When I started investigating civil servants’ responses to the first Trump administration in 2017, I presumed civil servants were likely to face ethical dilemmas. During his campaign and early presidency, Trump criticized what he called the “deep state.” Historic mass protests in support of women, science, climate change, and asylum seekers proliferated in response to Trump and his administration’s evident values and agenda.
Through civil servants’ own reports in real time across the first Trump administration, I show in my new book The Loyalty Trap how civil servants understood and responded to illiberal and anti-bureaucratic leadership changes in their workplaces. I also analyzed who was likely to resist, how, and why.
In reflecting on civil servants’ experiences and responses to the first Trump term, their stories and reflections on ethics reveal how workplace hierarchies can set the stage for, influence, and delimit agentic moral action, even among people who care more than most about doing the right thing for their country and the public. It also shows how autocratic turns in leadership can provoke particularly heightened and drawn out political and ethical conflicts for public servants.
First it is important to contextualize civil servants’ ethical quandaries in the federal administrative state and culture of professional public service. As public administration scholar Dwight Waldo (1980) explains, many civil servants grapple with various potentially contradictory professional ethical standards as part of their everyday work. American federal civil servants want to maintain loyalty to their country, the law, the Constitution, democracy, organizational and bureaucratic norms, their profession, their colleagues, public welfare and humanity in general, their selves, and family, and—increasingly in the past several decades—to the president and his administration. This is a delicate moral tightrope to walk, even under normal administrations.
For those in senior positions interfacing between Trump’s appointees under his first term, upholding all their ethical standards seemed nearly impossible at times. This raises the question of the conditions under which theories of moral action apply: do they apply equally under conditions of liberal and illiberal governance?
In the most politicized agencies, such as the State Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, and Health and Human Services during Trump’s first term, some of the senior executive service members and other high-level career civil servants who interfaced with political appointees experienced what I call loyalty traps. These senior civil servants found it nearly impossible to uphold their typical expected ethical standards and meet the new stringent standard of loyalty to the president above all else that was sought by the president himself and some appointees who failed to uphold public servants’ ethical code.
Civil servants told me about situations wherein evaluating spending requests, trying to hire qualified knowledgeable and experienced job candidates, and providing sound legal advice—as they long had done—were met with suspicion from some political appointees, who accused them of disloyalty to the presidential administration or sidelined them from their typical duties. Importantly, such critiques increased expectations of loyalty to the presidential administration, and decreased reliance on professional expertise. Such conditions raise questions of how much agency civil servants had, given their bureaucratic hierarchy.
Federal employees always ostensibly have the option of quitting. About a quarter of the federal employees I spoke with ended up leaving their positions over the course of Trump’s first administration. Some however, felt their exit was blocked, because they had student loans, were close to retirement, or wanted to retain the security of their position and its required hours for their families.
Some people tried to speak up, but found their powers taken away. As I show in my book, a senior official at the Environmental Protection Agency said that when she raised a question about an agency administrator’s aberrant request, she was told, “the administrator decided…you don’t get to decide,” even though it was supposed to be her job. Incidents like these occurred nearly every day. She noted how you could not stand up to leaders’ ethical transgressions daily and in her office “mostly we held our nose and signed” requests. Even so, she reported, “We were given a little bit of pushback for frivolously raising ethics questions…it wasn’t too long before they just…took away some of my authorities as a senior official and let somebody else sign the stuff. Remarkable.” Her ability to do her job as she long had done and saw fit had narrowed, as had her ability to speak up. When she simply asked questions, she was punished. Some of her duties were taken away. Others more willing to comply were rewarded with promotions. “Loyalty is not to question,” she said, under such leadership.
Others also described the “chilling” effect of witnessing others experience political retribution in their agencies. A mid-level manager who had previously been a rising star in international affairs, but worked under a particularly vindictive Trump appointee with a “bad list” of career civil servants in her agency said, “I have kind of determined that it is totally pointless to argue with him [the appointee about human rights issues] because he does not take on any alternative. I’ve never seen him change his position when he learns the full context. I think anything that doesn’t fit his worldview he just rejects…I think one choice is to argue the case with him, and I have not seen that win with anybody who’s tried to. It’s only gotten them put on the bad list. So I’ve not done that.”
