Since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has lost over 6,000 years’ worth of agency expertise from over 600 officials who have been fired or resigned as a result of politicization of the agency, according to a CREW analysis of resignation letters, news reports and other public information. CREW’s analysis includes officials who resigned in protest of the administration’s actions or after being asked to do something they believed was illegal, or who were fired in the name of political retribution or ideological purity.

Since this tally is based on public information, there are undoubtedly additional instances CREW has been unable to catalog, and in 98 cases, departing officials’ tenure could not be determined, so all totals presented here are a baseline and represent an undercount. Here is a breakdown of the DOJ’s loss of expertise:

  • 406 officials with 4,404 years of expertise have resigned in protest 
    • 353 officials with 3,842 years of expertise have resigned in protest of the administration’s actions
    • 53 officials with 562 years of expertise have resigned in protest after being asked to carry out orders believed to be illegal 
  • 202 officials with 1,619 years of expertise have been fired
    • 116 officials with 921.5 years of expertise have been fired due to political retribution
    • 79 officials with 655 years of expertise have been fired in the name of ideological purity
    • 7 officials with with 42.5 years of expertise have been fired for refusing to carry out orders believed to be illegal

57% of the firings were due to political retribution, including those targeted by Trump or his administration for involvement in the cases against President Trump brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith, objections to the first failed indictment of James Comey or Letitia James or those targeted by a Trump-aligned influencer.

Another 39% of firings have been based on ideological purity, including actions contrary to Trump’s political agenda, such as displaying a gay pride flag or the mass purge of immigration judges with rates of granting asylum that are perceived as too high.

Nearly 70% of the 608 total officials who have departed fit into four specific categories: those involved in investigating Trump and his supporters for their involvement in the January 6, 2021 insurrection, officials working on immigration, staff of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and staff in the U.S. Attorney’s office in Minnesota. This loss of expertise and the reasons behind it represent grave threats to the DOJ’s widely-accepted independence and competence. Some of these now-former officials have also sounded the alarm about the politicization of the agency.

Classified documents and January 6th insurrection investigations

102 firings or protest resignations were for involvement in cases Trump viewed as vindictive, specifically, his prosecution for mishandling classified documents and all prosecutions, including his, for the January 6, 2021 insurrection, amounting to 681.5 years of expertise lost. Over 50% of the 102 departures come from the FBI. Recently, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed, “There is not a single man or woman at the Department of Justice who had anything to do with those prosecutions,” suggesting that at least an additional 98 officials not included in CREW’s data have resigned, been fired or been pushed out.

The Impact: Those fired include numerous career prosecutors and FBI agents. Prosecutors and FBI agents play an essential role in keeping the country safe by investigating potential criminal actions, attempting to thwart crimes before they happen and bringing perpetrators to justice. The FBI in particular has an important role in fighting terrorism, which veterans of the agency worry is impacted by these firings. These vindictive firings seriously impair the DOJ and FBI’s crime-fighting and public safety mission, and have been widely condemned.

Immigration

Trump’s anti-immigration agenda has led to at least 631.5 years of expertise lost, with nearly 80% of the departures being firings by the administration. Acting Deputy Director for the Office of Immigration Litigation, Erez Reuveni, the nearly 15-year DOJ veteran who represented the United States in the case brought by the erroneously deported Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, is one such example. He was fired in April 2025, after admitting at a court hearing that Abrego Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador was a mistake. According to then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, Reuveni did not “zealously advocate on behalf of the United States.”

Other officials working on immigration have also been pushed out  and the ongoing purge of immigration judges has reshaped the Department’s immigration enforcement. In one case, an ICE lawyer who volunteered to support the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota to handle the flood of cases filed by immigrants challenging their arrests by federal agents, expressed frustration to the judge that “[t]he system sucks” and said she would rather be held in contempt rather than to continue on their defense. Rather than addressing the burden of the overwhelming number of cases caused by Trump’s anti-immigration agenda, the prosecutor was later fired from her temporary assignment by the DOJ.

