What Stories Do Government Workers Have That Could Change How You See Public Service Forever?

How Do Everyday Government Employees Save Lives and Make History Without Anyone Knowing? The Untold Story of Public Service

Discover untold stories of civil servants who prevent mining deaths, find life on other planets, and protect democracy through Michael Lewis’s “Who Is Government?” – revealing the hidden heroes behind America’s essential services. Prepare to have your assumptions about government workers completely transformed as you meet the remarkable individuals whose daily work keeps America running behind the scenes.

Genres

Politics, Management & Leadership, Society & Culture

Understand your civil service.

Who Is Government? (2025) asks an all-star team of US journalists to consider the questions: Who works for the government? And why is their work important? The answers uncover remarkable stories of the people, from cybersleuths to archivists, whose work keeps the United States running.

In 2016, Donald Trump won his first US presidential election. Both Trump and his opponent, Hillary Clinton, had assembled teams who were poised to manage the transition of office across the 15 large federal departments and hundreds of smaller federal agencies that comprise the US civil service. But days after winning office, Trump fired the 500 or so staff on his transition team. He reportedly told governor Chris Christie that the two of them could handle the transition themselves.

But in the days and weeks that followed, after a series of perplexing decisions – for example, appointing Rick Perry as Secretary of Energy, despite the fact that Perry had said in his own presidential campaign that the Department of Energy should be abolished – it became abundantly clear that this administration had very little understanding of what the civil service is and does.

But there’s one clear path to understanding the civil service’s what and why, and that’s the who – the people carrying out the work involved.

This summary brings together five fascinating profiles of contemporary civil servants, from cemetery directors to space researchers and, in the process, uncovers the hidden value of their work.

Chris Mark: Bureau of Mines

In his student days, Chris Mark was something of a political radical. In 1976, the beliefs that had led Mark on student marches and into union organizing, took him deep underground. He became a coal miner in West Virginia, with the idealistic aim of recruiting his fellow miners to the socialist cause.

Mark never led a miner’s revolution. But he did discover something unexpected in those dangerous tunnels: a genuine fascination with the underground environment, a fascination that persisted despite two brushes with death. This fascination eventually led him to Penn State’s mining engineering program. Here, professor Z.T. Bieniawski introduced him to coal pillar design formulas, which were meant to prevent deadly roof collapses.

Mark immediately spotted a problem. These formulas were contradictory and unreliable. Each suggested different pillar dimensions, yet mining companies used them interchangeably without understanding which one was most suitable. Engineers deployed their personal judgment to choose appropriate formulas. Which was fine … when their judgment was on point.

Utah, 1984: Twenty-seven people died in an underground fire in the Wilberg coal mine. The roof supports had failed during a record-breaking coal extraction attempt, trapping victims in an underground blaze. Mark knew that if the proper pillar calculations had been used, those miners would still be alive. His mission became clear: he wanted to eliminate deaths from roof falls in mines. In 1987, he joined the Bureau of Mines.

Mark spent years measuring how stress shifted onto remaining pillars as coal extraction progressed. He developed “stability factors” that predicted roof failure probabilities, then validated these predictions against historical collapse data. This analytical approach led to a breakthrough: the realization that geological stress from tectonic plate movement affected mine stability more than previously understood.

By 1994, he had created a comprehensive roof rating system, scaling mine safety from one to 100. This enabled engineers worldwide to evaluate their specific conditions and determine necessary support requirements. Mining companies eagerly adopted his methods, since roof failures cost $200 per minute in shutdown expenses.

2016: Forty years after Mark took a job as a coal miner in West Virginia, and 29 years after that terrible roof collapse in Utah, Mark achieved his goal. That year, for the first time in documented history, no deaths from roof falls in US mines were recorded.

Ron Walters: National Cemetery Administration

In December 1942, just days before Christmas, Staff Sergeant Robert Ferris Jr. soared toward Nazi-occupied France in his B-17 bomber. He and his fellow airmen were under orders to bomb a German factory near Romilly-sur-Seine. But the Luftwaffe had their own orders and when they intercepted the B-17, they carried them out. The aircraft plummeted, killing Ferris and his seven crewmates. Their bodies were recovered but couldn’t be identified, so Ferris was buried as an unknown soldier. Eighty-one years later, forensic scientists exhumed and finally identified his remains. In 2023, Ferris was repatriated to his home state of North Carolina, where he was buried with full military honors at New Bern National Cemetery. Like all national cemeteries, it’s reserved for burying military veterans and their families.

Among those attending Ferris’s homecoming was Ron Walters. Walters is neither a veteran nor a North Carolina native, but Ferris’s funeral would not have been possible without him.

