Justice Department Has Lost More Than 4,000 Law-Enforcement Employees Since 2024 Even As Trump Vows to Crack Down on Crime

Details

On April 23, 2026, Reuters reported that records obtained from the U.S. Justice Department's management unit through the Freedom of Information Act show the Trump administration has cut more than 4,000 employees from federal law-enforcement agencies since the 2024 fiscal year. The records, reviewed by reporters Brad Heath and Andrew Goudsward, provide the most detailed accounting to date of staffing reductions across the Department of Justice. As of early April 2026, the department employed about 107,000 people — roughly 11,200 fewer than in the fiscal year that ended three months before President Trump began his second term — with about 7,000 positions left unfilled.

Scope of the Cuts

According to the records reviewed by Reuters, staffing reductions are concentrated in agencies that traditionally handle the federal government's highest-profile criminal investigations:

• FBI: Down more than 7% (about 2,600 people) since fiscal year 2024
• Drug Enforcement Administration: Down about 6%
• Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives: Down about 14%
• National Security Division: Down nearly 38%; the division's most recent budget request to Congress described "unprecedented personnel constraints" in the unit that handles espionage and export-control cases involving sensitive military technology
• Civil Rights Division: Down more than half
• Environmental law section: Down about a third
• Bureau of Prisons: Down more than 2,200 employees (about 6%); the DOJ inspector general has described the bureau as facing a "staffing crisis"

The Bureau of Prisons reductions came despite the federal inmate population remaining largely unchanged. One prison official told Reuters — speaking anonymously for fear of retaliation — that some guard posts have gone empty while others are staffed by teachers and nurses pulled from their regular roles.

A separate Reuters investigation in February 2026 found that the Civil Rights Division's Criminal Section, which prosecutes police misconduct cases, fell from roughly 40 trial attorneys before Trump took office to no more than 13. The number of charges filed under the federal civil rights statute most commonly used in excessive-force cases dropped about 36% last year to 54 total cases — the lowest figure since 2020.

The Exodus of DOJ Lawyers

The reductions have been especially steep among the department's attorneys. Drawing on Office of Personnel Management records, the Financial Times reported in May 2026 that the Justice Department had lost more than a quarter of its lawyers, "with thousands quitting or being fired as Donald Trump's administration has ousted those who worked on now-disfavoured cases and used the agency to target opponents." The underlying figures come from the same OPM dataset analyzed by former FBI intelligence analyst Philip Fields for the advocacy group Justice Connection: DOJ employed 12,955 attorneys as of December 31, 2024, and roughly 3,402 of them left their roles over the following year — about 26%.

USA TODAY reported that more than 3,300 attorneys left between Trump's first day back in office and February 2026 while only about 800 were hired, a net loss of roughly 2,500. The departures stripped out unusual depth of experience: lawyers who left had served about 14 years at the department on average, and roughly 740 of them held leadership positions. Fields's analysis found that DOJ headquarters lost 1,421 attorneys (including 338 leaders) and the U.S. Attorneys' offices lost another 1,356 (including 260 leaders), and that 2,069 of the departing attorneys resigned before becoming eligible to retire — meaning many walked away without an alternate source of income.

Several divisions were hollowed out well beyond the department-wide average:

• Civil Rights Division: Division head Harmeet Dhillon said on a Breitbart podcast in August 2025 that about 75% of its lawyers — roughly 300 of 400 — had left in the administration's first seven months, a figure she framed as a deliberate redirection of the division's priorities.
• Appellate Section: In a February 2026 court filing first surfaced by journalist Scott MacFarlane, a DOJ attorney disclosed that the section had lost over 40% of its attorneys since February 2025 to retirement, resignation, or temporary transfer.
• Tax Division: The administration dissolved the Tax Division — created in 1934 — in late 2025, folding its remaining lawyers into other divisions; an official wrote in a court filing that more than 40% of the lawyers handling tax appeals had left or been reassigned over the prior year.
• Environment and Natural Resources Division: At least 140 lawyers, about a third of the division, left in Trump's first year, according to E&E News; over the same period environmental civil penalties collapsed from $1.88 billion to $15.1 million.

The strain has surfaced in court. DOJ attorneys have repeatedly sought deadline extensions, and in at least one Fifth Circuit filing a Civil Division supervisor admitted she could not give a case her full attention after the assigned lawyer left and the next went on extended leave, while she juggled nine other pending matters. The American Bar Association Journal described the pattern of delay requests as inadvertently revealing "a massive staffing crisis." DOJ spokeswoman Natalie Baldassarre disputed the framing, telling USA TODAY the department still has more than 10,000 lawyers and is "the most efficient Department of Justice in American history," and said the deferred-resignation program let the agency shed employees who "did not want to aggressively and faithfully tackle crime."

The Tough-on-Crime Rhetoric

Trump has consistently framed his second term around law-and-order policy. In his March 2025 address to a joint session of Congress, he called for a new crime bill aimed at repeat offenders and expanded protections for police officers. In May 2025, he announced plans to reopen and expand Alcatraz prison.

