More Than 10,000 Lawyers Depart the Federal Government

Details

On May 31, 2026, The New York Times reported that President Donald Trump's restructuring of the executive branch had produced an exodus of more than 10,000 government lawyers since the beginning of 2025, a loss of legal talent that left some agencies struggling to staff litigation and enforcement work. Based on an analysis of federal employment records, the Times found that roughly one in five attorneys employed at the end of 2024 had left the government by March 2026. The departures combined ordinary retirements and turnover with deep staffing cuts, deferred-resignation buyouts, and resignations by staff who objected to administration policies.

Scale of the Departures

The federal government employed about 37,000 civilian lawyers at the end of March 2026, roughly 17 percent fewer than at the end of 2024, according to the Times analysis of Office of Personnel Management data. While agencies hired about 3,200 lawyers over the same period, departures outpaced hiring, and attorneys left at a faster rate than the overall federal workforce. Federal agencies typically lose between five and eight percent of staff in a given year, with elevated turnover during transitions between administrations; the rate of attorney departures ran several times that pace and was sustained for more than a year.

Many of the exits came through the administration's government-wide "fork in the road" deferred-resignation offer, first rolled out in early 2025 with the stated goal of shrinking the federal workforce. Others resulted from reductions in force, reassignments, and firings, and some were voluntary resignations by attorneys unwilling to work on the administration's priorities. Available accounts of the departures suggest they were weighted toward experienced staff. A summary of Justice Department data compiled by Associated Press–affiliated reporting found that departing DOJ attorneys averaged roughly 14 years of service and that hundreds had held supervisory roles, indicating the losses were concentrated among senior lawyers rather than recent hires.

Which Agencies Lost the Most Lawyers

The Justice Department, which employs more than a quarter of all government lawyers, recorded the largest decline in raw numbers. But several smaller civilian agencies lost a greater share of their legal staff. According to the Times data:

Note: Defense figures include agency headquarters and the separately reported Army, Air Force, and Navy, civilian workforce only. Source: Office of Personnel Management, via The New York Times.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which the administration has sought to wind down, was left with fewer than 200 lawyers by March, a loss of more than 50 percent from the Biden administration, with only two openings posted on its website. The Environmental Protection Agency shed roughly a quarter of its legal ranks over the same period.

The Department of Homeland Security was the only major agency to add lawyers, growing its legal staff by about 21 percent as it carried out the administration's immigration enforcement agenda and defended the resulting litigation.

Why Lawyers Left

The Times reported that the departures reflected both the administration's staffing cuts and a broader shift in the working environment for career attorneys. Some left after being asked to defend policies that raised significant legal questions, including efforts to end birthright citizenship, expand executive authority, and deploy the National Guard into American cities. Others cited pressure to advance the president's priorities regardless of the strength of the legal position.

Nowhere was the turnover more concentrated than in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, which is the subject of separate reporting. Current and former officials told NPR that roughly 250 attorneys, about 70 percent of the division's lawyers, left after Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon redirected the division away from its traditional focus on discrimination in voting, housing, and policing and toward the president's executive orders. Dhillon publicly welcomed the departures, telling a conservative podcast that attorneys unwilling to do the work should pursue their interests elsewhere.

For younger lawyers, the reputational calculation has changed. Faculty and students told the Times that federal service, long treated as a credential that opened doors, had become something some employers now view with suspicion. A first-year Georgetown law student who declined a Justice Department internship said several peers had told him they would look down on a résumé that showed a federal job started during the current administration.

Where the Talent Went

Much of the departed talent moved to organizations now opposing the administration in court. Democratic state attorneys general, who had filed more than 70 lawsuits against the administration within its first year, have hired experienced federal litigators to sustain that effort. Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, a Justice Department veteran, told the Times he had hired 22 lawyers from across the federal government in the past year, and noted that his office and others obtained a verdict against the concert promoter Live Nation after the federal government withdrew from the antitrust case mid-trial.

