Every year in Washington, hundreds of federal workers put on gowns and tuxedos to honor colleagues who battle disease, pursue criminals and invent new technology, in what is billed as the Oscars of public service. Tearful honorees call co-workers and families onstage, and cabinet secretaries and the president offer thanks in person or by video.
Things looked different this year.
These are difficult times to be a nonpartisan federal expert, as the Trump administration has cast civil servants as villains and forced out a quarter-million of them. For the first time in the two-decade history of the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals, the federal employee of the year — the biggest honor — was no longer a federal employee.
David Lebryk, a former top Treasury Department official, was forced out of his career position for refusing to grant Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency what he considered unlawful access to the government’s payment system.
In accepting his award, Mr. Lebryk noted that “most of my career was spent trying to be unnoticed.” But he referred to the circumstances that led to his resignation, and offered a credo for public service.
“It is important to exercise principled leadership, make difficult decisions, have the courage and conviction to stand behind those decisions and be accountable and ultimately prepared to accept the consequences of those decisions,” he said.
There were no other acceptance speeches for awards given at the event — a departure from previous years — because some honorees said they were fearful of even inadvertently irking the administration. At least one winner turned down the award because the worker’s boss, a Trump appointee, forbade the worker to accept it.
Consequently, this year’s event also served as “a reminder of what we’re losing,” said Max Stier, chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit group that promotes an effective federal work force and sponsors the awards each year.
The ceremony was moved this year from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Washington epicenter of the Trump administration’s culture wars, to the new Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center, which offered the space for free.
Past ceremonies have included such attractions as a panel featuring Jeff Bezos. This year a bluegrass band composed of National Institutes of Health employees, including a sickle cell anemia researcher on bass fiddle, provided entertainment.
The Sammies, as they are called, are named for Mr. Heyman, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Connecticut and a financier who founded the Partnership for Public Service in 2001. This year, 23 winners were chosen from among 350 nominees from 65 agencies.
Among the honorees was Maya Bretzius, a strategic adviser at the Internal Revenue Service who worked to overhaul its call center operations to provide faster help for taxpayers trying to reach roughly 25,000 customer service representatives.
In an interview ahead of the ceremony, she said she was committed to completing her project in time for the upcoming tax season, despite losing hundreds of operators to buyouts and resignations.
Ms. Bretzius, 35, said she accepted a 50 percent pay cut in 2023 when she joined the I.R.S. from the Boston Consulting Group. Government “was a place that aligned with the type of impact I wanted to make in the world,” she said.
“I wanted people I grew up with in my community who don’t always have ways to advocate for themselves to have a government that works efficiently and effectively,” she added. “That is a really important part of democracy.”
Alexander Maranghides, a fire protection engineer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, was honored for decades of research into wildfires that spread to adjacent communities. His team recently condensed thousands of pages of research into a 169-page guide to planning evacuation routes, and an upcoming guide on hardening entire communities against fire.
Mr. Maranghides, an immigrant from Greece who helped with the investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks, said that the benefit of government research “is our neutrality.”
“It’s critical to what we do,” he said. “We don’t own fire engines. We don’t own land. We’re not responsible for writing building codes. All we do is science.”
Mr. Lebryk was introduced by Timothy F. Geithner and Janet Yellen, two of the 11 former Treasury secretaries he served.
He oversaw the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, which collects government revenue and disburses $6 trillion a year in government payments on behalf of government agencies. He was honored for carrying out a law that improved transparency in government tax collection and spending; for delivering 480 million stimulus payments during the pandemic; and for his use of a fraud detection program that last year clawed back $7 billion in improper payments.
In an interview before the ceremony, Mr. Lebryk said he was surprised that his departure had generated such attention for “a career guy who does this sleepy stuff.” He said he had “slept well” after he was forced to retire, “because we have the finest people in the fiscal service running these things.”
Mr. Lebryk grew up in a single-parent household in Indiana, and attended college with the help of federal education grants. “The federal government can’t and shouldn’t do everything, but it made a significant difference in my life,” he said.
The night before the awards, he addressed a group of incoming federal interns, encouraging them to pursue public service.
Eventually, he said, “things will break,” and the administration “will have to turn to people who know how to fix things.” He said he tells government colleagues to “take care of yourself, and take the long view; your skills are going to be needed in the future.”
In preparation for Tuesday’s program, he dug through photos documenting his 35 years in government. “I’ve been in Fort Knox, and sat on the gold. I helped Albania set up a ministry of finance after communism. I walked with George and Barbara Bush in the halls of Versailles,” he said.
“There is no career I ever could have had that would have given me these experiences and these opportunities,” he added. “I feel so lucky.”
Eileen Sullivan contributed reporting.
Elizabeth Williamson is a feature writer for The Times, based in Washington. She has been a journalist for three decades, on three continents.
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