The Justice Department is running out of attorneys.
The nation’s largest law office has repeatedly asked for delays in 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, one 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.”
“Therefore, at this time, it is not possible for me to assign this case to yet another attorney, who would need to devote time to learning the issues,” she wrote in a filing dated February 19.
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.”
“The system sucks, this job sucks, I am trying with every breath I have to get you what I need,” said attorney Julie Le when pressed as to why the government had failed to follow judicial orders. Since then, Le was removed from the temporary position and reshuffled back to ICE. She has since leveraged the notoriety of her remarks to launch a congressional bid for Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional District.
The DOJ’s appellate staffs vary in size, but altogether account for more than 150 positions, according to a 2012 writeup in Scotusblog by Al J. Daniel Jr., a former DOJ appellate attorney.
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 high priority within Trump’s second term 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. In reality, that means that the lives of more than three million people are effectively on pause as they await legal decisions that determine their future, either in or out of the United States.
The Justice Department’s hard right shift into the MAGA agenda has sparked concern inside the legal community, with former prosecutors and ethics directors arguing that the agency’s recent politicization has undermined public confidence in the country’s legal system.
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