Justice Department Loses a Third of Career Leaders Under Trump

At least a third of senior career leaders have left the Justice Department since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, taking with them centuries of combined expertise, according to a Bloomberg Law analysis.

The departures, both voluntary and involuntary, represent an unprecedented level of departures in recent memory, former officials said, with the divisions enforcing civil rights, immigration, and environmental laws among the hardest hit.

They include at least 107 career Justice Department senior managers in the span of eight months, out of roughly 320 career leadership positions immediately below presidential appointees included in a government directory.

The loss of so many senior managers, many of whom have spent their entire careers rising through the department’s ranks, could take generations to rebuild. The Justice Department is simultaneously hemorrhaging many more trial attorneys and other career employees.

“You’re talking about an incredible brain drain which doesn’t even take into account all of the other people who have been lost,” said Pamela Hicks, former chief counsel for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, who was fired early in Trump’s second term.

Stuart Gerson, who led the Justice Department’s civil division during the George H. W. Bush administration and served as acting attorney general early in Bill Clinton’s presidency, said the departures mean DOJ will “lose both excellence of ability and institutional memory that’s extremely important, both in terms of maintaining credibility in the courts and getting it right.”

The department’s civil rights division, created in 1957 by landmark civil rights legislation to enforce anti-discrimination law, was most impacted. Over 76% of career managers, including members of the Senior Executive Service, departed between the start of the new administration and mid-September, according to Bloomberg Law’s analysis.

The DOJ division enforcing federal environmental laws has lost over half of its career leaders, the analysis shows.

Political appointees routinely change over when new presidents take office. But it’s “almost unheard of” for career members of the Senior Executive Service to leave the Justice Department because of a change in administration, said Stacey Young, who founded Justice Connection, an organization that supports current and former department attorneys.

“There’s no precedent for this,” said Young, a former DOJ lawyer.

A Justice Department spokesperson didn’t return requests for comment.

Refocused Priorities

The exodus comes as the Trump administration has refocused the department on conservative priorities, including surging federal law enforcement resources to major cities and targeting universities for diversity initiatives. It also follows the White House’s January executive order calling to “prioritize accountability” among the Senior Executive Service, who “must serve at the pleasure of the President.”

The high-level turnover tracks what’s happening elsewhere in the department. At the Justice Department, approximately 4,500 employees, largely non-leadership positions, took deferred resignation offers, according to a June budget report.

The administration has also forcibly reassigned or demoted dozens of career managers across the department, prompting many to leave earlier than they’d originally planned. Some longtime career managers were pushed into the so-called sanctuary cities working group, widely viewed as a demotion. The last exiled member of that group left last month.

David McConnell, a veteran career leader who left in February, said departures of this scale are disruptive to the workforce. McConnell retired earlier than he’d planned after he was reassigned to the sanctuary cities group.

“It was certainly destabilizing when I was just suddenly gone when everyone was counting on me being there,” said McConnell, a former director at the Office of Immigration Litigation.

Several senior career leaders who were removed have challenged their terminations. Joseph Tirrell, formerly director of the DOJ’s ethics office, has contested his firing in a Washington federal court, alongside other fired DOJ employees. Former pardon attorney Liz Oyer has lodged a challenge at the federal board that hears civil servant disputes and testified before Congress about her removal.

In some cases, the Justice Department replaced a departing career manager with a political appointee, according to Bloomberg Law’s analysis.

Impacted Divisions

The losses have been felt most acutely in the civil rights division, where nine sections, including those that specialize in civil rights violations in education, employment, and voting, lost their chiefs. A number of deputy chiefs across the division are also no longer at the department, including some after forced demotions.

The departures follow leadership’s decision to pivot the civil rights division’s work to align with the Trump administration’s ideological priorities and away from its traditional advocacy on behalf of historically marginalized groups.

As career leaders have left, so have the trial attorneys working under them. As of July, DOJ disclosed to a Democratic senator that 368 civil rights division employees, including both attorneys and staff, had left during the second administration.

Graphic: David Evans/Bloomberg Law

Mikael Rojas, who served in a political role at the division during the Biden administration, said that political appointees in the division “took a lot of our direction from the career staff” to do their jobs.

“They are the subject matter experts,” Rojas said.

The Executive Office for Immigration Review, which houses the immigration courts, saw over 62% of those managers exit since January.

The Justice Department’s tax division has lost more than a third of its career managers under the current administration, while the national security division saw about half depart.

The civil division, whose attorneys have handled much of the litigation against federal policies, has lost at least a quarter of its career managers.

Methodology

The analysis is based on the Office of Personnel Management’s database of leadership-level positions reported under legislation requiring the government to publish a directory of certain executive branch leaders, including Senior Executive Service members and other high-level managers.

Current employment statuses for the individuals listed were verified by reviewing OPM’s information, public LinkedIn posts, news reports, Justice Department webpages, as well as by conducting interviews with current and former employees, as of mid-September. Employees who took the deferred resignation offer, and who are technically on administrative leave through this month, are counted as departures.

OPM relies on individual agencies to report the positions and managers as of June 30, and the directory may omit some career leadership positions that should have been included. The reporting is required under the PLUM Act, passed in late 2022 to increase transparency in government.

The analysis likely represents an undercount as civil servants continue to leave their posts.