Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
“Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service” is a timely celebration of federal workers — who may or may not still be employed at the time of this writing. And it is a sharp indictment of those who keep slashing essential government jobs.
Edited by best-selling author and journalist Michael Lewis, this new collection of essays by Lewis and six other writers examines the impactful work performed by some employees and managers in a variety of federal agencies.
In 2025, many federal workers have been thrown out, forced out, or bought out of their jobs by the Trump Administration and Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). At least 300,000 or more are expected to be gone by December, according to the White House.
Hard-earned skills, experience, and knowledge are all being tossed from federal agencies like bags of trash. And almost everything in daily life is being affected, from national security to the positions of trash and recycling bins in national parks.
In “Who Is Government?”, the focus is on public servants working in environments that leave them largely unknown outside their own departments.
In one essay, writer Casey Cep reports that a former Veterans Affairs (VA) employee told him “joining the civil service is basically like being in the Witness Protection Program. No one ever knows about the good you do.” Cep’s piece highlights the VA’s National Cemetery Administration (NCA), its dedication to dignified burials, and the careful, focused work of its long-respected director, Ronald E. Walters. “Walters and his 2,300 colleagues,” Cep points out, “bury more than 140,000 veterans and their family members every year, and they tend to the perpetual memory of nearly 4 million other veterans, from the Revolutionary War to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, interred in 155 national cemeteries around the United States.”
For those still convinced that federal workers are goldbrickers, Cep highlights another telling detail. “Walters … and his colleagues do their work better than any other organization in the country. Not just better than other cemeteries and funeral homes—better than any other organization, period. Seven consecutive times, the NCA has received the highest rating of any entity, public or private, in the American Consumer Satisfaction Index.” Cep notes that “[t]he average ACSI score for federal agencies is 68, but the NCA most recently scored 97—the highest rating in the survey’s history …” Costco was second at 85.
Michael Lewis’s opening essay, “The Canary,” is an intriguing look at the work of one former West Virginia coal miner turned college professor who was hired by the federal Bureau of Mines while working on a Ph.D. Christopher Mark’s personal goal became making improvements to mining safety. After many meticulous studies involving rocks, dirt, plate tectonics, and movements within mountains, he developed better ways to prevent mine roof collapses. These had plagued longwall coal mines for many decades and killed or injured many hundreds of miners.
Dave Eggers’s essay focuses on NASA scientists who specialize in starlight suppression techniques. These enable exoplanets hidden by the glare of distant stars to be revealed and studied. John Lanchester demystifies how federal employees compile the always-controversial Consumer Price Index. Geraldine Brooks writes about Jarod Koopman and other dedicated IRS criminal investigators working at a time when their jobs have “become piñatas for the agency’s critics.”
Sarah Vowell explores the National Archives and Records Administration and efforts by the agency’s first chief innovation officer, Pamela Wright, to make more historical documents digitally viewable by the public. Essayist W. Kamau Bell delves into Department of Justice antitrust efforts. And Michael Kelly concludes the book with an eye-opening account of how a low-level Food and Drug Administration (FDA) employee helped private-sector doctors find and obtain a drug not available in the U.S. that cured a devastating brain disease.
“Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service,” edited by Michael Lewis, Riverhead Books, 272 pages, hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats.
Si Dunn reviews books for Lone Star Literary Life (https://lonestar-lit.com) and is a freelance writer based in Massachusetts. He is a former reporter and photographer for daily newspapers in Texas and Arkansas and has written several books including “Dark Signals,” a Vietnam War memoir and “Erwin’s Law,” a detective novel.
