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.html
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u/Interesting_Total_98 1d ago

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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.