Government’s Vital Role

During the past three years, Service to America Medals have been conferred to 26 individuals and teams for contributions to public service they have made while working for the federal government. This year, nine more join the roster of honorees.

Government rarely is celebrated for the work it does. Indeed, it is more often the target of complaints about policies and performance, as has been the case during the past year with the pacification of Iraq and the response to Hurricane Katrina.

But government remains indispensable, relied upon, for better or worse, to respond to disasters and emergencies and to deliver a wide array of other vital services. The medal winners this year remind us of civil servants' important work in health research and disease prevention, combating discrimination in the workplace, exploring the frontiers of interplanetary space, working abroad to better the lives of foreign citizens, securing the nation against those who mean us harm, and collecting the revenues we need to achieve these and all the other purposes of our common enterprise.

The Service to America Medals program is a joint undertaking of three magazines-Government Executive, The Atlantic and National Journal-and of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit organization dedicated to revitalizing the federal workforce. The magazines and their readers, who are interested in deep reporting about national affairs, share a sustained focus on the public sector. The Partnership's purpose is to help federal agencies with workforce challenges, in part by seeking to interest more young Americans in joining the civil service.

This supplement profiling the 2005 SAM winners will be published in the three magazines, which are owned by Atlantic Media Company. Their stories will reach more than 1 million readers.

Featured are the nine people honored this year:

Federal Employee of the Year
Orlando Figueroa, the "Mars Czar," whose work helped bring the nation compelling images and scientific information about the Red Planet.

Career Achievement
Barbara Turner, whose long career at the Agency for International Development has given her many opportunities to bring America's generosity to suffering people in other nations.

Call to Service
Kevin McAleenan, who developed federal protocols for border security in cases of elevated threat levels or specific intelligence about terrorists.

Homeland Security
Steven D. Bice, whose longtime concern about bioterrorism led to the creation of a national stockpile of medicines for rapid dispersal in an emergency.

International Affairs
Tobin J. Bradley, a young Foreign Service officer who was an early architect of voting systems developed to bring democracy to Iraq.

National Security
Alan Estevez, whose work with radio frequency identification technology is bringing the right stuff at the right time to soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines deployed around the world.

Science and Environment
Subhashree Madhavan, whose cancer research team has developed a revolutionary database linking clinical records with researchers looking for cures.

Social Services
Terence Lutes, who has played an important role in deploying the electronic filing technologies that now are used by more than half of American taxpayers to file their tax returns.

Justice and Law Enforcement
Elizabeth Grossman, who took on Wall Street's establishment with a successful gender discrimination complaint against Morgan Stanley.

Timothy B. Clark
Editor, Government Executive