Latest news with #PartnershipforPublicService
Atlantic
4 days ago
- Politics
- Atlantic
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. 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.' 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.
Washington Post
4 days ago
- Politics
- Washington Post
Federal employees celebrate their Oscar night under a shadow
In a glittering counternarrative to the grim uncertainty about their careers, federal workers gathered Tuesday night dressed to the nines for an awards ceremony often referred to as the Oscars for government service. The Partnership for Public Service's annual award ceremony — the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals, nicknamed the Sammies — had an air of polite defiance this year, honoring problem-solvers in government at a time when the Trump administration has gone after the bureaucracy and ridiculed federal workers.
Observer
01-06-2025
- Politics
- Observer
Musk's legacy is disease, starvation and death
There is an Elon Musk post on X, his social media platform, that should define his legacy. 'We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,' he wrote on February 3. He could have 'gone to some great parties. Did that instead.' Musk's absurd scheme to save the government a trillion dollars by slashing 'waste, fraud and abuse' has been a failure. DOGE claims it's saved $175 billion, but experts believe the real number is significantly lower. Meanwhile, according to the Partnership for Public Service, which studies the federal workforce, DOGE's attacks on government personnel — its firings, re-hirings, use of paid administrative leave and all the associated lack of productivity — could cost the government upward of $135 billion this fiscal year, even before the price of defending DOGE's actions in court. Musk's rampage through the bureaucracy may not have created any savings at all, and if it did, they were negligible. Now, Musk's Washington adventure is coming to an end, with the disillusioned billionaire announcing that he's leaving government behind. 'It sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in DC, to say the least,' he told The Washington Post. There is one place, however, where Musk, with the help of his minions, achieved his goals. He did indeed shred USAID. Though a rump operation is now operating inside the State Department, the administration says that it has terminated more than 80 per cent of USAID grants. Brooke Nichols, an associate professor of global health at Boston University, has estimated that these cuts have already resulted in about 300,000 deaths, most of them of children, and will most likely lead to significantly more by the end of the year. That is what Musk's foray into politics accomplished. White House officials deny that their decimation of USAID has had fatal consequences. At a hearing in the House last week, Democrats confronted Secretary of State Marco Rubio with my colleague Nick Kristof's reporting from East Africa, documenting suffering and death caused by the withdrawal of aid. Rubio insisted no such deaths have happened, but people who've been in the field say he's either lying or misinformed. Atul Gawande, an assistant administrator for global health at USAID in Joe Biden's administration, told me that during a trip to Kenya last week, he visited the national referral hospital. There's been a major increase in the number of patients with advanced HIV symptoms, a result of losing access to antiretroviral medication. At refugee camps on the border of South Sudan, food aid has been cut so severely that people are getting less than 30 per cent of the calories they need. 'It is not enough to survive on, and that has caused skyrocketing levels of severe malnutrition and deaths associated with it,' said Gawande. Musk apparently did not anticipate that it would be bad PR for the world's richest man to take food and medicine from the world's poorest children. The Post reported that he hadn't foreseen 'the intensity of the blowback to his role in politics over the past year.' He's been doing a series of interviews that Axios called an 'image rehab tour.' If there were justice in the world, Musk would never be able to repair his reputation, at least not without devoting the bulk of his fortune to easing the misery he's engendered. Musk's sojourn in government has revealed severe flaws in his character — a blithe, dehumanising cruelty, and a deadly incuriosity. This should shape how he's seen for the rest of his public life. Musk sometimes refers to people he holds in contempt as 'NPCs,' video game speak for characters who aren't controlled by players and thus have no agency. More than just an insult, the term, I think, reveals something about his worldview. He either doesn't view most other people as entirely real or doesn't see the point of treating them as such. As he told Joe Rogan this year, 'The fundamental weakness of Western civilisation is empathy,' referring to the emotion as a 'bug' in our system. Yet even as he prides himself on dispassionate rigour, Musk has proved remarkably uninterested in figuring out how the government that he sought to transform really works. Samantha Power, head of USAID under Joe Biden, told me she tried to speak with members of the new administration, hoping to convince them there were elements of USAID's work that they could leverage for their own agenda. But aside from one meeting with a transition official, her outreach was ignored. Instead, Musk seemed to derive his view of the agency from conspiracy theorists on X. There, he called USAID a 'radical-left political psy op' and amplified a post from the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos smearing it as 'the most gigantic global terror organisation in history.' It would have been easy for Musk to take his private plane to a country like Uganda to see for himself the work USAID has done providing medicine to people with HIV or feeding refugees from South Sudan. Instead, he drew on the counsel of Internet trolls and staffed DOGE with lackeys who were similarly ignorant. 'If you heard the conversations USAID staff had with the DOGE people, there is no word in any language that captures the level of obliviousness about what USAID actually did,' Power said. This kind of intellectual carelessness should make people reevaluate their faith in Musk's brilliance. 'Being president doesn't change who you are; it reveals who you are,' Michelle Obama has said. The same is true, apparently, of being the president's best friend, even fleetingly. — The New York Times
