The Justice Department is running out of attorneys.
The nation’s largest law office has repeatedly asked for delays in arguing its myriad cases, and in doing so has accidentally divulged a massive staffing crisis raging underneath the surface.
In an obscure civil lawsuit dug up by independent journalist Scott MacFarlane, a Justice Department attorney revealed that “the Appellate Section has lost over 40 percent of its attorneys since February 2025, due to retirement, resignation, or temporary transfer.”
The overwhelming stress inside the agency has seeped through the cracks in other ways, as well. In early February, a lawyer volunteering with the short-staffed office on ICE-related cases in Minnesota begged a judge to put her in contempt of court so that she could “get 24 hours of sleep.”
so what I’m hearing is that there’s no backing to the rule of law now.
it’s a powder keg waiting to turn what’s left of our democracy into absolute anarchy.
The powder keg is the next election. If Trump is successful at hijacking what’s going to be a blue wave it will not go well.
They don’t need lawyers for the government if they just ignore the courts.
So, around 4000 quit. It’s great that they don’t have anyone to win they’re cases, but there isn’t any pushback either. Not sure of what’s better.
Yet that’s just the tip of the iceberg for the department’s staffing woes. There were an estimated 10,000 attorneys working across the Justice Department before Donald Trump returned to the White House. By September 2025, that number had been nearly halved: Justice Connection, an advocacy group that tracks DOJ departures, estimated that around 5,500 people (not all of them attorneys) had left the department, either by their own volition, by accepting the Trump administration’s buyout, or by being fired.
Just a fraction of those experienced employees have been replaced, causing a massive backlog of work. The immigration court system—which has been placed under tremendous pressure as a result of Trump’s aggressive deportation agenda—has been particularly hampered, experiencing a backlog of more than 3.3 million cases by the end of February 2026, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. That means that the lives of more than three million people are effectively on pause as they await legal decisions that determine whether their future will be spent inside or outside of the United States.
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What do you suggest people do?
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So instead of being snarky about something you care about, you’re snarky about snarky people.
Groundbreaking
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So are they. That’s what I’m barking at.
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Don’t you think a little pushback is good? I do. There are multiple studies that say to do the following:
- Don’t try to win the argument
- Put one response that gives the correct info
- Leave it at that and walk away
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Congrats to all the actual criminals who will get off scot free because the DOJ fails the speedy trial bit of the constitution or because the statue of limitations passes before they are charged. Oh and the ones who get to toss crucial evidence because DOJ violated rules of evidence while they were getting it.
They weren’t going up prosecute actual criminals anyway.
