Brown Bag Seminar by Jaime L. Kucinskas (Hamilton College)

Abstract: The Loyalty Trap 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. 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.

Bio: Jaime Kucinskas is Associate Professor of the Department of Sociology at Hamilton College and Visiting Professor at the Risk and Crisis Centre at Mid Sweden University for the 2024-2025 academic year. Kucinskas is the author of The Mindful Elite, which investigates how Buddhist modernist meditators transformed meditation in America into a mainstream practice embraced by esteemed secular organizations such as Fortune 500 companies, Ivy League schools, hospitals, the U.S. military, and K-12 schools. In her forthcoming book, The Loyalty Trap, (Columbia University Press) she shares how career federal civil servants responded to the Trump administration amid a leadership turn toward autocracy. Her first paper from this research, with Yvonne Zylan, explains the moral tightrope federal civil servants walked in the American Journal of Sociology.