The US has long held a commitment to bring all its soldiers, alive or dead, home from foreign soil. This commitment began with President Abraham Lincoln, whose administration established the first national cemeteries to bury the war dead. Its most epic iteration was in President Harry S. Truman’s pledge to repatriate every fallen World War II soldier: 170,000 soldiers, roughly half of the dead, were repatriated during the war. The US government continues to repatriate the remaining dead to this day. This is where Walters comes in. As acting undersecretary for Memorial Affairs, Walters has built the National Cemetery Administration into something remarkable.

Under his leadership, the organization orchestrated Ferris’s burial with full honors and now maintains his headstone among 7,500 others in perfect formation. Walters directs 2,300 employees across 155 national cemeteries, who conduct over 140,000 burials of military veterans annually. Their duties include maintaining pristine grounds with precisely cut lawns, ensuring every flag flies properly, keeping all markers readable, maintaining smooth roads, tending immaculate flower beds, and preserving the dignity of nearly four million graves spanning from Revolutionary War heroes to recent casualties from Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of the employees are graduates of Walters’ own initiative, an apprenticeship program for homeless veterans. Everyone who completes the year-long training in cemetery maintenance, learning skills from landscaping to grave digging and headstone alignment, is guaranteed a job at a national cemetery.

Occasionally, under special circumstances, a civilian may be offered the honor of burial in a national cemetery. Matthew Quinn, the undersecretary of Veterans Affairs under President Biden, offered this honor to Walters. Walters declined. He was not a veteran, he said, and did not feel he belonged in a national cemetery. Spending his life caring for them was enough of an honor for him.

Jarod Koopman: Internal Revenue Service

In 1930s America, there was no gangster more notorious than Al Capone. For years, FBI agent Eliot Ness and his crack team of operatives, known as “The Untouchables,” pursued Capone. But it was a quiet accountant with a ledger who brought down America’s most notorious gangster. IRS agent Michael Malone spent three painstaking years undercover, meticulously building the tax evasion case that finally sent Capone to Alcatraz. The lesson? Sometimes the most devastating weapon against crime isn’t a gun. It’s a calculator.

If there’s a modern-day equivalent to Michael Malone, it may well be IRS agent Jarod Koopman. Koopman’s cybercrime unit quietly provides breakthrough evidence in major investigations involving ransomware, human trafficking, terrorist funding, and child exploitation, all through tracing cryptocurrency transactions.

Cryptocurrency transactions are generally anonymous, but not unrecorded. They utilize 64-character alphanumeric strings called hashes, each representing specific financial exchanges. Global computer networks verify and permanently record these transactions, creating immutable public ledgers. Koopman had never heard of crypto until it was mentioned on a podcast he happened to be listening to. Almost at once, he understood that it was an investigative goldmine of permanent, uneditable transaction histories that could expose criminal networks. But of course, he and his team would only get to the gold if they were able to uncover the identities behind these anonymized transactions.

Since 2014, Koopman has headed up a cybercrime investigation unit. It’s not exactly glamorous work. But he now directs 200 agents stationed globally, working quietly at terminals while dissecting blockchain transactions, detecting anomalous patterns, analyzing temporal data for geographic clues, gathering digital evidence, and methodically unraveling criminal identities.

And often enough, unglamorous work yields spectacular results. Case in point: his investigators’ takedown of the dark web’s most notorious marketplace. For years, Ross Ulbricht operated Silk Road under the pseudonym “Dread Pirate Roberts,” facilitating millions of dollars in illegal drug sales and even allegedly commissioning murders. The digital kingpin thought he was untouchable behind layers of encryption and anonymity. But agent Gary Alford’s meticulous investigation revealed Ulbricht’s fatal flaw – a single carelessly exposed email address in an old forum post that connected his real identity to his criminal empire. That one digital breadcrumb led to a life sentence in federal prison.

Nearly a century after Capone, the principle remains the same: criminals always leave a trail. And the IRS knows exactly where to look.

Pamela Wright: National Archives

When British forces marched toward Washington in 1812, Secretary of State James Monroe urged President Madison to “remove the records.” Thanks to the brave clerks who rescued the documents from the oncoming army, the original copies of both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence still exist today.

Yet while there was a keen impulse to preserve the records, for generations after American independence they were preserved haphazardly at best, exposed to moisture and light and, devastatingly, fire. In 1921, a fire in Washington’s Department of Commerce destroyed most of the 1890 Census – a crucial chronicle of immigration and post-emancipation America. Spurred to action, Franklin Roosevelt established the National Archives in 1934. Initially, its remit was simple preservation. These days it has a broader mission: driving transparency and strengthening democracy through equitable access to government records.

