Franklin Foer

It's not a cliche, and I think that explains a lot of the hurt that they felt when they were kicked to the curb in such an undignified sort of way.

Now, I admit this all sounds kind of gauzy as I'm presenting it, but I think that the gauziness of it was kind of part of the surprise for me in the course of doing this, that I felt like...

I would be meeting people who were more bitter.

And I was very self-conscious about saying, we're going to talk about the end at the end of this conversation.

But really, most of the conversation is about what you did.

I want to hear about your job.

And I think that there was something almost cathartic for a lot of the people to be able to kind of get past the sad part of the story and to talk about the thing that they were most enthusiastic about.

Part of, I think, our cultural inclination as Americans, kind of the innate

libertarianism that's baked into all of us and the fact that we've had kind of distrust of government and the sense of its inefficiency hammered into us for so long, we're not inclined to think of bureaucrats charitably.

But when you actually think about what they do and you learn about their jobs, you see that

it's not just an academic exercise, it's not just a bunch of paper pushers, that there was a reason that Congress decided to create these jobs, that there was some good, some essential service that they were providing.

I wanted to get a portrait of the government in its entirety across hierarchies.

But I did it, I entered in a way where I was pretty confident.

I was like, I am a native Washingtonian.

I've grown up in the city.

I've grown up around bureaucrats.

I feel like I've written about politics for my entire adult career.

I felt like I knew what the U.S.

government was.

And I