Lecture | Event
The Loyalty Trap: Federal Civil Servants Under Trump
- Date
- Wednesday 22 January 2025
- Time
- Address
- Den Haag
- Room
- 3.46
The talk 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 the conditions under which they are more likely to speak up and exercise moral courage to preserve the integrity of government agencies in the face of organizational decline and politicized leadership.
About the speaker
Jaime Lee Kucinskas is Associate Professor of Sociology at Hamilton College and Visiting Professor this year at Mid Sweden University. She is the author of The Loyalty Trap (forthcoming 2025), The Mindful Elite: Mobilizing from the Inside Out (2019) and a co-editor of Situating Spirituality: Context, Practice, and Power (2022). Her work has been published in the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, Social Movement Studies, and other academic and popular outlets.
Registration
This is an hybrid event. If you are joining us on site, and are not affiliated with Leiden University, please register for the event before January 19, 2025.
Register here