- Sep 13, 2002
- 97,790
- 203,825
- 113
Excellent story here. I'll link the long version (10K words!) below, but here is the relevant excerpt:
Each spring, the most interesting organization that no one’s ever heard of collects nominations for the most important awards that most people will never know were handed out. The organization, called the Partnership for Public Service, created the awards, called the Sammies, in 2002 to call out extraordinary deeds inside the federal government. Founded the year before by an entrepreneur named Samuel Heyman, it set out to attract talented and unusual people to the federal workforce. One big reason talented and unusual people did not gravitate to the government was that the government was often a miserable place for talented and unusual people to work. Civil servants who screwed up were dragged before Congress and into the news. Civil servants who did something great, no one said a word about. There was thus little incentive to do something great, and a lot of incentive to hide. The awards were meant to correct that problem. “There’s no culture of recognition in government,” said Max Stier, whom Heyman hired to run the Partnership. “We wanted to create a culture of recognition.”
This was trickier than they first imagined it would be. Basically no one came forward on their own: Civil servants appeared to lack the ability to be recognized. Stier was reduced to calling up the 15 Cabinet secretaries and begging them to look around and see whether any of their underlings had done anything worth mentioning. Nominations trickled in; some awards got handed out. A pair of FBI agents cracked the cold case of the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham and split one of the prizes. Another went to a doctor at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who designed and ran a program that delivered a billion vaccinations and eradicated polio in India. A third was given to a man inside the Energy Department who had been sent to a massive nuclear waste dump outside Denver, containing enough radioactive gunk to fill 90 miles of railroad cars, and told to clean it up. He finished the project $30 billion under budget and 60 years ahead of schedule — and turned the dump into a park.
All these people had done astonishing things. None had much to say about them. The Partnership called the Colorado guy to see if he wanted to explain the miracle he’d performed. “I just managed the project,” he said. End of story. No story.
The Partnership hasn’t given up hope, however. Each year, it flushes out a few more nominees than the year before. Each spring, the list that circulates inside the Partnership is a bit longer than the last. I’ve read through it the past five years or so to remind myself, among other things, how many weird problems the United States government deals with at any one time. On this year’s list is a woman at the Agriculture Department who “found ways to create products from misshapen fruits and vegetables unsuitable for market, which reduces food waste, a $400 billion problem for the United States each year.” . . .
An additional 500 or so entries made it onto this year’s list: pages of single-paragraph descriptions of what some civil servant no one has ever heard of has done. In most cases, what they’ve done is solve some extremely narrow, difficult problem that the U.S. government — in many cases, only the U.S. government — has taken on: locating and disposing of chemical weapons in Syria; delivering high-speed internet to rural America; extracting 15,000 Americans from in and around Gaza on Oct. 8, 2023. The work sometimes rings a bell with me. The people who did it never do.
Each year, I finish reading the list of nominees with the same lingering feeling of futility: Democratic government isn’t really designed to highlight the individual achievement of unelected officials. . . .
Christopher Mark: Led the development of industry-wide standards and practices to prevent roof falls in underground mines, leading to the first year (2016) of no roof fall fatalities in the United States. A former coal miner.
A former coal miner. Those words raised questions. Not about the work but about the man. They caused a picture to pop into my head. Of a person. Who must have grown up in a coal mining family. In West Virginia, I assumed, because, really, where else? Christopher Mark, I decided, just had to have some deeply personal stake in the problem he solved. His father, or maybe his brother, had been killed by a falling coal mine roof. Grief had spurred him to action, to spare others the same grief. A voice was crying to be heard. The movie wrote itself.
But then I found Christopher Mark’s number and called him. Even after I’d explained how I’d plucked his name off a list of 525 nominees, he was genuinely bewildered by my interest. He’d never heard of the Sammies. But he was polite. And he answered my first question. “I grew up in Princeton, New Jersey,” he said. “My dad was a professor at the university.”
Full article: https://wapo.st/3XBZ1dA
Each spring, the most interesting organization that no one’s ever heard of collects nominations for the most important awards that most people will never know were handed out. The organization, called the Partnership for Public Service, created the awards, called the Sammies, in 2002 to call out extraordinary deeds inside the federal government. Founded the year before by an entrepreneur named Samuel Heyman, it set out to attract talented and unusual people to the federal workforce. One big reason talented and unusual people did not gravitate to the government was that the government was often a miserable place for talented and unusual people to work. Civil servants who screwed up were dragged before Congress and into the news. Civil servants who did something great, no one said a word about. There was thus little incentive to do something great, and a lot of incentive to hide. The awards were meant to correct that problem. “There’s no culture of recognition in government,” said Max Stier, whom Heyman hired to run the Partnership. “We wanted to create a culture of recognition.”
This was trickier than they first imagined it would be. Basically no one came forward on their own: Civil servants appeared to lack the ability to be recognized. Stier was reduced to calling up the 15 Cabinet secretaries and begging them to look around and see whether any of their underlings had done anything worth mentioning. Nominations trickled in; some awards got handed out. A pair of FBI agents cracked the cold case of the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham and split one of the prizes. Another went to a doctor at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who designed and ran a program that delivered a billion vaccinations and eradicated polio in India. A third was given to a man inside the Energy Department who had been sent to a massive nuclear waste dump outside Denver, containing enough radioactive gunk to fill 90 miles of railroad cars, and told to clean it up. He finished the project $30 billion under budget and 60 years ahead of schedule — and turned the dump into a park.
All these people had done astonishing things. None had much to say about them. The Partnership called the Colorado guy to see if he wanted to explain the miracle he’d performed. “I just managed the project,” he said. End of story. No story.
The Partnership hasn’t given up hope, however. Each year, it flushes out a few more nominees than the year before. Each spring, the list that circulates inside the Partnership is a bit longer than the last. I’ve read through it the past five years or so to remind myself, among other things, how many weird problems the United States government deals with at any one time. On this year’s list is a woman at the Agriculture Department who “found ways to create products from misshapen fruits and vegetables unsuitable for market, which reduces food waste, a $400 billion problem for the United States each year.” . . .
An additional 500 or so entries made it onto this year’s list: pages of single-paragraph descriptions of what some civil servant no one has ever heard of has done. In most cases, what they’ve done is solve some extremely narrow, difficult problem that the U.S. government — in many cases, only the U.S. government — has taken on: locating and disposing of chemical weapons in Syria; delivering high-speed internet to rural America; extracting 15,000 Americans from in and around Gaza on Oct. 8, 2023. The work sometimes rings a bell with me. The people who did it never do.
Each year, I finish reading the list of nominees with the same lingering feeling of futility: Democratic government isn’t really designed to highlight the individual achievement of unelected officials. . . .
Christopher Mark: Led the development of industry-wide standards and practices to prevent roof falls in underground mines, leading to the first year (2016) of no roof fall fatalities in the United States. A former coal miner.
A former coal miner. Those words raised questions. Not about the work but about the man. They caused a picture to pop into my head. Of a person. Who must have grown up in a coal mining family. In West Virginia, I assumed, because, really, where else? Christopher Mark, I decided, just had to have some deeply personal stake in the problem he solved. His father, or maybe his brother, had been killed by a falling coal mine roof. Grief had spurred him to action, to spare others the same grief. A voice was crying to be heard. The movie wrote itself.
But then I found Christopher Mark’s number and called him. Even after I’d explained how I’d plucked his name off a list of 525 nominees, he was genuinely bewildered by my interest. He’d never heard of the Sammies. But he was polite. And he answered my first question. “I grew up in Princeton, New Jersey,” he said. “My dad was a professor at the university.”
Full article: https://wapo.st/3XBZ1dA
