Blockers are federal employees who stood up to Elon Musk during the DOGE fiasco in the first months of Trump’s second term. Most lost their jobs for doing the right thing, in some cases simply following the law. In the first chapter, Michael Lewis sets the hook and brings the reader into a real-time description of the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE) assault on the U.S. Institute of Peace,
failing to understand that the Institute is not really a governmental agency. In the end, DOGE only managed to get Trump’s name added to the Institute. The pattern of interference and disruption continued in other departments, including the IRS, where one DOGE operative returned to become a valuable employee.
Elon Musk’s followers were mostly young computer engineering geeks who operated on a stereotypical view of government civil servants, seeing them as lazy, inept bureaucrats serving the deep state. DOGE discovered the stereotypes were false; the trillions in waste and fraud didn’t exist, so instead of leaving more, they kept destroying things.