Author: Brad Heath and Andrew Guswold
WASHINGTON, April 23 (Reuters) – The Trump administration has cut more than 4,000 employees from some of the nation’s top law enforcement agencies as it vows to crack down on crime, according to records obtained by Reuters.
Records from the U.S. Department of Justice’s management department show that the FBI’s total staff has dropped by more than 7% since the government’s 2024 fiscal year, with a loss of about 2,600 people. The Drug Enforcement Administration has reduced its staff by about 6 percent, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has reduced its staff by about 14 percent.
Other parts of the Justice Department are shrinking even faster. The National Security Service, which handles intelligence and terrorism matters, lost nearly 38 percent of its staff, department records show. The department’s most recent budget request to Congress noted that units handling cases involving espionage and the export of sensitive military technology face “unprecedented personnel constraints.”
“It’s the difference between being proactive and having an entrepreneurial spirit or being purely reactive to the most obvious imperatives of the day,” Adam Hickey, a former senior national security official, said of staff turnover.
The records, obtained by Reuters under the Freedom of Information Act, provide the most detailed look yet at the extent of the Trump administration’s cuts to some of the nation’s leading law enforcement agencies.
The agencies have traditionally handled the government’s most high-profile criminal investigations, including fighting terrorism, deterring drug dealers and keeping guns away from criminals.
Other records, including details about people leaving government staff, show an increase in the number of people leaving law enforcement agencies after Trump begins his second term in January 2025.
“The administration talks a big game when it comes to crime and terrorism, but the fact that it is hollowing out the agencies responsible for solving these problems shows they are not keeping their word,” said Stacey Young, a former Justice Department lawyer who leads Justice Connection, a group that supports employees leaving the Justice Department.
That contraction, coupled with growing concerns about immigration, has led authorities to eliminate some typical jobs, interviews and agency records show. Last year, for example, federal drug trafficking prosecutions fell to their lowest level in more than two decades.
The government has filed even fewer such cases this year, a Reuters review of millions of federal court dockets from Westlaw, a legal research service owned by Thomson Reuters, found.
Justice Department spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre said without providing evidence that last year’s acquisition allowed the agency to fire people who “did not want to aggressively and faithfully fight crime to protect the American people.”
She said that at a time when the U.S. murder rate has dropped to its lowest level in recent history, “any suggestion that reduced force is hindering our ability to combat violent crime is unfounded.”
Beginning in the first months of his presidency last year, the Trump administration made deep cuts to the federal government. One of the few exceptions is the government agency responsible for immigration enforcement, which has received billions of dollars in additional funding as the government pressures to deport more people.
Trump appointees have also fired or forced dozens of federal prosecutors and agents charged with investigating the president and his political allies and launched a slew of new cases against his opponents.
Justice Department officials have defended Trump’s ability to influence investigations and criticized past investigations of the president and his allies as an abuse of the legal system. Acting Attorney General Todd Branch said Trump has the right and obligation as president to influence investigations, even those targeting political enemies.
Records obtained by Reuters show the number of filled and unfilled positions across the Justice Department as of early April. All told, they show the department employs about 107,000 workers, about 11,200 fewer than in the fiscal year that ended three months before Trump began his second term.
The layoffs come amid an effort to reduce the size of government and upheaval at the Justice Department, with thousands of employees accepting buyouts. Officials have also struggled to fill some of those positions, leaving about 7,000 vacancies, records show.
“The Department of Justice is filled with career civil servants with expertise who have served both Republican and Democratic administrations for years or decades, and cutting that workforce would be a huge disservice to our communities and our country,” said Amy Solomon, a senior fellow at the Criminal Justice Council, a nonpartisan research group and a former Justice Department official.
The department responsible for environmental law lost about a third of its staff. The department’s civil rights division lost more than half. The Justice Department’s internal watchdog said the Bureau of Prisons was in a “staffing crisis” and it laid off more than 2,200 employees, or about 6% of its workforce. The number of prisoners in federal custody has remained essentially unchanged.
As a result, some guard posts have been left empty, while teachers and nurses at other guard posts have been moved from their original posts, a prison official said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.
(Reporting by Brad Heath and Andrew Goodsward; Editing by Michael Learmonth and Alistair Bell)
