A drastically diminished DOJ workforce is struggling to keep up with its civil side caseloads. A series of charts show how the number of attorneys within the civil division has plummeted under the Trump (R) Administration. The charts substantiate a dynamic long suspected: the DOJ would not be able to swiftly replace a crew of veteran attorneys after a wave of firings and resignations.
Stacey Young, who founded the DOJ alumni group Justice Connection, described the staff turnover as a “massive exodus.”
“The workload has skyrocketed, particularly in the civil division offices that have lost the most lawyers. So what we’re seeing is that the lawyers who are left are overworked, stressed out, many have lost those who led their office because they were pushed out by this administration.
And because of the difficult circumstances under which they’re working, I expect that the rate of departures won’t slow down anytime soon,” she told The Hill. “Putting out this data seems to me like a desperate cry for help. It seems like the civil division knows how badly it needs more funds to hire more lawyers to make up for the purge of longstanding experts that they caused.”
According to the Office of Personnel Management, the DOJ has lost roughly 10,000 workers since the start of the Trump administration, a metric that includes component agencies like the FBI and the Federal Bureau of Prisons. In graph after graph, the charts track data from the start of the Trump administration through August, showing a significant decline in civil division staff as caseloads have steadily ticked up.
The shedding of staff: One chart reviewing impact on each branch within the division detailed how caseload was skyrocketing — with work for the commercial litigation branch jumping a whopping 84% per attorney, while lawyers in the Office of Immigration Litigation saw their workload jump 63%. Attorneys who work on appeals saw their caseloads jump 54% while lawyers in the federal programs branch, those who work on defending executive orders among other administration priorities, saw their workloads jump 44%.
The number of attorneys in the federal programs branch dropped from 113 to 71 just within the first few months of the Trump administration. A jump in cases has largely settled to around 1,000, but they are being handled by a diminished team. Jennifer Ricketts, a former DOJ attorney who led the federal programs branch, said the swift exodus shows how many longtime attorneys who defended presidential priorities across administrations likely began looking for a new job as soon as Trump won the election. “They were aware of how much in the first Trump administration they tried to stretch the law and put us in positions where we struggled to make sure we satisfied our professional responsibilities and folks did not want to have to go through that exercise again,” she said of the branch.
“You don’t get jobs really quickly. So they had already started looking after the election, so it was not tied to any specific decision. It was the anticipation of what they may do, especially given how aggressive they said they were going to be and how aggressive we had seen them be in Trump one …. I think folks knew maybe not the scope of what was coming, but they knew none of it was going to be pleasant.” One of the other most significant declines in staffing, combined with one of the highest rises in cases, was in the Office of Immigration Litigation, which has seen cases surge amid Trump’s pledge to carry out the largest mass deportation operation in history.
The Office of Immigration Litigation handles both individual immigration cases being heard at the Board of Immigration Appeals as well as immigration matters brought in federal district court, such as habeas corpus cases brought by migrants being held in detention. Habeas petitions have soared alongside detention rates as the administration has largely cut off access to bond hearings. One former staffer from the immigration office noted the steady decline in staff in that branch, with attorneys going from 320 down to 243 as cases climbed from roughly 7,700 to nearly 9,500. “We never had attrition like we’ve had. There’s been a lot of reasons for that,” the former staffer said.
Early in the administration, the DOJ moved the branch’s leader to a new sanctuary city task force, and the DOJ later made headlines for firing Erez Reuveni, a longtime Office of Immigration Litigation staffer, after he acknowledged in court that Kilmar Abrego Garcia had been mistakenly deported. “When our colleague Erez Reuveni got fired, I think there were a lot of people that were saying, ‘If that could happen to him that could happen to any of us,’” the former staffer continued. “And I think that people just started looking, and you know, workload’s gone up. The office has sort of tried to recover from those blows … But it’s been increasingly challenging for people to do that. I think there’s a lot of unhappy people. With caseload going up and the resources going down, it just makes it challenging,” they added.
Also surprising is the attrition among appellate staff attorneys, though their ranks have been rising over the last several months. “It’s a very plum section, very elite section, and if folks leave there, they would often go to the solicitor general’s office or some other very prestigious placement,” Ricketts said, referencing the team of attorneys for the solicitor who argue before the Supreme Court. While staffing in that branch hasn’t dipped as much as others, their caseload has increased substantially because the Trump administration has been appealing so many of its losses in court.
Though now down six attorneys from the 61 it began with, the number of appealed cases went from around 780 at the start of the administration to more than 1,100 last month. “They will appeal everything. I mean, it does not appear to be an administration that takes losses. They do not seem to be worried about creating bad law in the court of appeals. They seem to be pursuing a very aggressive interpretation of executive branch authority, and so they are willing to roll the dice and take it up,” Ricketts said. “I think my sense is they have a sense that the Supreme Court is willing to accept more of those ideas, what would have been considered extreme ideas, than we ever imagined, and so why not?”
Similarly to the Office of Immigration Litigation, the commercial litigation branch has also seen a consistent loss in staff — dropping from 350 at the start of the administration down to 289 — while caseloads have jumped from around 13,000 to nearly 19,000. It’s hard to know what has driven the surge in caseload in the branch, which handles a wide variety of matters from cases where the government has a financial interest to intellectual property to those who represent the U.S. in cases in foreign courts. But it does include two areas where there has been more active litigation.
The commercial litigation branch includes fraud — a topic of great interest to the Trump administration as it probes entitlement programs.
It also handles cases before the Merit Systems Protection Board, the quasi judicial board responsible for reviewing federal employee workplace challenges, including wrongful termination cases that have surged as the Trump administration pushed to reduce the size of the government.
“Somewhere along the line, somebody in the division or the department is going to use this data to justify asking for more resources,” the former Office of Immigration Litigation staffer said. They noted that none of the graphs start its axis at zero, a choice that emphasizes the rise in cases and fall in staff. “They ginned up the charts to make that visually apparent,” they said.
The DOJ has already made efforts to recruit more staff. In May, the department promised something largely unheard of in the federal government — a $25,000 signing bonus to those joining the civil division. But it’s unclear if that’s working. The DOJ “had never given signing bonuses to try to attract applicants. These jobs were some of the most competitive legal jobs in the field. The fact that they’re now having to provide financial incentives for people to apply shows you just how desperate they are,” Young said. “And we know that job openings that used to attract hundreds or thousands of applications are now attracting almost none.”
The DOJ took a number of actions shortly after Trump took office that flushed staff and prompted headlines. In the criminal division, the DOJ fired those who had worked on cases involving Trump. In the civil division, many branch leaders were reassigned to take on unrelated work. The U.S. pardon attorney lost her job after she refused to certify that actor Mel Gibson should have his gun rights restored. And still more attorneys sought and gained jobs outside the department or availed themselves of a government buyout spearheaded by Elon Musk.
At the beginning of the administration, the DOJ also withdrew offers to recent graduates who had been given entry level jobs through the prestigious Attorney General’s Honors Program, cutting off a pipeline of young attorneys from top schools who then rise through the ranks of the department. “It reflects what we’ve been saying all along. This situation is untenable when you have an office that is experiencing a surge of cases because of this administration’s lawless conduct at a time when lawyers are fleeing the department. The administration won’t be able to defend itself in court,” Young said.
DOJ lawyers “in the best of times, are overworked. Their workloads right now have increased exponentially, especially when it comes to civil division lawyers, and as their workloads continue to increase, more will leave, and the problem will just keep getting worse and worse.”
Michael H. Drucker
