Among its many innovations, The New Yorker turned the humble biographical sketch into “The Reporter at Large,” arresting prose that revealed what little-known people do and why their work matters. My own experience with the form began in high school English, where I profiled a bond-trading family friend under the headline “Buy Low, Sell High.” In Who Is Government?, Michael Lewis assembles a roster of celebrated authors to write profiles shining a light on obscure federal employees—advancing a simple thesis that these unsung officials are the backbone of America.

At a time when President Donald Trump is determined to shrink the federal workforce, investigating how these officials work and the worth of what they do is a potentially valuable project. Unfortunately, while all but one of the profiles are informative and elegantly etched, the book contributes little to a fair assessment of the government employees’ overall performance. First, the sample is tiny: seven portraits, plus a cameo for government statistics in general. Such a small, hand-chosen selection cannot fully illuminate a mammoth bureaucracy that numbers in the millions. The administrative state has become so vast that it is almost impossible to evaluate through personal stories, however compelling.

Second, the writers have chosen a very unrepresentative group. For instance, the substantial focus is on those who gather and disseminate information. One of these essays covers the information the government produces in general, like employment and inflation statistics. In another, we meet Pamela Wright, an employee of the National Archives who digitizes census information so it can be more easily used in the hinterlands, including her native Montana. A third profile, Heather Stone, who runs a clearing house for the FDA that catalogues off-label uses of drugs that may cure rare diseases.  

Information production is a classic public good. It is undersupplied by the market, because once published, the information is hard to restrict and thus profit from.  Yet the dissemination of such matters as price and wage statistics or information about drugs that help cure obscure diseases has obvious positive externalities. And not only are they valuable, they do not impose substantial costs on anyone, unlike government regulations, but just add pennies to our tax bills. What’s not to like?

But even with seemingly unobjectionable government functions, the writers skate over difficult issues posed by the work their subjects do. For instance, the chapter about government statistics does not even mention the most substantial way that the government systematically misrepresents the state of our economy. Many economists think that the government understates growth, because it does not capture the accelerating technological improvements in goods; a cellular phone today may cost as much as one ten years ago, but its capabilities are far greater. And recently, economists have calculated that certain free goods, such as Facebook and other social media platforms, have also boosted real economic growth substantially, although they do not even show up in the statistics. This distortion matters: it creates an illusion of stagnation and feeds politicians’ claims that America is in relative decline from the boom post-WWII years. Maybe it is not an accident that government workers tend to statistically slight the accomplishments of the private sector, of which they are not a part.

Many of the remaining jobs portrayed are somewhat eccentric. One chapter focuses on a team building a coronagraph, an instrument used in conjunction with a space-based telescope, such as the ones named for NASA executives James Webb or Nancy Grace Roman. The device blocks out the brighter light from nearby stars to reveal more distant and fainter stars and structures. This project, too, might be described as gathering information to advance basic science–the positive externalities of discovering new galaxies or exoplanets are less clear than curing disease or gauging the employment rate, but increasing such knowledge can be defended as a form of civic flourishing.

But here, too, the profile’s author, Dave Eggers, glides past the less flattering facts surrounding his chosen agency. NASA has been shrinking, because presidents of both parties have concluded that private enterprise does a better job of supplying the infrastructure for outer space exploration than the state. As Law & Liberty contributing editor G. Patrick Lynch has written before, SpaceX, a for-profit company created by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has revolutionized rocketry and has taken over the trips to our manned space stations. Eggers never mentions that it will be this private company that will launch the Roman Telescope into the heavens. Worse still, Eggers insists, “This work is paid for by you; no billionaire would bankroll it—there’s no profit in it,” a claim belied by the philanthropic billions already pouring into science and health services with no expectation of personal return.

The most glowing write-up in the entire volume is that given to Ronald Waters, the principal deputy undersecretary for Memorial Affairs. That title is Washington-speak for tending to the burial and cemeteries of our nation’s veterans. It is an honorable calling, and Walters seems to be one of nature’s noblemen, but again, it is a very unusual kind of work in the vastness of American bureaucracy.

And it has something in common with the other jobs described above: it steps on no one’s toes and is not much touched by ideological disputes. If gathering information, studying the stars, and caring for veterans’ cemeteries were all or even most of what the government did, the administrative state would be far less controversial than it is. But, of course, the administrative state does a lot more than that.  It generates thousands of ideologically controversial regulations with which citizens and companies must comply. No doubt some of this is necessary, but the challenging questions are how much and whether government employees are sufficiently sensitive to the fellow citizens who spin the wheels of commerce that pay their salaries. The book does not shed light on these issues.

Oddly, the collection profiles only one government employee who works for a rulemaking agency, the Department of Labor. But that employee, Christopher Marks, also does not impose binding rules on industry. Instead, he worked out a formula for calculating how much support mine shafts needed for their roofs—a formula that mining companies may choose to use or not. Again, his work is best seen as information-generating. The argument for government provision is that coal companies might not have incentives to do this work themselves, because it may be hard to profit from. 

But this last point is controversial. As the writer Michael Lewis acknowledges, an economic historian has suggested that the real barrier to making roofs safer was the learning curve to use bolts to shore them up, and that the market naturally solved the problem over time, given that mining companies did not want expensive tunnel collapses any more than workers. Unfortunately, while Lewis has a skeptical attitude toward this theory, he does not provide any reason that it is not true. In a similar vein, Charles Murray has argued that the rate of accidents in the workplace declined at the same rate both before and after the establishment of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration. Greater wealth and more know-how, not government bureaucracy, reduced accidents.  

The one worker who clearly encroaches on the activities of others is Jarood Koopman of the Internal Revenue Service. But he is a cyber sleuth who unearths financial fraud and schemes to evade taxes. The criminals he helps catch rightly deserve little sympathy, unlike legitimate businesses which bear much of the brunt of government regulation.

All eight essays are superbly crafted and, like the best New Yorker profiles, provide the reader with a sense of what it would be like to be a colleague of these employees. The one exception is an essay by Kamau Bell, who writes about a paralegal who has just joined the Department of Justice’s antitrust division. The first problem is his choice of such a neophyte, which is hard to explain except that the paralegal is a goddaughter of his who hopes to be a social activist. Bell tells us almost nothing about what an antitrust paralegal actually does, substitutes first-name testimonials for evidence, and treats “fighting monopolies” as an unalloyed public good. Yet antitrust punishes only the abuse, not the mere possession of market power, and, as the Supreme Court reminds us, the prospect of monopoly profits is the spark that ignites innovation. By ignoring those trade-offs, Bell’s essay crystallizes the book’s larger defect: it invites us to cheer government in the abstract while averting our eyes from the hard arithmetic of costs, incentives, and unintended consequences that any serious accounting of the administrative state demands.

All nine essays also share a glaring omission: none confront the algorithmic elephant now charging through the administrative state that is artificial intelligence. No force is better designed to displace some of the very callings these writers celebrate—statistical clerks, archival digitizers, and government paralegals—than machine learning systems already scraping data, structuring case files, and drafting legal summaries in milliseconds. The Department of Government Efficiency’s question in any audit is now brutally simple: can a stack of silicon outperform a bevy of GS-12s? By refusing to reckon with that prospect, the book reproduces bureaucracy’s oldest vice—looking backward rather than forward and downplaying the private innovation that has made America great.