they just eliminate it. And then we live downstream of those consequences.

When you see a story, like there's lettuce contaminated by cyclospora, for example, are you just at the point where you just assume that that is because of the effect of Donald Trump? Or do you think it that underneath a lot of these signals, these sort of more acute examples, a lot of the functions are still working and shit just happens to let us in otherwise. Some combination. I wouldn't blame them for everything. In that case, I think you can trace it back to the reduction in the number of inspectors of the FDA inspectors.

And I do, I got to say, when I was on a casting search for this book, it was very easy to cast it. I had a choice for each section. but this was the public safety section, and Alex Maranguities, the fire, my fire science guy ends up being the character. But while I was roaming the government looking for who I might write about,

one of the people I did interview was the former head of the FDA food safety division. And he said bad stuff. This is before the lettuce and the cyclospora, but he said, look, this is bad stuff is coming. I can tell you that they're doing it in a way that it's just not going to work as well. And a lot of good people are being run out. So it's not, there is a connection.

Of course, there is a connection. Tell me if you think this is dumb. I mean, you know, that I, the book has a frame. And the frame is the government does, we all basically agree with a possible a handful of people who've read too much of Ayn Rand. We all agree that there's some things the government needs to do because the private sector won't. The private sector won't make long-term investments in scientific research, research that won't pay off for a very long time. The private sector just doesn't do that. The private sector probably won't generate a useful military that's better of the government to do that.

The private sector won't actually invent a new fire science to protect us from wildland, urban interface fires. So there are these things that the private sector won't do. You can kind of carve these things up into these. buckets, like the things that, like there is a public safety bucket. There is a, there's a, the science bucket. There is the data collection bucket. You know, the private sector won't do the census. It won't, it won't, it, it won't collect climate data. It won't, there's all kinds of stuff like that. And what, what interested me was to wander through the Trump administration,

the second Trump administration, and ask how, when you turn the executive branch from what it was to what is now from this nonpartisan sort of task-oriented thing into a loyalist operation serving the interests of Donald Trump, how does it affect the different functions? And it's a little different in each case. It's not all one story. And so that's the frame of the book. So my question is, do you think that's a dumb frame or do you think it's an interesting frame? Do you think that way about it?

So I think it's an accurate frame for describing what you describe in the book. I guess what I was thinking about. So there's this moment where this guy, Tim Curry, he's at the Office of Personnel Management. He's liked by everybody, it seems. Management like him. Trust it. Trust it. Trust it. Unions liked him. He actually has some, you know, so street credit, bipartisan street credit. Everybody, every administration thinks for some reason he's secretly on their side. Right. Which is an incredible talent for somebody at the, at the intersection of political appointees and career appointees. Yes. An important intersection. And as, you know, you say this in the book that he sees Project 2025. And one of the things that Project 2025 talks about in between some ridiculous ideological bullshit around the deep state is, hey, the civil service is rated as being 99% effective and only 0.1% performing poorly. Right.

Come on. Yeah. That's absurd. It is absurd. There are too many bureaucratic hurdles to giving people good feedback. Too many managers are not holding standards. Yes. And that's something this guy agrees with.

Yes. And it's true. It's true. And yet the hard work of addressing that problem is not something the administration's interested in. And so when he's in, he's in this job. And he doesn't get the, when who comes knocked on his door, it's not the authors of Project 2025. It's a bunch of fucking Doge twerps who seem to have absolutely no idea what anyone at this place does, but they're sure it's not important or at best, it's destructive. Yeah.

And it's, and the way they go about cutting the workforce is interesting. They just told cut it how you can cut it. And they don't address the basic problem, which is it's gotten hard, it is too hard to fire people. It's too hard to hire people. They do need protections. If you're going to have a nonpartisan workforce, they do need some protections because you can't have the Republican coming in and firing on the Democrats and the Democrat coming in and firing all the Republicans. And the truth about the workforce is it, I mean, most of them are not, they're not living their politics in their job. They're usually, the politics is like, that's not a part of it.

But instead, the Doge people go from place to place. And they figure out pretty quickly that while it's very hard to fire someone with civil service protections, it's not at all hard to fire people who are the so-called probationary workers. And that's people who've been in the job for like two years or 18 months for short time. So it's a pool of people. And it's a quite large pool of people who have only been around for a couple of years. Now, who are those people? They're the young people.

