What the US government has been up to lately

In a Washington Post story about this year's Sammie Awrds for great achievements in civil service talks about some of this year's nominees:

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.” A man inside the Environmental Protection Agency conceived and put in place a service called AIRNow that supplies Americans with the best air-quality forecasts in the world. A special agent at the Drug Enforcement Administration led a team that seized (and presumably also counted) 919,088 capsules of especially lethal fentanyl — and prosecuted the people peddling them.

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.

And some past winners:

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.