Reuters reviewed a list showing that 69 of the roughly 110 attorneys who work for the Federal Programs Branch responsible for defending Trump administration policies in court have voluntarily left Trump’s election in November or have announced plans to leave.
“Many of these people came to work at Federal Programs to defend aspects of our constitutional system,” said one lawyer who left the unit since Trump’s election. “How could they participate in the project of tearing it down?”
The news organization confirmed the departure of all but four of those departures using court records and LinkedIn accounts, and reporters spoke to four former attorneys and three other sources familiar with the departures who said staffers had become demoralized and exhausted by the onslaught of legal challenges to administration policies.
“We’ve never had an administration pushing the legal envelope so quickly, so aggressively and across such a broad range of government policies and programs,” said Peter Keisler, who led the Justice Department’s Civil Division under George W. Bush.”The demands are intensifying at the same time that the ranks of lawyers there to defend these cases are dramatically thinning.”
Some of the career lawyers feared they would be pressured to misrepresent facts or legal issues in court, according to three of the sources.
Four former DOJ lawyers told Reuters that colleagues in the Federal Programs Branch left over policy differences with the president, even after serving in the first Trump administration, and they had viewed their role as defending the government no matter which party was in power.
The four lawyers who left said they feared that some Trump administration policies, such as clawing back congressionally approved funding by Elon Musk’s DOGE service, violated the U.S. Constitution.
The attorneys also said that government lawyers frequently walked into court with little information from the White House about the actions they were defending, and attorney general Pam Bondi threatened disciplinary action in February against government lawyers who did not vigorously defend the Trump agenda.
“The Department has defeated many of these lawsuits all the way up to the Supreme Court and will continue to defend the President’s agenda to keep Americans safe,” a DOJ spokesperson told Reuters.
Reuters was unable to compare the number of departures with previous administrations, but sources told the organization that the number of staffers leaving was highly unusual and far greater than during Trump’s first term and Joe Biden’s administration.
