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Fareed Zakaria GPS

Back to the Barricades in Paris; How Lebanon's Bright Future was Dimmed. Interview With CNN Global Economic Analyst Rana Foroohar; Interview With Bestselling Author Michael Lewis. Aired 10-11a ET

Aired October 11, 2026 - 10:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[10:00:42]

FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN ANCHOR: This is GPS, the GLOBAL PUBLIC SQUARE. Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world. I'm Fareed Zakaria coming to you from New York.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA (voice-over): Today on the program, understanding the massive student protests in France. I'll ask "The Economist's" Paris bureau chief what is behind the unrest, and what happens next.

Then Kim Ghattas brings us the latest on Iran. And then I'll talk about the ongoing battle for control of the Arctic with the "FT's" Rana Foroohar.

Finally, blockers. Those are some of the public servants who were targeted for removal by Elon Musk's DOGE because they were unwanted by the Trump administration. Who are they and what were they doing that made them targets?

MICHAEL LEWIS, BESTSELLING AUTHOR: Their stories don't get told.

ZAKARIA (voice-over): Michael Lewis tells me some fascinating stories.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: But first, here's "My Take."

If you listen to some people these days, Washington should start planning victory parades. Quote, "We won, Iran lost, period," says CNN's Scott Jennings. Hugh Hewitt concurs, and the "Wall Street Journal" editorial page agrees the tide is turning, and they all have a point. The American military is getting oil from America's Gulf allies flowing through the Strait of Hormuz while choking off Iran's exports.

This is a remarkable display of military ingenuity, but it does not make the war a success. Remember how we got here. In June 2025 the U.S. and Israel massively bombed Iran's nuclear facilities, and Donald Trump declared its nuclear program obliterated. Eight months later, in February, they went to war again with far bigger ambitions. They attacked Iran's leadership, killing its supreme leader and many senior officials.

Trump urged Iranians to overthrow their government. The objective was clear, regime change. But the Islamic Republic survived. Closed ranks around hardline generals, installed a new supreme leader and unleashed the weapon it had long threatened to use, closing the Strait of Hormuz through which roughly one-fifth of the world's oil passes.

After more than seven months of war, the United States is now engaged in a vast campaign to force Iran to stop blocking a waterway that was opened before the war began. Washington has mounted this vast operation to restore the status quo, and is calling its progress victory.

Consider the costs just to get back to where we were. According to the Pentagon, the tab has reached $45 billion, and the CBO estimates that even a low intensity conflict will cost another $2 billion monthly. At least 19 American soldiers have died. The U.S. has likely used between half and two-thirds of its inventory of certain sophisticated missile defense interceptors. Replacing them could take more than five years and these are weapons America would need against China.

By the end of June, at least six American warships had been diverted from the Pacific to the Middle East. Since the war began Brent crude oil prices have averaged around $100 a barrel, roughly 40 percent higher than before the war. Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody's Analytics, estimated that the war's cost to the average American household as of July was about $1,000 in higher prices and interest payments.

Americans have paid about $130 billion extra for gasoline and diesel alone. Higher diesel prices have jacked up the cost of trucking, farming and food. Families heating their homes with oil could face bills 50 percent higher this winter. The damage abroad is staggering. Gulf States have seen their trust in Washington shattered. In addition, they face soaring shipping costs and collapsing tourism. Dubai's hotel occupancy plunged from nearly 85 percent in February to 23 percent in March.

[10:05:01]

Governments there must spend billions repairing infrastructure and building alternative routes around Hormuz. Energy importing countries, which means most of the world, have struggled paying the bills.

During the Vietnam War, the U.S. would regularly detail the massive damage it had done to the enemy. From weapons destroyed to body counts of enemy soldiers dead. But the test of success is whether that military force makes the adversary cry uncle. So far, Iran has not surrendered, and there are reasons to think that more bombing will not change that reality.

The fundamental problem with Donald Trump's approach is that he cannot decide whether he wants to change Iran's policies or its government. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent illustrated the contradiction in September, when he said the message to other countries was, this is the end of the regime. Yet in the same interview, he insisted the goal was not necessarily to collapse the government, but just to pressure it into negotiations.

Addressing the U.N. last month, Trump wondered whether he should make a deal, allowing Iran to rebuild into a greater country, or annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it "quickly," quote-unquote. Meanwhile, his envoy, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, were negotiating with Iranian officials. Washington was threatening to destroy the government while asking it to negotiate seriously.

