Associate Professor of Sociology Jaime Kucinskas recently discussed “The Loyalty Trap: Civil Servants’ competing loyalties under the Trump administration” in a University of York (U.K.) online lecture.
One of her research areas is “federal civil servants’ responses to times of rapid change and chaotic leadership.” Her talk examined the federal civil service under Donald Trump’s administration, answering the question, “How did civil servants make sense of and respond to the Trump administration?”
Kucinskas said her findings show 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.”
She said that in times of repressive political leadership, it is important to understand the difference between resistance and complicity by underscoring the processes through which bureaucrats make sense of and act in their immediate work environments. They must do this while negotiating multiple loyalties to personal and professional values, norms and obligations, and varying managerial cultures within complex organizations.
Kucinskas expects her new book on this topic, The Loyalty Trap: Conflicting Loyalties of Civil Servants Under Increasing Autocracy, to be published by Columbia University Press in May, 2025.
