Government employees have been battered with threats of layoffs and consolidation of agencies, most recently during the fall 2025 government shutdown. Prolific author Michael Lewis takes up the defense of these beleaguered government employees with Who Is Government?, a collection of essays by him and others about who these workers are and what they do. In a panel discussion about the work behind the book, he stated, “We’re going to blow up the stereotype of the bureaucrat.”

The reader’s path / There is a standard template for the book’s eight narrative chapters about specific government workers. Lewis and his co-authors write in awe of the feats of these workers, telling feel-good stories about their daily toils and under-the-radar accomplishments. These are one-sided anecdotes, not balanced and reliable samples of how effective government workers are, and there are no negative stories about government employees. There is no discussion of “turkey farms,” those entire agencies or departments and units within a government agency where incompetent staff are dumped to minimize the damage they can do. There are also no citations, so a reader cannot easily research and cross-check the many details cited by the authors.

Lewis contributes two of these chapters. The first tells the story of Christopher Mark of the Department of Labor, who spent his career working to reduce roof collapses in coal mines. The other focuses on Heather Stone of the Food and Drug Administration, who developed the CURE ID app, which provides access to a database that compiles and disseminates information contributed by doctors, caregivers, and patients regarding rare diseases, including the efficacy of approved drug treatments. One chapter writer, historian and best-selling author Sarah Vowell, admits her own biases in telling the story of Pamela Wright of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) when Vowell describes herself as an “old-fashioned liberal.”

Low-profile and modest federal agencies? / The subtitle of the book makes clear the authors believe the public has missed this vital “untold story,” and no one who knows about it has had the initiative or prescience to tell it. In the book’s introduction, Lewis justifies telling the story of these federal workers based on his thesis that the leaders of government agencies struggle to trumpet their agencies’ accomplishments:

Our government—as opposed to our elected officials—has no talent for telling its own story. On top of every federal agency sit political operatives whose job is not to reveal and explain the good work happening beneath them…. The PR wing of the federal government isn’t really allowed to play offense.

For me, these comments are not in keeping with reality. In decades of observing government and public policy in and around Washington, one of the most common scenes is the head of a federal agency rattling off a laundry list of agency accomplishments in prepared testimony before a House or Senate committee or subcommittee. The heads of agencies also have dedicated support staff in their public relations departments who push these stories to journalists, citizens, and researchers alike. These staffers’ job is to explain the heroic efforts behind agency actions, protect the agency’s turf, and counter any attempts at funding or staff reductions. One 2016 Government Accountability Office report (not cited by Lewis) estimates there were between 4,000 and 5,000 “federal public relations employees,” at a cost of half a billion dollars a year. As further evidence, we have the 2007–2009 financial crisis where, on a daily basis, heads of federal financial agencies, such as then-Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke and treasury secretary Henry Paulson, insisted that, were it not for their agencies’ courageous actions during the crisis, we would have had another Great Depression. In fact, the title of Bernanke’s 2015 book chronicling the crisis and the government response to it was The Courage to Act.

Case study / The NARA chapter is an exemplary case of the stories told in the book. NARA is essentially a massive storage facility for the full range of archived government documents. The chapter explains the agency’s mission: “drive openness, cultivate public participation, and strengthen our nation’s democracy through equitable public access to high-value government records.” Based on my own experience researching one of my books, the staffers of NARA are very knowledgeable and provide helpful advice in locating on-point government documents. My co-author and I noted these efforts in our book’s acknowledgements. Thanks to them, we unearthed many unique documents that added a richness to our book. In some cases, the documents put a federal agency in a negative light.

If you do not live near the DC metropolitan area (where general archives are housed) or the St. Louis area (where military documents are housed), the vast resources of NARA are not always easily accessible. Wright is featured in this chapter because, as NARA’s first chief innovation officer and leader of its “open government initiative,” she was given the task “to find the most efficient and effective ways to share the records of the National Archives with the public online.” She explains that “300 million of NARA’s more than 13 billion records have been scanned and posted to the internet.” That is a mere 2 percent of the total, showing the gargantuan task she and her colleagues face. The author of the chapter makes a case that NARA is “underfunded,” but also gives an example of how the agency stretches its resources through “partnerships on digitization projects with genealogy websites such as FamilySearch and Ancestry.” NARA also “manages the U.S. census records” and, in publishing the newly released (after the required 70-year delay) 1950 census data, undertook NARA’s “first use of [artificial intelligence] for … digital public access.”

But as a counterexample to NARA workers who look to enhance government transparency, there unfortunately are many government workers who do their level best to keep the government opaque. Once again, drawing on my experience in researching my books, I found plenty of government staff at the Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and Federal Housing Finance Agency who leveraged the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and Federal Records Act (FRA) to limit disclosure. They apparently don’t want anyone second-guessing their decisions and chosen implementation of operations. The federal courts usually defer to the judgment of these agencies and their expertise, although this may change as part of the ongoing reconsideration and dismantling of the Chevron doctrine.

One particularly egregious example my co-author and I discovered was the fate of bank examination reports that the federal agencies compile. FOIA exemptions are leveraged to keep these reports secret for decades in the name of financial stability and, when that period lapses, a provision of the FRA is triggered allowing the reports to be destroyed, never to see the light of day outside the government.

Conclusion / I have no doubt that the government workers featured in Who Is Government? are hardworking and noble public servants. The book starts with a quote from President John F. Kennedy:

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.”

Like Who Is Government?, these words from President Kennedy only provide the good, without the bad or the ugly. If readers want that view of their government, Who Is Government? may inspire them and “make their socks go up and down,” as Lewis writes in his introduction. But most readers will pine for a more reasoned and balanced assessment of government efficacy. They might remember the words of President Ronald Reagan, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.” Those who agree with Reagan and are more skeptical of the inner workings of government need to look beyond Who Is Government?