One year after President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, at least a third of the lawyers on staff at the Justice Department’s environment division have walked out the door, gutting the government’s capacity to defend its own energy and climate policies and kneecapping its power to keep polluters in check.
Over the last 12 months, at least 140 lawyers have departed — by force or by choice — DOJ’s Environment and Natural Resources Division, according to interviews with 11 former attorneys across the division’s 10 sections and analysis by POLITICO’s E&E News.
Those departures have cost ENRD, which at the start of 2025 employed about 400 attorneys, hundreds of years of institutional knowledge. Among the 11 senior attorneys and managers interviewed for this story alone, the division lost more than 260 years of legal expertise last year.
“Of all the many issues that trouble me about this administration, their treatment of our extraordinary career workforce is first on the list. The brain drain from the environment division that I served in for over 20 years and then led, has been extraordinary,” said John Cruden, who led ENRD during the Obama administration. “Many of the best and brightest have already departed, and those exceptional stalwarts who remain now have an overwhelming workload — often doing the work of several others who have departed.”
Some sections have lost more than others.
ENRD’s enforcement sections, which are tasked with pursuing civil and criminal charges against people and corporations that contaminate the nation’s air and water, have been among the hardest hit. The Environmental Enforcement Section lost about 54, or roughly half, of its lawyers, and the Environmental Crimes Section lost about 13, or 35 percent, of its attorneys.
Enforcement cases have ground to a halt, with decisions on even the most minor issues being funneled through ENRD’s interim leader, Adam Gustafson, or a political designee, according to five former managers across the division’s two enforcement sections.
Even DOJ’s crackdown on auto emissions cheating — a priority touted by ENRD during Trump’s first term — has been partly clawed back under the new administration.
The drop in civil enforcement is bad not only for the environment, but also for the government’s bottom line, said Todd Kim, who led ENRD during the Biden administration.
A recent analysis from Earthjustice, for example, showed that ENRD’s Environmental Enforcement Section imposed only $15.1 million in civil penalties during the first 11 months of the second Trump administration. The year before, the division netted $1.88 billion in civil fines, and it has historically averaged hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties annually.
“Departures of ENRD’s dedicated and expert professionals are particularly tragic given the immense benefit these public servants have provided year after year after year — for instance, the injunctive relief, fines and penalties, and defensive savings they have secured each has been worth orders of magnitude above ENRD’s budget,” said Kim. “ENRD has been a tremendous investment for the American people, and for that to continue, we need a healthy and supported career staff.”
ENRD declined to comment for this story. It did not refute the number of the division’s departures or the working conditions described by former employees.
Jeff Wood, who served as temporary chief of ENRD during the first half of the first Trump administration, said the changes at the division reflect transformations across the federal government.
“I think Adam [Gustafson] is doing what can be done to implement the attorney general’s directives for reforms at DOJ while also trying to ensure that ENRD attorneys have the resources and support they need,” said Wood.
“ENRD has been and very much remains a really great place to serve in the U.S. government,” he continued. “I’d encourage qualified lawyers to apply there now just as much as ever.”
Enforcement staff spent much of the early days of the new administration writing memos justifying the cases they were working — a time-intensive requirement that stunned team leads who had already navigated four years of working under Trump and other administrations less inclined toward enforcement.
“There was always Clean Air Act work. There was always bread-and-butter Clean Water Act work. It may have been deemphasized, but this is just shocking,” said one former enforcement attorney of their experience during prior administrations. Lawyers interviewed for this story were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive workplace conditions and to protect former coworkers who are still at the division.
“They aren’t changing the focus,” the lawyer said of the second Trump administration’s enforcement strategy. “They basically just put the hammer down.”
Any effort to address pollution or climate impacts in rural neighborhoods or communities of color — a focal point for the Biden administration and a longtime priority for DOJ — has been completely wiped out under Trump’s second term.
Cynthia Ferguson, former head of DOJ’s Office of Environmental Justice, which was established under former President Joe Biden, was among four lawyers placed on administrative leave during the first week of the new Trump administration as the department closed out all work on diversity, equity and inclusion.
Ferguson retired in August, according to an October document signed by 295 DOJ alumni rebuking the administration’s attacks on the department. The same document says that Sheila Ruffin, attorney adviser for the office, left DOJ as part of a reduction in force in April.
“If you had ‘environmental justice’ in your portfolio or title, you were gone,” said one former manager in ENRD. “You can’t even say the words.”
A crumbling defense team
While DOJ’s environment division has discretion to pursue — or not — enforcement cases, there are some elements of ENRD’s work that it cannot choose to set aside.
