Paul Rosenzweig: “It will be a long time before the DOJ recovers”
Society for the Rule of Law Charter Member Paul Rosenzweig wrote an article for “The Unpopulist” describing the damage that the Trump Administration has done to the Department of Justice. “Trump has effectively gutted the DOJ and turned it into a shell of its former self.”
Since Trump has taken office, more than 6,400 employees have left the DOJ, of whom 230 have been fired. These losses have occurred not only because of general reductions in the federal workforce, but also because the Administration has commandeered the Justice Department for the President’s own ideological objectives. “This has not been a mere hollowing out. Trump has taken the nation’s central authority for federal law enforcement and repurposed it as a weapon for ideological combat and an instrument of presidential retribution.” When the Administration ordered an investigation into Renee Good’s widow, and not into the ICE agent who shot Good, six senior prosecutors resigned. In April 2025, then DOJ-lawyer Emil Bove directed a corruption investigation into NY Mayor Eric Adams to be dropped, exchange for Adams’s support on immigration enforcement. Rather than execute Bove’s orders, eight prosecutors relinquished their positions.
These losses have been most pronounced in the Civil Rights Division. Since Trump returned to office, more than 75% of the Civil Rights Division’s career attorneys have resigned. The Administration has incapacitated numerous key initiatives, including the Community Relations Service, civil rights lawsuits against eight different city police departments, and an investigation into the abuse of child immigrant detainees. “The division is now little more than a vehicle to redress right-wing grievances.” In lieu of these programs, the President has created new divisions of second-amendment rights defense and welfare fraud investigation, the latter of which was prompted by a “right wing influencer’s misleading and misinformed allegations that Somalian childcare centers in Minnesota were engaging in such fraud.”
The Administration’s policies have not only abandoned the DOJ’s non-partisan norms, but also gutted its ability to perform high priority core functions. “Trump’s transformation of the DOJ into his political instrument also means that there are not enough prosecutors to focus on what ought to be the government’s chief priorities: public safety and national security.” The remaining DOJ employees are now hard-pressed to properly handle cases involving terrorism, cyberattacks, organized crime, and other continuing priorities that Americans traditionally depend on the DOJ to resolve. The loss of headcount has aggravated caseload backlogs and increased unforced errors involving professionalism and attention-to-detail. “The department is having a very hard time filling vacant positions. The upshot is that the sheer number of mistakes, errors, misrepresentations, and outright lies offered in courts by Trump’s DOJ is unprecedented.” Personnel shortages, caseload backlogs, and reputational compromise have significantly damaged the Justice Department. “It will be a long time before the DOJ recovers from the assault. In the meantime, the American public will suffer from this self-inflicted tragedy.”
Read the article here.