Bookshelf

Alumni and faculty members who would like to have their books considered for this listing should contact Stacey Himmelberger, editor of Hamilton magazine. This list, which dates back to 2018, is updated periodically with books appearing alphabetically on the date of entry.

The Loyalty Trap: Conflicting Loyalties of Civil Servants Under Increasing Autocracy by Jaime Lee Kucinskas, associate professor of sociology.

January 7, 2026

Tags Faculty Book

(Columbia University Press, 2025).

The arrival of the Trump administration marked a sharp shift in how the federal government viewed its own role. Promising to cut red tape and rethink Washington’s bureaucracy, the president’s agenda tested long-standing norms of democratic governance. But what happens to civil servants when political leadership seeks to redefine the government they serve? How do they balance their professional obligations with shifting visions of democracy and public trust?

The Loyalty Trap began as a longitudinal research study during Trump’s first stint in the White House, during which Kucinskas and co-researcher Yvonne Zylan, a former colleague at Hamilton, conducted 127 interviews over a three-year period with current and former federal employees from many different agencies. They included the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Health and Human Resources, the State Department, the Justice Department, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The author detailed how, under threats of political retribution and sidelining of experts under appointees' leadership, parts of the government and appointee accountability deteriorated remarkably quickly.

“Kucinskas argues that the professional culture and ethical obligations of the civil service stabilize the state in normal times but insufficiently prepare bureaucrats to cope with a president like Trump,” the publisher notes. “Instead, 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 shares their quandaries, recounting attempts to preserve the integrity of government agencies, covert resistance, and a few bold acts of moral courage in the face of organizational decline and politicized leadership. … The Loyalty Trap offers a timely and bracing portrait of the fragility of the American state.”