The administration has taken a series of high-profile law-enforcement actions:

• Federalized policing in Washington, D.C. in August 2025, with Trump declaring "liberation day" and deploying the National Guard
• Signed executive orders targeting cash-bail jurisdictions and homeless encampments
• Attempted to deploy National Guard troops to Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, and other cities (largely halted by federal courts, including a Supreme Court ruling against the Illinois deployment)
• Prepared a comprehensive crime bill expected in 2026, tracked by the Vera Institute

A February 2026 White House statement titled "President Trump Returned Our Nation to Law and Order" credited the administration with sharp reductions in crime in D.C., Chicago, and other cities, and touted the capture of cartel leaders and seizures of fentanyl.

Crime Trends

The cuts have coincided with one of the largest declines in U.S. crime ever recorded. According to the Council on Criminal Justice, homicides in 35 large U.S. cities fell 21% in 2025 — the largest one-year drop the organization has tracked, representing 922 fewer homicides. Other reported declines included gun assaults (down 22%), robbery (down 23%), and carjackings (down 43%). The Major Cities Chiefs Association and the Real-Time Crime Index reported similar national figures.

Crime analyst Jeff Asher projected that the 2025 U.S. homicide rate will likely come in around 4.0 per 100,000 residents — below the previous record low of 4.4 set in 2014, and likely the lowest rate since at least 1960, when the FBI's modern methodology began. PolitiFact rated as "Half True" Trump's claim that the rate is the lowest in 125 years; experts agreed the figure will likely set a 65-year low, but cautioned that pre-1960 data is not directly comparable.

Critically, the decline did not begin in 2025. According to Council on Criminal Justice tracking and FBI preliminary data, crime began falling in 2023, accelerated in 2024 under President Biden, and continued through 2025. The downward trend therefore predates Trump's second-term policies, complicating attribution in either direction — both the administration's claim that its policies caused the drop, and critics' implication that the staffing cuts have hurt public safety.

Practical Effects on Federal Casework

Reuters' analysis of millions of federal court dockets via Westlaw found that federal prosecutions for drug trafficking dropped to their lowest level in more than two decades in 2025, and the government is bringing fewer such cases in 2026. A separate Investigative Post analysis found the DOJ closed roughly 23,000 probes in the first half of the second term as it shifted resources toward immigration enforcement, with declinations in the program handling national internal security running about four times the typical rate for a new administration.

The National Security Division's losses have prompted alarm among former officials. A former DOJ employee told NOTUS, speaking anonymously, that they had no idea who in the department would currently handle a major espionage case, calling the situation a "real problem." David Laufman, who led the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section from 2014 to 2018, warned that the loss of attorneys is potentially very damaging to U.S. national security given ongoing threats from China, Russia, and Iran. Adam Hickey, a former senior National Security Division official, told Reuters that the staffing reductions are forcing the division to be reactive rather than proactive in pursuing investigations.

The cuts are accompanied by warnings from intelligence officials. According to reporting compiled by Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), a Naval Criminal Investigative Service assessment found with "high confidence" that foreign intelligence services were attempting to recruit fired federal employees as sources, including via LinkedIn and other platforms.

DOJ Response

Justice Department spokeswoman Natalie Baldassarre defended the staffing reductions, telling Reuters — without providing supporting evidence — that the buyouts allowed the agency to remove employees who were unwilling to vigorously prosecute crime on behalf of the American public. She added that with the U.S. murder rate at recent historic lows, claims that the workforce reductions had hampered the department's ability to address violent crime were not grounded in reality.

In a separate statement to The Independent, Baldassarre cited the country's low murder rate, more than 90 cartel leaders arrested, and millions of fentanyl doses removed from circulation. The DEA itself reported that since January 20, 2025, it had seized approximately 44 million fentanyl pills, 4,500 pounds of fentanyl powder, and 201,500 pounds of cocaine.

Outside Critics

Stacey Young, a former DOJ lawyer who now leads Justice Connection — a group that supports staff leaving the department — argued to Reuters that the administration's tough-on-crime rhetoric is contradicted by its decision to hollow out the agencies tasked with addressing crime and terrorism.

Amy Solomon, a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice and former DOJ official, told Reuters that the department had been built around career public servants with specialized expertise serving across Republican and Democratic administrations, and that cutting that workforce represents a significant loss of institutional knowledge.

Context for the Rating

The rating reflects two competing realities. The first is that the cuts and the rhetoric clearly conflict: an administration publicly committed to cracking down on crime has reduced the workforce of nearly every major federal law-enforcement agency, and federal prosecutions in several categories have fallen sharply. The second is that the headline measure of public safety — the homicide rate — is at a multi-decade low and continued to fall in 2025, undercutting any claim that Americans are visibly less safe as a direct result. The most likely effects of the cuts — degraded counterintelligence capacity, fewer civil-rights prosecutions of police misconduct, a reduced pipeline of complex drug-trafficking and white-collar cases — are real, but slow-moving and not easily measured. Whether this proves to be a meaningful long-term degradation of federal law-enforcement capacity or an overblown headline depends on developments that won't be visible for several years.