Social LibertySocial Liberty
← Back home

Heat of the Moment

After Tuesday's wipeout, anything that touched Trump will be thrown out together. DOGE began from a real question, how a country should produce its science, and that question is about to become unaskable.

Social Liberty Foundation ·
#election 2026#media#doge#elon musk#michael lewis#jon stewart#the daily show#blockers
+16
#civil service#francis collins#cystic fibrosis#nih#russell vought#sahil lavingia#nasa#spacex#cots#science funding#vannevar bush#terence kealey#longitude prize#john harrison#cystic fibrosis foundation#narrative war

Click to enlarge

Three days after the election, the phrase in every newsroom is the Trump wipeout. Democrats hold at least 54 Senate seats and a House majority that may run past 250, and the losing side has already begun the sorting that follows a rout. Whatever wore the president’s name is to be dropped, and whatever opposed it is to be vindicated. In the heat of the moment a party and a press don’t sort carefully. A bad method and a good question go into the same bin, because both arrived in the same truck.

DOGE will be the first thing in the bin. It was Elon Musk’s project, it was loud, it promised two trillion dollars and found a small fraction of that, much of it disputed, and by last November the director of the Office of Personnel Management was telling reporters it no longer existed as a unit. Few things in the administration are easier to reject whole.

Michael Lewis went on The Daily Show in October to talk with Jon Stewart about his new book, Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State, which follows seven civil servants who got in DOGE’s way. The conversation is worth watching in full, for what it shows and for what it can’t bring itself to ask.

What Lewis saw

Lewis came to the federal workforce by accident. When Trump fired his first transition team in 2016, some 550 people who were supposed to learn the government on his behalf, Lewis decided to learn it for his readers instead, and kept running into people working seventy-hour weeks for forty hours’ pay, chasing loose nuclear material, building the science of finding a person who has gone overboard at sea. They were, he says, “constitutionally incapable of telling their story,” and by now they assume that being noticed means trouble.

DOGE, in his telling, was a hostile takeover carried out by an “active ingredient” of young men aged nineteen to twenty-eight, engineers and fan-boys who mostly wanted to be near Musk. One scene in the book has a security guard at the U.S. Institute of Peace, a congressionally funded nonprofit that owns its own building, locking a wing of it on the DOGE team until the D.C. police arrive and march the guard out instead. Another has Francis Collins, who found the gene for cystic fibrosis in 1989 and ran the National Institutes of Health for twelve years, pushed out of his lab without ever learning who gave the order. Lewis’s chief suspect is Russell Vought, the budget director, who said in a 2023 speech that he wanted federal workers to be “traumatically affected,” and whose own child, Lewis says, has cystic fibrosis and lives on a drug descended from Collins’s work.

Most of this is true and much of it is damning. People who knew their work well were fired by people who didn’t know what the work was, often by email, sometimes by the loss of a badge at the door. Nobody doing the firing could have said which of the people leaving were the ones Lewis met. That’s the failure of a method that sorts by category instead of looking, and it would be a failure under any party.

The best moment in the interview isn’t about a victim. Sahil Lavingia, the founder of Gumroad, came into DOGE “with curiosity, not with contempt,” and after a few weeks told Fast Company that the government wasn’t as inefficient as he’d expected. He was gone the next day. Lewis and Stewart make a good bit of it, that you could survive almost anything at DOGE except saying the government works, and the audience laughs. It’s the one point in twenty minutes where the conversation touches the question underneath, and it passes by as a punch line.

The question underneath

Strip away the spite and the power grab, and DOGE grew out of a conviction held well beyond the Trump coalition: that much of what government does, and science above all, would be done better and cheaper by free markets than by public agencies, or at least on different terms. Musk believed it because he had lived it, and to his admirers he is living proof that private enterprise does space better than a “public” NASA. SpaceX is the standing exhibit. A private company now flies most of the world’s mass to orbit, lands its boosters, and carries NASA’s astronauts, while NASA’s own heavy rocket, the Space Launch System, has flown once and costs, by its inspector general’s 2022 estimate, about four billion dollars a launch.

