At the F.B.I. and Justice Department, a striking number of the most experienced investigators have quit or been fired.
Many of the agents and prosecutors who remain fear they will be dismissed for simply working on any case that draws unwanted attention from the leaders of their agencies.
In many offices across the country, the pace of new cases has slowed — the remaining work force has inherited too many open prosecutions and investigations from those who left, giving them little time to focus on new matters.
And personnel typically deployed to national security and fraud cases are being diverted to focus on other priorities, including the president’s demands for investigations into his perceived enemies and the congressionally mandated release of millions of documents about the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
How vulnerable that leaves the department — and the country — to national security or criminal threats is difficult to quantify.
But across the Justice Department, rank-and-file prosecutors and agents have expressed serious concern that a denigrated, distracted and depleted work force hurts the government’s ability to identify and stop terrorist plots, cyberattacks, mass violence and fraud, putting the country in a weaker position.
The department declined to answer questions about staffing levels. But interviews with current and former officials, numbers tracked by a government advocacy group and a court filing offer a telling picture of a hobbled work force struggling to keep pace.
In major metropolitan areas across the country — including Miami, Houston and Denver — U.S. attorneys’ offices have lost at least a quarter of their work force, according to current and former officials.
The numbers in some key offices are particularly stark. In New Jersey — which was briefly run by a former personal lawyer to President Trump, Alina Habba — about 50 assistant U.S. attorneys departed the office last year out of roughly 150, including much of the office’s leadership.
The office has made about 15 new hires in recent weeks. But it will take years for new prosecutors to gain the kind of experience possessed by those who left in droves in 2025.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation had about 13,000 agents at the beginning of 2025 and it lost about 800 more over the past year. The losses are so significant that the bureau is trying to coax recent retirees to return.
Late Monday, the Justice Department told a federal judge that 400 of its lawyers from its criminal and national security divisions in Washington, as well as U.S. attorneys’ offices in Miami and Manhattan, would “dedicate all or a substantial portion of their workday” to preparing documents from the Epstein investigation for release. At the Southern District in New York, according to the Justice Department, that means assigning about 125 lawyers to the task, or roughly half of the department’s premier office that conducts some of its most complex and sensitive investigations.
The turmoil that Mr. Trump and his administration have wrought has led many current and former investigators, along with national security experts, to increasingly acknowledge the consequences of rapid attrition and diverted personnel.
“You’re making it more likely something is going to be missed,” said Samuel W. Buell, a professor of law at Duke University and a former federal prosecutor on the task force that investigated the collapse of the energy company Enron.
He added, “The first question that happens whenever something horrific happens, whether it’s 9/11 or something like Bernie Madoff, is, ‘What did the Department of Justice and F.B.I. know and why weren’t they in a position to stop this?’”
Overall, the advocacy group Justice Connection estimates that about 5,500 prosecutors, agents and other department employees left in 2025. In total, the department employs about 115,000, including F.B.I. agents, technical support staff and thousands of correction officers at the Bureau of Prisons.
But while the portion of departures is small when compared with the entire size of the department, those who left include a disproportionate number of highly experienced prosecutors, like the many who helped lead U.S. attorneys’ offices or contributed to the overall leadership of the department, and similarly experienced F.B.I. agents.
The department appears to have lost a lower percentage of its overall work force than other major federal agencies have. That may be partly because it was not subject to the degree of cuts from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
Instead, Mr. Trump’s political appointees at the department have purged its ranks of those they suspect are not loyal to the president’s agenda, including his pursuit of retribution against his rivals.
Trump administration officials have repeatedly defended their management of federal law enforcement.
Natalie Baldassarre, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said the agency still had “over 10,000 attorneys committed to restoring public safety and upholding the rule of law.” She faulted Senate Democrats for the slow pace of approvals for U.S. attorneys, and blamed “liberal judges” for adverse rulings against the administration.
Trump Administration: Live Updates
Updated
- Trump Deepens Scrutiny of Minnesota, a Potential Model for Other Blue States
- Trump officials threaten to expand a crackdown on fraud in Minnesota to other Democratic-run states.
- The government’s new dietary guidelines abandon longstanding advice on alcohol.
She also pointed to significant drops in crime as a sign that the changes underway at the department were working. “Our attorneys will continue to deliver measurable results for the American people,” Ms. Baldassarre said.
