But as 2026 gets underway, conditions at the Justice Department have gone from bad to worse. Indeed, almost two weeks into the new year, the DOJ appears to be an agency in crisis, rapidly unraveling before our eyes.

Consider some of the more notable developments from just the past week:

At least four leading officials from the criminal section of the Civil Rights Division resigned in protest after Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon decided not to investigate the fatal shooting of Renee Good.

The Justice Department fired Robert McBride, a veteran prosecutor, after he declined to lead the controversial prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey.

The Justice Department opened an unprecedented criminal investigation into Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, sparking widespread and bipartisan criticisms.

Vice President JD Vance announced that the administration would soon have a new assistant attorney general but that their work would be “run out of the White House” instead of Main Justice, reinforcing concerns that the West Wing has effectively seized control of the DOJ, which has largely functioned as an independent entity since Watergate.

The New York Times reported on the gutted state of the department, which is plagued by systemic vacancies and prosecutors who fear they’ll be fired for working on cases the political right might not like. Complicating matters, the article added, “personnel typically deployed to national security and fraud cases are being diverted to focus on other priorities, including the president’s demands for investigations into his perceived enemies.”

The Justice Department has suffered a series of defeats in court over the past few days, including embarrassing setbacks in cases related to renewable energy, Energy Department grants to blue states, federal funding for child care and social services in blue states and, as of late Friday, federal election funds.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Donald Trump has “repeatedly” complained to aides in recent weeks about Bondi, “describing her as weak and an ineffective enforcer of his agenda.”

Each of these stories is important in its own right, but taken together, a picture emerges of a Justice Department that appears to be coming apart at the seams.

The Justice Department has lost thousands of experienced attorneys since the start of the Trump administration and has backfilled a fraction of the open jobs, with the process snarled by a lack of qualified candidates, bureaucratic delays and hiring freezes, according to people familiar with hirings in the department.

Last year, roughly 10,000 attorneys worked across the Justice Department and its components, including the FBI. Justice Connection, an advocacy group that has been tracking departures, estimates that around 5,500 people — not all of them attorneys — have quit the department, been fired or taken a buyout offered by the Trump administration.....

Multiple people familiar with the student bodies at top-ranked law schools and the department’s hiring process said the share of recent graduates across the political spectrum who are applying for jobs at the Justice Department has plummeted. The department has had difficulty finding qualified candidates for open slots, according to more than a half-dozen people familiar with the process, several of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment on the record.

Across the country, U.S. attorneys’ offices have experienced higher turnovers than they typically see during a change in administrations. In August, Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for D.C., said on Fox News that her office was down 90 prosecutors and told lawyers to email her if they wanted a job......

The process of filling career positions is distinct from installing political appointees. Career jobs are governed by federal regulations intended to ensure that politics do not play a role in who is hired. The Trump administration has pushed out many of the Justice Department’s top-ranking career officials and replaced them with political appointees. Many of these appointees came from Republican state solicitors general offices and conservative legal groups. The department has relied on them to argue some of its most high-profile and controversial cases in court......

The vast majority of the 600 employees in the Civil Rights Division, for example, have left. The division has refilled a dozen or so of those career positions, despite its chief, Harmeet K. Dhillon, publicly touting the flood of applications she has been receiving......

Under Attorney General Pam Bondi, however, top Justice Department officials have pushed out veteran prosecutors across the department who worked on cases during the Biden administration that they viewed as anti-Trump. Employees who prosecuted the hundreds of cases against the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, have been especially targeted. Others were given no explanation as to why they were fired. The Washington Post has reported that other prosecutors have been ousted after they refused to bring cases to grand juries that they believed had insufficient evidence......

The draw of the Justice Department has long been public service and job security. The widespread firings have undermined the job security belief. At the same time, some potential hires fear they could be put in compromising positions in which they would be forced to bring cases they felt would be unethical to present to a grand jury.