Blockers

For all its sound and fury, Doge achieved no meaningful cuts. Taking its false economies into account, Doge might even have added to the US deficit. Yet as Michael Lewis sets out in his commendable new book, Blockers, the effects of Doge’s 18-week storm will be felt for years to come... Those who want to know about how this is being done and what is at stake should read Lewis’s exemplary volume

Financial Times

Michael Lewis has a peerless, uncanny gift for finding the human frontlines of the most abstract and complex stories… He routinely populates these battlefields with unlikely heroes from real life… This new book is a straight war report. Lewis speaks to some of those people who have devoted their working lives to keeping ordinary Americans safe… In each case, Lewis builds an intimate picture of their precise skill set, their devotion to duty, their deep specialised knowledge of complex procedures at different levels of government; and he shows how in each case they came up against the thuggish Doge apparatchiks who told them that all those qualities were no longer required… This cultural revolution was just as wanton in intent if not in execution as Mao’s original… The few dogged souls Lewis identifies were among those who refused to be cowed. The Muskrats had a name for them, which becomes the title of Lewis’s book. They were blockers

Tim Adams, Observer

Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State sets out to give a ground-level view of how the nine-or-so months of the DOGE revolution played out for the people cast as the ancien régime: the ordinary bureaucrats who suddenly found themselves part of the ‘deep state’ ... For future historians trying to understand the fractious and chaotic era we’re living through today, Blockers is likely to become an invaluable source

Malcom Kyeyun, UnHerd

A roller coaster… reads like a political thriller… [Michael Lewis] has an unfailing eye for the image that nails the emotional undercurrent of a scene

Laura Miller, Slate

Engrossing and enraging…Blockers is a warning that our politicization of everything is a tremendous curse and a reminder that, especially in a country of the size and complexity and power of the United States, there is much that government does, or should do, that ought to be quietly nonpartisan

Tim Wu, New York Times