Yahoo
30-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump administration to prioritize ‘patriotic Americans' for federal jobs
As President Donald Trump moves to slash the size of the federal workforce, his administration unveiled a plan to ensure that any new hires are 'patriotic Americans' who vow to advance the president's policy priorities. The White House and the agency that serves as the government's human resources arm Thursday released directives for departments to use when recruiting employees in a memo that represents a dramatic shift in federal hiring procedures. The administration's 'merit hiring plan' comes after Trump ordered a revamp to the federal hiring process on his first day in office. The resulting plan issued this week says it aims to ensure that 'only the most talented, capable and patriotic Americans' are hired by the government. The 'overly complex Federal hiring system overemphasized discriminatory 'equity' quotas and too often resulted in the hiring of unfit, unskilled bureaucrats,' says the memo authored by Vince Haley, assistant to the president for domestic policy, and Charles Ezell, the acting director of the Office of Personnel Management. Trump and his allies have railed against civil servants, accusing them of working to undermine the president's policy priorities. The new hiring plan will require job applicants to write short essays describing how they plan to advance Trump's priorities. Under the plan, all federal job vacancy announcements starting at the GS-5 pay grade or above will require short essay responses to questions about their commitment to the Constitution, how they plan to improve government efficiency, how they plan to advance Trump's executive orders and policy priorities, and about their work ethic. Critics called the requirements a loyalty test for the administration, while saying they could make future recruiting even harder. 'I think it's foolish,' said Paul Light, professor emeritus of public service at New York University. 'It's hard enough to get talent these days.' Putting additional hurdles in the way of recruiting for government jobs at this point 'ain't a good thing,' he said. It's important to hire federal workers based on their skills, said Jenny Mattingley, vice president of government affairs at the Partnership for Public Service. But 'asking every federal applicant to demonstrate work toward presidential policy priorities should not be part of the criteria." 'Many federal employees are air traffic controllers, national park rangers, food safety inspectors and firefighters who carry out the missions of agencies that are authorized by Congress,' she said. 'These public servants, who deliver services directly to the public, should not be forced to answer politicized questions that fail to evaluate the skills they need to do their jobs effectively.' The Trump plan also says it aims to limit the government's focus on recruiting from 'elite universities.' The memo says hiring has focused too much on 'elite universities and credentials' and says it will target new recruits from 'state and land-grant universities, religious colleges and universities, community colleges, high schools, trade and technical schools, homeschooling groups, faith-based groups, American Legion, 4-H youth programs, and the military, veterans, and law enforcement communities.' The administration also bars agency heads from using racial quotas and preferences in federal hiring, recruitment and promotion. The memo directs agencies to 'cease using statistics on race, sex, ethnicity or national origin, or the broader concept of 'underrepresentation' of certain groups' in decisions about hiring or promotions. It orders agencies to stop disseminating information about the composition of agencies' workers based on their race, sex, color, religion or national origin. The hiring plan also aims to speed up the federal hiring process in response to Trump's order directing governmentwide hiring to be reduced to under 80 days. Also on Thursday, the administration issued a memo detailing hiring and talent development plans for leaders within the federal government's career employee ranks known as the Senior Executive Service, or SES. Trump issued a memo on the first day of his administration saying that because those officials 'wield significant governmental authority, they must serve at the pleasure of the President.' The new hiring memo criticizes SES hiring as a 'broken, insular' process that has 'resulted in the hiring of executives who engage in unauthorized disclosure of Executive Branch deliberations, violate the constitutional rights of Americans, refuse to implement policy priorities, or perform their duties inefficiently or negligently.' Previous qualifications for SES hiring 'included unlawful 'diversity, equity and inclusion' (DEI) criteria for hiring Federal executives,' the memo says. The administration says it's eliminating DEI factors in hiring for the service, and will focus on candidates' efficiency, merit and competence, ability to lead, and ability to achieve results. To build a pipeline of potential executive leaders, the memo says, OPM will provide an 80-hour intensive 'fee-based aspiring executive development program' that's 'grounded in the Constitution, laws, and Founding ideals of our government, and will provide training on President Trump's Executive Orders.' That program is 'designed to equip aspiring leaders with the skills, knowledge, technical expertise, and strategic mindset necessary to excel in senior leadership roles,' the memo says.
