In February, The Washington Post’s opinions editor, David Shipley, quit the paper after two and a half years in the job. The Post’s owner, Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos, had decided to no longer publish editorials or signed opinion pieces that weren’t entirely committed to defending “personal liberties and free markets.” Bezos told Shipley that if his commitment to this new, apparently libertarian direction was less than wholehearted, then Shipley should depart.

Over the next couple of months, liberal columnists Ruth Marcus and Eugene Robinson, each of whose association with the Post stretched back more than 40 years, followed Shipley out the door. A depressing indicator of where the Post may be headed surfaced in an April editorial about economic policy. “The economic history of the past 200 years,” the Post intoned, “teaches that progress, not redistribution, is the main determinant of living standards.” National Review couldn’t have stated it more clearly.

Shipley’s signature achievement at the Post was to commission a series of magazine-length profiles—edited by the bestselling nonfiction writer Michael Lewis and written by an all-star team that included Lewis, Dave Eggers, Geraldine Brooks, and Sarah Vowell—that spotlighted remarkable work performed by government employees. This was a theme Lewis had previously sounded in two excellent earlier works, The Fifth Risk (2018) and The Premonition (2021). The Post series, published during the 2024 campaign season, constituted a forceful rebuttal to Donald Trump’s crude disparagement of federal workers as “crooked” and “dishonest” time-servers who were “destroying the country.”

The profiles are now collected in a new book under the title Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service. In his introduction, Lewis disputes the public misperception of the government worker as “[t]he nine-to-fiver living off the taxpayer who adds no value and has no energy and somehow still subverts the public will.” That stereotype, Lewis writes, “has always been lazy and stupid, but increasingly, it’s deadly.” With federal workers and entire federal agencies on the chopping block (the United States Agency for International Development, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Voice of America, etc.), Who Is Government? couldn’t arrive at a better time.

Four of the book’s eight chapters are about as good as nonfiction portraiture gets. Two were written by Lewis: a profile of a principal roof control specialist at the Mine Safety and Health Administration, and a profile of a health science policy analyst at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Also superb are Eggers’s profile of multiple scientists working on a next-generation space telescope at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Pasadena, California, and Brooks’s profile of the executive director of cyber and forensic services at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

Lewis’s first profile follows Christopher Mark, the son of a Princeton engineer whose specialty was figuring out which architectural features in a Gothic cathedral are structurally necessary. The son ended up making similar calculations about coal mines. He arrived at his life’s work circuitously, deferring college first to work as a labor organizer in West Virginia coal country; then, when that failed, as a coal miner; and finally, when the romance of proletarian life wore off, as an undergraduate and graduate student of mining engineering, focused eventually on the problem of roof collapses. In Jeff Bezos’s market-fundamentalist dream world, Mark’s expertise would have got him snapped up by some mining company. But in the real world, mining industry executives “viewed safety as a subject for wimps and losers.” So Mark went to work for a succession of federal agencies, where he developed science-based safety protocols so effective at reducing roof collapses that the industry adopted them voluntarily.

The other profile Lewis wrote for the series similarly addresses how market forces can come up short on matters of life or death. Like Christopher Mark, Heather Stone advanced the work of a parent—in this case, her mother, an infectious disease doctor—into the realm of public policy. Here the market failure was drug development for deadly diseases so rare that pharmaceutical companies couldn’t make a profit off of treating them. At the FDA, Stone developed an app called CURE ID to collect what little clinical information exists on treatments for such diseases. Lewis tells the moving story of how Stone (in this instance personally, rather than through her app) swiftly connected clinicians, medical researchers, and government bureaucrats to save the life of a little girl dying of an infection by something called balamuthia. “An amoeba that on very rare occasions enters and eats the human brain,” Lewis writes, “isn’t a problem the free market is likely to solve.”

Eggers’s delightful group profile of scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a reminder that however unpleasant this political moment, we’re still living in a golden age of astrophysics. In the next couple of years, NASA will launch into outer space the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is designed to block the rays of distant stars sufficiently to enable scientists to identify planets that orbit them. Planets outside our solar system are called exoplanets, and only 82 have thus far been identified visually. One of these was first seen 11 years ago by a NASA staff scientist named Vanessa Bailey, back when she was a graduate student at the University of Arizona. Today she searches the skies for more. Bailey’s exoplanet, HD 106906 b, is too far from the star it circles to support life. But other closer-in exoplanets very well might. Soon Bailey and others will be able to see them, thanks to the forthcoming Roman Space Telescope, named for the pioneering NASA astronomer known as the “Mother of Hubble” for her role in the development of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Eggers also profiles Nick Siegler, the chief technologist for NASA’s exoplanet exploration program. Siegler is a latter-day Paul Gauguin who at 32 chucked a 12-year corporate career at Unilever not for Tahiti but for astrophysics. He spent 11 years taking the necessary undergraduate classes, then acquiring a master’s, then securing a doctorate in astronomy and astrophysics. When that was done, he made a beeline for a government job at NASA.

Siegler’s pet project is the Starshade, a prototype to accompany a successor to the Roman Space Telescope called the Habitable Worlds Observatory. A vividly exuberant fellow, Siegler rues the day Hollywood producers decided not to use the Starshade in the 2019 Brad Pitt vehicle Ad Astra. Siegler advised the filmmakers on a scene where Pitt floats in space considering suicide. “The Starshade comes into position,” Siegler tells Eggers, “blocks the sun, he sees the Earth and realizes everything he’s ever loved about the world, including his family, was on that blue dot. And the Starshade would have saved the day.… Good, right? It would have been good.” 

