On a spring evening earlier this year, more than a hundred lawyers and guests filled the Justice Department’s Great Hall to mark the end of an era.
The invitation-only event celebrated the retirement of Edwin S. Kneedler, who over a 46-year career in the Office of the Solicitor General, had argued 160 cases on behalf of the government before the Supreme Court — a modern record.
Standing in front of statues depicting the “Spirit of Justice” and the “Majesty of Law,” speakers praised the traditionally fierce independence of the solicitor general’s office, the elite unit inside the Justice Department that represents the federal government before the justices. But some in the crowd grew uneasy, as the event’s theme served as a striking contrast to a shift underway since President Trump took office in January.
Led by Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, D. John Sauer, the solicitor general’s office has appeared to be an unusually functional corner of a Justice Department that has been rocked by mass departures and internal chaos. The office has racked up a record of wins on emergency applications filed to the Supreme Court that even liberal critics describe as impressive.
But behind the scenes, people familiar with the office say it’s been affected by the politicization spreading through the rest of the department.
By Mr. Kneedler’s farewell on May 29, several other lawyers had also departed, adding to a number that would swell to nine, or more than half of the office’s frontline attorneys, by late November. It’s unusually high turnover, even for the first year of a new administration after a White House change of party. And new hires at the traditionally bipartisan office have leaned more Republican than in the past.
White House lawyers, who have typically had a carefully circumscribed relationship with the office, have also become more involved in its work since Mr. Trump began his second term, sending frequent emails and offering detailed edits of high-profile court filings, people familiar with the interventions said.
For the first time in modern memory, the office’s merits briefs, the legal filings it makes before the justices hear a case, begin with an “introduction,” a section often filled with unusually charged language, including direct quotes from Mr. Trump.
This account of how Mr. Trump is changing even one of the most staid, tradition-bound corners of the U.S. government is drawn from interviews with more than a dozen people familiar with the office, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of internal discussions within the office.
Mr. Sauer declined an interview request. In response to questions from The New York Times, a Justice Department spokeswoman, Natalie Baldassarre, wrote that “Solicitor General John Sauer has done historic work to advance and defend President Trump’s agenda, as evidenced by victory after victory in court.”
Ms. Baldassarre, who declined to comment on staffing or interactions with the White House, added that Justice Department officials appreciated Mr. Sauer’s “tireless work for the department.”
The changes have not yet rivaled those seen in other parts of the Justice Department, which has seen its culture of independence strained as the president and his allies have pushed for prosecutions of a number of his political foes. But the shift in norms with the solicitor general’s office has raised concerns among office veterans who worked during both Republican and Democratic administrations.
The Harvard Law School professor Richard Lazarus, an assistant solicitor general during the Reagan administration, said the charged rhetoric in filings could imperil the office’s special status with the Supreme Court as a trusted counselor that presents the justices with rigorous arguments that interpret the law consistently, no matter who occupies the White House.
The fiery language, Professor Lazarus said, makes the office sound like “a zealous ideologue.”
“They look like they are representing an individual. They don’t look like they are representing the United States or the federal government,” he said. “The question is whether the court will call them on it or not.”
“Learned in the Law”
The solicitor general’s office, established in 1870, is nestled within the Justice Department’s headquarters, but it’s long been seen as an office set apart from the rest of the agency. The solicitor general is the only U.S. officeholder required by statute to be “learned in the law,” a traditional descriptor of legal credentials not required even of the justices. The role is so trusted by the court that it is nicknamed “the 10th justice.”
The solicitor general leads a group of roughly two dozen lawyers focused on a single audience: the Supreme Court. About 16 assistant lawyers, most of whom are former Supreme Court clerks who graduated at the top of their classes from the country’s most prestigious law schools, draft legal filings and argue lower-profile cases. They typically argue one case their first year, adding a few more each year before leaving, often for larger salaries at the Supreme Court practices of major law firms.
They are supervised by three to four career deputies, senior attorneys like Mr. Kneedler who often spend decades in their roles, along with a principal deputy and the solicitor general, both political appointees.
Even the office’s work product sets it apart. Other parties file briefs to the justices in booklets with brightly colored covers, including red, blue and green. The cover of the solicitor general’s brief booklets is gray, leading to a joke that the government’s traditionally dry legal language makes the filings gray inside and out.
During a speech at the University of Virginia’s law school in April, Mr. Kneedler, who represented the federal government throughout 10 presidential administrations, described the office as “a small number of people who are highly competitive” but who maintain an “esprit de corps” regardless of any ideological differences.
“It’s critically important to us to be straight shooters in terms of the facts in a case, in terms of the law,” said Mr. Kneedler, who declined to comment for this article. “If there’s an embarrassing part of the case or embarrassing fact, we want to make sure the court knows it. We’re not keeping anything from it.”
Even before Mr. Trump was sworn in for a second time, some lawyers in the office began to worry.
An early sign of the changes to come happened in December 2024, when the president-elect filed an unusual brief urging the justices to delay imposing a congressionally mandated ban of the popular social media app TikTok until he took office.
The brief, written by Mr. Sauer, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer who had been designated to become solicitor general, included fawning language about the president-elect. “President Trump alone possesses the consummate deal-making expertise, the electoral mandate and the political will to negotiate a resolution” to the TikTok issue, Mr. Sauer wrote.
