Established by the Washington, DC Downtown Jaycees in 1948, the Flemming Awards honor outstanding federal employees with 3-15 years of federal service for their exceptional contributions to the federal government. Recipients were nominated by their federal agencies and then selected from a pool of nominees through a competitive judging process. Awardees were selected based on their work performance and factors such as leadership, contributions to society and potential for continued excellence. The Arthur S. Flemming Awards Commission partners with the George Washington University Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration and the National Academy of Public Administration to present the awards.
In addition to the Arthur S. Flemming awards given annually to midcareer federal employees, William D. Phillips, a physicist in NIST’s Physical Measurement Laboratory (PML), received the fourth annual Katharine B. Gebbie Lifetime Achievement Award for Outstanding Federal Service.
Dr. Phillips, a 1987 Flemming Awards winner, was part of a team that won the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics. Dr. Gebbie, the distinguished PML Laboratory Director who mentored Dr. Phillips, worked at NIST for 48 years and served on the Flemming Commission. She died in 2016; the award was created in her honor the following year. Prior winners are U.S. Comptroller General Gene Dodaro, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci and Elizabeth Dole, former U.S. secretary of labor, transportation and a former U.S. senator.