Trump's budget plans push US government lawyers to private sector

Source: Reuters

November 27, 2024 6:05 AM EST Updated 16 min ago


Nov 27 (Reuters) - Rank-and-file attorneys in the federal government fear major budget cuts when President-elect Donald Trump assumes office and are hunting for private-sector jobs in unusually high numbers, five legal recruiters told Reuters. Each new administration sparks an exodus of political appointees and other senior legal officials, but the recruiters said they are also hearing from far more lower-level, career government lawyers this year.

"It absolutely feels different than the transition to the first Trump administration," said Rachel Nonaka, a former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission attorney-turned-recruiter in Washington. Another Washington headhunter, Dan Binstock, said government attorneys have approached his firm Garrison at five times the normal post-election rate, and far more of them are career civil servants. "The level of uncertainty is like nothing we've seen," said Binstock, who has been a recruiter for 20 years.

More than 44,000 licensed attorneys serve in the federal government, according to March data from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. About a third of those lawyers work in the Justice Department, and fewer than 400 of them are non-career political appointees. The Department of Education, which Trump has claimed he would try to abolish, employs nearly 600 lawyers. The number of lawyers in all cabinet-level agencies grew by about 2,500 during both the Trump and Biden administrations.

This month, Trump created a new unofficial Department of Government Efficiency led by billionaire Tesla (TSLA.O) CEO Elon Musk and former biotech executive Vivek Ramaswamy, who argued last week that executive actions to lift regulations could pave the way for mass reductions in the federal workforce.

Read more: https://www.reuters.com/legal/trumps-budget-plans-push-us-government-lawyers-private-sector-2024-11-27/