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- Hiring of new federal prosecutors is down by about half compared to recent years, per LinkedIn profile data.Many new hires went to top-tier law schools and worked prestigious jobs, the data shows.Some former prosecutors still tell young lawyers to seek out government jobs. Others advise caution.
Being a front-line federal prosecutor has long been a plum job. Across the US, hundreds of applications can be submitted for a single opening. While government service doesn't pay as much as some Big Law firms, the chance to deal with high-stakes investigations, trials, and legal arguments has long been a big draw for ambitious lawyers.
So far this year, however, the Justice Department has hired significantly fewer assistant US attorneys than in previous years, according to an analysis of data from Workforce.AI, a data analysis platform.
From January through August, about 42 people updated their LinkedIn pages to indicate that they had joined the Justice Department in such a role, which is down by more than half from the same period in each of the four preceding years, the data shows.
Interviews with current and former prosecutors suggest the hiring slowdown stems from a mixture of budget and political pressures. Hiring freezes have stalled recruitment, and pay raises have made bringing in new talent more expensive. The Department of Justice is also mired in turmoil under Trump, with sagging morale and potential recruits possibly worried about taking on ethically murky casework.
"When we came into this administration, we came in with 30% of vacancies in our criminal division already," said Brook Andrews, who recently joined the law firm Nelson Mullins from the US Attorney's Office in South Carolina, where he worked for 10 years, most recently as acting US attorney. "There's a staffing crisis in federal law enforcement, and if it's allowed to continue, it will make Americans less safe."
Other factors, like public skepticism of law enforcement and rising wages, have also played a role. One former senior Justice official who worked in the department during the Obama and Biden administrations told Business Insider that the volume of applicants for AUSA spots fell significantly over his years at the department.
The data from the platform isn't comprehensive — some attorneys don't use LinkedIn, and others may be slow to update it with a new job. The decline is notable because these roles typically represent the lion's share of legal muscle in US attorneys' offices and because the Trump administration has called for increasing hiring of assistant US attorneys.
The administration has proposed hiring more than 400 additional attorneys in the US Attorneys' Offices, bringing the total to 6,144. So far, that's off to a slow start. The hiring freeze that the president signed on his first day in office put a damper on some lawyer hiring, though it was later clarified that law-enforcement roles like prosecutors were exempt from the freeze.
The Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency initiative, which was designed to slash the federal workforce, also spurred firings and retirements of some prosecutors.
The Justice Department didn't respond to a request for comment for this story, and people contacted at various US attorneys' offices didn't respond to questions about hiring. Auto-responses from some offices said the current US government shutdown prevented them from responding to media inquiries.
Andrew Tessman, a former assistant US attorney in the Southern District of West Virginia, said his office is down to about 22 attorneys, compared to 37 when it's fully staffed, with 11 departures in 2025. He said about five prosecutors took Musk's "fork," known as the deferred resignation program, and others left or resigned for other reasons.
Tessman, who was sent to Washington from 2022 to 2025 to work on January 6 prosecutions, said he made plans to leave over the summer after Michael Gordon, a prosecutor in Florida who also worked on the cases, was summarily fired by Attorney General Pam Bondi. Gordon has sued over his termination; the case is pending, and the government hasn't yet responded.
Some former colleagues still in government, Tessman said, have told him they are "having trouble finding people who are qualified to do the job."
Now, some of the nation's 93 US Attorneys' Offices are making a hiring push.
Philadelphia's US Attorney is hiring 20 frontline prosecutors, according to Bill McSwain, who led the office for part of the first Trump administration. The office covering Miami and southern Florida, meanwhile, has said in job listings that it is hiring "several" criminal prosecutors as well as civil and appellate assistant US attorneys.
The DOJ doesn't appear to be lowering its standards to fill AUSA spots. Many of the 42 people who posted about taking new AUSA jobs worked for prominent law firms or state and local prosecutors' offices. More than a third went to a Top 14 law school, compared to under a quarter of the roughly 100 people hired into AUSA roles four years ago who are still with the department.
The Justice Department has been at the center of several controversies during Trump's second term, including decisions to drop charges against the president's allies, like New York City Mayor Eric Adams, and investigate or charge adversaries like former prosecutor Jack Smith, New York Gttorney General Letitia James, and former FBI Director James Comey, whose daughter was also fired from her job as a federal prosecutor without explanation.
The department has also overseen the firings of dozens of prosecutors who investigated and charged people who sought to stop the certification of Joe Biden's 2020 election victory, as well as senior antitrust and national-security prosecutors accused of disloyalty or misconduct by Trump's political allies. It has also faced accusations of a cover-up related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Some people who led or worked in US Attorneys' Offices said new hires are unlikely to be involved in such controversies.
Most new federal prosecutors spend their first few years focusing on street crime, immigration violations, and sex offenses, regardless of which party sits in the White House.
"On the margins, maybe there's a couple of ultra-liberal people who are like, 'Oh well, I'm not going to do that job because I don't like Donald Trump,'" said McSwain. "Fine. If some people are going to be like that, the people who do like the job are going to take it."
While Republican officials have drastically stepped up funding for arresting and deporting immigrants without legal status, most of that enforcement activity is civil and agent-led, not criminal, and doesn't require prosecutorial involvement. Only a few new lawyer hires in US attorneys' offices are earmarked for immigration and border-related prosecutions.
Several former prosecutors told Business Insider they're still encouraging young lawyers to seek out work in US attorneys' offices. In most cases, they said, the people taking over the offices are qualified to lead them, and veteran prosecutors have stuck around to help new hires learn the ropes.
Other veterans of the DOJ say White House meddling could occur anywhere, and new attorneys could be dragged into scandals.
"I don't know if the president has any personal enemies in the District of North Dakota," Stacey Young, a former civil rights lawyer who leads a network of DOJ alumni, told Business Insider. "But someone in this administration could."
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