This is exactly who you don't want to fire. And there are people who have been brought in because there's some immediate problem. and they have some special skill that is of the moment. They fire these people. Now, it's actually against the law what they did because you're supposed to only fire these people for cause. What they did is they went from place to place and say you're all fired for cause,

which was demoralizing to talk about taking a thousand idealists and turn them into cynics. If you're like this young person who wanted to work in government because you wanted to give back or you wanted to help or you had some skill that would benefit the society and you're doing well and you get told you're being fired for cause, I mean, it's offensive. But they did that.

He started, Tim Curry watched that. I mean, he realized I can't, my job is to adjudicate fairly the disputes between the political, and it's a naturally fractious sort of environment, that border between the political people

who come in to run it and the permanent civil service. And by the way, like, attention that is irresolvable. It is a real, the spoil system where they could come in and fire everybody, didn't work. They create the civil service in response that it has problems. There's no perfect answer

for how to staff a government. That is run by political people, but ultimately has to provide continuity. It is a deep challenge. It is a deep challenge. But he realized what I loved about Tim Curry is that he seemed to be able to weather any political change. Like Trump, one, didn't phase him at all. The Trump people thought he was just great. And that this thing is so different.

He realizes that his job is to ensure that the tensions don't escalate, resolve disputes before they get really ugly, to preserve this sense of fairness. And it's his whole life. He doesn't have a family. He doesn't have a cat. He works 100 hours a week. Everybody trusts him. He has a physical response.

He starts, his heart rate goes up, his blood pressure goes up. He actually thinks, I physically don't survive in this environment. He could have survived any other environment. And I thought it was just, it's a canary in the mine shaft, right? And he doesn't sign out. He refuses to sign off on firing like 7,000. people for cause, right? That's fundamentally. And I think weirdly the thing that drove him over the edge was when Elon Musk's or the Doge people sent out that email to the two million person workforce

saying list the five things that you did last week that were useful, which sounds like, I guess if you work in a private company, you think, oh, that, why are they upset about that? Like, we get that kind of thing in the private sector all the time. I would say if you got that in the private sector, that is so stupid. I just, that is so insulting and stupid and trying to solve, like, if you believe that you're at an organization where no one is doing anything and everyone is lying to you and the managers aren't managing and the staff isn't working and no one's telling you the truth that your only solution is to ask every single person what they did last week, you're so far gone from like

actually being able to solve a price. It's ridiculous. Potta of America is brought to you by Walmart. Walmart keeps prices low for 150 million Americans every week. They help families save on food, clothing, school supplies, and countless other necessities in every aisle. In fact, Walmart's great value product lines save shoppers up to 35% every year compared to national brands. This means families have more to spend on pizza nights, birthdays, and all the moments that matter. Because when Walmart says save money, live better, they mean it. Learn more at walmart.com slash save money. U.S. voters abroad. Have you got your ballot yet? All states are now sending back.

to overseas voters. So if you want to vote this year, you should request your ballot right away. Go to vote fromabroad.org and click request my ballot. Ask to receive it by email. Questions? Ask our support team directly. Don't miss this chance to shape the future. Don't delay. Vote from abroad.org. I want to come back to this idea of private sector versus public sector because it's like, that that's just laziness. At root, that is, I don't want to. do the hard, hard work of going through and meeting with managers, talking about individuals as individuals, what's working, what's not. I want to do it with a cleansing fire. And like that to me is what this problem was. They didn't even read the emails. Right. So, I mean, that and the amount of

disruption, I mean, in the extreme case, what does a spy do when he gets that email? What does someone who is in the sensitive part of the IRS and looking at people's tax returns do? What do they do? There were stories, I mean, just in the IRS, like some huge number of people at the IRS don't have a computer. So the stories of in IRS processing centers like lines forming at the computer terminal and you have to wait three hours to answer this question. It was people took it seriously. They were told to take it seriously except in a couple of places where Trump's appointee said,

don't answer. Like I think maybe the Pentagon did that. But it's, yes, it's stupid. Yes, it's insulting. And but Tim, you know, he knew the whole workforce. And he knew just how how much trouble that was going to cause, how counterproductive it was. And he's the person who they should have gone to before they set it out. He would have saved them the trouble.

