New internal documents show the scale of a "massive exodus" at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), which has seen far more extensive departures since President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025 than during the turmoil of his first term — when Attorneys General Jeff Sessions and, later, Bill Barr both left the department on very bad terms with Trump.

According to reporting by Rebecca Beitsch and Samuel Marks of The Hill, "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 reporters write that the charts "substantiate a dynamic long suspected" and show that the department "would be able to swiftly replace a crew of veteran attorneys after a wave of firings and resignations." The civil division is the department's largest litigating component, representing the federal government, its agencies and employees in civil cases — the arena where the staffing declines captured in the charts are most visible.

Stacey Young, founder of the DOJ alumni group Justice Connection, described the departures 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 added, "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."

Citing figures from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), Beitsch and Marks note that the 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."

The charts also detail how caseloads have risen across the civil division's branches. Work in the commercial litigation branch jumped 84 percent per attorney, while lawyers in the Office of Immigration Litigation saw their workloads increase 63 percent, according to the report. Attorneys working on appeals saw their caseloads jump 54 percent, and lawyers in the federal programs branch — who handle defending executive orders among other administration priorities — saw their workloads rise 44 percent. Together, those branches cover the division's core workload — commercial disputes, immigration defense, appeals and the defense of executive actions — now spread across a diminished roster of attorneys.

A former DOJ staffer, interviewed by The Hill on condition of anonymity, said, "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." With Young expecting the departures won't slow down anytime soon and calling for more funding to rebuild the ranks, the OPM attrition tally and the civil division's resourcing picture are the markers to watch next.