The Loyalty Trap (1st edition)By JaimeKucinskas, New York: Columbia University Press, 2025. 416 pp. $30.00 (paperback). ISBN: 978‐0‐23‐120815‐4
基于127名联邦公务员的访谈，研究特朗普首届任期内公务员如何应对日益专制的行政当局，揭示其忠诚冲突、抵抗模式及对民主制度的警示。
Since President Donald Trump's inauguration in January 2025, his administration has been chainsawing the federal civil service. Under DOGE, civil servants were fired by the thousands. A presidential decree politicized the hiring and dismissal of thousands of career bureaucrats. Agencies such as USAID were defunded and effectively shut down. Individual dissenters are hunted down by the Administration. All of this at breakneck speed, by decree and seemingly without expert consultation or congressional oversight. This, however, is not where it started. Trump's first term as U.S. President—which started as a surprise victory and ended in the Capital Hill insurrection in January 2021—is also helpful in identifying the elements of a budding autocracy and civil service responses. This is what Jaime Kucinskas did in her well researched and unique book “The Loyalty Trap: Conflicting Loyalties of Civil Servants Under Increasing Autocracy.” The Loyalty Trap is based on 127 interviews with federal civil servants. The interviews were conducted in three waves, early during Trump's first administration, in the middle and near the end (2017–2020). For this, Kucinskas lived in Washington DC. With Yvonne Zylan, Kucinskas published an early subset of her findings in the American Journal of Sociology (2023). The Loyalty Trap is about how federal bureaucrats reacted to the first Trump administration. The book consists of three parts. First, Kucinskas reports the “keep calm and carry on” mentality that proved the cultural background for the civil servants' response to the 45th president and his administration. She quotes an insider with decades of experience who knew that every presidential transition comes with changes: “they are all different.” This explains why many civil respondents would “wait and see” and simply got on, while they waited for new directions from the president and his “politicals.” It did not take very long for most respondent to realize that something had shifted and they would experience “moral dissonance” (p. 39). Most civil servants take pride in their serial partisanship and their ability to work under any president, while also staying faithful to their agency's mission. When bureaucrats felt this was no longer possible, they felt they had to choose sides: loyal to the president or to their agency. Again, such conflicts existed under previous administration too, but Kucinkas reports a felt rapid increase of these “loyalty traps.” Most, if not all, bureaucrats had loyalty to the president as their baseline norm. Professional culture and legislation such as the Hatch Act (an American law that prohibits civil servants to engage in political activity at work) also makes civil servants reluctant to deviate from this norm. The Trump administration placed a premium on unquestioned obedience, and respondents experienced retaliation by the Administration against perceived disloyalty. This opposes mutual respect, reciprocal loyalty, and discretionary room—basic hygiene rules for political-administrative intercourse in normal times. In part 3, Kucinskas deals with covert and overt efforts by civil servants to respond to Trump's policies. While most of Kucinskas' respondents disapproved of the Trump administration, not everyone joined the resistance: “[my] supervisor made an ‘immediate switch’ to being more cautious when Trump was elected” (p. 251). Others would live split lives—separating their work from their own preferences and morals. Cloaked in what Rosemary O'Leary (2019) coined “Guerrilla Bureaucracy,” Kucinskas maps the pattern of resistance with which civil servants would frustrate their supervising politicals and their agenda. First, Civil servants would covertly continue work, unsupported by the new administration or its appointees. Sometimes this came with new names for the same work. “Climate mitigation” policies became “resource independence” policies. Others would neglect and slow-walk new policies and see how long that would last (p. 256). As some said, they would “get lazy.” Trying to outstrategize leadership—and letting leadership fail was a third approach (p. 258). Informal meetings and chats became forums of choice to gather support by like-minded bureaucrats (p. 263). Finally, if all else failed, civil servants would cautiously document perceived transgressions by the administration (p. 271). A few things helped bureaucrats in speaking up to their political masters: supportive colleagues, a clear sense of agency mission breach, personal efficacy and, among others, membership of alternative moral communities such as a church or other civic groups. Ultimately, Kucinskas is left “sobered by the fragility of the U.S. government in the face of a leader seeking autocratic power” (p. 328). Any resistance—rare as it may have been—proved a psychological salve (p. 276). The pattern or resistance did not hold up. You can slow-walk things for only so long. It may feel