Michael Lewis follows the presidential transition into the federal departments that quietly manage the country's biggest risks — nuclear materials, the food supply, weather forecasting — and finds incoming political teams who often didn't bother to show up for briefings, or arrived with no plan to staff the jobs at all.
His focus isn't corruption in the transactional sense of this tracker's exhibits, but the precondition for it: agencies stripped of expert leadership and institutional memory are agencies that can't see graft happening, let alone stop it.
Through portraits of career civil servants — the people who actually understood the risks their agencies were built to manage — Lewis shows how much of government competence lives in unglamorous, replaceable-seeming roles, and how quickly that competence can be hollowed out through simple neglect.
It's the "loot the watchdogs" story from the inside: not a dramatic firing, but an emptying-out, department by department, of the people whose job was to notice.