The Free-Living Bureaucrat
April 04, 2025 at 10:11PMWe’ve previously featured pieces from “Who is government?,” a Washington Post series in which writers search for “the essential public servant”—including Dave Eggers on the members of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and Michael Lewis on a U.S. Bureau of Mines employee whose life’s work prevents cave-ins. Here, Lewis works his characteristic magic—raising a rare subject, lacing a breadth of history with critical questions, composing an intimate narrative with sweeping implications—on Heather Stone, a science-policy analyst for the FDA. Stone devoted years to create a clearing house for case studies of rare infectious diseases, many of which pharmaceutical giants are disinterested in funding cures for. Lewis leads readers through a family’s harrowing medical mystery whose outcome hinges less on bureaucratic systems than a singularly motivated individual.
Like the other federal bureaucrats I’ve written about, Heather Stone, and her function, were buried under six layers on an agency organizational chart. The agency in her case was the Food and Drug Administration, and her function was to help doctors find new treatments for rare, deadly diseases. Like these other subjects, she was shocked to be discovered and explained nervously that she was unable to speak with me without the permission of the agency’s communications team. As always, that team felt uneasy about me communicating anything about this faceless government employee. Please submit the list of questions you intend to ask. Perhaps you’d prefer to speak instead with her politically appointed boss who would make for a far more important story? Any journalist who turns up inside the federal bureaucracy asking simple, if open-ended, questions — who is this person, what is she doing and why is she doing it? — becomes an object of suspicion, which is maybe why you read so few case studies about them. As it turned out, Heather really wanted to answer my questions. It just took a few months for her to shed the layers on the org chart designed to keep her from doing it.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/04/04/the-free-living-bureaucrat/
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