Reviews

"This is a crucial and timely analysis of how federal career bureaucrats experienced and navigated the unprecedented challenges of the Trump administration. Jaime Kucinskas offers profound insights into the tensions between bureaucracy and democracy, illuminating the precarious tightrope these public servants walked—balancing professional standards, personal ethics, competing loyalties, and workplace culture in an increasingly difficult political environment. This is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the complexities of governance in an era of profound political polarization. I highly recommend it."

Rosemary O’Leary, Distinguished Professor Emerita, University of Kansas, and author of The Ethics of Dissent:  Managing Guerrilla Government

“The Loyalty Trap provides extraordinary insights into how U.S. federal civil servants walked the fine line between their bureaucratic roles and their obligations to American democracy during the presidency of Donald Trump. Kucinskas’s three waves of in-depth interviews give readers an insider’s view of institutions that have served Americans well for more than a century.”

James Perry, author of Managing Organizations to Sustain Passion for Public Service

“Jaime Lee Kucinskas offers a compelling analysis of how bureaucratic loyalty can pave the way toward authoritarianism. Her study of bureaucratic resistance during the Trump administration revitalizes the conversation on ethics in public administration and provides strategies for safeguarding democracy. A must-read on organizational transformation.”

Michael W. Bauer, coeditor of International Bureaucracy: Challenges and Lessons for Public Administration

“Government bureaucracy is one of the most taken for granted and underappreciated type of organization in a democratic society, but when its stability and continuity is suddenly threatened by political forces in the executive branch, we realize why bureaucracy is there in the first place, and we fear its disintegration. Jaime Kucinskas’s book offers a captivating insider account of these bureaucracies and civil servants’ challenges in staying morally and culturally committed to their positions as autocratic leadership put them in ethically and legally compromised situations. This detailed and frightening study reveals the surprising fragility of our democratic institutions as seen through the eyes of government employees who are experiencing their deterioration in real time. Kucinskas’s book reminds us why we need a functioning and accountable government bureaucracy in order to save the future of democracy.”

Brayden King, Professor of Management & Organizations, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

Reading The Loyalty Trap evokes that set piece of war movies in which a strained and sweating submarine crew huddles silently, listening to the creaks and bangs that signal either an attack from without or failures of the vessel itself. During the previous administration, institutional norms and administrative procedures were severely strained and even broken. In the upper ranks of the civil service, some accommodated, some found (or made) spaces in which they could live up to established professional norms. Others slow-walked work, took the option of exit, or occasionally engaged in vocal critique and resistance. With the second Trump administration, the pressure on the civil service has resumed, but with greater policy focus as well as sweeping dismissals of employees and seizures of authority to spend and not spend. The Loyalty Trap should shape our expectations as creaks give way to groans and possibly ruptures.

Elisabeth Clemens, University of Chicago, Social Forces