The exhibit is more interesting than either side lets it be. SpaceX didn’t grow up outside government. It grew up on a NASA program, Commercial Orbital Transportation Services, begun in 2006, that changed the terms instead of the payer. NASA paid fixed sums for milestones reached, let the companies own their designs, and asked them to put up their own money too. SpaceX built Falcon 9 for roughly $300 million, and NASA’s own cost model, run the traditional way, said the same rocket should have cost about four billion. The agency was the customer in both cases. What changed was whether it bought results or paid for effort, cost-plus, with the overruns on the public.

Cystic fibrosis tells a story of the same shape. Stewart, hearing that Collins found the gene, adds “through government funding,” and Lewis answers “of course.” Collins’s lab was NIH-funded, and the gene was found jointly with Lap-Chee Tsui and John Riordan in Toronto. The drug that keeps people alive, though, came from Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and much of the early work was paid for by the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, a charity of patients’ families that put about $150 million into the search starting in 2000 and in 2014 sold its royalty rights for $3.3 billion, money it spends on more research. A public lab found the gene, a private company made the molecule, and a voluntary association of parents bet on it when neither government nor the market would move fast enough. “Of course” closes a story with at least three authors.

None of this is new. The postwar American arrangement, in which federal grants flow to university laboratories, comes almost entirely from one report, Vannevar Bush’s Science, the Endless Frontier of 1945, and was contested from the start. The British biochemist Terence Kealey argued in 1996 that state funding of science tends to displace private funding more than add to it. And before there was any federal science at all, the colonies’ leading scientific body, the American Philosophical Society, was a voluntary club Benjamin Franklin organized in Philadelphia in 1743.

The oldest version of the quarrel has a blocker in it too. In 1714 Parliament offered £20,000 to anyone who could find longitude at sea, and set up a Board of Longitude to judge. The winner, by any fair reading, was John Harrison, a Lincolnshire carpenter who built clocks that kept time on a rolling ship. The Board’s astronomers, led in time by the Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne, favored a method of their own, reckoning by the moon, and for years found reasons Harrison’s watches didn’t count. He was in his eighties when George III took his side and Parliament paid him most of what he was owed. The public prize drew out the invention, and the public experts nearly smothered it. Lewis’s title cuts both ways, since a blocker who stops a raid is also, in another decade, the one who sits on an idea from outside the guild.

What can’t be said on Comedy Central

Lewis ends on what he calls a narrative war. Republicans have told a story for decades that people in government are waste, fraud and abuse, and the other story, of what the government does, hasn’t been told. He’s right about the first story. But the second one, as told on Stewart’s stage, has the same form, with heroes in place of parasites. Both are stories about people. Neither is about the terms on which work gets done, who pays, who judges, what happens when a project runs late, and whether a fixed-price milestone or an open-ended grant gets more science per dollar. Those are the questions COTS answered one way and SLS another, and the ones DOGE handled with a blunt instrument, as when NIH capped the overhead it pays universities at fifteen percent in February 2025 and a federal judge stopped it. The negotiated rates had often run above fifty, and whether they should is a real question that the blunt cap was not an answer to.

A twenty-minute segment with an author on a book tour, on a comedy show, isn’t built to carry that. The format wants a villain and a hero and a laugh line, and it got all three. What a wipeout adds is permission. With Musk discredited, a fixed-price contract, a prize instead of a grant, or a charity’s venture fund will look like something only a Muskrat would propose, and the networks will have the guests to say so. The people Lewis admires would lose by that too, since the good ones in his book were, in their own departments, the reformers.

Lavingia, Lewis says, was rehired after DOGE washed out, and went back to work on something that let people file their taxes from a phone. The government was a little less inefficient than he’d been told, and he said so out loud, and the sentence cost him his job twice over: once to the people who couldn’t hear it from inside DOGE, and once to an audience that heard it only as proof DOGE had been a joke.

Sources

A note on how this piece was written: every argument, source, and structural decision in this essay is ours — we chose the examples, worked out the logic connecting them, and directed what each paragraph needed to say. The sentences themselves were drafted with AI assistance from that outline and then edited by hand. We’d rather say that plainly than have a reader guess at it.