You could laugh all the way through this book at the sheer Keystone Kops ignorance and idiocy of the DOGE punks Elon Musk and Donald Trump unleashed on the federal government in 2025.
The typical Project 2025 person was a middle-aged lawyer who’d spent his career in and around the federal bureaucracy and defined himself not by how much money he made, because he’d never made much money, but by his hard-earned anti-government ideology. The typical DOGE person was a twenty-five-year-old tech guy dying to breathe the same air as Elon Musk and only just now grokking the fact that the United States government had three branches.
Or you could rage in despair at how, with nearly Starlink-guided drone efficiency, see what I did there, these punks zeroed in on people who were doing more to serve and protect the American public than Trump, Miller, Vought LTD™ ever has or ever will in the wildest MAGA wet dream. And they did it without warrants or court orders or congressional approval, and certainly without any advice and consent whatsoever from the American people or their representatives.
Lewis begins his tale in February 2025 when DOGE arrives at the United States Institute of Peace, a hands on think tank whose existence was predicated on, Lewis writes
[T]he conviction that the best war was the war that never happened.
Security chief Colin O’Brien defended the building for two days, including locking the DOGE boys and their goons in a room, before his own bosses sold him out.
[O’Brien had] lost the building to its own private security company after it was blackmailed by the Trump administration…An institution dedicated to the idea that conflict did not need to lead to violence now found itself in a society in which might meant right. Of course it had to die.
The real outrage here is that the USIP was not a government agency; it was a private company, a nonprofit that effected real change for the better in the world at large and saved American lives while they were at it. O’Brien says
“These were people who genuinely want to make the world a less shitty place.”
Now it’s the Donald J. Trump United States Institute of Peace. Says so right on the building. For a derelict organization, it feels appropriate.
And then the DOGE punks rampaged blithely on to conflict resolution manager Tim Curry at Office of Personnel Management.
Anyone who thought about it for a moment must have realized that the minute you invented a professional civil service, you also invented a conflict between it and its political bosses.
Tim was good at it, too, until DOGE showed up and fired people right, left and center with absolutely no knowledge of what anyone did and no interest in finding out.
In a stroke the DOGE people on the fifth floor had emptied the federal government of young people and necessary people while leaving the old superfluous ones in place. “They didn’t do any analysis,” said Tim. “They just said, If you want to resign, resign.”
And on to the Internal Revenue Service, where DOGE pressured employees into giving up the tax returns of seven million undocumented aliens resident in the US so ICE could send thugs to kidnap them from their homes and deport them to Eswatini. Those employees who refused to go along because said action wasn’t just unethical, it was illegal, like for example privacy chief Kathleen Walters, either quit or were forced out, leaving a DOGE punk in charge to this day.*
After which came the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and fire researcher Alex Maranghides, who discovered a new way to look at and defend against fires that spread from the wild to urban and suburban areas.
He had spent some meaningful part of his career trying to get the message out. It wasn’t enough to create the knowledge; you had to put it out there in a way people could use without further guidance from NIST. He’d created, in addition to ESCAPE, an online tool for state and local officials, called Hazard Mitigation Methodology (HMM). It allowed anyone interested in fire risk to assess the effects of, say, bird stops on Spanish tiles.
Trump’s Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, and NIST’s overseer, cared so little about the workings of his own department that he couldn’t even be bothered to sign the checks needed to keep it going. Yes, really.
After which DOGE acquired the National Institute of Health in its sights, and its head, one Francis Collins, who had discovered a treatment for cystic fibrosis, rendering it no longer fatal. God forbid we keep anyone of that caliber around, and out he went, too.
Lewis ends with the tale of one DOGE employee, fired early on because he said out loud that the federal government worked pretty well, actually, was later rehired to help streamline the IRS. On his own, he wrote a better app for taxpayers who don’t deduct anything to use to file and track their taxes. He’s proud of the work he did. He saved the app users whole minutes of their time. And indeed, all of the federal employees Lewis wrote about could in theory agree that there was plenty of waste in government that needed addressing, and lookee here at this one earnest, capable DOGE guy who actually made a difference. What if they’d all been like that?
They weren’t. DOGE utterly failed to deliver on their promise to root out and eliminate government waste, fraud and inefficiency, and DOGE “slithered” (Lewis’ word) off stage after about five months.
While all this was going on, Congress cowered in their offices in that shining city on the hill and pretended there was nothing to see here, move it along. Oaths to defend the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic be damned. As I finished this book I was left with one hope remaining and one hope only: That the wreckers will one day hear someone bearing a federal subpoena knocking at their door.
It was a legal process no one afforded the people Lewis writes about here.
An enraging read, but once you start reading you’re sunk. Michael Lewis is too good a writer to put the book down and walk away.
* I pay my taxes on line. I wonder where that money ends up these days.