Nonprofit and advocacy groups have similarly absorbed former government attorneys. A former EPA Clean Air Act lawyer who left in 2025 to join the Center for Biological Diversity subsequently sued the agency over its non-enforcement of air pollution controls. Private law firms have also drawn heavily from the ranks of departing federal lawyers, competing with more lucrative positions than the government can offer, according to Bloomberg Law.

Recruitment and Retention Struggles

Agencies that once received far more applications than they could accept have begun offering financial incentives that were previously rare in federal legal hiring. The Justice Department's Civil Division, which defends administration policies against hundreds of lawsuits, posted $25,000 signing bonuses for attorneys willing to staff offices litigating the immigration agenda and investigating gender-affirming care for minors, and began paying current attorneys biweekly retention allowances of roughly $60 to $220. In March, the department revoked a longstanding requirement that newly hired prosecutors have at least one year of legal experience.

The Education Department, which lost more than half of its lawyers, has moved to rehire some it let go; Secretary Linda McMahon told Congress the department needed more attorneys in its civil rights office to clear a backlog of discrimination cases. To broaden hiring across the government, the Office of Personnel Management launched a legal talent recruiting network, which the agency said had drawn interest from about 300 people.

Officials have framed the turnover as a healthy realignment. A Justice Department official told Fox News that the deferred-resignation program had allowed the department to run more efficiently and to hire employees who believe in its mission.

A High-Profile Resignation

The departures have reached the senior ranks. On May 18, 2026, Treasury Department General Counsel Brian Morrissey resigned hours after the Justice Department announced a $1.776 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund." A former Sidley Austin partner and onetime clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Morrissey had been confirmed just seven months earlier in a 51-47 Senate vote.

The fund was created as part of a settlement of Trump's lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over the leaking of his tax records during his first term. The president dropped that suit after a federal judge questioned whether a sitting president could sue an agency he oversees. Under the arrangement, the Treasury would deposit money into an account, and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump's former personal lawyer, would appoint and could remove the commission members who decide which claimants, described by the administration as victims of government "weaponization," receive payments. Lawmakers including Senator Elizabeth Warren criticized the fund as a potential vehicle for compensating the president's allies and some of those prosecuted in connection with the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot. Morrissey did not comment publicly, and his resignation letter thanked Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. A federal judge later reopened the underlying case, saying she wanted to examine allegations that the deal was based on deception.

Signs of Strain in Court

The clearest evidence that the departures affected the government's work, rather than simply its headcount, comes from litigation. In a civil case surfaced by reporters, a Justice Department attorney disclosed in a February 2026 filing that the Appellate Section had lost more than 40 percent of its attorneys since February 2025 and that she could not reassign the matter to another lawyer who would need time to learn the issues, according to the ABA Journal. It was a rare instance of the government stating, on the record, that it lacked the staff to handle a case.

Bloomberg Law documented a series of missteps in early 2026, including a government lawyer who missed a deadline citing unfamiliarity with local procedures and attorneys who acknowledged relying on inaccurate information to defend migrant arrests, prompting a federal judge in Manhattan to order the preservation of internal communications. The report noted that mass firings and resignations had left offices short of veteran career lawyers, and that judges depend on a "presumption of regularity" that trusts the government to provide accurate information in good faith. In Minnesota, where courts confronted what one official described to CBS News as a "tsunami" of immigration habeas petitions, a federal judge held a Justice Department lawyer in contempt in February after the government cited understaffing and heavy caseloads to explain non-compliance with a court order. The judge wrote that a private litigant would not be permitted to rely on an "I'm too busy" excuse, and that the government's staffing problems were of its own making.

Inexperience among replacement lawyers has also produced setbacks in prominent cases. After the administration forced out the veteran U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia and installed Lindsey Halligan, a White House aide with no experience as a federal prosecutor, to pursue indictments of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, one judge identified grave missteps in how the Comey case was presented to a grand jury and another dismissed both prosecutions, calling the appointment unlawful.

