I posted some of this in another thread about this book in Elections but I don’t think that thread is going anywhere.
I got the book and finished it in one day. Michael Lewis is one of my favorite writers and I found this book very compelling.
It’s not really “another Trump book”. And it’s not about the transition, except for the first chapter. The quoted anecdotes about the transition are possibly the only direct mention of Trump in the book. (I’m guessing Chris Christie was the source behind those.)
The book is an exploration of the missions behind the various federal agencies (DOE, USDA, Dept of Commerce) that compose the “Deep State” and the ways in which they are being threatened by an incompetent executive branch. Lewis spends most of the book talking with administrators in these agencies, profiling them and describing their projects. Incredibly important stuff that no one ever thinks about.
For example, the USDA underwrites billions of dollars in loans for rural development. These loans are made to municipalities and private businesses for things like fire stations and medical clinics and water treatment and telecom in small towns and rural areas - services that are needed but aren’t necessarily profitable or low risk enough to attract private investment.
The thing is, the beneficiaries of these loans often don’t even know that they are getting a government loan. The loans are administered via banks, who identify applicants that qualify for these loans.
In the name of streamlining, this Rural Development program is being moved into the Office of the Secretary. The official Lewis interviewed suspects that they want to get their hands on the 200 billion dollar loan portfolio in order to sell it to their Wall Street friends. The program will become privatized and benefits will go to bankers instead of to the citizens that the programs are supposed to help.
There is a similar situation with happening with the vast amount of data accumulated by the Department of Commerce. This data is used heavily in weather forecasting, firefighting and farming applications. Private industry wants to restrict the free availability of this data as they greatly profit from applications that use this data. And it’s important, for example, if it weren’t for journalists poring through publicly available Medicare and Medicaid data we probably wold think even know we had an opioid epidemic.
The one thing that struck me was that the large majority of the vast number of programs that are being threatened exist to benefit areas that are typically very politically conservative. Because business and industry in urban areas have much better access to capital markets, a much larger tax base at the state and local level, and are much less dependent on the vagaries of climate, weather and nature in general. Which made me feel better and worse at the same time.
And I fear that the interview Lewis did with the guy at the USDA in charge of the food stamp program will end his career ( the bureaucrat’s career, not Lewis’s ).
Because the guy talked about maximizing participation among the eligible population as being a goal of the program. And he talked about how frustrating it was when state executives and legislators try to torpedo those efforts.
It’s a really good book, and it’s not centered around Trump’s antics.
TLDR - I think he should’ve called the book “You Didn’t Build That”. This is a important book, you need to read it.