By Brad Heath and Andrew Godsword
WASHINGTON, April 23 (Reuters) – The Trump administration has cut more than 4,000 employees from some of the nation’s top law enforcement agencies despite vowing to crack down on crime, according to records obtained by Reuters.
Records from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Management Unit show that the total number of employees at the FBI has decreased by more than 7% through the government’s 2024 fiscal year, a loss of about 2,600 people. The Drug Enforcement Administration’s workforce has fallen by about 6%, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has lost 14% of its workforce.
Other parts of the Justice Department shrank even faster. Its National Security Division, which handles intelligence and counterterrorism affairs, has lost about 38% of its staff, department records show. The division’s most recent budget request to Congress cited “unprecedented staffing constraints” in the unit, which handles cases involving espionage and the export of sensitive military technology.
“It’s the difference between being proactive and entrepreneurial or being completely reactive to the most obvious urgency of the day,” Adam Hickey, a former senior National Security Division official, said of the staff loss.
Those records, obtained by Reuters under the Freedom of Information Act, provide the most detailed account yet of the extent to which the Trump administration has downsized some of the nation’s top law enforcement agencies.
Those agencies have traditionally handled the government’s highest-profile criminal investigations, including efforts to fight terrorism, stop drug traffickers and keep guns away from criminals.
Other records, including detailed information on people leaving government jobs, show an increased pace of departures from 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 hollows out the agencies that address them shows that they don’t stand behind their words,” said Stacey Young, a former Justice Department attorney who heads Justice Connect, a group that supports employees leaving the department.
That contraction, along with an increased focus on immigration, has forced officials to pull back from showing their usual work, interviews and agency records. Last year, for example, federal prosecutions for drug trafficking fell to their lowest level in more than two decades.
The government is also bringing fewer such cases this year, Reuters found after reviewing millions of federal court dockets from legal research service Westlaw, a division of Thomson Reuters.
Justice Department spokeswoman Natalie Baldassare said, without providing evidence, that the purchases last year allowed the agency to “protect the American public by aggressively and conscientiously weeding out people who do not want to deal with crime.”
“While the U.S. homicide rate has fallen to the lowest rate in recent history,” she said, “any suggestion that this reduction in force has hampered our ability to combat violent crime is not grounded in reality.”
The Trump administration has made deep cuts to the federal government, beginning in the first months of his presidency last year. One of the few exceptions was the government arm that handles immigration enforcement, which secured billions of dollars in additional funding as the administration pushed to deport more people.
Trump-appointed officials have also fired or fired dozens of federal prosecutors and agents working on investigations of the president and his political allies, and launched a series of new cases targeting their opponents.
Justice Department officials have defended Trump’s ability to influence investigations and have attacked past investigations of the president and his aides as abuses of the legal system. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has said Trump has the right and duty as president to influence investigations, even into political enemies.
Records obtained by Reuters show the number of positions filled and unfilled as of early April in each division of the Justice Department. All told, they show the department employed about 107,000 people, about 11,200 fewer than in the fiscal year that ended three months before Trump’s second term began.
The cuts come amid both administration efforts to shrink the government and turmoil at the Justice Department, where thousands of workers have received buyouts. Officials have also struggled to fill some of those jobs, with about 7,000 positions unfilled, records show.
“The department is full of career public servants with specialized expertise who have served in Republican and Democratic administrations for years or decades, and cutting that workforce is a huge disservice to our community and our country,” said Amy Solomon, a senior fellow at the Criminal Justice Council, a nonpartisan research organization, and a former department official.
The section responsible for environmental law has lost about a third of its staff. And the department’s Civil Rights Division lost more than half. And the Bureau of Prisons — which the Justice Department’s internal watchdog says is in a “staffing crisis” — shed more than 2,200 employees, about 6% of its workforce. The number of prisoners in federal custody has remained largely unchanged.
As a result, some guard posts have been vacated and teachers and nurses in others have been removed from their regular posts, a prison official said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.
(Reporting by Brad Heath and Andrew Goudsward; Editing by Michael Lermanth and Alistair Bell)