If Iran's leaders believe Washington intends to destroy them regardless of what they do, why would they make concessions? Their incentive would be to resist, inflict costs and outlast America. In "Foreign Affairs," Stephen Biddle and his co-authors argue that wars ultimately always end through political bargains. Military force can improve the terms of those bargains, but cannot substitute for them.

America has repeatedly forgotten this lesson. From Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq, demonstrating extraordinary skill at destroying armies, but much less at translating battlefield achievements into lasting political outcomes.

The Trump administration must decide what it wants. If the goal is policy change, reopening Hormuz, constraining Iran's nuclear program and curbing its regional aggression, it must define achievable terms and pressure Iran to accept them. If the goal is regime change, it must plan for a bloody struggle, probably with more regional spillover.

Until Washington resolves this contradiction, we will remain stuck in our latest Middle Eastern quagmire.

Go to FareedZakaria.com for a link to my "Washington Post" column this week. And let's get started.

Hundreds of thousands of protesters, many of them high school students, have been taking to the streets in France in recent days. The protests began in the suburbs of Paris over staff shortages and poor conditions at public schools there, and have since swept the nation. Many of the student protesters say their schools are underfunded, in some cases lacking adequate power supply or even lacking teachers themselves.

Others complain that the reform of the national high school exit exam means longer, more intense school days. This is all transpiring while France is facing a rising debt crisis, which will make responding to some of the students' complaints very difficult. It is also transpiring during the run-up for presidential elections in April, in which the right-wing Marine Le Pen is leading the polls.

Joining me now is Sophie Pedder, "The Economist" Paris bureau chief.

Sophie, how are unexpected are these? I mean, protests happen all the time in France. It seems like France has, you know, the president, the Elysee Palace, and then street protests. And those are the two forms of political activity in France. But how much was this kind of a complete bolt from the blue? SOPHIE PEDDER, PARIS BUREAU CHIEF, THE ECONOMIST: I think the way it

snowballed was a big surprise because you can often have a protest in one school, and it doesn't actually spread anywhere else. But what happened was very, very fast. After the beginning of the school term, most of the students sharing those videos on social media of the blockades that they were putting together, and it spread from the Paris region, to big cities across France and then beyond.

So it has been surprising how fast it's spread. I think it was -- it's also been surprising how violent it's been. And how visually, you know, distressing for a lot of parents and teachers looking at the schools going at least, police having their entrance halls going up in flames at some of these protesters with the violent clashes that have taken place between the police and the students.

So it's -- it has, I think, taken the authorities absolutely by surprise. And it's been particularly difficult to bring under control.

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ZAKARIA: So what is the answer to the kind of puzzle I posed in the introduction, which is France has the worst budget deficit and debt in Europe. It has a debt that's 120 percent of GDP. It has the billion, the largest amount of state spending, I think, in the whole OECD. And yet you see these videos of schools and they seem dilapidated and underfunded. What's going on?

PEDDER: Well, I'd make a couple of points there. I mean, one of them is obviously some schools are in a state of terrible disrepair and there is no question about that. But if you can also visit some of the schools I've been going to are absolutely brand new and they have been built recently and are very well-equipped. So, you know, it's important to put a bit of context on that picture.

On the budget, you're absolutely right. And this is the real difficulty for France. And I've been out on the streets talking to a lot of students this week. And one of them made the point to me that she was complaining about the fact that the education budget has been fairly flat, while defense spending is the one that the budget has gone up. And obviously all countries are under pressure to increase defense spending. That's part of what belonging to NATO means. That's what part of what France has had to do in order to meet its NATO obligations.

So it is a really difficult moment. And there is some underfunding. If you look at spending per pupil for secondary. So high school pupils over the last 10 years, it has not gone up. It's been very flat. And that has meant that there haven't been the resources that probably should have been or could have been for the high school students.

ZAKARIA: It feels to me like looking at France's budget and spending. It spends an enormous amount on, you know, pensions and things like that, worker protections, which, you know, one of the reasons people have been trying to do these pension reforms is if you raise the age of retirement, you solve a lot of that pressure on the budget. But that seems politically impossible. And Macron, who came in as a great reformer, has essentially surrendered and turned into a huge spender. Right?

So at this point, Le Pen talks about the budget. Is there any prospect that anyone is going to actually cut some of the spending on, say, pensions so that you can -- you can fund the schools better?

