Internal DOJ charts show agency bleeding staff as caseloads surge

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, The Hill’s sister network.

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 charts substantiate a dynamic long suspected: that the Justice Department would not be able to swiftly replace a crew of veteran attorneys after a wave of firings and resignations.

Stacey Young, who founded the Justice Department alumni group Justice Connection, described the staff turnover as a “massive exodus.”

“The workload has skyrocketed, particularly in the civil division offices that have lost the most lawyers. 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,” she told The Hill.

“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.”

According to the Office of Personnel Management, the Justice Department 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.

In graph after graph, the charts track data from the start of the Trump administration through August, showing a significant decline in civil division staff as caseloads have steadily ticked up.

DOJ did not respond to request for comment to this story.

The shedding of staff

One chart reviewing impact on each branch within the division detailed how caseload was skyrocketing — with work for the commercial litigation branch jumping a whopping 84 percent per attorney, while lawyers in the Office of Immigration Litigation saw their workload jump 63 percent. 

Attorneys who work on appeals saw their caseloads jump 54 percent while lawyers in the federal programs branch — those who work on defending executive orders among other administration priorities — saw their workloads jump 44 percent.

The number of attorneys in the federal programs branch dropped from 113 to 71 just within the first few months of the Trump administration. A jump in cases has largely settled to around 1,000, but they are being handled by a diminished team.

Jennifer Ricketts, a former Justice Department attorney who led the federal programs branch, said the swift exodus shows how many longtime attorneys who defended presidential priorities across administrations likely began looking for a new job as soon as President Trump won the election.

“They were aware........

© The Hill