The DOJ Can’t Keep Up With Trump

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

For several hours last week, Attorney General Pam Bondi sat before the House Judiciary Committee with one apparent mission: Don’t back down.

The oversight hearing focused on the recent actions of the Justice Department, which has been consumed with the release of the Epstein files, as well as ongoing investigations into the fatal shootings of two American citizens by federal agents in Minneapolis. At some points, the back-and-forth between Bondi and Congress devolved into a screaming match. Faced with questions about her department’s haphazard redaction of the files, she often went on the attack, calling Representative Jamie Raskin a “loser lawyer” and asking Representative Jerry Nadler whether he’d “apologized to President Trump” for participating in his impeachment hearings.

Bondi seemed more passionate about these deflections than she did about defending the department’s work, which has been hampered in recent months by understaffing and low morale. DOJ reportedly lost nearly 10,000 employees from November 2024 to November 2025. U.S. Attorney’s Offices (which are part of the department) shed 14 percent of their workforce, a one-year reduction that officials say is unlike anything they’ve seen in years. Some were fired, some took a buyout package, and others simply walked away. Last month, Bondi suggested in court filings that the department was struggling to keep up with its workload, having released only a fraction of the millions of Jeffrey Epstein–related files under review. Some attorneys were reportedly spending all or most of their days on the files. (Bondi said on Saturday that “all” of the files have been released, as mandated by the Epstein Files Transparency Act, but lawmakers have criticized the files’ heavy redactions.)

Add to that a backlog of federal immigration cases and the ongoing legal fallout from the administration’s mass-deportation push, and the result is an organization that is thoroughly overwhelmed. The U.S. attorney for Minnesota, who has been responsible for defending recent federal immigration-enforcement efforts, described the new influx of casework as an “enormous burden.” One ICE attorney who volunteered to work on Minnesota’s backlog was reportedly removed from her DOJ post after telling a judge that her job “sucks” because of the increased caseload and the administration’s failure to comply with immigration court orders. “I wish you would just hold me in contempt, your honor, so that I can have a full 24 hours of sleep. I work days and night,” she said.

Nationally, DOJ is making some progress—the Executive Office for Immigration Review announced in September that it had whittled its pending-case backlog down from more than 4.18 million to under 3.75 million—but the lack of staffing will only make it harder to tackle the remaining caseload. (A DOJ spokesperson told me in a statement that “after four years of bureaucratic weaponization under the Biden Administration, President Trump and Attorney General Bondi have created the most efficient Department of Justice in American history.”)

The mission and purpose of the department has also been overhauled—many of its core functions have been politicized since Trump’s return to office. The president has directed the department to pursue his personal enemies and has replaced career DOJ employees with inexperienced MAGA loyalists, sometimes to the detriment of his own agenda. Take the recent prosecution of two longtime Trump rivals, New York State Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey. In September, after an acting U.S. attorney reportedly decided that the case against Comey was too weak to pursue, the president pressured him to resign and replaced him with one of his former lawyers, Lindsey Halligan, who had never prosecuted a case before. Halligan appeared to make several fundamental errors in presenting Comey’s case, and her cases against James and Comey have since been thrown out. She resigned in January, a few months after a judge ruled that she had been illegally appointed.

The New York Times reported that Bondi’s former chief of staff put out an open call on social media for lawyers who “support President Trump and anti-crime agenda” to privately message him about jobs within the department. These were, until recently, some of the most prestigious positions in the American legal system—the “crème de la crème,” my colleague Quinta Jurecic, who covers politics and law, told me. Now the halls are empty enough that a department affiliate is seeking out applicants online.

At least the remaining employees know who’s in charge. This afternoon, a banner was hung on the DOJ building’s facade—on it, right above the slogan “Make America Safe Again,” was a picture of the president.

Related:

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former prince, was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office after accusations that he shared confidential information with Jeffrey Epstein while serving as a U.K. trade envoy and could face life in prison if convicted; King Charles III said that the “law must take its course,” and Mountbatten-Windsor has repeatedly denied wrongdoing.
President Trump announced at his Board of Peace’s first meeting that the United States would contribute $10 billion to its Gaza-rebuilding efforts; he also said that he plans on naming his son-in-law Jared Kushner as a “special peace envoy.”
The Pentagon is sending additional warships, air defenses, and submarines to the Middle East as the U.S. prepares for possible strikes on Iran, though officials say that no decision on such action has been made.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Rebecca Boyle explains why the West’s winter has been a slow-moving catastrophe.
Time-Travel Thursdays: American writing instruction has always involved some level of torture, Jake Lundberg writes. What happens when technology makes it easy?

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

A color photograph of a woman with an led light mask in front of her face — Tonje Thilesen / Connected Archives

The Longevity Scam

By Jordan D. Metzl

The quest to live forever has fascinated humans for millennia. The Epic of Gilgamesh, composed about 4,000 years ago, follows a king who searches the world for a plant that can restore youth, only to lose the plant to a thieving snake. The (likely apocryphal) story of Juan Ponce de León, who is said to have embarked on a search for the Fountain of Youth in the early 16th century, refuses to die—unlike its protagonist, who was killed along his journey.

Today’s longevity-medicine movement is driven by the same aggressive desire for eternal youth as the mythic stories of old. But whereas in earlier times ideas about wellness could travel only as fast as the people who held them, today just about anyone with an internet connection can use social media and AI-generated graphics to sell medical advice in seconds. Despite a decided shortage of placebo-controlled trials in humans to support that advice, the business of longevity is booming, thanks in large part to sleek direct-to-consumer marketing delivered by health influencers with far more confidence than evidence. By 2030, $8 trillion might be spent annually on longevity-related products.

Read the full article.