Michael Lewis is one of my favorite non-fiction writers. I’ve written about Boomerang and Flash Boys here before.

Lewis builds his stories, and the points he’s going to make, around a deep exploration of individuals. Sometimes the entire book is focused on one person, like Sam Bankman-Fried in Going Infinite, or built around one, like Billy Beane in Moneyball. In Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State, he goes deep on six.

• Colin O’Brien, the chief security officer at the U.S. Institute of Peace, who locked DOGE out of his building. He lasted eight weeks. DOGE had no legal authority over the institute, and he refused to hand it over, so on March 17, 2025, police escorted him out, and he was fired along with most of the institute’s staff.
• Tim Curry, a deputy associate director at the Office of Personnel Management, who refereed disputes between federal managers, their employees, and the unions. He lasted about five weeks. After 36 years in federal human resources, he retired in late February 2025, right after the “What did you do last week?” email ordered every federal employee to send five bullets on what they had accomplished.
• Kathleen Walters, the head of the IRS privacy office. She lasted about ten weeks. At the end of March 2025, she resigned rather than help hand taxpayer data to the Department of Homeland Security, which she believed broke the law. She left weeks before she would have qualified for lifetime retirement benefits.
• Alex Maranghides, a fire researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology who spent his career studying how wildfires burn into neighborhoods. He lasted the longest, about 15 months. The administration cut NIST’s budget in half, and he quit at the end of April 2026, at 56 and exhausted.
• Francis Collins, the former director of the National Institutes of Health, who led the Human Genome Project. In 1989, his lab co-discovered the gene that causes cystic fibrosis. There is still no cure, but that discovery led to drugs that treat the underlying cause of the disease for about 90% of people with it and have greatly extended their life expectancy. He lasted less than six weeks and was forced to retire on February 28, 2025. Who pushed him out isn’t clear, so Lewis writes the chapter as a whodunit, with Russell Vought, whose own daughter has cystic fibrosis, among the suspects.
• Sahil Lavingia, a software engineer who joined DOGE at the Department of Veterans Affairs. He lasted 55 days. DOGE fired him in May 2025 after he told Fast Company that the government was “not as inefficient as I was expecting.” He later came back to work on the IRS’s computer systems.

Almost two years after the débâcle that was DOGE began, Blockers makes it clear that one of the goals was the mass destruction of the federal civilian workforce, and fear among whoever was left. Five of Lewis’ six had spent their careers in public service and knew exactly how their part of the government worked. All five were gone within 15 months, and four of them were gone within ten weeks. Everyone else got the message.

Blockers pairs well with Who Is Government?, the 2025 anthology that came out of a Washington Post series Lewis led. He invited a group of his favorite writers to each find someone doing an interesting job for the government and write about them. Who Is Government? is about the work, while Blockers is about what happened to the people doing it once DOGE showed up.

Lewis did a great job here. He makes you care about each of these six people, then shows you exactly what DOGE and the new administration did to them.