The Fifth Risk
Michael Lewis's brilliant narrative takes us into the engine rooms of a government under attack by its own leaders. In Agriculture the funding of vital programs like food stamps and school lunches is being slashed. The Commerce Department may not have enough staff to conduct the 2020 Census properly. Over at Energy, where international nuclear risk is managed, it's not clear there will be enough inspectors to track and locate black market uranium before terrorists do. Willful ignorance plays a role in these looming disasters. If your ambition is to maximize short-term gain without regard to the long-term cost, you are better off not knowing the cost. If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it's better never to understand those problems. There is an upside to ignorance, and a downside to knowledge. Knowledge makes life messier. It makes it a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a worldview. If there are dangerous fools in this book, there are also heroes—unsung, of course. They are the linchpins of the system: those public servants whose knowledge, dedication, and proactivity keep the machinery running. Michael Lewis finds them, and he asks them what keeps them up at night.
Stats for nerds
21recommend
37mentions
33people
2019–2026years
59% recommend41% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I normally don't like talking politics on HN, but as someone who actually worked alongside talented and diligent federal employees I really can't abide this slander. Most of the people I worked with were brilliant and technical people. You think we didn't know we could pull down 2-5× the salary in the private sector? We stayed in the civil service because we were mission-driven and we cared about impacts beyond a quarterly profit motive, even though it paid like shit.
We are talking about people with STEM doctorates and 30 years of experience working 60-80 hour weeks for a 120k salary, because that's about where the GS scale caps. People are on the road for weeks, flying economy class and sleeping in roadside motels with a $50 per diem and when they visit a vendor or a lab or a client they cannot accept a meal or a beer or anything beyond a cup of coffee because of government ethics rules. I worked in an office in Washington, DC where all the staff pooled their money to buy a water cooler, and people gave voluntary donations of $2/month to join the "water cooler club" to defray the cost of maintaining an office water cooler because OPM considered that an unnecessary expense.
The first thing DOGE did, literally in the first week, they implemented a "deferred resignation plan" — they paid people 8 months of salary to not work. The smartest and most talented people saw the writing on the wall at that point — folks with PhDs from MIT or Stanford; self-made founders; crusty veteran engineers who preferred work to retirement. They took the money and they had no problem finding alternative employment, or they took it as a sign to hang up their spurs for good. Many of them were subsequently rehired by their agencies as contractors at 2-3× their previous salary when it became evident they were irreplaceable.
(I had friends in the NNSA, the branch of the US Department of Energy that manages the nuclear arsenal. DOGE fired hundreds of employees without realizing what they did, then attempted to rescind 90% of the firings months later. Plenty of the fired employees had already found new employment. Others simply did not want to return to a job with such contingent status where they would be treated disrespectfully. Several fired employees could not be rehired because they were fired so abruptly there was no way to contact them and offer reinstatement.)
You know who didn't take up the deferred resignation offer? The unproductive layabouts you claim to despise. The ones that knew they couldn't get a better job elsewhere. Yeah, there are bad employees in the federal government, same as anywhere else. DOGE bullied out all our best talent and now we're stuck with the dregs. They paid billions of dollars for people to not work for the privilege of doing so. "Department of Government Efficiency".
If you are interested in learning more about excellent and unglamorous work done by underappreciated American civil servants, I highly recommend the book The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis.
- > Also talked about in Michael Lewis’s book Fifth Risk.
Highly recommend that book. Haven't gotten to his most recent Who Is Government?:
* https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/788713/who-is-govern...
But from the interviews it sounds interesting as well. Colbert interview from April 2025:
- I can recommend Michael Lewis's The Fifth Risk that covers Trump #1 doing this sort of thing - go after the public bodies that protect against low probability but high consequence events because you'll get minimal pushback from the general public who are unlikely to notice.
- Michael Lewis' book "The Fifth Risk" has other stories of exceptional public servants, and a very insightful commentary on public service in general.
- "The governments of the world provides these big weather companies (weather.com (cough IBM), Accuweather (cough IBM cough), etc) a metric shit ton of their data completely for free (by law) including data transfer. These are things like radar, satellite, ground station data, forecasts, composite models, etc. These companies profit substantially on it, as in billions of dollars"
Michael Lewis' book The Fifth Risk goes IN DEPTH into how Accuweather/Weather.com and the government were interacting (particularly during the Trump administration).
I highly recommend the book in general and for this particular story in particular.
- If you like this idea, read the Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis (he also wrote the Big Short which you may have seen). The book essentially argues that this is already the case in many (crucially not all) government departments. I like to TL;DR the book to other people as "the deep state is good, actually". Of course, the government itself is absolutely not helmed by technocratic politicians.
