r/moderatepolitics • u/Interesting_Total_98 • 1d ago
News Article Trump Administration Sees Striking Exodus of Legal Talent
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/31/us/politics/trump-administration-exodus-of-lawyers.html223
u/alittledanger 1d ago
Almost like people whose lives revolve around respect for the law don’t want to work for someone who constantly breaks the law.
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u/Elegant_Athlete_7882 1d ago
There’s a very funny quote from Bondi’s former chief of staff about why Trumps had such a hard time using the department against his enemies:
“Part of the reason the weaponization work has been difficult is that you need people who are MAGA and who are really competent,” Mizelle said. “Many career prosecutors are not interested in this kind of work. It’s a very small group of people.”
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u/Plastastic Social Democrat 1d ago
that you need people who are MAGA and who are really competent
A more rare class by the day.
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u/Elegant_Athlete_7882 1d ago
A more rare class by the day.
I truly don’t believe it exists, and I say that as a former Trump voter. He’s the founder of the movement, and his definition of it is “MAGA is Trump:” https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-says-us-not-war-venezuela-rcna252427
So the only way to be MAGA is to agree with Trump on any given issue, and since someone can’t be competent and do that, I don’t think it’s possible to be both.
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u/sadandshy 1d ago
I would think how wildly and completely he changes his mind, especially about his allies and underlings, also has a bit of a narrowing of prospective employees.
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u/Krinder 1d ago
As much as I want to admire them for respecting the law it’s also a requirement. People are being asked to risk bar complaints and their licenses to fulfill this White House’s agenda during its retribution tour. That’s definitely not worth the $120k the average DOJ attorney gets a year.
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u/FeatherlyFly 1d ago
For $120k a year, you can be pretty sure that many of the lawyers in question are the ones who already turned down bigger paychecks with more questionable morals.
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u/Bacontester33 1d ago
Honestly doesn't even need to go that far. This administration wants loyalists who will break the law for Trump.
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u/A_Clockwork_Stalin 1d ago
It is well established that Donald Trump is willing to risk your law license to get what he wants. I don't know why anyone who intends to have a career in the legal field beyond this Administration would stick around.
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u/jonowelser 1d ago
Losing a law license isn’t even the worst case outcome - Michael Cohen, his long-time personal lawyer, spent over a year in federal prison and the rest of his 3 year sentence under house arrest.
There are 2 categories of lawyers here: those dumb and/or unethical enough to put themselves in situations like that by working for Trump, and competent professionals with their act together. There is no overlap between these groups.
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u/ghostofwalsh 1d ago
You're basically left with people who have a law degree who want a future career as a right wing talking head
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u/DrVader314159 1d ago
No shit. Trump values personal loyalty above everything else, as is evident in every single one of his appointments. Naturally, no sane competent person would want to deal with the headache of trying to implement and/or defend Trump’s idiotic, insane, and often illegal policies.
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u/chloedeeeee77 1d ago edited 1d ago
I can’t believe the chance to prosecute cases as thrilling as “former FBI Director posts photo of seashells” and “Attorney General of New York may have incorrectly filled out her mortgage paperwork” don’t have talented lawyers beating down the door to work on them.
(Not so coincidentally, even the Trump lackey prosecutors in those cases are, respectively, longer on them and no longer working at the DOJ)
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1d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/MetersYards 1d ago
But something DEI related 500 comments.
DEI is more emotionally divisive from both ends.
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u/Another-attempt42 1d ago
But this is what people accused DEI of being.
The Trump administration is full to the brim with people of questionable competency, but they're there because they are loyal to Trump.
The main critique of DEI is that it throttled competency.
It's DEI, but for Republicans. That's it. It should be as divisive, but isn't, because Republicans aren't held to the same standard of competency regardless. We now assume "of course this was poorly done, it was done by someone in a GOP admin".
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u/MetersYards 1d ago
The main critique of DEI is that it throttled competency.
Throttled competency due to immutable characteristics.
Are you claiming loyalty to Trump is an immutable characteristic?
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u/Another-attempt42 1d ago
No, but to suggest that we got rid of DEI to promote meritocracy when the administration is made up of... well... look at it...
Is laughable.
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1d ago
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u/onlyonedayatatime 1d ago
As one of the attorneys in this pic/article, I’ll add that this goes far beyond just DOJ. Those of us who left are from pretty much every agency. Only DHS has had an influx.
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u/chloedeeeee77 1d ago edited 1d ago
County councilmen who have already removed themselves all criminal cases, and who are apparently contemplating leaving the DOJ altogether: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/lead-federal-prosecutor-james-comey-seashells-photo-case-steps-rcna345342
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u/CovetousOldSinner 1d ago edited 1d ago
Imagine the exodus of talent. These aren’t jobs you can just hire someone off the street for. It takes years to become a talented government prosecutor/attorney. That’s true for most every government profession. Top that off with the layoffs/resignations across every agency. Every government agency will be less effective because of the Trump administration.
