Walking the Moral Tightrope: Federal Civil Servants’ Loyalties, Caution, and Resistance under the Trump Administration

Abstract

The Trump administration and its supporters were quick to decry the federal civil service as a “deep state” thwarting the president’s agenda. Yet most research describes the career corps as loyal to mission, risk averse, and rarely partisan. Our research asks whether this characterization holds under conditions of budding autocracy and efforts to dismantle the administrative state. Our case study uses data collected over 2017–20 and finds that, despite widespread dissatisfaction with the Trump administration, most civil servants largely sought to comply at work, circumscribed by their conceptions of activities as appropriately within the scope of their mandates. When resistance did occur, it cohered with institutional and professional imperatives. Meanwhile, incentives to exit increased. Our research complicates the conceptual difference between “resistance” and “complicity” under repressive political leadership by underscoring the processes through which bureaucrats make sense of and act in as they negotiate multiple loyalties to personal and professional values, norms and obligations, organizational cultures, and their own circumscribed efficacy in complex organizations.