Justice Department struggles as thousands exit -- and few are replaced

[LetMyPeopleVote]

The Justice Department has lost thousands of experienced attorneys and backfilled a fraction of the open jobs, in part because of a lack of qualified candidates.

Justice Department struggles as thousands exit – and few are replaced go.shr.lc/4nO65gT

— Anne Grete (GoogeliArt) 🦋💙PD (@googeliart.bsky.social) 2025-11-10T21:24:03.893Z

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/11/10/justice-department-hiring-stalled/

The Justice Department has lost thousands of experienced attorneys since the start of the Trump administration and has backfilled a fraction of the open jobs, with the process snarled by a lack of qualified candidates, bureaucratic delays and hiring freezes, according to people familiar with hirings in the department.

Last year, roughly 10,000 attorneys worked across the Justice Department and its components, including the FBI. Justice Connection, an advocacy group that has been tracking departures, estimates that around 5,500 people — not all of them attorneys — have quit the department, been fired or taken a buyout offered by the Trump administration.....

Multiple people familiar with the student bodies at top-ranked law schools and the department’s hiring process said the share of recent graduates across the political spectrum who are applying for jobs at the Justice Department has plummeted. The department has had difficulty finding qualified candidates for open slots, according to more than a half-dozen people familiar with the process, several of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment on the record.

Across the country, U.S. attorneys’ offices have experienced higher turnovers than they typically see during a change in administrations. In August, Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for D.C., said on Fox News that her office was down 90 prosecutors and told lawyers to email her if they wanted a job......

The process of filling career positions is distinct from installing political appointees. Career jobs are governed by federal regulations intended to ensure that politics do not play a role in who is hired. The Trump administration has pushed out many of the Justice Department’s top-ranking career officials and replaced them with political appointees. Many of these appointees came from Republican state solicitors general offices and conservative legal groups. The department has relied on them to argue some of its most high-profile and controversial cases in court......

The vast majority of the 600 employees in the Civil Rights Division, for example, have left. The division has refilled a dozen or so of those career positions, despite its chief, Harmeet K. Dhillon, publicly touting the flood of applications she has been receiving......

Under Attorney General Pam Bondi, however, top Justice Department officials have pushed out veteran prosecutors across the department who worked on cases during the Biden administration that they viewed as anti-Trump. Employees who prosecuted the hundreds of cases against the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, have been especially targeted. Others were given no explanation as to why they were fired. The Washington Post has reported that other prosecutors have been ousted after they refused to bring cases to grand juries that they believed had insufficient evidence......

The draw of the Justice Department has long been public service and job security. The widespread firings have undermined the job security belief. At the same time, some potential hires fear they could be put in compromising positions in which they would be forced to bring cases they felt would be unethical to present to a grand jury.

[Mz Pip]

1. My DIL quit in November.

She was a trial attorney in anti-trust. She just couldn’t take it anymore. She was working 60-80 hours a week and then half of her team got fired . I remember when she was offered the job a few years ago. She was so excited.

It’s going to take years for the DOJ to recover from the mess the Trump Administration made of it.

[newdeal2]

2. They will just hire loyalists

They’re mainly interested in show trials anyway. All to please the dotard.

[Norbert]

3. People are realizing working for dump and Blondi is a stain on their resume

with that hanging over their heads they may not even get jobs as paralegals.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

4. MaddowBlog-In Trump's Justice Department, resignations, once rare, are suddenly much more common

Prosecutors hardly ever walk away from their sought-after DOJ jobs in protest — but that’s changing in a hurry.

It used to be quite rare to see federal prosecutors resign in large numbers, exiting the Justice Department in protest.

But as Trump-era abuses become common, it’s clearly not rare anymore. www.ms.now/rachel-maddo...

— Steve Benen (@stevebenen.com) 2026-01-14T18:18:19.248Z

https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/resignations-justice-department-minneapolis-more-common

Predictably, problems emerged shortly thereafter. The Justice Department division that typically handles investigations of police shootings, for example, was reportedly excluded from the probe, The Washington Post reported. Around the same time, there was related reporting to suggest the Trump administration’s investigatory focus was on the victim, rather than the shooter.

It’s against this backdrop that The New York Times reported:

Six federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned on Tuesday over the Justice Department’s push to investigate the widow of a woman killed by an ICE agent and the department’s reluctance to investigate the shooter, according to people with knowledge of their decision.

Joseph H. Thompson, who was second in command at the U.S. attorney’s office and oversaw a sprawling fraud investigation that has roiled Minnesota’s political landscape, was among those who quit on Tuesday, according to three people with knowledge of the decision.

The departure of Thompson and several of his colleagues will ironically undermine the Minnesota fraud investigation that the White House claims to care so much about.

These highly sought-after positions are career highlights for those who reach such prosecutorial heights. It’s not at all common for attorneys to walk away from these jobs in protest.....

The more common these resignations become, the clearer it becomes that the DOJ is an institution in crisis and apparently coming apart at the seams

[ananda]

5. Well, they can always replace them with mar-a-lago faces...

as soon as the plastic surgery is done and they call
themselves attorneys.