The administration also says that the Justice Department has continued to proactively thwart national security threats. It identified, arrested and charged a man with leaving pipe bombs outside the Democratic and Republican national headquarters on Jan. 5, 2021, a case that had stumped investigators for years.
The department also arrested and charged individuals in Los Angeles with plotting to attack two companies with improvised explosive devices on New Year’s Eve. Last week, Justice Department officials announced they had arrested a man who they said had intended to attack a North Carolina grocery store and Burger King location, also on New Year’s Eve.
But the number of departures, combined with the loss of institutional expertise and the lack of qualified candidates to fill those open jobs, has troubled many current and former investigators.
Applications for open positions at the Justice Department — once considered among the most prestigious jobs in the legal field — are down, officials familiar with the matter say. And those who are applying are not nearly as qualified as other candidates in recent years, leaving the department struggling to fill empty positions.
In Houston, the white-collar crime squads of the F.B.I. were decimated in 2025 by orders to put dozens of their agents onto immigration enforcement, according to people familiar with the decisions. At other offices, public corruption and corporate fraud investigations have been deprioritized, while health care and government fraud have continued, these people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal personnel decisions.
And under intense pressure, both from Mr. Trump’s base and the law, the department has diverted hundreds of prosecutors and agents on a mammoth effort to sift through hundreds of thousands of pages of material from the Epstein investigation.
The most recent scramble came after the House and Senate nearly unanimously passed a bill mandating the release of the files.
The Justice Department has pledged to review 5.2 million pages of material, seeking to recruit volunteers across the agency to ensure that the information that is ultimately released does not compromise victims, in compliance with the law.
While prosecutors and agents hold wrongdoers accountable after a crime has already been committed, part of their jobs are preventive: stopping terrorist plots and large-scale fraud, protecting Americans in the process.
That task is challenging in any era, but all the more difficult when the department and F.B.I. are subject to sudden changes in staffing priorities.
Mr. Trump expressed his own dissatisfaction with the department’s focus on releasing the Epstein documents.
“DOJ is being forced to spend all of its time on this Democrat inspired Hoax,” Mr. Trump posted on his social media site on Dec. 26. “When do they say NO MORE, and work on Election Fraud etc.”
The attrition has been driven by the Justice Department’s transformation during Mr. Trump’s second term.
The president returned to the White House last January, determined to correct what he and his closest aides believed was a fundamental error of his first term: having top political appointees who were not expressly loyal to him run the Justice Department.
The steps he took exacerbated the stream of departures typical of any incoming administration. Mr. Trump appointed his former criminal defense lawyers to critical positions. One, Emil Bove III, fired dozens of prosecutors and agents who had been involved in a range of investigations into Mr. Trump and his supporters. The firings, in turn, led to resignations.
The administration also installed loyalists in many U.S. attorneys’ offices around the country, meaning that there is far more direction from the top down than there was under previous administrations, as prosecutors have been warned to zealously embrace the president’s agenda.
The most high-profile example of the Justice Department’s tightening grip on U.S. attorneys’ offices played out in February, when Mr. Bove ordered the interim U.S. attorney in Manhattan to abandon a corruption case against Eric Adams, then the mayor of New York, citing the mayor’s need to focus on immigration enforcement.
At least eight prosecutors in New York and Washington resigned, presaging the dismantling of anticorruption units within the F.B.I. and the Justice Department. The punishments delivered upon agents and prosecutors who have challenged the president’s priorities — or whose past work has indicated their independence — have served as a kind of morale-sapping warning to the rest of the work force that they, too, could pay a steep price for challenging orders from above.
But there are more subtle ways in which the new direction of the Justice Department has prompted many employees to head for the exits.
The push to have F.B.I. agents around the country spend a significant portion of their time working on immigration matters has had a cascading effect, as prosecutors find it harder to keep investigators working on white-collar fraud cases, according to current and former officials.
And in many offices, the prosecutors themselves have been instructed to focus more of their energy on street crime than on the complex investigations that they had previously worked.
With fewer agents available to work long-term cases, prosecutors have found they are less able to pursue continuing investigations, or start new ones, current and former officials said, inciting frustration and ultimately encouraging their departure.
Michael S. Schmidt is an investigative reporter for The Times covering Washington. His work focuses on tracking and explaining high-profile federal investigations.
The post Depleted and Distracted, Justice Dept. Staff Fear Losing Focus on Potential Threats appeared first on New York Times.
