New internal docs reveal soaring workload amid DOJ’s 'massive exodus'

Although the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) had plenty of turmoil during Donald Trump's first presidency — Attorneys General Jeff Sessions and, later, Bill Barr, both left DOJ on very bad terms with Trump — DOJ has seen a lot more departures since Trump's return to the White House in January 2025. And according to The Hill, new internal documents show just how bad the "massive exodus" at DOJ is.

Reporters Rebecca Beitsch and Samuel Marks, in The Hill, explain, "A drastically diminished Justice Department workforce is struggling to keep up with its civil side caseloads, according to documents obtained by The Hill and NewsNation. A series of charts, apparently inadvertently shared and then recalled, show how the number of attorneys within the civil division has plummeted under the Trump administration."

The charts, according to Beitsch and Marks, "substantiate a dynamic long suspected" and show that DOJ "would not be able to swiftly replace a crew of veteran attorneys after a wave of firings and resignations."

Stacey Young, founder of the DOJ alumni group Justice Connection, described the departures as DOJ as a "massive exodus."

"The workload has skyrocketed, particularly in the civil division offices that have lost the most lawyers," Young told The Hill. "So what we're seeing is that the lawyers who are left are overworked, stressed out, many have lost those who led their office because they were pushed out by this administration. And because of the difficult circumstances under which they're working, I expect that the rate of departures won't slow down anytime soon."

Young continued, "Putting out this data seems to me like a desperate cry for help. It seems like the civil division knows how badly it needs more funds to hire more lawyers to make up for the purge of longstanding experts that they caused."

Beitsch and Marks, citing U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) figures, note that DOJ "has lost roughly 10,000 workers since the start of the Trump administration — a metric that includes component agencies like the FBI and the Federal Bureau of Prisons."

"One chart reviewing impact on each branch within the division detailed how caseload was skyrocketing — with work for the commercial litigation branch jumping a whopping 84 percent per attorney, while lawyers in the Office of Immigration Litigation saw their workload jump 63 percent," Beitsch and Marks report. "Attorneys who work on appeals saw their caseloads jump 54 percent while lawyers in the federal programs branch — those who work on defending executive orders among other administration priorities — saw their workloads jump 44 percent."

A former DOJ staffer, interviewed on condition of anonymity, told The Hill, "We never had attrition like we've had. There's been a lot of reasons for that."

Jennifer Ricketts, a former DOJ attorney, told The Hill, "They were aware of how much, in the first Trump administration, they tried to stretch the law and put us in positions where we struggled to make sure we satisfied our professional responsibilities — and folks did not want to have to go through that exercise again … I think folks knew maybe not the scope of what was coming, but they knew none of it was going to be pleasant."