Athens was fighting Sparta in 406 BC and won a major victory at Arginusae. After the battle, a violent storm broke out and the Athenians were unable to rescue sailors on wrecked or disabled Athenian ships. Many sailors drowned.
The Athenian public was incensed that so many good men had been lost. They blamed the generals in charge, held a legally questionable collective trial, and executed six of them.
Very quickly, the Athenians regretted what they’d done. They had killed many of their own experienced commanders. A year later came a catastrophic defeat at Aegospotami, where the Athenian naval fleet was essentially destroyed. The following year, Athens surrendered to Sparta.
This story has been teaching lessons for over 2,000 years. The propensity of humans to act fast and then regret their actions soon after is timeless. We are still learning that lesson today.
And we saw it in action during Trump’s second term. There’s one thing about the federal government most everyone can agree on: It should work better. Taxpayers have every right to expect government agencies to spend money carefully, eliminate waste and update outdated systems.
That’s why many people were excited about the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE — the Trump administration’s cost-cutting effort, publicly spearheaded by Elon Musk.
A new book, Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State, asks what happens when we put people’s jobs on the chopping block and then realize what we’ve lost. And it’s about the people who know what’s being lost as it’s happening, and fight back.
Michael Lewis, the author of Moneyball and The Big Short, has made a career out of finding compelling human stories inside subjects that sound painfully technical. This time his unlikely protagonists are federal employees.
The title comes from a term Musk used for government workers who stood in the way of DOGE’s efforts. But Lewis uses the word as a term of honor. For him, the “blockers” were people who stood up to actions they believed were illegal, wrong, or contrary to their agency’s responsibilities — whether during the DOGE program or as part of the broader transformation of the federal workforce that followed.
One “blocker” was Kathleen Walters, an IRS official whose job involved protecting taxpayers’ information. Walters had served under administrations of both parties. When ICE wanted to access taxpayer information for immigration enforcement, Walters believed they hadn’t met the legal requirements to do so. She said no, and eventually resigned. Federal courts later ruled that the IRS’s data-sharing arrangement with ICE violated taxpayer privacy law.
Another “blocker” was Alexander Maranghides, a fire protection engineer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. He spent years studying how wildfires move into communities and how residents can survive them. His research included the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California, which killed 85 people and destroyed more than 18,000 structures.
It’s easy to use the word “bureaucrat” as an insult, but it’s harder to do that for a bureaucrat whose job is figuring out why neighborhoods burn.
Lewis clearly admires the civil servants he profiles, and he isn’t shy about criticizing DOGE and the Trump administration’s approach to the federal workforce. Readers who strongly support Trump or Musk will likely find themselves arguing with him.
But that doesn’t negate the question he raises.
There’s a legitimate case for reforming government, and even Lewis says he initially thought DOGE might accomplish something useful, particularly by modernizing federal technology.
In fact, one of the most interesting figures in the book is Sahil Lavingia, a software entrepreneur who joined DOGE hoping to find waste and improve government technology. After 55 days inside the Department of Veterans Affairs, he said he was surprised to discover the government wasn’t nearly as inefficient as he had expected.
DOGE promised enormous savings, but a report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found that some of the savings DOGE reported were incorrect or unsupported. In one category, federal leases, GAO calculated that DOGE had overstated savings by over $80 million.
That doesn’t mean the government shouldn’t be scrutinized — it means the cutters need scrutiny, too.
Reform doesn’t require destruction, and an organization that creates waste might still be performing essential work. Government rules can be cumbersome but still exist for a reason.
When almost every question about government quickly becomes a question about which political team you’re on, Blockers makes an important point: We don’t have to choose between blind faith in bureaucracy and a chainsaw.
Americans can demand efficiency, while also valuing the experience and competence of many government workers, and the importance of the jobs they do to serve all of us.
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