It’s No Longer Safe for Civil Servants to Be Good at Their Job

If you’re an effective federal worker, don’t let Trump find out—you might not be one for much longer.

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........

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