The New Danger in Trump’s Washington: Honoring Federal Employees

In some ways, last night’s Sammie awards—also known as the Oscars for federal employees—proceeded just as they do every year. In a packed auditorium a few blocks from the White House, government luminaries handed out medals to some of the nation’s most talented civil servants, recognizing groundbreaking research, major improvements in customer service, and top-notch stewardship of taxpayer money.

The ceremony, however, was unusual in one respect: Hardly any of the honorees took the stage to accept their awards. Instead, they stayed at their seats, away from the cameras. Public recognition of their good work in Donald Trump’s government, organizers feared, could cost them their jobs.

Such is the climate of fear that has pervaded the federal workforce during the second Trump administration, which has moved to shut down entire agencies, shrink the government through mass layoffs and inducements to quit, and crack down on dissent. The Partnership for Public Service, the nonprofit that awards the Sammies, was determined to hold the ceremony, but it did not want to put its honorees in additional jeopardy. “The sensitivity is real,” Max Stier, the partnership’s CEO, told me. “We did not want to see them harmed in any way for being recognized for their work.” At least one federal employee who organizers wanted to honor was told by supervisors to not accept the award, Stier said. He called the administration’s assault on the civil service “a five-alarm fire.”

Past Sammie ceremonies—the awards’ full name is the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals—have hardly been controversial. Administrations of both parties have participated in the black-tie event since its debut in 2002, sending Cabinet secretaries and other high-ranking officials to serve as presenters and laud the achievements of their underlings. TV-news stars including CBS’s John Dickerson and PBS’s Judy Woodruff have taken turns as emcees. (The selection committee this year included Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic.) The evening is the one night a year when largely unheralded public servants are feted.

For many years, the nonprofit partnership operated inside the Washington establishment. It has remained studiously nonpartisan and worked closely with every presidential transition since George W. Bush, including, initially, the first Trump campaign. But the escalation of Trump’s attacks on federal employees has forced the partnership to take up a post, somewhat uncomfortably, in the opposition. Stier has fought the president’s efforts to convert thousands of nonpartisan civil servants into political appointees, a shift that he says would revive the discredited “spoils system” of 19th-century America. In turn, Trump allies have labeled Stier “a Democrat activist” because of his past work as a lawyer in the Clinton administration. He was also on Bill Clinton’s defense team when the president was impeached over his affair with Monica Lewinsky, then a White House intern.

[Read: The Oscars, but for federal employees]

The first Trump administration took part in the Sammies, but Stier said the partnership did not reach out this time around. “All the signals were that they were undermining excellence” rather than recognizing or honoring it, he said. “Therefore we did not believe we could do that.” As a result, the event felt at times like a reunion of a government in exile. Although the ceremony did include a taped appearance by a former George W. Bush chief of staff, Joshua Bolten, former Democratic officials were overrepresented. At one point, a former Barack Obama chief of staff, Denis McDonough, spoke alongside Jeff Zients, who was Joe Biden’s most recent chief of staff. At another, one of Obama’s Treasury secretaries, Timothy Geithner, appeared with Biden’s, Janet Yellen.

The Sammies usually take place in September, with a smaller event in the spring to announce finalists. But Stier decided to move up the celebration this year. He wasn’t sure how many of the honorees would still be working for the federal government in September. “We need the public to understand that this is urgent,” Stier said. “We cannot operate under the same timeline, because the destruction is happening so quickly.”

To guard against reprisal, the honorees sat in the audience and stood when their names were called, rather than appearing onstage to talk about their work in acceptance speeches. (The ceremony will air on some PBS stations next month.) The partnership appeared torn between recognizing the recipients publicly—none of their identities were hidden—and protecting them from any punishment if officials in the Trump administration objected to their remarks or believed they were making a political statement by standing in a literal spotlight. Although the partnership has traditionally been eager to make honorees available for interviews, a spokesperson this year said some were reluctant to speak publicly “given the current environment.”

I did talk with Dr. Laura Cheever, who received a Sammie for her decades of work managing federal programs combatting and treating HIV/AIDS. She retired in December—it was “long-planned,” she told me. She was now freer to speak, but she said she might have been at risk had she stayed, because she had signed a letter stating that recipients of federal HIV/AIDS money should be able to provide gender-affirming care to their clients—a position at odds with the Trump administration’s moves to block transgender-health services.

Cheever told me she thought the partnership’s efforts to shield its honorees from retaliation were necessary. Inside the government, she said, “people are working aggressively not to call attention to themselves or the work that they’re doing. They’re just trying to do their work.”

[Read: Federal workers are facing a new reality]

This year’s awards honored achievements across a wide swath of the government, many in areas targeted by DOGE or threatened by cuts Trump has proposed to Congress. An employee with the all-but-defunct USAID, Kathleen Kirsch, was recognized for leading efforts to help Ukraine rebuild its energy infrastructure after attacks by Russia. The IRS’s Maya Bretzius received a medal for reducing wait times in the agency’s call center. “Thanks, Maya, for making calls to the IRS a little less, shall we say, taxing,” McDonough joked in his speech. Others won awards for speedily cutting checks for COVID-era relief during the first Trump administration as well as for recovering fraudulent payments.

Trump’s name was not uttered during the hour-long program. But before and after the ceremony, the pall cast by his cuts to the workforce dominated. Attendees commiserated over the intrusions of DOGE and a job market suddenly stuffed with fired federal workers or those looking for a way out of the government. One attendee described a “heaviness” in his Virginia neighborhood, a suburb populated by federal workers who either had lost their jobs or feared losing them. A cancer scientist told me about research he had worked on for decades that was now at risk of losing funding. “There’s just sort of a miasma of concern that overrides everything else,” Cheever said, describing morale among her friends who are still in the government. “It’s like walking on eggshells all the time, which is just not a very comfortable place to be.”

One Sammie honoree did take the stage last night—the federal employee of the year, Dave Lebryk. But his award, too, carried reminders of a civil service under siege. Lebryk was recognized for his many years as the Treasury Department official responsible for the government’s payment system. Under both Republican and Democratic administrations, he oversaw trillions of dollars in annual disbursements—including the regular checks that go to Social Security recipients and veterans—while maintaining the security of a system that contains confidential information for millions of Americans. Lebryk has even seen the gold at Fort Knox. “It really does exist. It’s there,” he quipped during his speech.

But in late January, he ended his 35-year career in government, resigning rather than hand over access to Treasury’s sensitive payment system to Elon Musk’s lieutenants at DOGE. That act of resistance helped to explain his Sammie medal, as well as his willingness to publicly accept it: The federal employee of the year is, in fact, no longer a federal employee.