S2 Ep1005: Michael Lewis: Government Workers Aren't the Corrupt Ones

The Bulwark Podcast

The Bulwark

Politics, News, News Commentary

4.6 • 8.9K Ratings

🗓️ 21 March 2025

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Trump loves to complain about the deep state while Elon claims he's rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse with all his mass firings. But DOGE should be looking higher up the food chain to target the graft: for example, the South African immigrant whose car company would not have gotten off the ground without the taxpayer money he still collects. In contrast, government workers are mainly mission-driven and they're not in it for the money. Michael's new collection of essays takes a look at some of the characters who populate our federal workforce, including people performing small miracles without fame and glory. Plus, the risk of Trump politicizing economic data and his plan to destroy whatever trust people still have in the government.

Michael Lewis—and Sarah Vowell, who profiled a record keeper at the National Archives for the new book—join Tim Miller for the weekend pod.
show notes

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey guys, just a couple programming notes. There are two news stories that me and my colleagues have our
0:03.9	hair on fire about, and I did not get to them on this podcast. I'm going to direct you to where you can find
0:10.0	our scorch not takes. For me, it is the continued revelations around the men that we have sent to this
0:19.6	barbarous El Salvador prison camp and the fact that
0:24.4	according to their lawyers, at least a few of them actually had not done anything illegally,
0:30.0	were here legally under the Venezuelan temporary protected status and were sent wrongfully
0:36.0	based on a misunderstanding of their tattoos or a government that
0:40.5	doesn't care or it's being intentionally cruel.
0:43.0	You know, we will find out the reasoning.
0:45.2	But it is just so sick and so un-American.
0:48.0	I did a 11-minute rant about this when my blood was boiling hot last night.
0:53.5	You can get that either on our YouTube
0:54.9	feed or now we're turning these into a podcast as well. Search for bulwark takes in your podcast
1:00.9	feed. Subscribe to that feed and then you can see it's under the headline breaking the new news
1:05.8	about the El Salvador deportations. So on addition to that, Adrian Keroskiyo in his newsletter for us huddled masses
1:12.6	writes about this tattoo issue and gives you some historical examples of how the government
1:17.9	has screwed this up before, misunderstanding the tattoos of the people that they're detaining.
1:22.7	So please go read that as well. One other thing, George Conway, his hair was on fire over Paul Weiss,
1:28.9	this law firm's capitulation to Donald Trump. Trump extorted them. It's a complicated story,
1:34.8	but essentially that an executive order that was going to target the firm because of their work
1:38.9	on some of the investigations against Trump, the head of Paul Weiss went to the White House,
1:44.0	groveled, cut some deal
	...

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