"Public" broadcasting and liberal books, a natural match. The PBS News Hour fell over itself to highlight Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State by liberal author Michael Lewis, painting the federal bureaucracy's triumph over the former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), once run by the press’s Public Enemy No. 2, space and electric car entrepreneur Elon Musk.
Why would public media be praising Lewis’s book, besides its defense of unchallenged taxpayer spending? Co-anchor Geoff Bennett answered that question in his introduction to reporter Lisa Desjardins’ interview with Lewis, noting “Musk has donated more than a quarter-billion dollars to support Republicans in the midterm elections since July.”
Lisa Desjardins: In the early months of 2025, Elon Musk oversaw DOGE's shock and awe campaign to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. Those promised savings never materialized, and Musk left the government after four months. But the chaos and cuts, including tens of thousands of layoffs, many later deemed illegal, left a lasting impact on the civil service. A new book by Michael Lewis untangles some of what happened with new details from inside the institutions Musk assailed. It's called "Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State" after the name Musk used to describe federal workers unwilling to follow his orders….
Lewis went wild with his metaphorical style in the service of painting DOGE as bloodthirsty for power.
Lewis: ….So, if you look at the very beginning of this phenomenon, they seize power very crudely, and then they lop off the heads of anybody who's like an independent referee, the inspectors general, anybody who might identify -- actually identify waste fraud abuse, corruption. And so they create the environment in which they can do whatever they want to do….
Desjardins even prodded Lewis to read from his book.
Desjardins: When I read the book, it felt like you were reaching a few epiphanies, and there's one of them that I'd like you to read.
Michael Lewis goes metaphor-crazy on PBS while pushing his book on the federal bureaucracy's triumph over Elon Musk and DOGE: "But the precondition for what happened in the federal government, in this kind of seizure of power, starts with a pretty crude seizure of all the guns." https://t.co/9fbR1kkGae
— Clay Waters 🇮🇱 (@claywaters44) October 13, 2026
Lewis obliged, reading from the book, accompanied by a cued-up graphic that filled in his words of wisdom as he spoke them: "American civil servants, as a group, have learned that any attention they receive tends to be negative attention. And in any case, the sort of person who goes to work for the government isn't usually looking to be the life of the party. The federal bureaucracy wasn't exactly out of touch with the society it served, but its society was out of touch with it."
The author demonstrated the paranoid style, not considering mere incompetence at DOGE when he could suggest a sinister conspiracy of failure instead.
Lewis: It was doomed to fail if actually he was trying to do what he said he was trying to do. If, on the other hand, what he was trying to do was sow chaos and confusion and create a lot of smoke and explosions, so that the huge power grab that then happened could happen without people really paying as much attention because so much is going on at once, well, then it made a lot of sense. Now, what's odd about it is, if you talk to Elon Musk's friends, they say Elon never lies. He always at least believes what he's saying. But it just seems impossible he could believe what he was saying about DOGE. The lies are so preposterous. So what worries me about him anywhere near the federal government now is I just don't trust him….
Lewis heralded bureaucrats as non-partisan heroes who cherish constitutional restraints on power (though on one can seem to locate the Department of Education -- or a Public Broadcasting Service – within the actual Constitution). Possible ideological or ulterior motives were ignored – though federal bureaucrats based in D.C and its suburbs vote deep blue, and were fighting a battle to retain their jobs as well as supposedly performing principled resistance.