PEDDER: Well, I would make a couple of points about that, Fareed. One of them is that, yes, Macron was a big spender during the lockdown, the COVID period, and that was incredibly popular across the political spectrum. So the problem was that it took him a long time to sort of wind down that spending. So that was the beginning of the problem. And the second is that after he dissolved parliament in 2024 and called snap elections, he shrunk his own majority, his minority at the time.

He's got a small minority government as a hung parliament. And that means it's almost impossible to even get a budget through. So you're talking about cuts to budgets is one thing. Just getting a budget through that's acceptable across the political spectrum is incredibly difficult. And as you said, he had to shelve what was a very important and hard won fought on the streets. We had weeks and weeks of strikes and protests against his pension reform, which had raised the retirement age, has now been frozen as a way of securing the budget through parliament.

So it is an incredibly difficult political equation to solve. And we have these very fragmented parliaments that are incredibly difficult to deal with. So France is under pressure at a difficult time. And what we haven't talked about is that there's an election coming up, a president -- a presidential election in six months, which makes it even more tense and even more sort of polarized politically.

ZAKARIA: All right. We will, of course, be coming back to you as that election draws closer.

Sophie Pedder, always a pleasure.

PEDDER: It's a pleasure to speak to you. Thank you.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, what does one American academic's mysterious murder in the 1980s in Beirut have to tell us about the state of the Middle East today? My next guest has written a fascinating history. The journalist and author Kim Ghattas joins me next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:18:29]

ZAKARIA: When you hear about Beirut in recent years, it's usually about death and destruction. The blast that rocked the city in 2020 or the Israeli airstrikes against the city more recently. But this has not always been the fate of Lebanon's capital. It was once known as the Paris of the Middle East, a prosperous city, a travel hotspot, a place where the fashionable crowd went to see and be seen.

In 1955, the beginning of Beirut's golden age, a man named Malcolm Kerr was finishing his studies at the American University there. He went on to become the president of that university, a renowned scholar of the Middle East and a trusted adviser to officials in Washington. But in 1984, nine years after a civil war began in Beirut and the city was plunged into devastating urban conflict, Kerr was killed by two gunmen outside his office on the university campus.

The journalist Kim Ghattas has written a book about Kerr that also sheds great light on how Lebanon and the broader Middle East have found themselves in such turmoil today.

Before we get to Malcolm Kerr, I want to ask you, in a sense, how did Lebanon go from being the Paris of the Middle East to where it is now, particularly in the last 20 or 30 years? Because there was the Shia- Sunni-Christian civil war of the '70s and '80s but this is something different. And you said to me something just now, which was striking and haunting. You said southern Lebanon used to be occupied. It is now being obliterated. Explain what you mean.

[10:20:04]

KIM GHATTAS, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR, FINANCIAL TIMES: Fareed, thanks for having me. Yes, Lebanon had a reputation of being the Paris of the Middle East, or Beirut had the reputation of being the Paris of the Middle East. But Lebanon is a small country that I describe as a playground and a boxing ring for the regional powers and international powers. And it has found itself at the heart of the U.S.-Iran confrontation, of the Iran-Israel battle today, as we see it unfold in the Middle East, and Israel is obliterating large parts of south Lebanon.

Six percent of the country, rather, has been destroyed. We still have at least 600,000 people displaced. That's a lot for a country of about five million. There's no clear sense of how this begins. And the Lebanese really feel trapped, as they often have, between the U.S. and Israel on one side and Iran on the other.

ZAKARIA: The question, I think, on everyone's mind these days is, is Iran under enormous pressure? Is it going to buckle? Is it going to, you know, surrender in some way to American demands? You have an interesting prism because in a sense Iran controls Hezbollah, which is so active in Lebanon. What's your sense?

GHATTAS: They are under more pressure in Iran than they've ever been before, because it's not just economic. It's not just sanctions. It's not just proxy warfare. It is for the first time in the Islamic Republic's history a direct confrontation with America, with American bombings of the country, with Israel also participating. It's always been a shadow war in which America did not confront Iran directly.

And that combination of pressure, I think, is hard for Iran to sustain for a long time. We know that at the beginning of the war in February, President Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu thought it would be a quick war, an excursion. Within a week, the regime would fall. That's not what happened. And we're now six months in.

