The Bulwark Daily
The Bulwark Daily

Michael Lewis: Don't Bet Against the Country

October 6, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

Michael Lewis: The People Who Could Save Government—If We Let Them

Michael Lewis's new book Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State arrives at a moment when the federal government has been systematically hollowed out—and the author of Moneyball, The Big Short, and The Fifth Risk wants readers to understand something counterintuitive: the civil servants being driven out are often the very people the country most needs. In conversation with Tim Miller on The Bulwark Daily, Lewis walks through the mechanisms of how the Trump administration's assault on government actually works, who gets hurt, and why he still refuses to bet against the country.

The Doge Experiment and the One Person Who Got Fired

Lewis tells the story of Sahil Lavingia, a successful entrepreneur who joined the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) wanting to fix the IRS—to turn it into an app. Instead, Doge sent him to the Veterans Affairs department, where he found a young staffer blindly cutting contracts by searching for keywords like "gender" or "bias." The kid looked up and said, "Thank God you're here, because man, I don't know if I should be doing this."

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What you'll learn

  • 1 (01:14) **Introduction & Host Commentary** - Tim Miller opens the show with a sale announcement and then delivers a monologue on Trump's recent speech and the state of the 2024 election.
  • 2 (08:34) **Babbel Ad Read** - Tim Miller reads a sponsored segment for the language learning app Babbel.
  • 3 (10:44) **Introducing Michael Lewis & The Katrina Prologue** - Lewis is introduced, and the conversation begins with a personal anecdote about New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, setting up a metaphor for government stagnation.
  • 4 (15:39) **The Rebirth of American Government vs. The "Fifth Risk"** - Lewis argues that while the federal government feels stagnant and kludgy, the underlying society is still vital, making a rebirth more plausible than the rebirth of New Orleans.
  • 5 (20:35) **The DOGE Story: Sahil Lavingia & The IRS** - Lewis tells the hopeful story of Sahil Lavingia, a successful tech entrepreneur who joined DOGE to fix the IRS but was fired for telling the truth about government efficiency.
  • 6 (27:10) **The Water Fountain Metaphor & The Self-Deport Strategy** - Lewis describes Sahil’s attempt to fix a broken water fountain in his new IRS office, using it as a metaphor for the spirit of problem-solving that is still alive in government.
  • 7 (30:10) **Is Elon Musk a Good Manager?** - Tim Miller and Lewis question whether Elon Musk’s success with SpaceX translates to being a good manager of an enterprise like Twitter or the federal government.

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Guests on this episode

Tim Miller

Show Notes

Destroying trust in the government is one of Trump's key sources of power, but Michael reports from the front lines of the deep state that there still are good employees serving the public interest. In his new book, Michael celebrates some of the heroes who either managed to survive DOGE—or were stupidly pushed out despite the vital roles they filled. And the absolute failures of DOGE raise serious questions about how Elon could be trusted to run any enterprise. Plus: Trump sure sounded like he was inviting Iran to bomb two big blue cities, and Republicans are rushing money to South Carolina and a very GOP district in Kentucky. Seems like Tim and Bill were onto something with their long-shot midterms picks on Monday.

Michael Lewis joins Tim Miller.

show notes:

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