You can imagine a completely different version of Doche where there's a team. And over a few weeks, they go and they meet with department heads. And they get, you know, they go department by department. Yep. And they say, hey, like, you know, your last report. said that your workforce is 99.9% effective. We think that's probably a little bit of an exaggeration. We believe it isn't. We're going to go through and do a 10% cut everywhere, and we will do it if you don't do it. I don't support doing it this way, but you would get

much better way to do it. You cut 10% or we'll cut 10%. Right. Right? And then we need, and give us a report as to where and why, and we would love to know that and we'll go through it. But they don't do that. They do it in this ham-fisted way. And just to come back to a question, you asked at the beginning, which is how do we choose these people to run these departments, right? That we ask if they're in the Epstein files, and you shouldn't be in the Epstein files, but are you interested in these topics? You have experience in these topics.

You have management experience. And I actually, you look at... Do you even want to be there? Right. Are you really you coming because you'll get you a ticket to get to the White House and hang out with Donald Trump? Right. And by the way, look, there have been times when we've had, I think, of like, the best

and the brightest and these sort of best. business leaders that all knew each other from college and these prep schools, these high and mighty guys coming in and sort of sort of with these arrogant perspectives on how the world should work. But they were at least civic minded and they were curious, right? And they had a sense of purpose. Right. Like, do you need the person that runs the Commerce Department to have a deep knowledge of weights and measures? No, you don't. And actually, you could just be a person that was an incredibly successful. Howard Ludnik. He's a very successful business. Right. Like, not him, he's a, he's a dipshit.

But like somebody that had his expertise, but actually the kind of style of leadership, I think the public associates with civic-minded corporate leadership who said, you know, I don't know what you do here, but I'm a great manager of people. I want to understand it. I want to help you guys do your job better, right? Like, that is not inconceivable. Nope. But instead, Howard Ludnik has a butler who brings him fancy meals into secure compartmentalized

information facilities. I mean, that's extraordinary. Yeah. Right. Like what? What? You know what? This is, and we're not even, but beyond that, why don't, why, why don't we know this already? Like, why, why is this just a soon tolerated? It's, it's, it's, it's, it's demoralizing for the people who put their lives, throw their lives into the business of, I don't know, predicting the weather or figuring out what a pound is or stopping wildfires from devouring us to have someone, or perhaps. protecting data at the IRS. Or protecting data at the IRS. You have someone on top who is so dismissive of the function that they are supposed to be managing. I mean, it's just, you wouldn't, look, you would not run just for starters.

I mean, this is a whole, this is a big subject. But you wouldn't run any private sector organization the way we run the government. You wouldn't change bosses every 18 months. You know, you just, you wouldn't do it, right? You wouldn't have ignoramus as being brought in to run places every 18 months. You wouldn't change the budget every year. You would, the amount of instability that they already deal with is it's such a problem. It's such a hard thing to run.

And there are reasons it is the way it is. To add on to this, this, we've just thrown out the window, any standards for who runs the places. It's not going to function. Eventually, is this going to cease to function. So this is, I'm coming back to your question about sort of the framing in the book. What I was thinking about is, I remember reading Manker also. and I will maybe get it a bit wrong because I read it a very long time ago, the rise and decline of nations and about what happens over time as institutions

build up interests, bureaucracies, guilds, rules that get layered and layered and layered and layered and layered. And that after World War II, the reason Germany can come back so quickly and the reason Japan can come back so quickly is they got to start again. Yeah. Right. Now, there are problems with this, and there are ways in which this is way too simple, obviously. But, you know, at the end of the book, you talk about somebody that was at Doche, who comes back and decides to actually work at the IRS, in part because seem to have learned something about the government and what was needed inside the government. And he had tools that would be useful.

He wanted, he's got the spirit, right? He wants to fix the tax system, or not the system. He wants to, he wants to, he was to, what bothered him, his name is Sahil Lavingia, what bothered him, he's a technologist. By the hell of him, he had to get paper from the IRS. Why can't I do it all on an app? He wanted to build an app. And he's done it. He's come back and he's done it.