As the Archives’ inaugural chief innovation officer, Pamela Wright has shifted a key paradigm. In the traditional archive model, the archivist is also the gatekeeper. Wright believes that the archives, and the valuable materials they contain, should be “in your pocket.” And by “in your pocket,” she means on your phone: accessible and searchable.

The project of digitizing and organizing the US’s formidable archives is mammoth. Too big for any one archivist, or even a whole team of them. Which is why, in 2011, Wright threw the job open to the public, with the Citizen Archivist program. Volunteers have transcribed over three million catalog pages, deciphering faded handwriting in painstaking detail. Their recruitment slogan asks: “Is reading cursive your superpower?”

Wright’s most captivating innovation, History Hub, launched in 2016 as a free digital reference service. Citizens worldwide submit queries answered by archivists, federal staff, and volunteers. Among the 23,000 questions which have generated 52,000 responses: Were the Hoovers related? (Herbert and J. Edgar received each other’s mail accidentally, but weren’t family.) Why did Ohioans marry in Indiana? (Fewer restrictions made it “the hot elopement destination.”) These exchanges provide glimpses into American curiosity. And among the more esoteric questions (Were any specimens of the fruit flies launched into space in 1947 preserved?) are simpler, universal queries: people looking into their own genealogical stories, trying to trace immigrant grandparents, long-lost cousins, and family history. Simply put: there’s something in these records for everyone, because they preserve everyone’s history.

James Monroe’s impulse to save the Constitution in 1812 is borne from the same belief that drives Pamela Wright’s impulse to open the archives to all citizens: the belief that these archives contain the story of America, and that this story should never be lost.

Vanessa Bailey: NASA

Within the next quarter-century, humanity will almost certainly discover extraterrestrial life. This might sound like a bold prediction but we now have the technology to identify the chemical components of exoplanets – or planets outside our own solar system. This means that in the coming decades, we should know which exoplanets possess atmospheres, water reserves, and essential elements like carbon, methane, and oxygen. In other words, the fundamental ingredients for existence.

How will scientists pinpoint these signs of extraterrestrial life? Through the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Currently in development, it’s scheduled to launch into orbit in 2027. Boasting panoramic vision 100 times broader than Hubble’s scope, Roman will deploy advanced coronagraph technology for starlight suppression. In other words, it will block starlight to reveal hidden planets lurking behind blazing stars. Roman’s launch will allow scientists to identify worlds where life might flourish. After millennia of cosmic speculation, we’re approaching definitive answers about extraterrestrial existence.

The people leading this charge work out of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a place that’s been pushing boundaries since 1936. What started as a Caltech rocket research project has become NASA’s go-to facility for everything that flies unmanned into space. JPL built Explorer 1, America’s first satellite, and Pioneer, the first probe to escape Earth’s gravity entirely. It’s photographed the moon, landed rovers on Mars, sent the Cassini spacecraft to orbit Saturn, and helped build both the Hubble and Webb telescopes.

These days, JPL scientists are laser-focused on finding exoplanets – scientists like Vanessa Bailey, who works on the coronagraph technology for the Roman telescope. She’s one of the few people on Earth who can say they’ve directly photographed an exoplanet. And that’s impressive, since only 82 exoplanets have been confirmed through direct imaging so far.

While studying astronomy at the University of Arizona, Bailey spent about 100 nights at the telescope before she detected a Jupiter-sized world called HD 106906 b. At that time, only 14 exoplanets had been identified. Bailey was excited, but this wasn’t a moment for celebration. Instead, she performed lengthy follow-up imaging before finally confirming her finding.

Bailey’s persistence calls to mind another NASA employee and civil servant: Nancy Grace Roman, who the Roman telescope is named after. Nancy Grace Roman was NASA’s first chief astronomer and the driving force behind the Hubble Space Telescope. Known as the “Mother of Hubble,” she spent decades convincing Congress that space-based astronomy was worth the investment. She brought that same patience to convincing skeptical colleagues that women belonged in the field of astronomy at all.

Like Roman’s legacy, Bailey’s work will further open up space’s vast terrain to us all. But Bailey is hesitant to call her findings especially consequential. Of course, she admits, it would be inspiring to find evidence of life on another planet. But for Bailey, the real thrill will come from feeling that we are not alone in the universe. We are part of a bigger whole.

Conclusion

In this summary to Who Is Government? by Michael Lewis, you’ve learned that the civil service performs essential but often invisible work that ranges from preventing mining deaths to finding life on other planets. Civil service employees tackle work that private companies might find unprofitable or politically risky. While civil servants rarely receive public recognition, their methodical efforts often yield profound results.