Also consider, one of the few advantages of working for the government is the stability. Now that it’s gone, what is going to draw talented people?
These agencies are going to feel the ripple effects of this administration for decades.
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u/onlyonedayatatime 1d ago
I’m one of the attorneys in this article, and your comment is so, so true. My regional office of a small agency had the entire supervisory team resign. They’d all worked at this agency their entire careers - first job out of law school through the Honors Fellow program. All gone. Even if I ever felt I could go back, that’s a massive amount of institutional knowledge out the window.
Federal agencies really were the gold star of government attorney jobs. And my colleagues were all exceptional people; I think there’s some self-selection with those who turn down law firm salaries for public service. (I took a roundabout way and had to learn through experience that the law firm work wasn’t for me.)
I get incredibly sad thinking of what my small agency lost in just our regional office, with the same happening to every agency in every office across the country.
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u/Interesting_Total_98 1d ago
More than 10,000 government lawyers have left since the beginning of 2025. About one in five lawyers who worked for the federal government at the end of 2024 were gone by March 2026. The scale is tied to staffing cuts discomfort with the direction of the administration. This has weakened the federal government’s reputation as a top destination for lawyers interested in public service.
The legal workforce has declined faster than hiring can replace it. Federal agencies hired around 3,200 lawyers during the same period, but overall legal staffing dropped by 17 percent. The Justice Department lost the largest number of lawyers.
These departures could help the administration avoid some internal resistance from career lawyers, but they also create practical problems. The Education Department has lost more than half of its lawyers and now faces a backlog of civil rights cases. The Justice Department has also had to relax some hiring standards and speed up recruiting efforts, but the political climate has made some law students and young lawyers hesitant to work there.
The unusual amount of error has result in judges trusting the government less.
How will exodus affect the president's ability to accomplish his goals?
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u/HavingNuclear 1d ago
That jump from 0.5% to 21% case dismissal rate is one of the wildest things I've ever seen. What happens to our institutions now that Trump's federal government can't be relied on? There are a lot of mechanisms that defer heavily to the government, assuming that it was competent, trustworthy, and acting in good faith. Those assumptions are null now. How will they adjust to the new reality?
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u/jason_abacabb 1d ago
Wow, the jump from 1 in 200 to 1 in 5 is astounding.
Has there been a less competent justice department since it's founding?
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u/thinkcontext 1d ago
Even if things returned to something resembling normal after Trump, it will take years for the DoJ to recover. The next Democratic president will have to fire most of the department because so many of the lawyers left are compromised and there's no way to trust those that Trump hired.
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u/shacksrus 1d ago
Which was always their intention. They didn't get enoughvoluntary in the first go round last year so they've implemented these humiliation rituals to get the rest of the competency hires out. Leaving only the dei for the true believers.
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u/nycbetches 1d ago
Yeah and I personally know a bunch of them. Really sad to see what’s happening. These were dedicated public servants, but they were being asked to put their bar license on the line by doing things they believed to be illegal or against the legal code of ethics. Sad to think this could happen in America.
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u/Educational-Bet-8979 1d ago
He can pardon them from crimes, but not the state bar association’s control over their license to practice.
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u/RedditorAli RINO 🦏 1d ago
Thinner ranks have been well-documented, but it’s the qualitative degradation of new hires that I would worry most about.
For example, what’s the percentage decline of T14 representation in selective DoJ components and programs, such as SLIP and Honors?
No disrespect to those scrappy Scalia Law kids.
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u/JohnnyZoidberg 1d ago
Don't we see articles like this every few months? Trump legal team naturally has a really high turnover.
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u/onlyonedayatatime 1d ago
This isn’t about the political appointee level attorneys you hear about. This article is about the career service attorneys many of whom have been with the federal government for decades. 10,000 attorneys leaving is pretty staggering.
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u/JohnnyZoidberg 1d ago
Very much so, and it's been going on since Trump took office. That was my point.
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u/onlyonedayatatime 1d ago
My point is that these attorneys aren’t “Trump’s legal team.” Not even remotely.
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u/nycbetches 1d ago
I am in the legal profession and can attest that the turnover for government attorneys (not just DOJ) has been much higher than is normal, based on my 10+ years of practice.
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u/JohnnyZoidberg 1d ago
thru what timeframe? last 1 year, 5 years, etc?
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u/nycbetches 1d ago
Since January of last year. It’s normal for there to be turnover at the beginning of a new administration, but this was far more extensive than I saw during Biden’s first month, Trump 1’s first month, and Obama 2’a first month (I was not practicing during Obama 1).
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