Brooks’s chapter is about Jarod Koopman, an accounting whiz who chases virtual currency cybercriminals for the IRS. One member of Koopman’s team identified the creator of a billion-dollar online drug bazaar whose onscreen name was Dread Pirate Roberts. The criminal mastermind turned out to be a 29-year-old named Ross Ulbricht who, after failing as an online bookseller, branched out into selling homegrown psilocybin, and from there became a drug lord who hired hit men to take out other dealers (though the killings never took place). Dread Pirate Roberts was serving two life sentences until January 21, when Trump pardoned him, explaining on Truth Social that “The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me.” I hate to interrupt Brooks’s tale of uplift, published one month before Trump’s victory, but this is where we are right now.

Another member of Koopman’s team discovered that a Drug Enforcement Administration agent and a Secret Service agent had siphoned funds for themselves from Ulbricht’s drug empire; they ended up serving prison sentences of five and six years. Koopman’s team also identified a man living outside of Seoul, South Korea, who ran a website that sold videos of children being abused sexually, purchased with bitcoin. Some of the children were as young as six months old. Three hundred seventy suspects were arrested, including two United States Homeland Security officials and an assistant principal at an Atlanta high school.

This is not the sort of work taxpayers imagine when they think about the IRS. Near the end of her chapter, Brooks quotes Danny Werfel, IRS commissioner under President Joe Biden, on this point. “Government touches you a hundred times before breakfast,” says Werfel, “and you don’t even know it.”

These four chapters are reason enough to buy Lewis’s book. Three other chapters are less compelling but still worthwhile. I found myself less impatient with these on second reading, maybe because long-form journalism is easier to consume between the covers of a book than on newsprint. (Yes, I still subscribe to dead-tree newspapers.)

Casey Cep of The New Yorker contributes a chapter about Ronald E. Walters, principal deputy undersecretary for memorial affairs at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), that reads like one of those puffers airline magazines used to publish about corporate titans (back when there were airline magazines). In fairness to Cep, the basic problem here is structural. What Walters excels at is customer-oriented management efficiency, which is unquestionably important but boring to read about. I’d be remiss not to mention that “seven consecutive times” Walters’s National Cemetery Administration—custodian of the VA’s vast network of military cemeteries—“has received the highest rating of any entity, public or private, in the American Customer Satisfaction Index,” which is “the gold standard for measuring consumer experiences.” One can scarcely imagine a customer base more deserving of the best possible service than grieving families.

The other two middling chapters are Vowell’s profile of Pamela Wright, who until recently was chief innovation officer at the National Archives, working to make the agency’s documents more readily available online, and W. Kamau Bell’s profile of Olivia Rynberg-Going, a paralegal in the antitrust division of the Justice Department. (Bell is a jack-of-all-trades TV producer, stand-up comedian, author—and godfather to Rynberg-Going.) These two chapters are executed in a faux naif style that puts the author at the center. Some may find this whimsical approach charming. I do not. What little I learned about Wright and Bell made them sound like lovely people, but I didn’t take away much more than that.

Bell mitigates his whimsy by interviewing Max Stier, founding chief executive of the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, which gives out annual prizes to exceptional civil servants. These are named “Sammies” after the group’s founding chairman, the philanthropist Samuel J. Heyman, who died in 2009. Christopher Mark (the mining engineer) is a Sammie laureate, and Ronald Walters (from the VA) was a finalist. “We need a new generation in public service,” Stier tells Bell. “There are only 7 percent of the [federal] workforce under the age of 30.” Stier’s group is trying to increase young people’s awareness of the opportunities government offers for “making a difference.”

The only chapter in Who Is Government? that’s a dud is by John Lanchester, a British novelist and essayist who writes wonderfully shrewd essays about finance for the London Review of Books. Here Lanchester phones it in with a profile not of a government worker but of a government statistic, the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Sorry, John, that wasn’t the assignment. Lanchester’s point is that the American public was wrong not to believe CPI numbers that showed inflation, which spiked in 2022, had subsided by 2024. I agree wholeheartedly. But this was familiar op-ed territory when the Post published Lanchester’s piece one month before the election. Sadly, no one wanted to hear it then. It feels like ancient history today.

Lanchester sees statistics as a product of the same Enlightenment that gave birth to the United States—“numbers created by the state to help it understand itself and ultimately to govern itself.” And that they are. But under the Trump regime, rationality takes a back seat to the toxic delusions of a senile narcissist, making appeals to sweet reason seem a little quaint. And with Trump pushing tariffs beyond the breaking point, the public’s conviction that inflation is out of control will likely soon find confirmation in the CPI.

What can we do in this awful time? Protest, of course. Take Trump to court; most of his firings of government employees are illegal because Trump lacks the patience to follow the rules. Put pressure on Congress, especially in red states, where Trump’s fouling up of government agencies obstructs delivery of necessary services as much as in blue states. But consider also, if you have conservative friends, giving them this book. The government employees profiled here are not ideologues. They’re patriots who show their love of their country by trying to make it work better for everybody in a thousand ways that most people never imagine.