Turnover
Mr. Trump appointed Sarah M. Harris, a former law clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas, as acting solicitor general.
To fill the job permanently, Mr. Trump nominated Mr. Sauer, a former Missouri solicitor general who vaulted onto the national scene when he successfully argued that Mr. Trump was immune from criminal prosecution for acts undertaken while he was previously president. Although a Washington outsider, Mr. Sauer had been a Rhodes Scholar and clerked for former Justice Antonin Scalia.
Once confirmed, Mr. Sauer retained Ms. Harris as his second-in-command and added a second principal deputy, his fellow Harvard Law classmate Hashim M. Mooppan. People familiar with the office said it was unusual to appoint two primary deputies — political staffers are responsible for liaising with the rest of the Justice Department and the White House.
Typically, two or three career lawyers leave the office when a new administration takes over. But this time, it was a mass departure.
People close to the office said they left for various reasons but most were unsettled by Attorney General Pam Bondi’s demand for loyalty to the administration, the mass firing of prosecutors and the office’s aggressive legal stands.
Although Mr. Kneedler’s departure was not a surprise given his tenure, it was viewed as a particular blow. When he concluded his final argument in April, the justices joined in a standing ovation.
To replace departing lawyers, Mr. Sauer hired at least six new frontline attorneys. They broadly share the stellar credentials of their predecessors and include former law clerks to Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett M. Kavanaugh.
But people close to the office say they are drawn more exclusively from the pipeline of Republican judges and justices than in the past. None has clerked for a justice nominated by a Democratic president. Mr. Sauer also hired Michael Talent, a colleague from Mr. Sauer’s law firm and the son of a former Republican senator from Missouri.
“An 18-Wheeler Truck”
So far, people familiar with the office said the turnover had not affected morale; Mr. Kneedler and other recently departed attorneys returned for a recent happy hour with their former colleagues.
The office’s output has also remained high.
The Trump administration has filed an unprecedented number of emergency requests to the court, asking the justices to swiftly intervene and lift lower court orders that have repeatedly blocked his second-term policies.
Legal experts say the office has strategically chosen cases to bring to the justices, picking topics and legal arguments to appeal to a conservative supermajority ideologically supportive of presidential power and eager to avoid confrontation with Mr. Trump.
Indeed, the justices have sided with the administration in nearly every case, allowing the president, at least temporarily, to fire the heads of independent agencies, remove deportation protections for hundreds of thousands of immigrants and terminate millions of dollars in research grants.
Even critics of the president admit the office has an impressive record.
“It’s like an 18-wheeler truck,” said Lisa Blatt, a veteran of the Supreme Court bar and a partner at Williams & Connolly who has been critical of President Trump. “They’re crushing it.”
But the justices are only beginning to weigh the underlying merits of the president’s agenda, scheduling arguments in a series of cases that will determine just how far the administration can expand presidential power. In a first major test, key conservative justices sounded skeptical when Mr. Sauer argued in November that Mr. Trump could use emergency powers to impose tariffs.
Several people described particular discomfort with the office’s filings in that case, pointing to their heated rhetoric, including Mr. Sauer’s inclusion of a quote from Mr. Trump describing America before his tariffs as a “dead country.”
J. Michael Luttig, a retired appeals court judge whose past clerks include both Mr. Sauer and Mr. Mooppan, said he was appalled by the office’s tendency to quote the president’s rhetoric in briefs. He was concerned too by their frequent attacks on judges who ruled against Mr. Trump, a break from the office’s traditional respect for the judiciary.
“It is embarrassing for the Supreme Court, and it is embarrassing to the solicitor general,” said Judge Luttig, a conservative jurist who has become a frequent critic of Mr. Trump. The office today, he added, is “little more than the political extension of the president and the attorney general.”
The new “introduction” section of briefs has been another point of contention. Government filings have typically begun with the legal argument, but now they open with a summary, often using punchy language. Ms. Baldassarre, the Justice Department spokeswoman, said the introductions offer a preview of the government’s argument for the justices and make it more accessible for a general audience.
Veterans of the office have also worried about its interactions with the White House, according to people familiar with the situation.
Previously, the Justice Department relied on guidelines that limited contact between the White House and department officials, in part to guard against political interference.
That policy extended to the solicitor general’s office, where people familiar with Mr. Trump’s first presidency said discussions were carefully choreographed. Now the White House offers frequent input, as the office defends even the president’s most legally controversial stands.
Asked about the tariff case, a White House spokesman Kush Desai said the president “regularly keeps abreast of all tariff matters including legal proceedings,” calling tariffs “a marquee issue.”
The shift can be seen in the administration’s approach to a particularly hot-button issue, people familiar with the discussions say.
Near the end of Mr. Trump’s first term, he was considering an executive order ending birthright citizenship, the longstanding practice of extending citizenship to virtually all children born on U.S. soil.
But the solicitor general’s office argued it would be a loser in court. Mr. Trump left office without issuing the order.
This time around, Mr. Trump announced he was ending birthright citizenship on his first day in office.
The order was immediately challenged in court and multiple federal judges have found it unconstitutional.
Even so, the solicitor general’s office has brought it to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to overturn more than 100 years of precedent and support Mr. Trump.
Tyler Pager contributed reporting.
Julie Tate contributed research.
Abbie VanSickle covers the United States Supreme Court for The Times. She is a lawyer and has an extensive background in investigative reporting.
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