But I do also think that Iran has learned that this war -- has discovered, rather, that this war is lasting much longer than they anticipated because in their playbook, if you attack, if you bomb, America will withdraw, will pull back, will, you know, fold. And they're seeing now that President Trump, not necessarily out of strategy, but perhaps out of ego, is not folding. And I think that's difficult for Tehran to deal with.

ZAKARIA: Let's get to the book. I love the title. "The Best Kind of American." So explain why Malcolm Kerr, the head of the American University in Beirut, was the best kind of American.

GHATTAS: He represented the best of America at that time in the tradition of educators and missionaries who went to Lebanon, went to the Middle East, loved Lebanon. Malcolm Kerr was born in Beirut to parents who were on the university campus already, who had participated in relief efforts in the Middle East for the Armenians. He spoke Arabic. His children were born -- some of his children, three of his kids were born in Lebanon.

He met his wife in Lebanon, and he was really devoted to the Middle East and to this country that he loved so much, which is why he took the mission of being president of the American University of Beirut, even though it was in the middle of a war and things were changing under his feet and under America's feet, as the Israelis had invaded in 1982. Within days, Iran had sent Revolutionary Guards to Syria and on to Lebanon to confront the Israelis in Lebanon.

And with the arrival of U.S. Marines in Beirut as well, all in the summer of 1982, it brings you a very volatile situation. And Malcolm Kerr found himself in the middle of that. In the book, I raised the question that as the Israelis and the Americans and the Iranians all found themselves on Lebanese territory fighting it out, there were some in Beirut who began to think that, unfortunately, the best kind of American was a dead one.

ZAKARIA: And why he ended up dying, being assassinated, the whole story behind it. You're going to have to buy the book to understand. But it really is, it's a riveting story, and it does shed enormous light on what's going on. But a personal story as well.

Kim Ghattas, a wonderful book. Thank you for joining us.

GHATTAS: Thanks for having me.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, my next guest spent 10 days aboard a U.S. icebreaker in the Arctic Circle and came back with some urgent observations on how the region is becoming the new arena for great power conflict. U.S., Russia, China, in the Arctic, when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

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ZAKARIA: President Trump has long touted his ambition to annex Greenland.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Greenland. Greenland. Greenland is a wonderful place.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: But last month, he appeared to settle on a far more modest goal when he signed a security pact with Greenland and Denmark, the country of which the island is an autonomous territory. The deal will expand America's military presence in Greenland. That's pretty much it.

My next guest argues that the president is in some ways right to focus on what he calls the northern frontier since the Arctic has become an urgent new arena for great power competition.

Rana Foroohar is a business columnist at the "Financial Times." She's the author of this excellent new book called "Sea Change: America's New Great Game in the Arctic." It documents her 10-day trip aboard a U.S. icebreaker in the Arctic Circle, and then goes on to discuss the issue.

[10:30:00]

Rana, such a pleasure to have you on again.

RANA FOROOHAR, CNN GLOBAL ECONOMIC ANALYST: Oh, thank you so much for having me.

ZAKARIA: What was it like to be in the Arctic? What is the thing that most struck you, you know, that you took away just personally?

FOROOHAR: Oh, my God. Well, you know how Eskimos have 40 words for snow? I now have 40 words for cold. Because, you know, when you're in Nome, Alaska, getting ready to depart, and then you're through the Bering Strait, the Chukchi Sea, the Beaufort Sea, lots of different kinds of cold. The nature is incredible. But one of the things I think is really telling is America, at the time I was on board the ship, had just that one icebreaker in all of the high north. So, on the boat, we were --

ZAKARIA: Compared that to --

FOROOHAR: Compare that to, say, Russians and Chinese they have 60. Americans have three now, although one really still, the Healy that I was on doing most of the work, as ice melts the Arctic is becoming a way around other choke points like the Strait of Hormuz or the Suez or the Panama. And in fact, recently the Chinese launched a weekly transpolar shipping route to do just that.

ZAKARIA: So, you know, fundamentally, climate change is melting this -- the ice, making it easier to navigate. And the Chinese seem to have a long term plan, even though they're far away from it actually.

FOROOHAR: Well, they consider themselves a near-Arctic nation. That was a -- that was a terminology that --

ZAKARIA: Like a thousand miles away from there? FOROOHAR: You know, who's counting, right? But, you know, it's fascinating. On board the Healy, all the maps look at the world from the top down. So, you look starting at the North Pole. When you look at the world that way, you get a very, very different view.

