Since Liar’s Poker in 1989, Michael Lewis has made a career of finding the people inside institutions most readers rarely think about, from bond traders and baseball executives to the analysts who saw the housing crash coming.
His newest book turns to Washington.
In Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State, Lewis profiles federal employees who found themselves in the path of the Department of Government Efficiency, the Trump administration initiative closely associated with Elon Musk. Lewis comes to Coral Gables on Monday, Oct. 12, to discuss the book with Miami’s own Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist Dave Barry.
The Books & Books event begins at 7 p.m. at Coral Gables Congregational United Church of Christ, 3010 De Soto Blvd. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. Tickets are required, and each admits one guest and includes a copy of Blockers, which carries a $29.99 list price. Additional copies will be available for purchase.
The people DOGE called ‘blockers’
The title comes from a term Lewis says Musk used for federal employees seen as standing in the way of DOGE’s objectives.
Lewis found six of them.
They include public servants responsible for protecting taxpayer information, enforcing government personnel rules, reducing wildfire risks and advancing biomedical research. Rather than writing broadly about the federal workforce, Lewis builds the book around individual people who believed their work served purposes the government could not simply abandon.
That approach puts Blockers on familiar Lewis territory: obscure institutions, complicated systems and the people inside them who understand how those systems actually work.
One of the book’s central figures is Kathleen Walters, a former senior Internal Revenue Service executive responsible for protecting taxpayer information. Walters told CBS News that she resisted requests involving taxpayer information sought by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and ultimately resigned. ICE later said its requests involved individuals under criminal investigation. CBS reported that the Treasury Department’s inspector general subsequently found that ICE had not met safeguarding standards, while federal courts have ruled that aspects of the IRS data-sharing process violated taxpayer privacy protections. The Trump administration has maintained that it acted lawfully.
DOGE’s record remains contested
The book arrives amid continuing argument over DOGE’s accomplishments and methods.
Musk initially said the effort could produce at least $2 trillion in savings. An August report from the Government Accountability Office found that some savings figures published on DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts” were incorrect or lacked sufficient supporting evidence and said the site did not adequately disclose limitations in its methodology. The watchdog did not conclude that every DOGE savings claim was overstated.
Administration officials have defended the broader effort as the beginning of longer-term changes in how government operates. Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor has described DOGE as a catalyst for efficiency reforms being institutionalized across government.
Lewis is interested in something larger than the accounting.
In his CBS interview, he argued that Americans who say they distrust government often underestimate the extent to which they depend on public institutions, from the safety of drinking water to commercial aviation. His book asks readers to consider what happens when the employees who understand those systems are treated primarily as obstacles.
Familiar Lewis territory
Early reviews have been enthusiastic.
Book Marks currently gives Blockers its highest overall designation, “Rave,” based on its first three reviews, from The New York Times Book Review, Slate and Booklist. Reviewers have praised Lewis’s ability to turn federal bureaucracy into narrative and individual civil servants into recognizable characters rather than abstractions.
The book also returns Lewis to ground he explored in The Fifth Risk, his 2018 examination of federal agencies and the largely invisible work performed inside them.
It is a subject well suited to the writer who made subprime mortgages gripping in The Big Short and transformed baseball statistics into drama in Moneyball: complicated systems explained through the people who know them from the inside.
Dave Barry joins the conversation
Barry gives the evening a distinctly South Florida counterweight.
The longtime Miami writer won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for commentary and is the author of numerous bestsellers, including Swamp Story and Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up. His 2025 memoir, Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass: How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up, looked back on a career built largely around refusing to behave with appropriate seriousness.
His official biography still describes him as a syndicated columnist best known for his booger jokes.
Putting him across from Lewis gives Books & Books an interviewer capable of taking the policy seriously without requiring the evening itself to remain solemn.
