The Fight Over Facts and Public Service
TL;dr examines political narratives vs. truth, government overhaul, and the ongoing battle over free speech and media bias
Public service has always been a quiet force in American life. It’s built for function, not headlines. Government ensures safety, gathers data, and maintains the stability that allows democracy and the economy to thrive. But in today’s political climate, where narratives overshadow facts, that quiet force is under attack.
Author Michael Lewis recently joined Andrew Sullivan’s The Dishcast to discuss his latest book, Who is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service, a collection of essays dismantling the lazy stereotype of bureaucrats as faceless, wasteful paper-pushers. Instead, Lewis and his contributors—including John Lanchester and Dave Eggers—reveal an often-hidden world of public servants who are problem-solvers, data-gatherers, and truth-seekers. The book expands on Lewis’ outstanding earlier work on federal employees, The Fifth Risk, which GGF reviewed last January.
After listening to the podcast, you can bet I’ll be reading this latest book as well. Here are my highlights from the pod.
One of government’s most crucial but least understood roles is as the nation’s empirical backbone. One essay in the book examines the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the statistic underpinning everything from Social Security adjustments to economic policy. The CPI “is an incredibly important thing and an immensely complicated thing,” Sullivan notes. There are countless variations in product sizes, shapes, and weights, and determining what the average consumer purchases is an incredibly complex statistical challenge. Yet, for over a century, experts have refined this process, continuously improving their methods. That’s no small feat, yet it’s just one example of the critical data collection and analysis accomplished by federal employees.
“Our very ability to understand the country and the world we’re in,” Sullivan notes, “is dependent massively on countless nerds spending day and night figuring these things out.”
These “nerds” have built a vast infrastructure of data collection that allows us to see ourselves clearly. Yet, as Lewis warns, the Trump administration is actively undermining this work—gutting expertise and questioning politically inconvenient statistics. If an administration decides it can simply “make up the numbers,” Americans will lose one of their last safeguards against governance by fabrication.
This, Lewis and Sullivan argue, is the real battle: an empirically grounded government versus a political culture increasingly untethered from reality. Federal agencies aren’t political machines—they’re operational backbones staffed by specialists. But today, expertise is being sidelined, defunded, or purged in favor of loyalty.
Sullivan sums it up: Americans haven’t fundamentally changed. They still want functioning borders, safe communities, and a strong economy. But if public institutions are deliberately sabotaged—if problem-solvers are demoralized or fired—it won’t be long before essential services break down. The crisis is not just one of governance but of trust.
This book—and the conversation—reminds us the fight isn’t just over policy or personnel. It’s about whether truth and expertise still have a place in governance at all.
Don’t Cry for the Education Department
A March 14 Wall Street Journal op-ed reminded why The Department of Government Efficiency remains a worthwhile endeavor, even if its approach is more wrecking ball than scalpel. They recall that the Education Department was created as a payoff to the National Education Association, which backed Jimmy Carter in its first-ever presidential endorsement.
“The idea of an Education Department is really a bad one,” an anonymous liberal House Democrat told the Wall Street Journal in 1979. “But it’s NEA’s top priority. There are school teachers in every congressional district and most of us simply don’t need the aggravation of taking them on.”
Devastating.
Can the USDA Be Cut to Size?
The U.S. Department of Agriculture was once called “the people’s department” by Lincoln, back when most Americans worked on farms. Today, it oversees 29 subagencies with nearly 100,000 employees and a $228 billion budget—despite agriculture employing less than 2% of Americans.
The WSJ this weekend profiled new USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins, who “grew up barrel racing and raising livestock for 4-H” and is now leading a major overhaul of the massive agency.
“If we walk out of here in four years and we have not done a complete overhaul,” she says, “then I will have failed.”
Rollins sees her broader mission as “the restoration of rural America.” She argues the USDA has strayed from its core functions—rural development, farming, food, and forestry. On day one, she scrapped 78 contracts for things like “diversity dialogue workshops” and a “Brazilian forest and gender consultant,” saving $132 million—just 0.06% of the USDA’s budget.
