From HIV clinics to outer space: Awards program spotlights federal employees in the face of civil service headwinds

Almost as soon as Dr. Laura Cheever found out that she was being honored for her decades of leadership at the Health and Human Services Department, she thought it was somewhat peculiar to be receiving an individual recognition. 

“When they first called…they said, ‘We want you to talk to us about what you did,” Cheever recalled. “I think that to be successful in government you have to be able to work well in teams and to collaborate and to see possibilities and partnerships.” 

Cheever is one of 23 current and former federal employees who received a 2025 Samuel J. Heyman Service to America medal (Sammie), an awards program that the Partnership for Public Service has sponsored since 2002 for outstanding civil servants. This year, however, the nonpartisan good government group had to contend with the Trump administration’s cuts to agency workforces and efforts to weaken the independence of the civil service. 

“I was really, one, honored to have received an award, and, two, really pleased that they were able to find a way to do it,” Cheever said. 

While she is nearly six months into a “long-planned retirement” that was “not related to elections,” Cheever spent more than two decades leading the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program, which provides medical and other support to low-income people with HIV and annually assists more than half of all people in the U.S. with HIV, estimated at about 500,000 individuals. 

Her involvement with treating HIV began while she was doing medical training in San Francisco in the 1990s. She then moved to Baltimore for similar work during which time medicines started emerging that stopped an HIV diagnosis from automatically meaning a death sentence. 

“I was very interested in making sure that as many people as possible could get started on these medications as quickly as possible,” Cheever said. “I saw that working for the federal government, I would be able to really increase that impact exponentially, and that's why I went to work for the federal government from a position that I loved in academia.”

At the end of 2024, HHS announced that a record-breaking 90.6% of individuals with HIV receiving medical care through Ryan White were virally suppressed, meaning they are on medication that prevents sexual transmission of the virus. This is a roughly 20% increase from 2010 and higher than the national viral suppression rate of 65%. 

Cheever is worried, however, that proposed cuts to public health care funding in congressional Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act (H.R. 1) and the Trump administration’s anti-LGBTQ+ policies could impede that progress. 

“If Medicaid or Medicare were to drastically be reduced or otherwise cut people off from being able to access care, or people are scared to come to care because they are transgender or gay or whatever those issues are going to be for people in this current environment, that is what makes me very, very concerned about the nation as a whole making progress,” she said. 

She’s also apprehensive about the ability of agencies to bring on top-tier talent in the future. 

“I've recruited many, many very talented people to come into federal government, and I've been able to tell them, quite honestly, that in every administration I've worked in, Democrat, Republican, all sorts of different people, we always had amazing opportunities to pursue our work. We had to shift the work, but our core mission and values really had not changed over time,” she said. “I'm not sure I could tell that to people today.” 

Another 2025 honoree — Richard Burns, a project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center — was recognized for leading the team behind OSIRIS-REx, a spacecraft that brought back the largest asteroid sample to Earth. 

Studies on that sample have found molecules that are key to life, suggesting, according to NASA, that “the conditions necessary for the emergence of life were widespread across the early solar system [and] increasing the odds life could have formed on other planets and moons.” 

As such, Burns said he gets a lot of questions about aliens. 

“It’s not unreasonable. One of the points of OSIRIS-REx was to investigate the composition of these primitive asteroids to ascertain whether they contain the ingredients for life,” he said. “It answers key questions in how did life originate.”  

But to reach that discovery, Burns and his team faced a barrage of complications. 

“OSIRIS-REx was really just a series of crises once we got to the asteroid,” he said. 

The asteroid Bennu had an unexpectedly rugged surface, which created difficulties for landing. The spacecraft also collected too much rock, which briefly prevented the lid on its sample collection capsule from closing. And when it returned to Earth, one of its two parachutes didn’t work. 

“The first parachute didn't open. There was a lot of tension in the sample return event,” he said. “The main parachute did open and deployed successfully, and everything was okay in the end because the system was designed robustly.” 

Still, Burns said there were many celebratory “fist in the air moments.” 

“We had lots of moments where we celebrated pretty good, but always knowing the race wasn't won yet,” he said. “Finally, when we got the sample mass we knew that we had accomplished what we had set out to do.” 

Overcoming obstacles, however, is why Burns argues individuals should want to work for NASA. 

“You get to…be part of teams that are very highly capable, motivated and focused on success and contributing to solving some of the hardest problems there are to solve. It is a really rewarding career,” he said. “So that would be the pitch. I hope it's true in the future.” 

Other honorees this year include the State Department team that implemented the first-ever online passport renewal system, National Weather Service employees who developed a seven-day, localized forecast system to gauge heat risk — the top weather-related cause of death in the U.S. — and Kathleen Kirsch of the U.S. Agency for International Development who led U.S. assistance in helping Ukraine maintain its energy infrastructure amid Russia’s invasion. 

Dave Lebryk, formerly of the Treasury Department, was named federal employee of the year. He was responsible for ensuring the disbursement of trillions in government funding before retiring after a clash with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency over access to the payment system. 

“The stories of these Sammies honorees vividly highlight the kinds of important services, innovations and benefits provided by our government, and are a reminder of what could be lost as a result of the ongoing cutbacks to federal agencies, personnel and programs,” Partnership President and CEO Max Stier said in a statement. 

There were more than 350 nominations across 65 agencies for this year’s Sammies. A ceremony was held on June 17 at the John Hopkins University Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C.