Over 10,000 lawyers have left the federal government since just before President Donald Trump took office in January 2025, according to a report released Sunday.
The federal employment data show that approximately one-fifth of government lawyers employed at the end of December 2024 had left by March of this year, providing evidence that the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the federal workforce have proven at least somewhat successful.
Trump said as such on Truth Social, in which he criticized the New York Times analysis for framing the “striking exodus of legal talent” as “a bad thing.”
“The people that are leaving are Radical Left Deep State Lunatics, who are destroying our Country, and Weaponizing Government,” Trump said. “We want people that will, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, not people that are trying to destroy our Country, that were put in by Obama and Biden and, in many cases, they shouldn’t have been representing the U.S.A. in the first place.”
Almost a year and a half ago, Trump signed an executive order creating the Department of Government Efficiency, an initiative led by Elon Musk that sought to “modernize federal technology and software” and broadly rein in a federal bureaucracy that Republicans have long argued is too large.
The effort was originally conceived as a legal reform initiative to be co-led by Vivek Ramaswamy, who left the department to run for governor of Ohio that January. In a co-authored Wall Street Journal opinion piece published in November 2024, Musk and Ramaswamy wrote that “the entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy represents an existential threat to our republic.”
DOGE, under Musk’s sole leadership, ultimately focused more on modernizing government technology and exposing waste, fraud, and abuse than on reducing the federal headcount, but the administration did fire thousands of government employees last February.
The analysis says that staffing reductions and “the resignations of some staff members who objected to Mr. Trump’s policies” paired with typical turnover to cause such a large volume of departures. The New York Times also reported that many such lawyers now work for Democratic state attorneys general and nonprofit organizations opposed to the administration.
The Department of Education now has fewer than half as many lawyers as it did at the end of 2024, while the Department of Homeland Security is the only agency to have gained lawyers over the same period.
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Trump said in the Truth Social post that many of these lawyers had been fired and that he wishes them all well.
Musk and DOGE were constant sources of controversy during the Trump administration’s first 100 days, but the department has remained out of the headlines since Musk left his government position last May. DOGE was disbanded in November.