"The Loyalty Trap" by  Jaime Kucinskas explores how civil servants navigated competing pressures and duties
amid the chaos of the first Trump administration, drawing on over 100 in-depth interviews
with mid-level and senior officials working across agencies over the course of a tumultuous
term. Federal employees became ensnared in intractable ethical traps, caught between
their commitment to nonpartisan public service and the expectation of compliance with
political directives. In this talk, Kucinskas explains different challenges career civil servants face amid
organizational decline in the most politicized parts of the government, and the conditions
under which select civil servants speak up to maintain their work and democratic integrity.