The Truth About the Federal Workforce: They’re Incredible!

In 2018 Michael Lewis published an excellent book titled The Fifth Risk
that attempted to explain to President Donald Trump—or, failing that, to everybody else—that the 2.2 million civilians who make up the federal bureaucracy perform vitally necessary and criminally underappreciated work. Lewis is a popular author, but I was still surprised to see The Fifth Risk make the New York Times bestseller list, because not even liberals take much interest in how the administrative state works. After the book came out, The Washington Post and The New York Times reviewed The Fifth Risk favorably, but neither followed through on the book’s implicit message that newspapers ought to expand their coverage of the administrative state and the people who populate it.

The Post’s indifference to the nuts and bolts of policymaking at the agency level is not new. For decades it was a source of great frustration to my mentor, the late Charles Peters, founder and editor-in-chief of The Washington Monthly—a magazine dedicated to shining a flashlight into dark corners of the federal bureaucracy and considering, in a practical and public-minded spirit, how its gears and pistons could operate more smoothly. It was Charlie’s view that had the Post been more engaged in covering the 280,000 or so bureaucrats situated inside the Washington metropolitan area—no small part of the Post’s target audience—then he never would have had much reason, in 1969, to create the Monthly.

Now David Shipley, opinion editor at the Post, is addressing that longstanding deficit by running a series of seven lengthy profiles of civil servants, all by brand-name writers, all under the rubric “Who Is Government?” Shipley hired Lewis to oversee the project, and Lewis contributed the first profile, about Chris Mark, a “principal strata control specialist” who works in the Pittsburgh office of the Mine Safety and Health Administration. Sounds boring, no? It may be the best magazine piece I read this year, except it ran in a newspaper, the Post. Mark devised a novel method to keep rooves from collapsing in underground coal mines, one that Lewis describes in a lively manner that’s very detailed yet accessible to non-engineers. Thanks to Mark’s efforts, 2016 became (in Lewis’s words) “the first year in recorded history that zero underground coal miners were killed by falling roofs.” It was no fluke. There were also no deaths from roof falls in 2018, 2019, and 2020. During the past three years, four coal miners were killed by falling roofs, which is four too many. But compare that to 1968, when 89 miners were killed in 82 roof falls.

Casey Cep of The New Yorker wrote the second profile, of Ron Walters, acting undersecretary for memorial affairs at the Veterans Administration. That one, I have to admit, was a much less compelling read. But when writing about somebody whose superpower is customer service—as Walters’ apparently is—it’s very hard for the result not to read like an airline-magazine puffer. Still, I’m glad to learn that Walters made his agency maximally attentive to the needs of grieving families, which is obviously quite important, and plenty of Post readers will relate to the managerial challenges Cep describes.

The third profile, by Dave Eggers, was about a team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, or JPL, in Pasadena, and it was a delight, full of infectious enthusiasm for this golden age of astrophysics that humankind has stumbled into. Still to come are profiles by W. Kamau Bell (Justice Department antitrust division), Sarah Vowell (National Archives), Geraldine Brooks (the Internal Revenue Service), and, most mouth-wateringly (at least to me), John Lanchester on the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I very much hope the Post will collect these pieces, perhaps add five or six more, and publish them in book form, where readers might find them easier to digest.

Why do these stories go untold? It isn’t only because newspaper editors presume that federal bureaucrats and the work they do is boring. It’s also because the bureaucrats do their level best to sound boring whenever a reporter comes within 10 miles of them. Eggers wrote in his NASA piece:

No one at JPL — no one I met, at least — was willing to take credit for anything…. There was such a relentless emphasis on teams and groups and predecessors, and such a deep unwillingness from anyone to put themselves forward, or to talk too much, or above all take credit for anything.

That isn’t just modesty. People who work in the government know you can get into a lot of trouble talking to a reporter. Civil servants are supposed to be invisible; if anybody at a federal agency is going to interact with the press, it’s a political appointee, preferably one who works in the press office, whose job is to scrub away every conceivable item of interest before making information public. The fiction that governs Cabinet and independent agencies is that anything that happens there is the personal handiwork of the Cabinet secretary of agency director.

If nothing else, “Who Is Government” is remarkable not only for getting civil servants to speak to reporters, and not only for getting them to speak on the record, but for getting them to speak on the record about themselves—and even to be photographed! When I wrote an essay for this magazine two years ago defending the people who populate the Deep State (“Washington Is Not A Swamp”), I relied mostly on sources who’d recently retired from government service. If memory serves, so did Lewis in The Fifth Risk. But each of the principals in the Post series, at least so far, has been someone who still resides within the civil service.

What’s changed? Partly, as Lewis points out in his Mark profile, the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service helped pry open the oyster by creating an annual series of prizes (“the Sammies”) to award civil servants who excel. (In a New Yorker dispatch last week, Cep called it “the Oscars for the Deep State.”) Partly, too, I suspect, agency chiefs are starting to get wise that hiding civil servants’ light under a bushel will only help Donald Trump, should he be re-elected, re-impose Schedule F, his plan (which last time never quite got off the ground) to strip job protections from civil servants and re-establish the famously corrupt spoils system of the late 19^th century. Trump is pathologically eager to do this. “Either the Deep State destroys America,” Trump said at a rally last year, “or we destroy the Deep State.”

At a September 11 panel discussion that the Post hosted on “Who Is Government?,” Brooks, who before she became a novelist was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, said that IRS commissioner Daniel Werfel let her know right away that he was well aware his agency had a particularly keen image problem. “I knew that he would get what we were trying to do,” Brooks said. “It was very easy to explain this… ‘It’s for the opinion section. We have a strong point of view here. The strong point of view is we want to defend government. You describe yourself as iconically unpopular. Let me help you.’”

“The Post should own this market,” Lewis chimed in, echoing Charlie Peters. “I mean, the Times should not own this market. The Post should own this market. If the Post is going to flourish in the future, it will have to own this market and not run away from it.” I agree (with the caveat that you should also subscribe to The Washington Monthly, still walking this beat under the editorship of Paul Glastris, where I have been a contributing editor since 1985).

The point, let me emphasize, is not that reporters should portray every federal worker as a hero. Rather, they should strive to portray federal workers as plausible human beings. Like anyplace else, a government agency is a cross-section of humanity. Sometimes you’ll encounter a manager who’s unreasonably resistant to positive change. Sometimes you’ll encounter a malingerer or an incompetent or an opportunist or just a flat-out prick. Lewis depicted such complexities in his 2021 book The Premonition, a sort of sequel to The Fifth Risk that’s about the internal bureaucratic obstacles, especially within the Centers for Disease Control, that right-minded public health officials had to battle during the Covid epidemic. The point is that these are interesting people performing all sorts of tasks of which you are very likely unaware.

What the press needs to grasp—and which Trump never will—is that the federal government is neither intrinsically good nor intrinsically bad. That ridiculous binary has formed the basis of most political discussion for four decades. Government is a tool that can be used for good or ill—depending to a great degree, yes, on who is president—but depending also on the invisible people who work well below, most of them (in my experience) smarter and more public-spirited than you’ll find most other places. The last thing we need to do is dismantle the civil service. As voters, it’s our duty to elect leaders who will support it and inspire it to do its best work. A good start is to find out what exactly it is these people do. As the Post is demonstrating in this fine series, the answer will very often be much more interesting and important than you imagined.