good, or look good, but it was “largely ineffective in stymieing the many autocratic assaults on the state by Trump appointees and their allies” (p. 333). Moreover, whatever civil service experts did or did not do, “appointed leaders simply were not relying on them, or listening” (p. 279). This book could hardly be about a more important topic in public administration today. The politics of bureaucracy are a bedrock theme in our field, and its ground is shifting. Kucinskas' inside reports speak to the disarray in American governance in a way that is engaging, jargon free, and humanizing the bureaucracy. Admittedly, the gist of the interview material was previously told by various media. Its strength is not the novelty of the interview material. Rather, Kucinskas transforms her interview material from current affairs commentary to insights into the state of federal agencies and the erosion of their capacity to deliver public service and serve as a counterweight to political whims, as Woodrow Wilson envisioned. Kucinskas does not hide her dislike of Trump and his policies. I respect her choice to be a normative voice in the debate about the state of the American democracy and its government. In this case however, it would have helped if she had interviewed Republican-leaning bureaucrats too, but she has not. She tried, but unlike Democrat and centrist bureaucrats, Republicans were unwilling to cooperate in Kucinskas study. This inevitably impacts her findings and the story she tells, but without hearing “the other side,” it is hard to know how. Readers need to keep this in mind when they're evaluating what they're reading. Also, I see two limitations in the book that need further elaboration: the relationship between the individual and the institutional level, and the absence of public administration theory where it would have helped. First, the book introduces the argument that the Trump administration created “structural holes” between the “politicals” and the career civil service (p. 17). This is referenced again in chapters 6–9, but only resurfaces in the concluding chapter. Most of the chapters and quotes relate to individual experiences of civil services (although some carried responsibility for agencies). This blurs the institutional dynamics. People may experience more chaos, loss of advisory capacity or diminished morale. But do rules, agency missions, information streams and budgets change too? Do departments and agencies merge or change their structures? Do political appointees get different rights? Different levels of access? The question of structural holes and institutional change is raised but remains unanswered. Under Trump's second term, the question seems even more relevant now. Finally, the book is rather light on theory. This makes the book an easy read, but it misses opportunities to use the case study to critique tried-and-tested concepts. I missed distinguishing between formal and functional politicization (Hustedt and Salomonsen 2014) or international experiences of bureaucrats under democratic backsliding (Bauer et al. 2021). More importantly, precisely because the U.S. government has been the empirical laboratory for decades of public administration theory, this book offers the opportunity to discuss which understandings about political-administrative relationships we should revise or discard. The years after Kucinskas concluded interviewing hardly suggest her findings were a one-off anomaly. Future inventories should take this seriously. Reading between the lines, The Loyalty Trap makes a chilling argument: bureaucracy will not save democracy. Kucinskas: “the public servants” professional culture, which they deeply revered and which could safeguard the democracy in stable times, seemed woefully insufficient in preserving the democratic state under an autocratic leader (p. 329). Bureaucrats were the frog that got boiled. What started as “wait and see” resulted in frustration, professional ineffectiveness and ultimately burnout or a push to a disillusioned exit. Of course, there were exceptions—top managers in the federal civil service that overtly, yet tactfully, resisted some of the administration's policies because they believed they violated their agency's core mission and they nibbled at their moral conscience too, and thrived—but the majority followed the pattern. This study provides an important case study of the U.S. government, that should be the basis for more case studies and comparative analyses, spanning Latin-America, Europe and beyond. Studies of bureaucracy under democratic backsliding are essential, because they extend the imagination of scholars and bureaucrats accustomed to a relatively stable democratic society where most politicians and appointees play nice and by the rules. Scholars and practitioners need to know what it looks like, before they can recognize it in their own day and context. To some, the institutional differences may limit comparability, but the dilemma's faced by practitioners will be awfully similar across administrative traditions (Jugl 2025). The Loyalty Trap will open eyes in many government offices across the globe.