<p>-
- Some federal lawyers want to leave. They can't find jobs because Trump's policies are closing typical exit paths.</p>
<p>Jack Newsham July 7, 2025 at 2:42 PM</p>
<p>Getty Images; Tyler Le/BI -</p>
<p>Lawyers have left the federal government as Donald Trump has targeted the nation's workforce.</p>
<p>Some typical off-ramps have closed as Trump takes a light touch with corporate crime.</p>
<p>Nine current and former government lawyers and recruiters told BI about the harsh legal job market.</p>
<p>Whenever a new president takes office, the revolving door between the federal government and the private sector starts to spin a little faster. Agency heads, their deputies, and their deputies' deputies typically exit to make room for the new president's picks, and take up jobs in C-suites and think tanks.</p>
<p>At elite law firms, the practice became so routine that it was the subject of a running joke. "Out with WilmerHale, in with Jones Day," law professor Orin Kerr tweeted when Donald Trump won in 2016, a nod to each firm's ideological reputation. In 2020, when Joe Biden won, he flipped the names.</p>
<p>In 2024, Trump and his allies made clear that they were going to do things differently.</p>
<p>It wasn't just Biden's appointees who needed to go; it was thousands of federal workers who the administration saw as roadblocks to its agenda. The goal, Trump aide Russell Vought said, was to "put them in trauma" and make them want to quit. The administration has also prioritized immigration, while de-emphasizing financial regulation and corporate crime prosecution — closing some of the usual off-ramps.</p>
<p>Now, the revolving door is jammed.</p>
<p>Recruiters and lawyers in and outside government told Business Insider that it's increasingly hard to move from public to private sector work: there's a large supply of job seekers, and comparatively low demand for their expertise and experience.</p>
<p>One federal lawyer who recently resigned said it took him months to find a new job despite working in a prestigious role, forcing him to stay at his job longer than he wanted. "I had a responsibility to my family to bring home a paycheck," he told Business Insider.</p>
<p>White collar slowdown</p>
<p>Typically, the roughly 40,000 lawyers who work for the US government can parlay their experience drafting, interpreting, and enforcing a dense thicket of laws and regulations into well-paid jobs for law firms and large businesses.</p>
<p>Over the last few months, law firms across Washington and in New York have been inundated with résumés, and they're being choosy, especially when hiring white-collar criminal defense lawyers — many of whom are former federal prosecutors.</p>
<p>"White-collar demand is down across the board," whether it comes to recruiting from the government or poaching a partner with an established clientele from another law firm, said Karen Vladeck, the founder of Risepoint Search Partners, a legal recruiting firm.</p>
<p>"For your standard white-collar partner right now, they want to see twice as much business as they want to see from another practice." In other words, law firms are skeptical that hotshot criminal defense lawyers can reel in the kind of revenue that they used to.</p>
<p>Another headhunter told BI that only "very senior" lawyers coming out of US Attorney's Offices were getting interviews — and even those candidates were taking haircuts on compensation. The same job seeker who might have been able to get an offer for $1 million or $1.2 million in the past as a defense-and-investigations specialist might get $750,000 today, the headhunter said.</p>
<p>Another issue, said Jack Zaremski, who runs Hanover Search Partners, is that Big Law firms already have a deep bench of white-collar litigators — and a partner at a large law firm said there isn't much work to go around for colleagues who focus on that kind of work.</p>
<p>White-collar criminal enforcement has been declining since the Obama administration, according to Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which compiles federal law-enforcement data. The number of white-collar criminal cases filed yearly fell from a high of more than 10,000 in the mid-1990s to about 4,300 today.</p>
<p>Though prosecutions were down, there was still work for Big Law's ex-prosecutors keeping their clients out of court. After the 2009 financial crash, banks needed outside help dealing with crisis-related investigations, the large law firm partner said. The 2012 Libor scandal and similar rate-rigging allegations led to even more work. That has pretty much dried up, the partner said, and banks' in-house lawyers can do some of the work that they used to have to outsource.</p>
<p>Trump, who was convicted of falsifying business records, has shown skepticism for white-collar criminal enforcement. His Justice Department has slashed its corruption unit and made moves to close its tax division and fold its responsibilities into other parts of the agency. One of his early executive orders paused cases under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bans paying bribes to foreign officials to get business. (Several have since resumed.) He has also pardoned people and companies that collectively owed $1.3 billion for offenses like securities fraud and tax evasion, erasing their debts to the government and their victims.</p>
<p>Matthew Burke, a former federal prosecutor on the team led by Jack Smith that charged Donald Trump with keeping classified documents after his presidency and trying to subvert the 2020 election, said that while his experience deterred some potential employers, it attracted others. Scale LLP, a firm of about 80 lawyers that focuses on the tech sector, said in May that Burke would lead its investigations practice.</p>
<p>"There undoubtedly were doors that were closed to me because of what I've done, but there will also be doors that will be opened," he said. It's been "informative to know what doors have been closed and which have been opened," he added.</p>
<p>It's not just criminal cases where the administration's approach is being felt. Some financial regulatory lawyers are also stuck in a tightening job market, as the administration attempts to pare down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. A former bureau lawyer said that among some people who have managed to stay employed, the common attitude is "They're gonna have to drag me out of here."</p>
<p>The Trump administration's efforts to reduce headcount at the Bureau have been put on hold by the courts. The CFPB employees' union said in an email that some of its members have taken other jobs, but "many more remain ready to get back to the work we were hired to do."</p>
<p>Job market challenges aren't universal</p>
<p>Some CFPB managers have been able to parlay their experience into jobs at financial technology firms, law firms, and banks or credit unions, the former bureau lawyer said. And some people leaving the Justice Department are still in high demand. Deep familiarity with international trade restrictions and export-control laws makes some lawyers valuable to tech companies worried about running afoul of US sanctions and trade restrictions. Antitrust experience is also a plus, Vladeck and others said.</p>
<p>Charles Cain, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission's FCPA Unit, went to work at EY, according to a LinkedIn post. He was one of at least five lawyers who announced their departures from the unit at a meeting in late March, according to Mark Yost, a former member of the unit who was present.</p>
<p>Some former feds are having a much tougher time on the job market. Waves of civil rights lawyers have been fired or left the Justice Department and other agencies, like the Department of Education.</p>
<p>"There are only so many civil rights-related jobs out there, and a lot of people are competing for them," said Stacey Young, a former Justice Department attorney who leads the networking group Justice Connection.</p>
<p>Despite competition for open roles, relatively few lawyers, regardless of where they work, are quitting or being terminated without something lined up. While the D.C. area unemployment rate has ticked upward, the national rate for legal occupations — a group of about 1.8 million people of whom 1.1 million are lawyers — was 2.1% in May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, below the 4% average across the US workforce. For lawyers, a smaller group of workers for which estimates are less reliable, the first-quarter unemployment rate was about 1%.</p>
<p>Still, a glut of supply on the job market means lawyers will need to broaden their search. Vladeck tells job seekers to think of landing their next job outside government as a Trivial Pursuit pie, with each slice representing a more niche avenue for employment: boutique firms, in-house counsel roles, nonprofits, or legal-adjacent roles.</p>
<p>"In order to get a job in this market, you have to pay attention to each of those slices," Vladeck said. "You can't rely on the DOJ to Big Law path."</p>
<p>Have a tip? Know more? Reach Jack Newsham via email ([email protected]) or via Signal (+1-314-971-1627). Do not use a work device.</p>
<p>on Business Insider</p>
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