Politico
30-05-2025
- Politics
- Politico
Trump administration to prioritize ‘patriotic Americans' for federal jobs
As President Donald Trump moves to slash the size of the federal workforce, his administration unveiled a plan to ensure that any new hires are 'patriotic Americans' who vow to advance the president's policy priorities. The White House and the agency that serves as the government's human resources arm Thursday released directives for departments to use when recruiting employees in a memo that represents a dramatic shift in federal hiring procedures. The administration's 'merit hiring plan' comes after Trump ordered a revamp to the federal hiring process on his first day in office. The resulting plan issued this week says it aims to ensure that 'only the most talented, capable and patriotic Americans' are hired by the government. The 'overly complex Federal hiring system overemphasized discriminatory 'equity' quotas and too often resulted in the hiring of unfit, unskilled bureaucrats,' says the memo authored by Vince Haley, assistant to the president for domestic policy, and Charles Ezell, the acting director of the Office of Personnel Management. Trump and his allies have railed against civil servants, accusing them of working to undermine the president's policy priorities. The new hiring plan will require job applicants to write short essays describing how they plan to advance Trump's priorities. Under the plan, all federal job vacancy announcements starting at the GS-5 pay grade or above will require short essay responses to questions about their commitment to the Constitution, how they plan to improve government efficiency, how they plan to advance Trump's executive orders and policy priorities, and about their work ethic. Critics called the requirements a loyalty test for the administration, while saying they could make future recruiting even harder. 'I think it's foolish,' said Paul Light, professor emeritus of public service at New York University. 'It's hard enough to get talent these days.' Putting additional hurdles in the way of recruiting for government jobs at this point 'ain't a good thing,' he said. It's important to hire federal workers based on their skills, said Jenny Mattingley, vice president of government affairs at the Partnership for Public Service. But 'asking every federal applicant to demonstrate work toward presidential policy priorities should not be part of the criteria.' 'Many federal employees are air traffic controllers, national park rangers, food safety inspectors and firefighters who carry out the missions of agencies that are authorized by Congress,' she said. 'These public servants, who deliver services directly to the public, should not be forced to answer politicized questions that fail to evaluate the skills they need to do their jobs effectively.' The Trump plan also says it aims to limit the government's focus on recruiting from 'elite universities.' The memo says hiring has focused too much on 'elite universities and credentials' and says it will target new recruits from 'state and land-grant universities, religious colleges and universities, community colleges, high schools, trade and technical schools, homeschooling groups, faith-based groups, American Legion, 4-H youth programs, and the military, veterans, and law enforcement communities.' The administration also bars agency heads from using racial quotas and preferences in federal hiring, recruitment and promotion. The memo directs agencies to 'cease using statistics on race, sex, ethnicity or national origin, or the broader concept of 'underrepresentation' of certain groups' in decisions about hiring or promotions. It orders agencies to stop disseminating information about the composition of agencies' workers based on their race, sex, color, religion or national origin. The hiring plan also aims to speed up the federal hiring process in response to Trump's order directing governmentwide hiring to be reduced to under 80 days. Also on Thursday, the administration issued a memo detailing hiring and talent development plans for leaders within the federal government's career employee ranks known as the Senior Executive Service, or SES. Trump issued a memo on the first day of his administration saying that because those officials 'wield significant governmental authority, they must serve at the pleasure of the President.' The new hiring memo criticizes SES hiring as a 'broken, insular' process that has 'resulted in the hiring of executives who engage in unauthorized disclosure of Executive Branch deliberations, violate the constitutional rights of Americans, refuse to implement policy priorities, or perform their duties inefficiently or negligently.' Previous qualifications for SES hiring 'included unlawful 'diversity, equity and inclusion' (DEI) criteria for hiring Federal executives,' the memo says. The administration says it's eliminating DEI factors in hiring for the service, and will focus on candidates' efficiency, merit and competence, ability to lead, and ability to achieve results. To build a pipeline of potential executive leaders, the memo says, OPM will provide an 80-hour intensive 'fee-based aspiring executive development program' that's 'grounded in the Constitution, laws, and Founding ideals of our government, and will provide training on President Trump's Executive Orders.' That program is 'designed to equip aspiring leaders with the skills, knowledge, technical expertise, and strategic mindset necessary to excel in senior leadership roles,' the memo says.
