Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State by Michael Lewis -- Doge's wrecking ball

Early into Elon Musk's chainsaw massacre of the US government last year, he appeared on Fox News to share his progress. His "Department of Government Efficiency" was making big strides towards its goal of cutting $2tn in federal spending, he said.

One of his examples was the US Institute of Peace -- a quasi-government body on a modest $55mn yearly grant. Having stormed USIP's building with the help of police and FBI agents, and then scoured its databases, Doge staff had exposed several cases of alleged waste, fraud and abuse. The most egregious of these was $675,000 for "private aviation services". This was in fact the cost of an emergency charter plane to extract more than 200 Afghan staff and their families from Kabul as it was falling to the Taliban.

One of the other items was a $132,000 payment to an "ex-Taliban member". The man had been an invaluable supplier of on-the-ground Afghanistan intelligence. Musk outed him, which led to the Taliban rounding up and arresting dozens of his relatives. Doge's other three citations were also small and misrepresented.

Compared to the wreckage Doge visited on America's aid budget, or the Department of Education, the USIP example is a rounding error. Yet Doge's upending of the still-shuttered, now renamed, Donald J Trump Institute of Peace is emblematic of his raid on the federal bureaucracy in general.

For all its sound and fury, Doge achieved no meaningful cuts. Taking its false economies into account, Doge might even have added to the US deficit. Yet as Michael Lewis sets out in his commendable new book, Blockers, the effects of Doge's 18-week storm will be felt for years to come.

The book's title comes from Musk's moniker for career civil servants who balked at Doge's often lawbreaking demands (for example, to hand over private taxpayer, social security and other data that are protected by statute). "The blocker," writes Lewis, "was the person who didn't understand progress. The person without vision . . . The person who didn't want to live on Mars or possibly even care if anyone ever got there."

The typical Doge employee, by contrast, was "a twenty-five-year-old tech guy dying to breathe the same air as Elon Musk and only just now grokking the fact that the United States government had three branches."

One of those, Jeremy Lewin, 28, who got the job because he had a friend at Musk's company Tesla, was put in charge of shutting down USAID. Having mothballed that agency, Lewin was appointed by Marco Rubio to run the US state department's policy planning unit, a job once held by George Kennan, the godfather of US cold war strategy. The average "Muskrat", as Doge employees became known, wore skinny jeans, T-shirt and carried backpacks filled with iPhones and laptops. The more of those they accumulated, the higher their status. A bag loaded with Apple products displayed the tally of government departments you had penetrated, since each issues their own phone and laptop to employees. When Doge employees emailed for guidance, the standard response from Steve Davis, Musk's top lieutenant, was, "PILLAGE!".

The only unforgivable sin was to find something good about government. This was the fate that befell Sahil Lavingia, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, who was sent by Musk to shake up the sprawling Veterans Administration. Expecting to find huge waste and a demoralised workforce, Lavingia encountered motivated civil servants on tight budgets. Then he made the cardinal error of being quoted in a magazine saying that he had been expecting easy wins but had been surprised by the purpose he found -- in the VA's case, providing healthcare to millions of former soldiers. Lavingia was fired that day from Doge. "As a Doge member, you could get away with saying -- or having said -- almost anything," Lewis observes. "What you couldn't say is that the government actually sort of worked."

Lavingia was the rare type who caught the bug of wanting to help with genuine reform of government. After being fired by Doge, he applied to join the Internal Revenue Service. Though the agency operates on notoriously outdated IT, Lavingia feels that the agency is "kind of a bargain". The IRS spends 34 cents for every $100 it collects in revenue.

One of the agency's biggest recent changes had been to set up "direct file", which allowed taxpayers with uncomplicated returns to file easily and for free on IRS software. It got rave reviews. Donald Trump scrapped the service last year after commercial tax preparers, notably H&R Block and TurboTax, spent millions lobbying against it.

Had Doge been anything close to what it claimed to be -- a vehicle for improved, streamlined government -- they would have lionised IRS's direct file. They would also have retained good civil servants and fired bad ones. By offering severance to every federal employee, Doge triggered the exit of those who could get private sector offers -- the ones with the most skill and expertise.

Lewis's story ought to have a happy ending. When Musk fell out with Trump, who called him a "big-time drug addict", his party of latter-day Vikings vanished overnight from DC along with him. "It felt like the fall of Saigon," one recalled.

But the deconstruction of the administrative state goes on under the quieter and more watchful eye of Russell Vought, Trump's White House budget director. Vought's aim is to so badly demoralise federal bureaucrats that he puts them "in trauma". Those who want to know about how this is being done and what is at stake should read Lewis's exemplary volume.

Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State by Michael Lewis WW Norton & Company $29.99/Allen Lane £25, 256 pages

Edward Luce is the FT's US national editor

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