Enforcement Output

Enforcement activity fell across several categories over the same period, though the causes are a mix of deliberate policy and diminished capacity, and disentangling the two is difficult. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act enforcement is the clearest illustration. The department brought only six core FCPA actions in 2025, a decline of more than 70 percent from 22 in 2024 and the lowest total since 2006, and it closed roughly half of its pending FCPA investigations, according to The Dispatch. That drop followed a February 2025 executive order that paused FCPA cases and new Justice Department guidelines narrowing enforcement, a policy choice by the executive branch. It also coincided with the FCPA unit shrinking from 32 attorneys to 22 and with prosecutors being redirected to immigration work, a capacity effect. Analysts and the department's own outside observers attribute the decline to both.

A broader pattern appears in criminal declinations. A ProPublica analysis of Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse data found the department declined more than 23,000 criminal referrals in the first six months of the term, including over 1,000 terrorism cases and about three times as many environmental cases as the Biden administration, with February 2025 producing the most monthly declinations since at least 2004. The Public Integrity Section, which prosecutes corruption by public officials, was hollowed out from roughly 35–40 attorneys to about two over the same period—part of a broader collapse of public-corruption enforcement covered in a separate entry. The Justice Department said the declinations reflected an effort to clean up case-management data and to run the agency more efficiently, and it maintained that it remained committed to prosecuting crime.

Two caveats temper a straightforward reading of these figures. First, some of the decline continues a long-run trend: TRAC data show white-collar prosecutions have fallen for decades across administrations of both parties, from more than 10,000 a year in the mid-1990s to about 4,300 in fiscal 2024, and were projected to reach roughly 3,900 in fiscal 2025. Second, much of the shift is a reallocation rather than an across-the-board reduction: immigration prosecutions rose sharply even as other categories fell, and the administration has framed corporate leniency and faster case resolutions as deliberate improvements rather than gaps.

The Administration's Response

Trump welcomed the reporting on the exodus. Writing on Truth Social, he said the Times had framed the departures as a negative development when, in his view, the outcome was "very good." He described those leaving as radical operatives who had weaponized the government against him. A White House spokeswoman said the administration remained committed to hiring Americans dedicated to public service and to delivering on the president's promises, and called the individuals being hired highly qualified.

The administration's supporters argue that a portion of the departures reflect ordinary retirements and voluntary buyouts rather than a crisis, that agencies continue to hire, and that the Justice Department has prevailed in the large majority of the roughly two dozen cases it has taken to the conservative-leaning Supreme Court on an emergency basis. They contend that career lawyers who resisted the president's agenda were an obstacle to his first-term priorities and that their exit lets agencies operate more efficiently.

Assessing the Impact

Whether the departures constitute a problem depends on what replaced the lost lawyers and what work went undone, not on the headcount alone. On that measure the record is genuinely mixed. The government continued to win most of the emergency applications it pressed at the Supreme Court, agencies kept hiring, and a share of the reduced enforcement reflects policy choices a president is entitled to make and, in areas such as white-collar prosecution, a decades-long secular decline. The Times cautioned that the full effect of the legal departures is difficult to measure, and for a president who viewed career lawyers as an impediment during his first term, thinner ranks also mean fewer internal checks on executive action.

At the same time, the documented downsides are concrete rather than hypothetical. The government has acknowledged in court that it could not staff cases; judges have imposed sanctions and contempt and questioned the accuracy of its filings; and inexperienced appointees have contributed to the collapse of marquee prosecutions. Because the departures skewed toward senior, experienced attorneys, the lost expertise is slow to rebuild. The watchdog group CREW estimated that Justice Department departures alone represented thousands of years of accumulated experience, and a former development official quoted in coverage of the broader workforce cuts observed that rebuilding expertise, relationships, and institutional trust takes years. Weiser, the Colorado attorney general, framed the shift as both an opportunity for states and a warning, saying that the states can absorb some of the displaced talent but that the situation is not sustainable and the country ultimately needs a Justice Department with high-quality lawyers operating with integrity.