The New York Times dropped a big one on Sunday. After months of anecdotal reporting — emergency jump teams, “forward this to a friend” recruiting emails, $25,000 signing bonuses, DRAFT watermarks on filed motions — the paper put hard federal employment data behind what everyone in the legal world already knew was happening. Trump’s upheaval of the federal government has led to an exodus of more than 10,000 lawyers since the beginning of 2025, roughly one in five lawyers who worked in the government at the end of 2024 had left by March of this year, according to the Times’s analysis of federal employment data.
The DOJ-specific numbers are disturbing. The Department of Justice has shed 21 percent of its attorneys, more than 2,600 lawyers over the past 16 months. Six different government agencies have lost more than a quarter of their attorneys, with the Department of Education having lost 53 percent of the lawyers it had at the start of Trump’s second term.
“This is a remarkable shift in talent out of the federal government to other places,” Andrew Mergen, director of the Emmett Environmental Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School, told the Times. But Mergen didn’t stop there, delivering a truly devastating line for those hoping to quietly bide their time in government service, “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. 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.”
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That’s a real credibility crisis for an institution that has historically competed for the best legal talent in the country on the basis of prestige alone. The old pitch was simple: you take a pay cut, you do important work, you build a reputation that carries you anywhere. That pitch doesn’t work anymore, and indeed, it’s being actively inverted.
This tracks with what we’ve been reporting for months. The DOJ that fired its experienced career attorneys has struggled to replace them with anyone of comparable quality. It has lowered its experience requirements. It has offered $25,000 signing bonuses. It has deployed emergency jump teams of rotating AUSAs to plug holes in understaffed offices. It has, I am not making this up, tried recruiting on X. And the results have shown up in court filings, wrong documents, DRAFT watermarks, missed deadlines, and cases filed in the wrong district.
Now, you might think the president, upon seeing a New York Times report documenting that his government has hemorrhaged one in five of its lawyers in 16 months, might express some concern. Some acknowledgment that staffing a functioning legal apparatus is, in fact, necessary for governing. But of course not.
Trump responded on Truth Social:
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“The New York Times wrote a story today entitled, ‘Trump Administration Sees Striking Exodus of Legal Talent,’ as though that’s a bad thing, when actually, it’s very good. The people that are leaving are Radical Left Deep State Lunatics, who are destroying our Country, and Weaponizing Government. Many of them didn’t leave, but were fired! The Failing New York Times writes this, but makes it sound like it’s a terrible thing when actually, it’s just the opposite. We want people that will, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, not people that are trying to destroy our Country, that were put in by Obama and Biden and, in many cases, they shouldn’t have been representing the U.S.A. in the first place.”
There’s a lot to work with here. And, to be clear , noting that “many of them didn’t leave, but were fired” is the opposite of a flex. Like, we *know* the purge is on in the federal government and it’s actually deeply disturbing. Also undermining Trump’s argument that the legal talent exodus is a good thing is the $25,000 the DOJ is offering to get anyone at all to take the jobs these alleged saboteurs left behind.
Second, and more importantly: the president of the United States just confirmed the core premise of the Harvard professor’s concern. If the president himself is saying that people who work for this DOJ are people he actively selected for loyalty over competence, then Professor Mergen’s observation that a DOJ résumé is now a trust problem isn’t a liberal talking point. It’s a straightforward inference from the president’s own account of his own personnel decisions.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Bluesky @Kathryn1