‘It’s more important than ever’: Federal employee awards program endures in time of civil service job cuts

Lt. Cmdr. Melissa de Vera first worked for the Indian Health Service as an administrative assistant at a health clinic. Now, she’s helping to distribute $3.5 billion in funding from the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law to support clean water and sanitation services at 115,000 tribal homes.  

“I hope that I can inspire somebody that’s sitting in a similar position that I was many years ago,” she said. “Maybe there's a receptionist right now at an IHS tribal clinic that is going to set her sights on and consider being an engineer, or maybe a dentist, or maybe a doctor. I hope that people can take that away from this and see that we have many journeys and many missions.” 

On Sunday, de Vera will be one of 12 individuals to receive the Arthur S. Flemming award for federal employees, which is put on by the National Academy of Public Administration and George Washington University’s Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration.  

Kathryn Newcomer, a public policy and public administration professor at GWU and president of the Flemming Awards Commission, said she is relieved that the ongoing government shutdown will not prevent any of the winners from attending the ceremony. She argued that this year’s honor is particularly important because of the cuts to federal jobs and programs. 

“There are wonderful people who we need to celebrate more than ever,” Newcomer said. “It's better than a protest, and it's also indoors.” 

de Vera, who is an officer in the U.S. Public Health Service and is an enrolled member of the Rocky Boy Chippewa Cree tribe, grew up visiting cousins who didn’t have running water. 

“It never occurred to me that having to haul water was any kind of hardship at that time,” she said. “I really just associated it with family and community and warmth.” 

She recalls having a “quiet, withdrawn” classmate, however, who didn’t have access to clean water. 

“It made me really start to think about how something so basic — like access to clean water or safe water — it's more than just about physical health,” de Vera said. “It can really influence a person's dignity, their sense of self worth, their opportunities, their sense of belonging. So I think that that understanding is really what kind of drives me to stay with the Indian Health Service.”

de Vera’s professional relationship with water initiatives began when her cousin who worked for IHS invited her to meet with engineers at the agency. She said that “everything kind of clicked” after that, and she applied for and received an IHS scholarship that partially covered her tuition in exchange for working at the agency after graduation. 

As part of implementing infrastructure funding for sanitation projects, de Vera recruits individuals to work for IHS. She described recruiting as one of the most impactful parts of her job and is “not just filling vacancies for us.” 

“My cousin helping me find Indian Health Service — I know that that was very life changing for me,” she said. “So I really want to be able to provide that opportunity for students to come and investigate ‘Is this for them?’ And if it is, when it is a good fit, it's amazing.” 

Similarly, an environmental enforcement externship at the Justice Department is what made Nick McDaniel, another Flemming awardee, decide to work for the federal government. 

“It didn't seem like there was any other place where you could, first and foremost, be working in the public interest and doing public service, which was something that was important to me and something I wanted to pursue,” he said. “But also be working on really high-impact matters that make a big difference in people's lives, ensuring compliance with environmental laws, which oftentimes come down to protecting public health.”

McDaniel is receiving the award primarily for his work on a $1.675 billion settlement, the largest Clean Air Act civil penalty in history, with engine manufacturer Cummins to resolve charges that it installed devices circumventing emission standards in pickup trucks. The company has said in response to the settlement that it “has seen no evidence that anyone acted in bad faith and does not admit wrongdoing.”

When asked what his most impactful work has been, however, McDaniel pointed to an enforcement action early in his career that led to improvements at a sewer system in Ohio that frequently discharged raw sewage into a local water body. 

“Over the next number of years, I was able to see those projects be implemented, see the improvements in the river, have pretty good confidence that it had good public health impacts on the community as well, especially kids who would otherwise be missing school because they have [gastrointestinal] issues from the raw sewage problems,” he said. 

McDaniel found out he received the Flemming award at about the same time that he accepted the deferred resignation incentive, a program by the Trump administration to shrink the size of the federal workforce that generally offered federal employees pay and benefits through Sept. 30 if they agreed to leave the civil service. 

He said that he left DOJ partly because after 11 years he was already considering going into private practice, but budget cuts and staffing reductions in the Environment and Natural Resources Division also impacted his decision. 

“There's a lot of work that still is happening and still needs to happen, and it's still really important, but there's less money and less people to do that work,” he said.