When the government is sued over climate rules, such as its regulations for power plant emissions, ENRD’s Environmental Defense Section must respond. Since Trump’s return to the White House, at least half of the section’s roughly 60 attorneys have departed, including the team of lawyers that defended the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, as well as Trump’s repeal rule.
The strain is reflected in recent court filings from ENRD.
In one court document in a lawsuit launched by young climate activists against Trump’s energy executive orders, ENRD attorneys cited “limited availability of staffing resources” in a request for an extension to a filing deadline.
DOJ has reassigned some enforcement lawyers to defensive work, according to two former ENRD attorneys with knowledge of the moves.
But when it comes time to defend the Trump administration’s latest iteration of its power plant emissions rule, for example, it will be doing so with a severely diminished staff and without the firepower of lawyers who have honed decades of expertise on the subject.
The Environmental Defense Section is among five sections of ENRD that have been permitted to hire. A recent USA Jobs posting indicates that DOJ is seeking 25 litigators to serve across the Appellate, Environmental Defense, Land Acquisition, Natural Resources, and Wildlife and Marine Resources sections.
But since the start of the new Trump administration, ENRD has received only a tiny fraction of the applications it once saw for new openings, according to five former managers with knowledge of the division’s hiring processes.
The USA Jobs listing notes that the open ENRD positions are not eligible for telework, reflecting a change in working conditions brought about under Trump’s leadership.
Even prior to the Covid-19 lockdowns, ENRD employees had been permitted to do some telework, and staff enjoyed even greater flexibility during and after the pandemic.
At the start of the Trump administration, DOJ employees were ordered back to the office 8.5 hours per day, five days per week, with zero flex time permitted, according to five former managers within the division. Requests for ad hoc telework were tracked, and extremely few were granted, the former managers said.
“That’s discouraging, and it takes away one of the nonmonetary benefits we can offer to folks,” said Tom Mariani, former head of ENRD’s Environmental Enforcement Section. Mariani was among four section chiefs transferred to immigration work at the start of the Trump administration. All have since left DOJ.
A recent internal document reviewed by E&E News said that the Civil Division, another part of DOJ, is moving to reintroduce some workplace flexibilities, such as allowing employees to choose their start and stop times, so long as they are working during designated core hours.
But two former managers noted the changes, if they are also applied to ENRD, don’t even begin to replace the flexibility the division used to afford to attorneys and staff who more than compensated for decreased office time with remote work.
Working for Trump? ‘Not a snowball’s chance in hell’
For graduates of the nation’s top environmental law programs, a position at ENRD — or elsewhere in the government — is no longer the dream job it once was.
While even high-level litigators at ENRD are paid less than the starting salary at a big law firm, for many budding environmental lawyers, a position at DOJ once offered the promise of stability and a sense that they were working toward a critical mission.
Now, recent law school graduates are dispirited by Trump’s attacks on DOJ’s independence and the gutting of programs that helped jump-start new attorneys’ careers at the department, said Christophe Courchesne, director of the Environmental Law Center at Vermont Law and Graduate School.
He recalled the high regard with which he held ENRD lawyers, even when he battled them in court while he served at the Massachusetts attorney general’s office during the first Trump administration.
“Even if we disagreed with their position in litigation or were on the opposite side of the ‘v,’ we absolutely looked to the line attorneys and the nonpolitical parts of that division as honest brokers, credible advocates and hard workers,” Courchesne said.
“That perception among students that that’s the type of workplace that DOJ is right now has been gravely damaged by the way the administration has approached DOJ generally and the hollowing out of ENRD,” he continued.
At the start of the Trump administration, Dan Khieninson, a law student at Pace University, had his summer internship offer rescinded at EPA’s Office of Environmental and Compliance Assurance, which works closely with ENRD. He had hoped the role would help him launch a career as a federal environmental lawyer.
“I always thought that one of the best ways to achieve environmental benefits is through the government, particularly through the federal government, because it has such a wealth of resources,” Khieninson said.
Instead, he watched last year as his internship offer evaporated, leaving him scrambling for another opportunity. He was able to land a summer internship at the nonprofit group Save the Sound and recently accepted an offer for a permanent position in private practice.
He said he’s not sure he would consider revisiting his dream of being a federal environmental lawyer.
“In the future, maybe,” he said. “Under this administration, there is not a snowball’s chance in hell.”
Pamela King can be reached on Signal at pamelaking.12.
Lesley Clark contributed to this report.
Correction: An earlier version of this report incorrectly mischaracterized ENRD as part of DOJ’s Civil Division. It is a co-equal division.
