Got Milk? Fresh Air? Safe Data? Thank a Bureaucrat.
Bureaucrat: “While technically neutral (someone who works in a bureaucracy), the term is frequently used with negative, disapproving connotations, implying someone who is rigid, unimaginative, or ‘creates red tape.’” Dictionary.com
We don’t think about the dirty air we don’t breathe. The cyber attacks we don’t get. The taxes we don’t pay. The fresh milk we don’t pay an arm or a leg for. But thank the stars there are government workers who do the work that enables us not to think about those things.
This month marked the 25th Anniversary of the Partnership for Public Service’s “Service to America Awards,” also known as “The Sammies,” presented each year to career federal government employees who make our lives healthier, safer and more prosperous. I love the Sammies. I love great government service. But if you are a skeptic of federal government employees, stay with me for a summary of this year’s winners.
Building a Better Cow
Since 1980, the amount of milk the average dairy cow produces every year has more than doubled — cows now produce an average of 2800 gallons of milk a year. Dairy farmers have done their part. So have nutritionists. But three scientists at the US Department of Agriculture may have played a bigger role than anyone: they’ve been figuring out how to breed a better, healthier dairy cow.
Thanks to the work of three “bureaucrats,” today’s dairy cow is stronger, healthier and milkier than ever (Image generated with ChatGPT)
Curt Van Tassell, Paul Van Raden and Ransom Baldwin, all Ph.D.’s, have been at the cutting edge of efforts to transform dairy cattle breeding to increase milk production and make cows healthier, leading an international consortium that developed a low-cost DNA chip to decode animal genomes to predict future milk and health traits. They’ve analyzed millions of records to determine which genes have positive and negative effects on cow health and productivity.
As a result of their work on breeding, modern dairy cows now consume 90 million fewer pounds of feed every year and economic losses from diseases are down 66%.
What do the scientists think about their service in the federal government that has been vilified over the past year? Paul says his work has been an “extremely rewarding experience.” Curt says he is “humbled” to be part of the team that has been doing this important work.
A Quicker Path to Cleaner Air
Forget the tortured acronym: the TEMPO (Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution) program really just makes it easier to figure out what’s going on with the air we breath, and how to make it better. James Szykman, a scientist at the Environmental Protection Agency since 1999, has been doing the unsexy work of figuring out how to translate data collected by NASA into easy-to-understand information that can be used by state agencies. That helps those agencies improve air quality across the country and provides individuals with information about the health and safety of their communities.
Coordinating work and information transfer between NASA, EPA and other agencies? Classic “bureaucracy.” Sykman’s view of his role? He says he is excited about his “commitment to being the connective tissue between scientific discovery and public health protection.”
Stopping Cyberattacks
Gharun Lacy doesn’t understate his mission at the State Department. He is there to “protect the people, protect the property, protect the data.” As Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Cyber and Technology Security (a bureaucratic title if there ever was one), his most recent job was identifying and squelching a Chinese cyber attack designed to steal secrets about US-China policy.
A custom detection tool Gharun had built found the attack shortly after it launched. Realizing that the hack had used a stolen Microsoft encryption key to gain access to Microsoft cloud email accounts, he quickly realized the breach could impact more than 300 million Microsoft Cloud users worldwide. Gharun formed a task force of federal agencies, international partners and private sector engineers, unraveled the attack and shut it down in just ten days.
“Everybody got to the table,” said Gharun. “Microsoft was at the table with us. Sister agencies were at the table with us. The FBI was at the table with us.” But it was Lacy, the government bureaucrat, who built the table.
Collecting Billions from Tax Evaders
Imagine this scenario. You’ve made the organization you work for billions of dollars, collecting from companies who’ve avoided paying you what they owe. Then imagine that organization tells you to get lost. That’s what happened to Jill Frisch last year.
Jill was the IRS’s go-to person when they suspected a large corporation was avoiding paying federal taxes, and over the years she proved cases against companies like Coke, Colgate-Palmolive, the Bank of New York and others. The companies claimed they had made their profits in other countries; Jill proved they owed the US.
Her work resulted in the recovery of tens of billions of tax dollars.
She was, one of her coworkers said, “unwavering in her commitment to get the right result.”
You may have noticed that last sentence was in the past tense. That’s because Jill was one of the 25,000 IRS employees who left the agency over the past year through mass layoffs, forced retirements or deferred resignations. “We always tried to do the right thing and get to justice,” she says. “It was a tremendous job, and I loved every minute of it.”
You’d never pick out the Sammie winners walking down the street, but they’ve made your life better.
If you’ve heard any description of the federal workforce over the past 16 months, it probably involved the words “waste,” “fraud” and abuse,” by bureaucrats who are “rigid, unimaginative, and create ‘red tape.’” The terms have been used to justify the firings and forced retirements of more than 300,000 workers over the past year. Before you join the chorus celebrating the mass bureaucra-cide, think about the work of Paul, Ransom, Curtis, James, Gharun and Jill, and ask yourself, does that sound like the work they’ve been doing?
Notes:
This year’s “Sammie” winners: https://ourpublicservice.org/know-the-facts/blog/2026-service-to-america-medals-ceremony-25th-anniversary
IRS layoffs since January 2025: https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2026/03/after-shedding-25000-employees-irs-chief-says-his-agency-now-has-perfect-staffing-level/411890/
Total federal layoffs since January 2025: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_federal_mass_layoffs