Russia is more than 50 percent of the territory. Canada is huge. Greenland suddenly becomes more important. The U.S. relatively small.

So you start to see, wow, OK. If Trump is saying we want to protect what's western, what's northern, and we have, basically, between one and three icebreakers that can even go into this area at any given moment, and the Chinese have, as you say, as part of a long term strategy, ring-fenced maritime, ring-fenced ship building, declared that they want to establish a polar ice route through Russian waters, the northern sea route, which is all part of this larger logistical effort, the one belt, one road pathway effort to really kind of ring fence, what I would call the bricks and mortar of globalization.

ZAKARIA: What about Russia? What is Russia's strategy?

FOROOHAR: So, I always think of Russia as a vassal nation to China. But Russia has the main path through the Arctic right now, the Northern Sea Route, which -- it is increasingly claiming as its own territory. So, it's shipping exponentially more gas through the area.

You know, possession is 9/10 of the law. So, as different countries are up using these paths, jockeying for status, you get a sense that the Russians and Chinese are moving ahead. Whereas the U.S. and Canada are kind of still trying to even figure out and map the way through the northwest passage, which would be the route that they would use.

ZAKARIA: The Trump Greenland deal is -- which is essentially just a kind of reaffirmation of the deal that existed, right?

FOROOHAR: It is. I mean, I will say, I often think that Donald Trump comes to some of the right issues in very much the wrong way. And I would say that Greenland is an example of that.

Greenland is strategically important in the area post-Cold War. It's been a place for munitions and intelligence operations. There's been concern, actually, amongst defense hawks on both sides of the aisle that if Greenland were to declare independence from Denmark, which is something that's been discussed in the next few years, would it then be open to, say, Chinese or Russian influence campaigns?

And so, there's something real here. But of course, the way to create more Arctic security is not to alienate your prime NATO allies in the area.

ZAKARIA: Do you think that, you know, the U.S. is now buying icebreakers from Finland? But the Chinese have shipping -- building capacity that is, I think, I read somewhere it has 300 times the shipbuilding --

FOROOHAR: Yes.

ZAKARIA: -- capacity of the United States.

FOROOHAR: Yes.

ZAKARIA: It feels like this is going to be very difficult to match the Chinese. So, is there --

FOROOHAR: Yes.

ZAKARIA: -- a kind of a -- another strategy? Like what's the -- it's always seemed to me that's why you need allies.

FOROOHAR: Yes.

ZAKARIA: That's why you need to put a collection of countries together.

FOROOHAR: A 100 percent. And I'm thinking about -- you know, do you remember the word friendshoring, which Janet Yellen actually used first time with me in 2022? That's exactly what this icebreaker deal is. It's why I got interested in it. It's small, but it's kind of perfectly formed.

You work with two NATO allies, Finland, and at the time Canada, although that's on ice, if you will. These kinds of collaborations, frankly, are where Europe and the U.S. and other allies are going to have to go in order to compete with Chinese mercantilism.

ZAKARIA: Well, we're glad you're back. And it's warm. The book is "Sea Change," really fascinating. You learn a lot about a very new part of the world.

[10:35:00]

Next on GPS, the author, Michael Lewis, has written a new book about the civil servants who fought back against Elon Musk and the Trump administration as they tried to gut the federal bureaucracy. Those fascinating stories when we come back.

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ZAKARIA: In January 2025, Elon Musk took charge of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, having previously pledged to cut at least $2 trillion in government spending.

[10:40:07]

For the next few months, DOGE went on a rapid assault against the federal bureaucracy. Those who pushed back against DOGE's assaults were labeled by Musk as blockers, the term for someone who wasn't on board.

The author and journalist Michael Lewis tells the stories of some of these civil servants in his new book "Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State." Michael, welcome again.

MICHAEL LEWIS, BESTSELLING AUTHOR: Thanks for having me back. ZAKARIA: So, I mean, you write these mega bestsellers about all kinds of things, but you've been circling around this topic for a while. What is it that so captivates you about this topic?

LEWIS: So, it started with Trump one. It started when Trump came in and fired his transition team, and he was clearly someone who had not really had much experience in the government. He was going to be running it.

