The federal employment data show that approximately one-fifth of government lawyers employed at the end of December 2024 had left by March of this year, providing evidence that the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the federal workforce have proven at least somewhat successful.Trump said as such on Truth Social, in which he criticized the New York Times analysis for framing the “striking exodus of legal talent” as “a bad thing.”
“The people that are leaving are Radical Left Deep State Lunatics, who are destroying our Country, and Weaponizing Government,” Trump said. “We want people that will, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, not people that are trying to destroy our Country, that were put in by Obama and Biden and, in many cases, they shouldn’t have been representing the U.S.A. in the first place.”
Almost a year and a half ago, Trump signed an executive order creating the Department of Government Efficiency, an initiative led by Elon Musk that sought to “modernize federal technology and software” and broadly rein in a federal bureaucracy that Republicans have long argued is too large.
The effort was originally conceived as a legal reform initiative to be co-led by Vivek Ramaswamy, who left the department to run for governor of Ohio that January. In a co-authored Wall Street Journal opinion piece published in November 2024, Musk and Ramaswamy wrote that “the entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy represents an existential threat to our republic.”
