'There are bombs at the end of the fuse': Michael Lewis on DOGE's dangerous cuts
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The author of The Big Short, who spotted the 2008 financial crisis before it hit, warns that Elon Musk's government cuts are creating dangerous systemic risks – and Americans won't realise the damage until it's too late.
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Read time: 4 minutes
In brief:
- Michael Lewis, author of ‘The Big Short’ and ‘Who is Government?’ warns that Elon Musk fundamentally misunderstood how government works in his DOGE role.
- Lewis traces current distrust to Reagan-era messaging that the government is "there to kill you, not help you," combined with Americans not facing serious existential crises that would make them appreciate the government's protective role.
- Lewis predicts the cuts will cause the government to "perform worse and worse" until real consequences force Americans to recognise what essential services they've lost.
What’s the story?
The Trump administration, with the implementation of DOGE, has “lit fuses,” and Michael Lewis has a stark warning for what’s about to come as a result.
“There are bombs on the other end of the fuse, it's just a question of how long the fuse is before it gets to the bomb,” he says.
Michael Lewis, the American author best known for writing The Big Short and Moneyball, has extensive knowledge of the damage caused by DOGE, a new ‘department of government efficiency’ created by Donald Trump and led by Elon Musk to cut government spending and waste.
He researched extensively the stories of government workers who no one knows, but who make decisions that are consequential, and often beneficial, to everyday Americans, for his new book ‘Who is Government?’
And although he started writing it before DOGE was created, the book captures the zeitgeist of America today as it explores the tension between the valuable work such workers carry out and the public perception of them, due to an erosion of trust in the government.
Lewis says what started as a meme - that there is a ‘deep state’ - has become what people in America actually believe, and that’s “dangerous”.
“It's gone from being a trope in politics to people actually behaving as if the government doesn't matter, or it's bad, or it's the enemy of the people - and it's so the opposite,” Lewis tells Emily Maitlis on The News Agents.
Why has DOGE got the civil service all wrong?
Lewis initially came across the stories of civil service workers whilst researching for his book ‘The Fifth Risk,’ which examines the transition and political appointments of the first Donald Trump presidency.
“When I went into the first Trump administration and started opening the lid on various government departments, I was shocked.”
Lewis describes the civil service as essential for managing risks private sectors avoid, for example, being responsible for stopping a nuclear bomb going off.
“The perception of what it is is so different from the reality.”
“When you know what they do, you can't believe anybody would attack them. They're like heroes,” he adds.
And while Lewis admits there is waste in government - he believes Musk was looking in all the wrong places, and the cuts he made through DOGE “heightened these risks.”
"Elon Musk, when he went into the government, did not understand how the government worked.
“What they've cut, you can argue a lot of it isn't waste. The numbers are trivial.”
Musk ended up cutting approximately a few billion dollars from government spending, far less than the 2 trillions he said he would achieve.
As the bomb at the end of the fuse Trump has lit draws closer, Lewis points to examples of negative things that have already happened as a result of the cuts.
“There was a tornado that ripped through a town in Kentucky and killed a bunch of people a few weeks ago, right after DOGE had eliminated the tornado wet warning system in Kentucky,” he says.
“Oddly, the population is not really making the connection between what they've disabled in the government and what might happen to them.”
His hope is that eventually things will be so mismanaged that people will “wake up” to the hard work the government actually does - but people will “take it for-granted” until it’s not working anymore.
Why did the public lose faith in the government?
“The Republican Party has been pounding this message for 40 years that the government is there to kill you, not help you,” Lewis says, blaming Reagan as the start of this narrative.
“This has been an incessant public relations campaign from one side that has so cowed the other side that nobody actually stands up and defends the government.”
But moreso, he argues that the public have lost faith in government because they’ve not had to rely on it in a big way for some time.
“We've lived through a period, historically, of extraordinary peace and prosperity. Yeah, there are little wars. Yeah, there are little financial crises, but the American people have not faced a serious existential risk,” Lewis says.
“COVID was close to where they actually felt like ‘I could die’ if it didn't work.”
He says people don’t turn to the government in the US unless there is a “crisis” and they want the government to “fix it”.
The pandemic, he thought, might have been the crisis to make the public open its eyes to the life-changing work the government does.
“But the pandemic didn't do it - it might have done it if it had been kids it was killing, as opposed to old people.”
Thinking about why this narrative towards the government has been allowed to flourish, Lewis concludes with a last warning; “I think it's because we can afford it.
“We can afford to think this way about our government - and the minute we can't, we won't.”
Listen to the latest episode of The News Agents.
