Michael Lewis stopped by ABC News Live Prime to discuss the new book he edited, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service.
Lewis’ book, published Tuesday by Riverhead, is a collection of essays by writers including Dave Eggers, W. Kamau Bell, and Sarah Vowell, highlighting federal government employees and the jobs they do. A critic for Kirkus said the book contains “compelling arguments against ideologues bent on dismantling the government.”
ABC News correspondent Stephanie Ramos asked Lewis, known for his bestseller Moneyball, about the origin of the book, which began as a series of pieces in the Washington Post.
“I had already written a book about the federal government, and I had been shocked by the quality of the characters just as literary material, so this goes back a year,” he said. “These weren’t opinion pieces. These were just writers I love, and I wanted to drop them into the government and see if they had the same excitement about the material I did.”
Ramos noted that the book’s release comes at a time when federal government jobs are being slashed by President Donald Trump and his senior adviser Elon Musk.
“All the chapters were written but one—the one at the end—before the [2024 presidential] election,” Lewis said. “This is before the Department of Government Efficiency, which isn’t a department…started coming with chainsaws…Half the people in the book have either already left their jobs or are under threat.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
