On Sunday, the New York Times published a piece explaining how a significant number of of lawyers have left employment with the federal government since Donald Trump was once again elected president.

President Trump’s upheaval of the federal government has led to an exodus of more than 10,000 lawyers since the beginning of 2025, a striking loss of legal talent that has left some agencies pushing to find attorneys to carry out his agenda.
Roughly one in five lawyers who worked in the government at the end of 2024 had left by March of this year, according to a New York Times analysis of federal employment data.

It is understandable yet still hard to believe that 20% of all lawyers employed by the federal government left in just 14 months. The amount of institutional knowledge the Justice Department and other federal agencies have lost must be staggering, and the quality of work has surely suffered.

But it is more than simply turnover. The number of attorneys employed by the federal government is shrinking.

While federal agencies brought on about 3,200 lawyers since the beginning of 2025, departures still outpaced hiring, data shows. Lawyers also exited the government at a faster rate than turnover in the overall work force. All told, the federal government employed about 37,000 civilian lawyers at the end of March, 17 percent fewer than it did at the end of 2024.
The Justice Department, which employs more than a quarter of all government lawyers, saw the largest decline in raw numbers. But other agencies — including the Department of Education, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development — lost an even greater share of attorneys.

The issue of quantity is leading to a serious issue of quality in both the lawyers themselves and the work good lawyers are able to provide. Likely due in significant part to the plunging interest in working for the federal government under Trump, the US Justice Department has lowered hiring standards, "The Justice Department has waived a policy requiring newly hired federal prosecutors to possess at least one year of experience practicing law, as US attorneys’ offices struggle to find qualified replacements following mass departures." Some offices even had rules requiring at least three years of legal practice to work there.

A federal judge in New Jersey reached his limit and ripped into the local US Attorney's Office in court for its poor conduct,

You have lost the confidence and the trust of this Court,” Quraishi told Rosenblum during a tense 22-minute hearing. “You have lost the confidence and the trust of the New Jersey legal community, and you are losing the trust and confidence of the public.”

The judge demanded three senior attorneys come to court to testify under oath and even ordered a supervising attorney to leave the court.

The dwindling number of federal attorneys has apparently made the job more difficult as well. A now former attorney for the Department of Homeland Security who was assigned to a US attorney's office voiced her frustrations in court,

“The system sucks. This job sucks. I wish you could hold me in contempt so that I could get 24 hours of sleep,” Le said, according to reporting by Lou Raguse of NBC affiliate KARE. A person in the courtroom confirmed Le's remarks to NBC News.

The attorney also said, "[I]t takes 10 emails from me for a release condition to be corrected. It takes me threatening to walk out for something else to be corrected." According the NBC News, she "had been assigned 88 cases in less than a month." Unsurprisingly, she is no longer assigned to the US attorney's office.

As I, and many others have explained, many of the departures are likely due to the politicization of the Justice Department and other federal agencies by Trump and his cronies.

There have been a number of high profile resignations by federal attorneys. Six experienced federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned in January over pressure from higher-ups to investigate the killing of Renee Good by an ICE officer as an assault on a federal officer. Additional experienced attorneys left the Minnesota office soon after. At least seven federal prosecutors, including the conservative acting US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, resigned after receiving corrupt orders from top officials to dismiss corruption charges against now former New York City Mayor Eric Adams. The corruption from her bosses was so blatant that the acting US Attorney detailed it all in her resignation letter.

Who could blame lawyers for not wanting to be a part of the federal government when it is helmed by a man who could not care less for the rule of the law, impartial justice, and traditional concepts of morality? Even if it an attorney is more concerned about getting ahead in their career than with morals and high-minded principles, they have to think twice about the potential damage to their careers from working in the Trump administration. The New York Times, explained,

Wariness of the Trump administration is also palpable inside law schools, where many aspiring lawyers who would have once jumped at the chance to hold a federal government job are seeking alternative paths, according to faculty members and students.
“A lot of people my age are asking, ‘Is it worth getting a job, and will that help career wise — having one year of Trump administration experience on your résumé?’” said Matthew Duray, who described himself as a conservative Republican and just finished his first year at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. “Or will that hurt? And that’s the question I guess everyone’s asking, and that’s the bet you have to make ahead of time. But it’s hard to know long term.”

Of course, Trump had his own take on the issue.

One cannot help but wonder why Trump would feel the need to address this issue in a rant published to the world if it is not a big deal and the New York Times is merely a failing newspaper.

Working as an attorney for the Justice Department was once one of the most prestigious jobs an attorney of any political persuasion could have, particularly if they wanted to be in public service. The Justice Department was known, for the most part, from staying independent of party politics.

Now, the Justice Department (and the federal government as a whole) is becoming a politically-driven means by which Trump and his pathetic sycophants can enrich themselves, take revenge on those Trump perceives to have harmed him, and provide a thin patina of legitimate cover for Trump's various unlawful and harmful endeavors.

The Trump administration has destroyed the Department of Justice's reputation and much of the prestige associated with working for it and the various other federal agencies.

If you work as an attorney for the federal government under Trump, you will be overworked and surrounded by underqualified attorneys and/or political hacks. At some point, you likely will be asked to do something unethical that further erodes the credibility of an impartial justice system, undermines the rule of law, and harms the civic fabric of our nation.

If you are an attorney who still retains a moral compass or believes in the foundational principles on which our justice system and nation were based, it is hard to imagine how you can justify continuing to work for the federal government. Perhaps you are in denial about how bad things are getting. Perhaps you are desperate for a paycheck in tough economic times. Perhaps you think you and those like you who remain are keeping things from getting worse.

Or, perhaps you think this is just a storm to be weathered before you can help rebuild and restore the credibility of the Justice Department and other federal law offices under a different president.

While I admire such optimism, I find it hard to share.