Michael Lewis’s new book, Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State, puts six portraits of federal workers at the center of DOGE’s early push into government records. The book says those workers faced access demands for sensitive data, and in one case the fight centered on information tied to 7 million taxpayers.
Lewis has built books around complicated systems before, from Moneyball to The Blind Side and The Big Short. Here, the system is the federal workforce, and the immediate effect is narrower but sharper: civil servants who tried to keep data and operations in place were cast as obstacles to a campaign to cut government spending.
Six portraits, two agencies
One chapter profiles the head of security at the United States Institute of Peace. Another follows an official at the IRS who locked herself in a darkened conference room to avoid Gavin Kliger, who wanted confidential information on 7 million taxpayers. Lewis says Elon Musk liked to slap the label “Blocker” on anyone trying to stand in the way of that spending campaign.
The structure matters because Lewis is not writing a single-agency account. He divides the book across six portraits, turning the conflict into a series of close-range encounters rather than a broad policy summary. Readers looking for the immediate stakes get them in the form of records, access, and who gets to see what.
Alexander Maranghides and NIST cuts
One of those portraits is Alexander Maranghides, a naturalized citizen originally from Greece who worked at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. He specialized in firefighting in the wildland–urban interface and retired in his late 50s.
The budget backdrop is blunt: the second Trump administration cut the institute’s budget by half. Lewis writes that Howard Lutnick, who became secretary of commerce and oversees the institute, made no protest after the cut.
DOGE, data, and the work itself
Lewis describes DOGE as having 20-year-olds with no professional experience demanding access to tranches of sensitive data and firing people whose jobs they could not understand. He writes that the civil servants on the other side were competent people who had left private-sector jobs to make government work.
That contradiction runs through the book’s account of DOGE and the people it targeted. Lewis portrays the agency as pushing deep into data systems while the workers it portrayed as “Blockers” were often trying to protect basic institutional functions, from security to taxpayer records to the technical work at National Institute of Standards and Technology.
The unresolved issue is how much of Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State comes from direct access to the agencies and workers it describes. For readers, the practical takeaway is simpler: Lewis is treating DOGE not as a slogan, but as a force that reached into records, budgets, and the day-to-day work of federal civil servants.