Mid-level managers described other kinds of ethical binds. Some described trying to do their best to support appointees without sufficient directives on what to do. They witnessed in-fighting between appointees and contrasting support for certain projects and policies from the president, some of his aides, members of his family, and their agency’s appointees. As civil servant working in international affairs Yasin Abadi (pseudonyms used to protect study participants) reported, the political appointees “want things which are in direct contradiction of each other.” Under such conditions, civil servants struggled between whether to obey in advance or continue work being done, or wait for more guidance. Doing so might let some work stagnate or cease.
Abadi felt like he had insufficient information to properly do his job, and was especially anxious about acting in his agency, where he had witnessed political retribution for missteps. “I don’t know what’s going on,” he said. “I don’t know what all this stuff means.” In facing such uncertainty, he also felt like he had to choose between being “a slick salesman and come out of it looking good,” but then have to face “unintended consequences down the line,” or “you could also be not a slick salesman, have trouble now, but maybe no unintended consequences down the line. So take your pick, and neither of them sound very great.” He concluded that helping appointees sometimes meant: “just doing little, quite frankly. And it means just doing what’s necessary, and it means waiting to help educate folks about what their opinions are as we go forward, as opposed to getting too fired up about things. Because it’s safer.” By the end of Trump’s term, he described how he still wanted to support appointees, as he was supposed to do, but his productivity had diminished, and out of fear, he was wary to take on new projects or engage in innovative work.
These stories help show how for some civil servants’ facing ethical quandaries under increasingly authoritarian leadership, there were simply not good options. Civil servants were entrapped between competing loyalties to serve the public, uphold democratic checks and balances, serve the elected president and his appointees, adhere to the law and maintain state functioning. They were also limited by the bounds of their positions, and the amount of trust appointees and supervisors placed in them to assist in policy and project work. Across politicized government agencies, civil servants reported not being included in as many decision-making meetings as they typically would have been under other presidential administrations.
As a sociologist, I wonder when moral theories apply under authoritarian leadership that narrows windows to speak up and threatens political retribution? How can philosophers take into account how these conditional circumstances act upon people both consciously and unconsciously, as their self-narratives and habits are challenged and begin to crumble and their possibilities for agentic action shrink?
Among the rare civil servants who lucidly assessed the risks of the authoritarian turn in the government under the first Trump administration and acted in morally courageous and risky ways—they were more likely to view political changes as dire and requiring urgent action. In weighing the risks, they opted to engage in loyal dissent. In this seeming paradoxical approach, these civil servants questioned and challenged the new status quo and direction of their agencies under Trump’s leadership from within, in accordance with their professional public service values and standards of quality work as stewards of the state. Such actions not only dissented from some Trump appointees’ agendas, but contradicted their expectations of loyalty to the president above all else. Civil servants justified such actions by their deeply held professional ethical commitments to share their expertise, uphold the law and Constitution and serve the democratic state to benefit the public and nation.
Those who overtly engaged in loyal dissent reflected on their core values and who they wanted to be in the future. They were more likely to have supportive colleagues at work and mentors outside of work that affirmed the importance of maintaining a meritocratic democracy, regardless of its risks. Dissenters were also more likely to have a rich life outside of work: they participated in local community work and non-profits, and were more likely to regularly attend events, such as protests and rallies, that supported their benevolent, universal values.
Civil servants’ experiences under democratic backsliding leave one with many questions to continue pondering. This is where political moral philosophers can serve as an anchor during these turbulent times. Drawing on symbolic interactionism and pragmatism, it is also now more important than ever to be inquiring into what ideas, networks, places, and structures tether the self to an ethical commitment when the real-world norms and incentives change and challenge such commitments? How do visions of one’s future self or the greater good for all matter in holding onto such values? How can collectives form more beloved communities which can inspire and maintain such values in the face of the illiberal societal turn we are now facing under Trump’s second term?
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