According to sources who describe ever decreasing morale inside the DOJ Voting Section, this year the Voting Section gave not a single performance award to any DOJ Voting Section lawyer.  

Only some support staff received awards, including one particular person who was highlighted in my book Injustice for refusing to work on voting cases when the victims were white.  As one person familiar with this award told me, “you should collect a commission from this person because the person never received a performance award in decades at DOJ until you called out the behavior in your book.”   

Performance awards are actually useful ways to encourage those who work hard inside DOJ, and find and bring cases.  They can range from $1,000 to sometimes $3,500.  Of course since the DOJ Voting Section has all but shut down litigation in a number of statutory areas, as I also describe in my book, perhaps there wasn’t much to reward this year.  Nevertheless, the base instincts of some managers to use positions to punish rather than reward seems to have won out over the policies of previous years, across all administrations, and that is to reward hard work.  And this wasn’t a question of funds.  Other attorneys in other DOJ components received performance awards.  Expect it to be like this for the next few years, with morale lower than anything experienced during the Bush administration, with platitudes and half-truths for public consumption, and some managers more comfortable with vinegar and bitterness, than with honey.