There are a lot of empty desks in the Justice Department’s offices compared to this time two years ago. Attorney General Pam Bondi has been struggling to restock the much-depleted ranks of federal attorneys after last year’s flood of firings, resignations and buyouts. Now, in the interest of quickly getting bodies in courtrooms, the DOJ has reportedly shifted its policies to allow U.S. attorneys’ offices to hire lawyers straight out of law school.
According to Bloomberg Law, a memo from DOJ headquarters last week said the typical one-year minimum experience requirement can be waived when posting job openings. Bloomberg Law quotes the memo as saying, “This suspension is in effect until February 28, 2027, and was implemented due to an exigent hiring need for attorneys across the Department.” (The memo and its contents have not been reviewed or independently confirmed by MS NOW.)
The “exigent need” for fresh hires that the Justice Department cites is a relatively recent development.
The “exigent need” for fresh hires that the Justice Department cites is a relatively recent development. Burgeoning lawyers used to leap at the chance to add a DOJ credential to their resumes. But that credential has lost some of its appeal since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term. Bondi’s day-one demand that federal lawyers “zealously advance, protect, and defend their client’s interests” — with almost no room for dissent — hasn’t made it easy to replace the thousands of staffers who have left the department since last January.
Many of the staffers the department has been able to retain are being worked to the bone under the crush of lawsuits filed in response to Trump’s most controversial policies. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota is one office where the newly relaxed hiring policy is already in place, Bloomberg Law reported. The office’s civil division has been buried under an avalanche of habeas corpus petitions from immigrant detainees since a surge of federal enforcement began last year.
Shuffling lawyers from other parts of the administration to help the caseload hasn’t exactly worked perfectly. Then-Department of Homeland Security lawyer Julie Le made headlines when she complained to a federal judge about the workload piled on her since she’d been detailed to the DOJ in Minnesota. (She was removed from that post the next day and is now running for Congress in Minnesota.)
There’s no indication of how this new initiative fits with the Trump administration’s ongoing war on elite universities. The Ivy League’s law schools used to be a pipeline for the Justice Department’s ranks, albeit not as immediately as the current policy allows. But last year, the Trump administration revoked offers to students from top schools under the previous exception to the rule, the Attorney General’s Honors Program, which allowed for entry-level hires. The spigot has dried up since then, as The Washington Post noted last year, with many graduates turning to state government work instead. There’s a world where this shift toward hiring newly graduated lawyers could be a good thing. If this project were truly about meritocracy, seeing more slots available for lawyers who didn’t all go to the same handful of schools could be admirable. But the administration’s screenings for ideological purity and loyalty to the MAGA agenda would undercut any claim that the department is truly trying to hire the best attorneys possible. Instead, as my MS NOW colleague Steve Benen noted on Tuesday, it is another example of the administration lowering its hiring standards as we’ve seen as it has struggled to recruit at the FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. For those opposed to the administration’s policies, it’s somewhat encouraging that there are so few qualified lawyers who are willing to defend the administration’s abuses in court that Bondi has reached this level of desperation. But for Bondi, it seems the hope is that a green attorney fresh from passing the bar will be too inexperienced to stand up against the orders of their higher-ups, no matter how much it might defy the Constitution.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on politics and policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House. 
