The Loyalty Trap: Civil Servants’ Competing Loyalties under the Trump Administration

Chair: Anna Strhan

While critics of the federal civil service under the Trump Administration were quick to decry it a “deep state” thwarting the President’s agenda, most research instead describes the career corps as loyal to mission, risk-averse, and serially partisan or non-partisan. How did civil servants make sense of and respond to the Trump administration? I find that, despite widespread dissatisfaction with the Trump administration, most civil servants largely sought to comply at work, circumscribed by what they defined as appropriately within the scope of their mandates.

Acts of resistance and moral courage were possible, but seemed to occur under particular local work conditions and largely in forms that cohered with institutional and professional imperatives. My research suggests the need to complicate the conceptual difference between “resistance” and “complicity” under repressive political leadership by underscoring the processes through which bureaucrats make sense of and act in their immediate work environments, while negotiating multiple loyalties to personal and professional values, norms and obligations, organizational cultures and their own circumscribed efficacy in complex organizations.

About the speaker

Jaime Kucinskas is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Hamilton College, and this year is a Visiting Professor at Mid Sweden University. In her research, she examines the constitutive institutional conditions under which people engage in moral-sensemaking.

She is the author of The Mindful Elite and co-editor of Situating Spirituality: Context, Practice and Power (Oxford University Press). Her work has been published in the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, the Journal for the Social Scientific Study of Religion, Sociology of Religion, Social Movement Studies, and other academic and popular outlets.