No. of Recommendations: 6
The Justice Department has lost thousands of experienced attorneys since the start of the Trump administration and has backfilled a fraction of the open jobs, with the process snarled by a lack of qualified candidates, bureaucratic delays and hiring freezes, according to people familiar with hirings in the department.
Last year, roughly 10,000 attorneys worked across the Justice Department and its components, including the FBI. Justice Connection, an advocacy group that has been tracking departures, estimates that around 5,500 people - not all of them attorneys - have quit the department, been fired or taken a buyout offered by the Trump administration.
The department did not provide a breakdown of attorney departures, but officials did not deny that widespread vacancies exist.
The department’s struggle to fill vacancies reflects a dramatic shift for a law enforcement agency that has long attracted high-performing alumni from the nation’s top-ranked law schools and law firms.
Multiple people familiar with the student bodies at top-ranked law schools and the department’s hiring process said the share of recent graduates across the political spectrum who are applying for jobs at the Justice Department has plummeted. The department has had difficulty finding qualified candidates for open slots, according to more than a half-dozen people familiar with the process, several of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment on the record.
Across the country, U.S. attorneys’ offices have experienced higher turnovers than they typically see during a change in administrations. In August, Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for D.C., said on Fox News that her office was down 90 prosecutors and told lawyers to email her if they wanted a job.
In Chicago, U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros sent an email in August to former prosecutors that asked them to consider applying for prosecutor jobs in the office - and asked them to forward his email to potentially interested friends.
“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,” said Mark Rotert, a retired Chicago-based attorney who worked as a federal prosecutor there in the ’80s and ’90s and received the recruiting email from a friend. “Now it’s like, ‘If you ever threw a pass, do you want to be a quarterback?’”
William Treanor, the former dean of Georgetown University Law Center, said that “it has historically been the case that Department of Justice is one of the most attractive places for our Georgetown graduating class.”
“What we are seeing is a total drop in who is applying,” said Treanor, who stepped down from the law school’s top job this summer and is now a professor there. “It’s very, very dramatic. It’s gone from a good amount of our graduating class to virtually no one applying for jobs at the Justice Department.” ——Washington Post, via Apple News, no link available
