It has come to this. Every year a completely inoffensive nonprofit called the Partnership for Public Service hosts a ceremony to hand out awards to civil servants who excel at their jobs. The awards are called the “Sammies,” after the roofing magnate and philanthropist Samuel J. Heyman (1939–2009), who put up $45 million to create the Partnership for Public Service in 2001. The Sammies have won bipartisan praise over the years, and at the latest gala, held May 6, former Presidents George W. Bush and Joe Biden made video appearances.
But the Trump administration doesn’t want excellent civil servants. It made that plain last year when it pushed out Dave Lebryk, fiscal assistant treasury secretary, who at last year’s Sammies ceremony won the highest honor, “federal employee of the year.” Lebryk was cashiered for denying Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency access to the government’s payment system. (That’s also what won him his Sammie.)
Indeed, Trump doesn’t seem to want civil servants at all. Last year he either fired or harassed into quitting 317,000 of them, and this year he’s poised to reclassify 50,000 more as “at will” employees with no civil service protection. White House budget director Russell “Project 2025” Vought famously said in a 2024 speech, “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.” The only reason Vought would ever show up at a Sammies ceremony would be to scribble down license plate numbers like a police detective at a Mafia funeral.
In light of all this, it’s hardly surprising that attendance was way down at this year’s Sammies ceremony, according to Meryl Kornfield of The Washington Post. Participation was also down among the federal agencies that nominate employees for Sammies. In 2024, 70 agencies nominated about 500 federal bureaucrats for Sammies. In 2025, 65 agencies nominated about 350. This year, 39 agencies nominated about 140. Several Cabinet members explicitly refused to participate in the survey, and many others declined more quietly. “There was nervousness about nominating anyone,” Max Stier, chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service, told The New York Times’ Elizabeth Williamson, “nervousness about accepting, a culture of fear and subbasement morale.”
Last year, the Partnership awarded 19 Sammies; this year, only four. I’m going to withhold their names because I don’t want to put a target on their backs.
Fear may not be the only factor driving down the number of Sammies awarded this year. Another reason may be that there are 317,000 fewer civil servants to choose from. Conservative rhetoric to the contrary, the civil service isn’t that big; it’s only about 2.1 million people, which is significantly fewer than there were 50 years ago. The total went down because about half those people worked for the Defense Department, which downsized after the Cold War ended. Even so, the three defense agencies—the Defense Department, the Veterans Affairs Department, and the Homeland Security Department—today employ the majority of civil servants. Civil servants at non-defense government departments—the departments where Musk and Vought concentrated their bloodletting—number only about 725,000. That suggests that in the last year we lost somewhere between one-third and one-half of all non-defense civil servants.
Were some of the 317,000 fired civil servants incompetent? With a sample that large, there’s bound to have been some clock-watchers and dumbbells. But all available evidence suggests that it wasn’t the incompetents who got targeted, but rather the smarter, harder-working, and more dedicated employees, who weren’t afraid to get in Musk’s and Vought’s way. Incompetents tend to be compliant and try not to draw attention to themselves. If I’m right, then the one-third-to-one-half of all civil servants fired last year included a disproportionate number of Sammie prospects. It’s a terrible brain drain for the country—and, whether he knows it or not, for Trump. As my colleague Grace Segers reported last month, one reason (among many) that the conflict with Iran is going so badly is that the experienced staff who would normally help manage it are no longer there.
Last year, Michael Lewis published Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service, an excellent anthology of profiles of stellar civil servants that originated as a Washington Post series under the stewardship of opinion editor David Shipley (who quit rather than adhere to Jeff Bezos’s policy that the Post publish only opinions with which Bezos agreed). As best I can tell, all of the government workers celebrated by Lewis and Co. still seem to be in the employ of the federal government, and one of them, Jarod Koopman of the IRS, actually got promoted last fall to acting chief tax compliance officer. (To read my Democracy review of Lewis’s book, click here, and to read my 2022 celebration of public servants in TNR, click here.)
Or maybe Koopman got kicked upstairs. In Lewis’s anthology, Geraldine Brooks wrote about Koopman’s derring-do as director of the IRS’s Cyber Crimes section. Among the achievements Brooks celebrated was the prosecution of one Dread Pirate Roberts, a 29-year-old drug dealer named Ross Ulbricht. But the day after Trump was re- inaugurated in 2025, he pardoned Ulbricht, saying on Truth Social, “The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me.” So much for excellence.
The Pulitzer Prize for public-service journalism was awarded earlier this week to a different Washington Post series about civil servants, this one focused on how they’ve been abused under Trump. After the pieces ran, the FBI raided the home of the principal author of the series, Hannah Natanson. If that’s what happens to big-time journalists who write sympathetically about civil servants, you can imagine what happens to the civil servants themselves. The price these days of winning a Sammie would appear to be too high. If you’re doing the people’s work effectively, best to keep quiet about it and to ask your friends and colleagues to clam up about it too, until the present Cultural Revolution in Washington ends.