In early March, the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service released its annual Best Places to Work in the Federal Government rankings, based on a survey of over one million civil servants across 75 agencies. Good news! Over two-thirds of the respondents to the Office of Personnel Management’s Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, or FEVS, administered in the summer of 2024, reported feeling “engaged and satisfied” with their jobs in the federal government—up 1 point from the year before. The Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institutes of Health were among those topping the list of popular employers; the Social Security Administration and USAID came in among the lowest. But no matter where in the rankings you start, the act of reading through the survey responses in the report produces the same effect: the eerie feeling of gazing at a snapshot taken just before a tsunami swept through.

Reading the essay collection Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service inspires something of that same haunting dissonance. Edited by long-form megastar journalist Michael Lewis, the book draws together seven portraits of heroic individual federal bureaucrats—along with one essay about a particularly heroic statistic, the Consumer Price Index—that first ran as a series in The Washington Post. Two of the pieces are Lewis’s, while the remaining six come from a roster of non-wonky, literary-leaning essayists: Geraldine Brooks, W. Kamau Bell, Dave Eggers, John Lanchester, Casey Cep, and Sarah Vowell. These are good writers, and the book is a fun read. Indeed, the fun is what’s strange. The contributions vary in quality as narrative and analysis, but what unites them is a deliberately light, human interest-y, ingratiatingly accessible tone—“wouldja look at these geeky do-gooders go?” That tone is the source of the dissonance. As substance, the book is timely in an extraordinarily urgent way; as vibe, it’s a disconcerting fit for that very topicality. The plucky, unheralded bureaucrats get their day in the sun in this book, their song finally sung at the exact moment that their work and the institutional scaffold supporting it fall victim to a mad paroxysm of destruction. Cue the power ballad: Don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.

As deliberately light-touch as Lewis and Co. are with explicit argumentation, the essays in Who Is Government? do ultimately make the implicit case for bureaucracy—the core rationale for why we use government to perform certain tasks, and why lawmakers in that government would want to grant significant autonomy to unelected agents to carry them out. The writers’ shared instinct for character observation and portraiture, moreover, helps to elucidate a distinct ethos and personality type common in the civil service. It’s a culture that belies the image of a rogue deep state that animates Donald Trump’s demolition squad, whether in its vanguardist iteration under the Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought and his Project 2025, or in the edgelord tech-right anarchism suffusing Elon Musk’s DOGE. But it also stands unmistakably at odds with those wreckers’ own vision of work and collective purpose.

As it happens, the Partnership for Public Service gets credit for leading Lewis to the subject of the book’s first profile—a quietly intense engineer named Chris Mark, who spent multiple decades solving the problem of collapsing roofs in coal mines. Mark was nominated for an annual award the partnership gives out for extraordinary achievement in the federal civil service. Having written a bestselling book on the first Trump administration’s mismanagement of the executive branch, The Fifth Risk, Lewis has made a habit of reading through the partnership’s nominees each year. It’s a way to remind himself “how many weird problems the United States government deals with at any one time.” Coal mine roof collapses turn out to be just such a problem—centuries-spanning, chronic, and extraordinarily deadly. In Lewis’s hands, Mark’s lifelong engagement with the issue across multiple agencies, and its resonance with his engineer father’s scholarly preoccupation with the structural functions of Gothic cathedrals, become a fascinating story of governance as puzzle-solving and public commitment.

Lewis has gone through a shaky few years of late, marred by a strangely blinkered biography of Sam Bankman-Fried and some even more strangely dismissive public comments about Michael Oher, the disillusioned subject of his 2006 book, The Blind Side. But he’s a star for a reason. For the piece that concludes the book, a portrait of a Food and Drug Administration bureaucrat designing a website and app to help doctors find drug treatments for rare deadly diseases, he executes a seven-page opener that’s a masterpiece of distilled pointillistic narrative. With just a few strokes of detail and a handful of perfectly chosen quotes,........

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