The department runs the Forest Service, which manages 193 million acres of land, an area bigger than her native Texas. It faces a fiscal crisis due to unprofitable forest-management practices and Biden-era workforce expansions. Rollins says billions from the Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Bill — meant to be spent over a decade — have already been burned through. “This is the classic case of government gone awry.”
USDA is also in charge of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (commonly known as food stamps), a $122.1 billion entitlement program that consumes over half its budget.
She wants to make sure the program continues “serving the families that need it the most,” and she says she grew up in such a family: She and her two sisters were raised by a single mother making $5 an hour, and she gets emotional recalling that as a girl she sometimes had to wear shoes that didn’t fit. “While I’m obviously in a different situation now than I was, it seems like yesterday,” she says, kicking off her high heels under the table. “I will do everything I can to make sure that the people that truly need that will get it. It’s really important to me.” She cries, blushes and wipes her tears: “I’ve talked about it a million times. I’ve never teared up before. I think I’ve had a very long day of interviews, and I haven’t eaten very much.”
I appreciate her passion—and what appears to be a more thoughtful approach to reshaping the federal government. The profile highlights a core challenge of reform: cutting inefficiencies without undermining essential services. A case in point—Rollins laid off key staff working on avian flu, only to realize she needed their expertise back.
Truth Undermined: From Narrative Games to Government Overreach
We’ll wrap up with two sharp essays on the state of free speech in the public square—one on the rise of narrative over truth, the other on the federal government’s chilling new crackdown on political dissent—plus a Pirate Wires takedown of media bias.
Liberals Only Censor. Musk Seeks to Lobotomize. Richard Hanania argues the public square is turning into an idiocracy. He writes Elon Musk isn’t just shifting X’s political bias—he’s fundamentally altering the nature of public discourse. At first, Hanania found it concerning that Musk might tweak Community Notes to hide his falsehoods. But what’s worse, he now argues, is that Musk doesn’t seem to care at all that he’s constantly being exposed as a liar. A normal person would try to hide their dishonesty. Musk, he says, has contempt for the entire concept of truth.
Being caught lying doesn’t embarrass him, since he is not trying to win over anyone who is independent minded and honest. Similarly, Grok [X’s AI chatbot] will cheerfully tell you, accurately, that Musk is the biggest source of misinformation on X.
The Return of the McCarthyite Chill. Andrew Sullivan highlights the Trump administration’s use of AI and federal surveillance to track social media posts of noncitizens and revoke visas based on political speech. Mahmoud Kalil, a Palestinian student at Columbia University, was arrested—not for any crime, but for alleged “pro-Palestinian activity” deemed harmful to U.S. foreign policy. Sullivan argues this sets a dangerous precedent: stripping free speech rights from millions of legal residents, making their presence in the U.S. contingent on avoiding controversial opinions. He compares it to McCarthyism:
The White House mocked him from their X account: “SHALOM, MAHMOUD.” Take a second to absorb that monstrosity: the glib and spiteful use of a Jewish term for goodbye to a Muslim. And not from some nasty X nutter. From the president who is supposed to represent all of us, but is, in fact, a deranged, bigoted troll.
Finally, here’s Pirate Wires—not just on Mahmoud, but on the New York Times’ framing of the Trump administration’s actions surrounding him.
Onward and Upward
A big thank you to everyone who joined last week’s inaugural GGF Office Hours! We had a lively, thought-provoking discussion on the growing impact of DOGE-like efforts on local government—and how communicators can pull back the curtain on the critical, often unseen work that keeps our communities running.
Keep an eye out for next month’s session, where we’ll welcome a few more of the outstanding public servants recently featured in GGF. April’s meet-up is the second in our three-part pilot, as we gauge how valuable these conversations are for subscribers. Hope to see you there!