Staffing Crisis is Unfolding Inside Justice Dept., Giving Criminal Defendants New Leverage
New report shows agency has lost approx. 25% of its attorneys since early 2025
A staffing crisis is unfolding inside the U.S. Department of Justice, which has long relied on its army of attorneys and agents to combat organized crime, child pornographers and terrorists.
A mass exodus of thousands is unfolding inside agency offices and operations. But it’s happening quietly and largely behind closed doors.
A keen observer will spot the clues, though.
A February 19th court filing in New Orleans, in an obscure civil lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, a Justice Department attorney revealed a big problem. The attorney asked for a one-month delay in the case. She wrote, “The Appellate Section has lost over 40% of its attorneys since February 2025, due to retirement, resignation, or temporary transfer. Therefore, at this time, it is not possible for me to assign this case to yet another attorney, who would need to devote time to learning the issues.”
A few weeks earlier, a federal attorney detailed to the Justice Department appeared to reach a workload breaking point. Before quitting her post, Julie Le reportedly told a judge that her job “sucks” and asked to be held in contempt by the court so she “could get 24 hours of sleep.”
The problem is getting bigger.
A new report released by Justice Connection, an organization of former Justice Departrment employees, showed the number of attorneys who have left the agency since January has topped 3,400.
Justice Connection executive director Stacey Young, who resigned in Janaury 2025 after an 18-year career with the agency, told Meidas Touch Network, “That’s about a quarter of lawyers inside the department. That’s a very serious issue and it’s affecting the ability of the department to do its work.”
Young said, “Unless there is a course correction, it’s going to get much worse.” Young said it is challenging for the agency to find replacements or applicants.
In a newly-published report, Justice Connection emphasized, “This is not normal.” The report said, ‘DOJ had 12,955 attorneys as of December 31, 2024. Approximately 3,402 attorneys left their roles between January 2025 and January 2026.”
The turnover includes politically-motivated firings of prosecutors who handled the criminal investigations of President Trump and the successful prosecutions of the hundreds of Trump supporters who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The departures also include attorneys who quit or retired, rather than continue working for an agency they view as politicized by Trump appointees. It also includes the wiping out of historic civil rights functions at the agency.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/civil-rights-era-government-agency-to-be-purged/
Among those who quit was Mike Romano, an elite criminal prosecuting attorney who secured a stellar record in the January 6th Capitol Siege cases. Romano worries about the casualties from the deeply depleted ranks of attorneys.
Romano told Meidas Touch Network the staffing shortages inside the Justice Department are giving new leverage to criminal defendants. Romano said, “One way attorneys might try to get out of the work overload is to make deals or plea offers that they wouldn’t otherwise make. They will try to wrap cases up.”
Romano said, “It also can mean they’re stacked up with trials back-to-back. It’s really draining over time. It becomes hard to be adequately prepared for any one of them.”
The report from Justice Connection said, “Of the departing attorneys, 2,069 resigned prior to retirement eligibility, meaning many did not have an alternate source of income. These were civil servants faced with such abject disillusionment they had no alternative but to walk away from their passion.”
Romano noted how many of the recently-resigned attorneys opted to leave, despite a challenging job market for attorneys.
A Justice Department spokesperson told Meidas Touch Network, “The Administration gave career employees the fork in the road option to reduce the size of the government and eliminate unnecessary layers of staff who don’t effectively contribute to the mission of aggressively tackling crime. This has allowed DOJ to run more efficiently and hire new employees who wholeheartedly believe in the mission.”
The agency’s recruitment has elicited concern from veteran attorneys who wonder if standards are being lowered.
In a November report posted by the American Bar Association, a retired attorney said,
“I was astonished. I have never seen anything like that. When I came to the U.S. attorney’s office, I had won 13 state murder prosecutions, and I still thought I had such a slim chance of getting a job because it was such an ultracompetitive place. Now it’s like, ‘If you ever threw a pass, do you want to be a quarterback?’”
Rep. Glenn Ivey, a Maryland Democrat who previously worked as a federal prosecutor, warns that the recruitment process is going to be long and arduous to replace the departing attorneys. Ivey told Meidas Touch Network, “The Justice Department is going to have to do background checks for the new lawyers before they can bring them in. It’s going to be six to 12 months, even if you have someone who wants to come and even if you have a spot for them. And – with younger lawyers – I know a lot of people are telling them not to go to the Department of Justice right now.”
Romano was promptly scooped up by a private law firm after his resignation from the Justice Department in 2025. He said his departure from an agency brought a jumble of emotions, as he watched himself and his colleagues undergo politicized scrutiny for their work on January 6th cases. Romano said, “There was sadness. There was some grief. And there was relief because being worried about whether or when you’re going to get fired is exhausting.”
The mass firings of attorneys by the department has also deprived the agency of a combined hundreds of years of experience. The firings -- including the termination of Molly Gaston who worked the probes of Trump with then-Special Counsel Jack Smith – reduced the ranks of elite litigators. Gaston and others who handled Trump probes were chosen because of their prolific skillsets. Gaston said her firing was “incredibly sad and disappointing and also surprising.”
Managers and senior level officials are feeling the pain of the purge. In late 2025, Jeanine Pirro, the US Attorney for the District of Columbia, acknowledged her office was down approximately 90 prosecutors from prior years.
The office continues to churn out cases. But former attorneys told Meidas Touch Network they fear the shortages could impact the speed and efficacy of the office’s uniquely high-profile cases.
Pirro’s office is prosecuting – among many other cases – the murder of two Israeli embassy officials in DC and the alleged assassination attempt at the April 2026 White House Correspondents Dinner.
Young said rebuilding the agency and its staff ranks will be a long and painstaking process.
Who in their right mind would want to work for a criminal enterprise. Those lawyers who have been there are sick of the corruption going on. Would you like to work for the mob?
Even if the Democrats were to win a trifecta in 2028, every federal institution needs to be reformed and rebuilt.
This will take massive organizational planning by both non-partisan experts and young people with fresh ideas.
The work will need to be done quickly, and laws supporting the permanence of such reforms passed expeditiously.
Unless this is viewed as a 5-alarm fire, which our current governing gerentocracy is utterly unable or unwilling to address, I don't think this country will be governable.