But it's the story of how hard it was for him to do little things is this is also the story of government. The spirit still exists. The big problems still exist. You know, if what you were, I thought where you were going with Manker Olson was, have we hit a point where. we can just rebuild it because it's been those it's effectively been destroyed well this is what i want to this is the the this is what i did want to talk about because you know he's now this this guy who was at doge is now at the irs a lot of empty desks it's alone he's alone uh and i'm wondering if you're seeing anyone any democrats any policymakers anyone who's thinking that this is now an opportunity i

i keep waiting for this i it seemed to be a hole in the political marketplace for someone to talk about government as opposed to talking about Trump. I just don't know. Maybe it's just a boring subject. Maybe it's that people just don't care. I just, but I don't believe that. The books I've done have way outperformed what anybody expected. There seems to be an appetite for this stuff.

I keep waiting for the candidate to arise who says we're going to rethink how we govern ourselves. And because a lot of it makes no sense. And Trump is a symptom of a lot of big problems. So that if everything was working just beautifully, Doge would never have been allowed to come in and trash it. They're allowed to come in and trash it because people have a sense that some of this isn't working. Maybe they can fix it. And it's vague enough.

Or they take it for granted. Or they take it for granted. But so I, it does feel to me like there is a vacuum in our politics and that there's a hole there waiting for someone to walk into it, a role that's waiting to be played. And it is a person who it's an explainer and a builder. explain and rebuild this thing. And that I don't think it's that hard to interest people in it. And this is where I also was just thinking about the way Democrats talk about the government and the way Trump talks about the government.

There was a piece the other day talking about how Trump wields executive power and with all the downsides and how he does it. But we haven't had a president in our lifetimes that has been so aggressive at making decisions. from the White House to great ill effect, right? But when I, you know, I talked to Barry Diller, long time media, ran Paramount, ran Fox, kind of created this company. And he talks a lot in his book

about how he'd be in these meetings with people that would give him all the research data what people want to see on television, right? And of course, that data is always wrong. It just gives you a frame by which you can make decisions, but of course, what matters, is it good? Is there a great writer?

Do you love it? Right. Do I, does my instinct tells me something, right? And I think sometimes Democrats valiantly believe in making data-driven decisions. Yeah. Right. But then you end up with a bureaucracy that's 99.9% effective. Yes.

And then Trump comes in and has no respect for past and no respect for numbers and no respect for facts. Right. Right. But knows how to wield power. And you know how to tell story. And has an instinct. Yeah. Right.

An instinct that defies the polls and often shocks Democrats by. being effective, right? And I'm like looking for what, when I'm reading what you're, I'm like, where is the person that can understand power, right, and understand where you should and should not be making evidence-based decisions, but rather decisions based on philosophy or theory, right? But actually respects and cares about the civic purpose of our government. And like, that to me is the opening that I see. Right. From the very beginning in writing about Trump's approach to government, I've had this feeling that we're in this narrative war, that he has a story and the other side doesn't have a story.

And that the purpose of blockers, the purpose of this, is to show you a story that's a true story that is a constructive story. And it's that surfacing these narratives is actually, it isn't just entertainment. It's kind of fun to read about kind of thing, but it's that it is actually absolutely essential to the preservation of the democracy.

that you need to have the narrative. And we've sort of lost the narrative. Yeah. And I do think it's about who can appreciate this. Who sees what's been happening with the government, sees the value of what people are doing at the IRS and NIST and at the Office of Personnel Management, but actually understands that we're,

without just a platitude of we're not going back or we're going to build something better than before, but actually is going to have the people that are eager and excited for the project of building a functional working faster, better government than what we can. Right. And that's the conversation that I think is missing. Yeah. Michael Lewis, thank you so much for your time. The book is called Blockers. This is out Sunday. You can pre-order it now. It's out on Tuesday.

It's really worth your time. Thank you for your time. And we'll talk to you next time. Thanks, John. Thank you to Michael Lewis for joining us. Thank you for listening. And we will be back in your feeds with a brand new episode on Tuesday. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. Our show is produced by Austin Fisher, Saul Rubin, McKenna Roberts and Michael Goldsmith with Reed Churlin, Elijah Cohn, and Adrian Hill. Our team includes Matt DeGroote, Ben Hefcoat,

Jordan Cantor, Charlotte Landis, Kenny Moffat, Adam Lippert, Joseph Dutra, Desmond Taylor, Dan Farrow, David Tolls, Mia Kelman, Ryan Young, and Naomi Single. Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.