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.
Along with the usual retirements and turnover in the federal work force, the last year saw deep staffing cuts and the resignations of some staff members who objected to Mr. Trump’s policies. Their departures show how rapidly the president has eroded the image of the federal government as the gold standard for lawyers seeking public service roles.
Instead, many of those looking for such work are flocking to the offices of Democratic state attorneys general and nonprofits that are challenging administration policies in the courts, boosting Mr. Trump’s opponents with seasoned lawyers.
“There’s all this awareness that people in the federal government are dissatisfied, are angry, are frustrated, and want no part of it,” said Phil Weiser, Colorado’s attorney general, who has hired 22 lawyers from across the federal government in the last year. “That’s translating directly to people saying, ‘I want to be part of organizations that actually operate with integrity, that people want to be a part of, that people feel good about doing the right thing.’”
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.”
Departures Outpace Hires
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 only major agency to gain lawyers was the Department of Homeland Security, which saw its legal ranks grow by 21 percent as it drove Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown.
It is difficult to assess the scope of the impact the legal departures have had on government functions. In some ways, it has meant fewer internal obstacles for a president who saw career lawyers as an impediment to much of his first-term agenda.
But the deficit of lawyers has also meant that there are fewer of them available to defend the administration’s policies in court, and to enforce laws across the government.
“There are a lot of things that just can’t get done without lawyers — appearances in court, reviewing of regulations,” said Erik Heins, a former lawyer at the Department of Housing and Urban Development who was fired last year after raising concerns internally about fair housing lawyers being reassigned to other offices. As of March, the agency employed 40 percent fewer lawyers than it did at the end of 2024.
The Education Department, which shed more than half of its lawyers since the end of 2024, now needs more attorneys for its civil rights division to clear a backlog of discrimination cases, Linda McMahon, the education secretary, recently told Congress.
The Justice Department, which saw its attorney ranks shrink by a fifth, has relaxed its hiring requirements for some positions.
“We are fast-tracking applications to bring talented professionals on board,” Harmeet K. Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s civil rights division, declared in a recruiting ad posted on social media this spring.
But the overt political pressure inside the Justice Department to carry out Mr. Trump’s retribution agenda has turned off some potential candidates.
Scott Bourque, who just finished his first year at Georgetown University Law Center, said he declined a Justice Department internship this summer.
“A lot of people I’ve spoken to just in the last few months have said that they would look down on a person if they had a federal job on their résumé that they started during this administration,” he said. “And some people have explicitly said they would see a person willing to go to work at this D.O.J. as somebody they couldn’t trust.”
To bring in more lawyers for the entire government, the Office of Personnel Management recently launched a legal talent recruiting network for people to learn about openings, and to put them on the radar of hiring managers. So far, that outreach has drawn the interest of just 300 people, the agency’s spokeswoman said.
The White House did not respond directly to questions about the climate that has led so many lawyers to leave, or about whether the administration is struggling to hire new ones.
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement that the administration “remains totally dedicated to empowering and hiring hard-working Americans who are committed to public service and delivering on the president’s many promises to the American people.”
“The individuals who are hired are extremely qualified and talented,” she added.
‘Not a Sustainable Situation’
Mr. Trump’s willingness to blow through traditional guardrails and upend the mission of federal agencies has created a volatile environment far different than what many career lawyers said they experienced in his first administration.
“I was pretty blindsided by Trump 2.0,” said Brandon Jones-Cobb, a former Environmental Protection Agency Clean Air Act lawyer.
“All of the enforcement cases I’ve been developing for years were just on permanent pause,” Mr. Jones-Cobb said. He left the agency during the summer of 2025 to go work for a nonprofit organization, the Center for Biological Diversity. He recently sued the E.P.A. over not enforcing air pollution controls.
The E.P.A.’s legal ranks shrank by about a quarter between the end of 2024 and this March.
Some young lawyers looking to launch their careers are acutely aware of the federal government’s shift in enforcement priorities, particularly on the environment.
“It didn’t seem to be the right mesh of what I, and perhaps others, ideologically believed in doing,” said Stanley Shaw, a recent graduate of the University of California, Irvine School of Law. He said he was also worried that if he took a job as an environmental lawyer at the Justice Department, he could be reassigned to conduct civil immigration enforcement. He, too, has turned his focus to looking for work with state and local governments and nonprofits.
For lawyers committed to a particular enforcement mission, the federal government may not be the right place for them to work, said Cara Petersen, a former lawyer at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
“At least not right now,” said Ms. Petersen, who works at Protect Borrowers, an advocacy group focused on student debt and predatory lending.
The agency had fewer than 200 lawyers in March, a loss of more than 50 percent from the Biden administration. It currently has just two openings posted on its website.
Some prospective applicants have also been rattled by the departures of high-profile attorneys inside the administration.
Earlier this month, the general counsel of the Treasury Department, Brian Morrissey, resigned hours after the government announced it was creating a $1.8 billion fund expected to benefit Mr. Trump’s allies, a maneuver the administration said resolved the president’s pending lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over the leaking of his tax records. (On Friday, a federal judge reopened the case, saying she wanted to examine allegations that the deal was based on “deception.”)
“We’re seeing a lot of alarm about the recent damage to the tax system and the rule of law,” said Chye-Ching Huang, the executive director of the Tax Law Center at New York University. “And people who want to be part of making things right, but they’re looking for guidance on whether there’s even a viable path to doing that.”
George Washington University’s law school, which is about a 15-minute walk from the White House, is now helping students who want to go into public service find opportunities with state legislatures or city councils.
“What we have done, in response, and we have to move nimbly because of our focus on public service, is we broaden the net of the kinds of public service jobs we can prepare and place our students in,” said Dayna Bowen Matthew, the dean of the law school.
Andrew Mergen, the director of the Emmett Environmental Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School, said that he recognizes more people from his government career when he is doing video calls with nonprofit organizations and environmental advocates.
“I know two-thirds of the people, because they were my colleagues at D.O.J.,” said Mr. Mergen, who spent more than 30 years at the Justice Department. “This is a remarkable shift in talent out of the federal government to other places.”
Mr. Weiser, the Colorado attorney general and another Justice Department veteran, said the changes were both an opportunity for attorneys general like him and a painful reality.
“We’re getting talent we wouldn’t have gotten, and we’re getting expertise that’s valuable,” Mr. Weiser said. He noted that Colorado and other states successfully obtained a verdict against the concert giant Live Nation after the federal government backed out of the case mid-trial and settled.
“The states are able to pick up some of the slack, but this is not a sustainable situation,” he added. “We need a Justice Department with high-quality legal talent that operates with integrity.”
Michael C. Bender and Andrew Duehren contributed reporting.
Eileen Sullivan is a Times reporter covering the changes to the federal work force under the Trump administration.
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