And I remember having this feeling, and the feeling was like he was just cutting off sources of information. And it's like you're driving on the highway. When someone's driving you on a highway, they're going too fast and they're talking to you, like, while they're driving, you're going -- and I thought, if I pay really close attention to this, maybe we won't wreck kind of thing. I was like --

And so, that's how I -- and I started to kind of like, just ask the question, what is the -- what is this thing he's neglecting? I got into it, wrote a book about a few agencies. It was just like a sort of almost a magazine exercise and found in the course of that that there were extremely rich characters buried in the bureaucracy. So, that's what got me interested.

And in this case, you know, I thought I was kind of done with it. But when Trump came in this time with malice towards the federal workforce, I mean, Russell Vought, his director of -- I mean, sort of the spider in the middle of the web, said, we're going to traumatize them. We're going to put them in a state of trauma.

I thought, well, that's -- I know those people. Like they aren't -- they're not really a deep state there. They're a collection of people. And I just started watching. So, that's how this came about.

ZAKARIA: To me the fascinating thing is that you get at something that I've always felt, mainly because I grew up outside America, I grew up in India, that the American government -- I know some people are going to faint when I say this, American government works astonishingly well when you compare it to other places around the world.

LEWIS: Yes.

ZAKARIA: I mean, there's much more attention to consumers, the voters. They're, you know, remarkably efficient. And as you said, there are these thousands of people doing it for no money and no fame.

LEWIS: Right. Yes. And it's -- it isn't that it's perfectly efficient. It's in some ways, it's a completely screwed up system. I mean, if you think about it we, unlike a lot of other democracies, impose on top of these people a thick political class that rotates in and out.

So, you know, you're working in a place in the boss changes every 18 months. And your budget is uncertain and nobody appreciates you. Like you're not getting -- there's no culture of like --

ZAKARIA: No, everyone's denigrating -- LEWIS: Everyone's on you. So, it's surprising it works as well as it does given the thing and the answer to why it works as well as it does given all how screwed up the systems are is these people.

ZAKARIA: Let's just talk about the IRS case because that's really interesting one. Describe what happened.

LEWIS: Well, so there is a person inside the IRS. The chief privacy officer is like the human being between your tax return and some political person in the White House who wants to damage you, like use it as a weapon. The tax -- there are buckets of data in the U.S. government. Much of the data is meant to be collected and disseminated, but there's really sensitive data like tax returns or health information that is protected by really strict laws.

Right after the inauguration, Kathleen Walters, who's the chief privacy officer, starts getting pressured to release the tax returns of 7 million undocumented workers to ICE. We've been telling undocumented workers since the 90s that if you file tax returns you will be in a better position when you come to apply for citizenship -- you are demonstrating good faith towards our society.

We've collected hundreds of billions of dollars, or at least the numbers are a little loose, $150 billion in taxes from this population, and they don't get a very good deal because they don't get a lot of the benefits in return. And we've told them that their information will be treated like the information of an American citizen. It will not be it will not be -- it won't be used against them.

So, there was this trust built up over decades. And Kathleen Walters was literally hiding in like conference rooms with the lights off, trying to avoid encountering the DOGE person who was trying to find her in the hallways to fire her because she wouldn't do the things that they wanted her to do.

And one of the things that the Trump administration was asking her to do was just to -- just hand over this information. She lost her -- she ended up -- she ended up being run out, basically. And that information, some of it, I don't know how much, at least 50,000, but maybe a lot more moved from the IRS to DHS.

[10:45:03]

And if you look -- if you think about where we are right now as a society in the history of this -- of this kind of information, when you ask people who are like experts on government data, has anything like this happened before? They say the only thing that comes to mind is the use of census data to round up Japanese-Americans in World War II and put them in concentration camps.

And so, it's like -- it's a gut check. Like we're talking about the kind of -- not just -- not just crime, but we're talking about the state of our soul. Like, why are we letting this happen?

And what I loved about Kathleen Walters is in addition to being the human body between my tax return and the Trump administration is just how dedicated she was -- she put her career -- she just tossed her career to one side, trying to -- trying to prevent this from happening. It was a 30-year career.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, I'll ask Michael Lewis what struck him the most about DOGE's attacks on the federal bureaucracy when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:50:22]

ZAKARIA: And we are back with more of my conversation with the author and journalist Michael Lewis about his new book, "Blockers."

What struck you the most that people won't understand about the DOGE assault on government?

