For nearly 25 years the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals have been one of Washington’s feel-good events, honoring public servants whose inventions, cures and discoveries have benefited Americans paying their salaries.
This year’s gathering, at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, reflected the brutal success of the Trump administration’s drive to gut the federal work force — and at the same time, the determination of those who remain to persevere.
This year, “there was nervousness about nominating anyone, nervousness about accepting, a culture of fear and subbasement morale,” said Max Stier, the chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service, which advocates a more effective federal work force and sponsors the awards.
Nominations slowed to a relative trickle this year as an administration hostile to federal workers slashed government agencies. Only four awards were given to federal workers, compared with two dozen in past years.
“It’s terrible,” Mr. Stier conceded. “But the goal is to still make this celebration for the people that are there.”
Nicknamed “Sammies,” the awards were created to inspire more talented people to enter government service by honoring federal workers for outstanding achievements that often went unrecognized. They 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.
The awards are considered the government equivalent of an Oscar and go to civil servants nominated by their bosses and colleagues. In past years, winners were hailed by cabinet secretaries, department heads and the serving president.
Awardees have battled Ebola, busted financial scammers, improved crop yields, created precision bombs and solved cold cases. In 2002, the winners included two F.B.I. agents who spent four decades pursuing the Ku Klux Klan members responsible for the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., that killed four girls.
But since last year’s ceremony, 388,000 public servants have lost their jobs in what Russell T. Vought, President Trump’s budget director, has called his desire to put federal workers “in trauma.” Mr. Stier has been a high-profile critic of the deep cuts by the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, saying they “inflicted costs on the American people, who will pay them for many years to come.”
Last year, the award for federal employee of the year — the biggest honor — went to David Lebryk, a former top Treasury Department official who was forced out of his career position for refusing to grant DOGE what he considered unlawful access to the government’s payment system. Mr. Lebryk’s award was the first time in Sammies history that the federal employee of the year was no longer a federal employee.
This year multiple Trump cabinet secretaries refused to participate in the awards, leaving federal workers afraid to nominate colleagues for an award that could put a target on their backs.
In 2024, before Mr. Trump’s second term, some 70 agencies nominated more than 500 public servants. This year, 39 agencies nominated 140 people and only four awards were given to civil servants on Wednesday.
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They were the State Department’s Gharun Lacy, whose team found and halted a hack of department email accounts by a China-linked group; James Szykman of the Environmental Protection Agency, whose multiagency team used NASA’s TEMPO satellite to monitor and stem air pollution; Jill A. Frisch, formerly of the Internal Revenue Service, who recovered billions of dollars for taxpayers by suing multinational corporations for artificially lowering their federal tax liability; and Ransom L. Baldwin VI, Curtis P. Van Tassell and Paul M. VanRaden, a team from the Agriculture Department who boosted milk production and dairy cattle health through DNA research and genetic testing.
In past years, awardees’ colleagues and family members crowded the stage, dressed in formal wear. Winners often grew emotional. This year, the speeches were tight, safe and written in advance.
Mr. Szykman departed from his prepared remarks to thank his colleagues in the “defunct E.P.A. office of research and development,” which, he did not note, was shuttered by the Trump administration.
Josh Bolten, the chief of staff to President George W. Bush, and Jeffrey D. Zients, who served in the same role for President Joseph R. Biden Jr., spoke to the importance of nonpartisan public servants who “serve across administrations,” Mr. Bolten said to applause.
The evening also featured videotaped messages from Mr. Bush, who saluted “career public servants whose work makes our country safer, stronger, healthier and more prosperous,” and Mr. Biden, who told federal workers their work “matters more now than it ever did.”
Mr. Stier remained undaunted. “It’s our 25th year, so we have the opportunity to open the aperture and look at the 800-plus folks we’ve honored over the years, and their extraordinary record of accomplishment,” he said.
In an onstage conversation with the author Michael Lewis, who has written extensively about the federal government, Mr. Stier said he would not stop criticizing the Trump administration’s treatment of federal workers, which he described as “erasure.”
Past awardees in the room included Rory Cooper, a retired Department of Veterans Affairs official who is a partially paralyzed veteran and “spent his career developing tools that enable vets to access a fuller range of mobility in the world,” Mr. Stier said.
Mr. Cooper said of he and his colleagues at the V.A., “We show up every day for the person in front of us, who deserves a better life.”
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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