The Impact: There has been a flood of immigration cases nationally, and compounded with massive losses of staff  resources in many offices, this is affecting both the DOJ’s quality of work and those wrongfully detained due to the administration’s extreme approach of mandatory detention resulting in a historic number of habeas petitions. There have been a growing number of incidents where judges have sanctioned, fined and even held some U.S. Attorneys in contempt because of their inability to prepare for the proliferation of cases due to  mass departures and Trump’s anti-immigration agenda. 

Civil Rights Division

The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division has been eviscerated in the second Trump administration. This division alone has seen the departure of 214 employees by way of resignations, firings or being pushed out, amounting to 2,223 years of expertise lost. The division handles a wide range of cases, including environmental justice, use of force investigations in state police departments, disability rights and others. 

In a December 2025 letter, over 200 former Civil Rights Division employees say they left “because this Administration turned the Division’s core mission upside down, largely abandoning its duty to protect civil rights.” The letter cites multiple abandoned lawsuits, reports and settlement agreements, as well as department memorandums invoking Trump’s political agenda. According to the letter, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memorandum that insinuated that “DOJ attorneys were Trump’s personal lawyers, an assertion that struck at the heart of the agency’s independence. Bondi’s demand to us was obvious: loyalty to the President, not the Constitution or the American people.” More than 25% of the signers have 15 or more years of experience working within the DOJ.

The Impact: Roughly 75% of the division has departed and priorities have shifted from protecting the rights of marginalized groups to protecting white people from discrimination, focusing on  voter fraud rather than voting rights and prioritizing executive orders over congressional statutes and constitutional provisions. This looks like ending a settlement meant to require functioning sanitation where raw sewage was gathering in backyards and bubbling in bathtubs, because it falls under environmental justice, or ending multiple police consent decrees meant to reform police departments with a history of misconduct, because they are perceived as federal overreach by the current head of the division.

The investigation into the killing of Renee Good

Finally, the January 2026 killing of Renee Good by an ICE agent has resulted in 19 officials resigning in protest, amounting to 162.5 years of expertise lost.

Multiple attorneys from Minnesota’s USAO and the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division resigned in protest over the Justice Department’s handling of the investigation into Good’s death. A total of 13 prosecutors from the Minnesota office resigned over the administration’s refusal to investigate the agent responsible for Good’s death and after a criminal investigation was opened into Good’s widow. A supervisor from the FBI’s Minneapolis field office also resigned after growing pressure to stop the inquiry into the federal agent responsible for Good’s death. From the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, five senior prosecutors resigned in protest after the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, Harmeet Dhillon, expressed that the division would not investigate the ICE official responsible for Good’s death.

The Impact: In an already strained U.S. Attorney’s Office of Minnesota, the mass departures are creating  issues of public safety. At  least six federal criminal cases have been dropped as a result of the strain, including that of a 12-time felon facing drug trafficking charges, carrying a potential 25-year sentence. The case was dismissed after the prosecutor handling the case, a 40-year DOJ veteran, retired in the wake of the Trump administration’s inept investigation in the death of Good.

The big picture

The 6,023 years of expertise lost within the DOJ in Trump’s second term posts a warning of the agency’s widely recognized independence and the firings, protest resignations, and those pushed by the administration are a reflection of the politicization of the agency. The DOJ does not and should not be subservient to the whims of the president but should uphold the Constitution, and this huge shift in agency culture and practice is one of the drivers impacting the quality of work, public safety, the integrity of the institution and notably the future of the DOJ. The mass reduction in expertise at the DOJ is putting the public at risk and making way for white collar crimes, fraud, and corruption to evade accountability. In the words of a former senior counsel, what’s happening at the DOJ is not the normal transitional changes between administrations, but rather, it is “a key indicator of democratic backsliding.”

Lauren Bingham contributed to this report. 

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