LEWIS: Well, that they led with contempt instead of curiosity, that they had no interest in knowing what was inside these places. I mean, way less interest than like a journalist would. And assume the worst about the places and then never bothered to learn what they were disrupting.

So this sounds preposterous, but this is the kind of thing that happened. Twenty-eight-year-old gets sent over to the Department of Veterans Affairs and told, cut people, cut contracts. He doesn't -- he could barely find the building, and he knows nothing about it. Nothing.

He gets a file with all the contracts, starts (INAUDIBLE), you know, plugging in keywords, bias, gender, woman, trans, hoping to find woke like words, but bias, that's a statistical concept too. You know these words it's a little tricky when you're just doing it.

And when he finds the thing with the word, he just cuts it. They can't -- they go in to cut people. Instead of cutting -- I mean, there's an argument. There's a pretty good argument that the civil service is too hard. People are civil servants too hard to fire. I mean, it is -- there needs to be more churn in the workforce.

But instead of like looking, going and saying, like, who here is doing a good job? They go in and they realize they can only fire the people who've arrived in the last 18 months because after that they get protections.

Now, who's in that pool of people? It's -- it's the young people who are desperate for. It's people who are there to deal with some immediate problem. It's people who -- it's ambitious people who've moved from different parts of the government. They're unprotected.

So, they just fire them and tell them they're firing them for cause. What you find when you go in to do to -- to change the government, the way they change the government, it's way easier to get rid of the good people than bad people.

If you start telling people voluntary retirement, who takes it? The people who have jobs can get jobs in the private sector. So, what they did was -- I think that it -- what they -- you know, Elon Musk has this famous -- he thinks it's funny to say that all government agencies are kind of the title of the opposite of what they are.

I don't know if that's true of all government agencies, but it's definitely true of the Department of Government Efficiency that his -- that it was like the opposite. They just introduced a lot of waste. And, you know, it's --

ZAKARIA: And ended up cutting almost nothing.

LEWIS: You know, we've -- the GAO studied it. The New York Times has studied it. Musk claims like $100 billion, but it's a made up number.

The GAO said that they can only ascertain about 4 percent of what he claims he cut, he cut. So, it's a handful of billions of dollars against costs. And some of the costs are very hard to measure. Like, how do you measure the cost that we're not going to have a wildfire plan in 10 years.

So, it's -- it was -- I think, it's perplexing that a person who is obviously talented in some ways could do something so diabolically dumb, but on the other hand, there is an argument that what they were doing was not what they said they were doing, that they actually weren't there to cut stuff. They weren't there to reduce the deficit, that they were there -- what they were there to do was create enough confusion and smoke and explosions that nobody paid much attention when all the inspectors general were fired. Those are the people who are actually there to prevent waste, fraud and abuse.

When all the referees who sort of prevented the administration from abusing a nonpartisan civil service are eliminated. So, I think what they did do is make possible a massive power grab. And that's the real story.

ZAKARIA: It feels to me like the picture you paint, which seems to me exactly right, is of a sprawling government, complicated bureaucracy, lots of laws, even more rules, many of which don't make a lot of sense. But at the heart of it all are these fairly good, hardworking, dedicated people trying to operate within that system. In other words, all the bad things about government are actually laws and rules created by the hierarchy.

LEWIS: Yes, on top of them.

ZAKARIA: And these people are trying their best to do what they can --

LEWIS: In that situation -- I think that's right. And that what we've done to that pool of people is we're telling them now that up until now they've taken an oath to the constitution and they serve the country. And that means, among other things, if you're asked to break the law, don't do it.

The current administration is trying to turn that into a loyalist operation that serves the narrow self-interest of a president, and that creates a completely different behavior inside that operation. If all of a sudden what your job is just to please Donald Trump, that you are going to -- the whole government is going to function differently.

[10:55:05]

You're going to experience government differently. It's not a great idea. I mean, we figured this out in the late 19th century that a nonpartisan civil service, as complicated as it is and as much friction as it naturally causes with the political class, that it's necessary to get the big things done, you know.

ZAKARIA: And the day to day life.

LEWIS: And the day to day life stuff. Right.

ZAKARIA: Michael Lewis, you know, all your stuff is always so beautifully written and so compelling. But this really does also feel like so important. So, I hope -- I hope it will be your 25th mega bestseller. Thank you for coming, Michael.

LEWIS: Thank you, Fareed.

ZAKARIA: And thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. I will see you next week.

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