The 2024 conversation was driven by a handful of names. Trump. Harris. Biden. Vance. Walz. These individuals put themselves forward to lead our government. But who really is our government? And what is at stake when politicians say they want to expand or dismantle it? To find out, The Washington Post Opinion section set seven writers loose on the federal bureaucracy. Their only brief was to go where they wanted, talk with whomever they wanted, and return with a story from deep within the vast, complex system Americans pay for, rebel against, rely upon, dismiss and celebrate.
We called the series “Who Is Government.” It featured, in order of appearance, Michael Lewis, Casey Cep, Dave Eggers, John Lanchester, Geraldine Brooks, Sarah Vowell and W. Kamau Bell. We presented it as a unified series and published it in a range of forms in the weeks leading up to the presidential election. Though singular (and sometimes idiosyncratic) in construction, each piece found a way not just to describe the value of government work but also to illuminate lives worthy of emulation and celebration.
Michael Lewis found an engineer in the Bureau of Mines who singlehandedly revolutionized mine safety. Casey Cep discovered an official at Veterans Affairs who rehabilitated our national cemeteries, the resting place of America’s fallen. Dave Eggers zeroed in on a group of scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories obsessed with finding planets hospitable to life. John Lanchester chose to profile a thing — the Consumer Price Index — and in so doing explained how data-gathering is essential to the American Project. Geraldine Brooks managed to unearth an IRS agent who also happens to be a martial arts superhero. Sarah Vowell wrote about the democratization of our defining documents by chronicling the efforts of a worker at the National Archives. And W. Kamau Bell, using both video and text for his journalism, profiled the next generation of civil servant: his goddaughter, a paralegal at the Department of Justice.
