Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Elon Musk had a pet name for the civil servants he encountered during his shambolic DOGE purge: “the blockers.” People he deemed lacking in vision and oblivious to progress. People like Tim Curry at the Office of Personnel Management and Kathleen Walters at the IRS. People who knew well the powerful government they had served faithfully for decades, who understood the complex processes required to run their divisions with an efficiency that the “Muskrats,” as Lewis dubs Musk's cohorts, couldn’t begin to comprehend, much less replicate. The mission of DOGE was destruction—simplistic in its aim, diabolical in its methods. Musk’s henchmen pounced with a swaggering lawlessness, exuding a brazen, sometimes vindictive, animosity towards the individuals and institutions in their crosshairs. No one explains the mind-numbing minutiae of the federal government better than Lewis (Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service, 2025). Through vibrant profiles and sparkling anecdotes, Lewis tells the stories of those frontline yet behind-the-scenes employees who served as a bulwark against the Trump administration’s punitive and retributive plans to undermine the government it is responsible for. “Heroic” may be an overused term, yet Lewis explicitly demonstrates why it is the most apt description of the selfless dedication of a federal workforce under attack by its own leadership.