DOJ suspends prosecutor experience requirement as 5,500 staff have departed

The Justice Department sent an internal memo on March 13, 2026 with the subject line "Suspension of Attorney One Year Experience Requirement," announcing that its longstanding rule requiring one year of legal practice before joining as a federal prosecutor had been suspended through February 28, 2027. The memo cited an "exigent hiring need" across the department as the reason for the change. (, )

Within days, U.S. attorneys' offices including those in 🦆Minnesota and Southern 🌴Florida posted open assistant U.S. attorney positions under the new standard, listing a law degree and active bar membership as the only mandatory qualifications.

The one-year minimum was the floor, not the standard. Many districts had previously required three or more years of legal experience before considering applicants for federal prosecutor roles. The suspension dropped that floor to zero across all U.S. attorneys' offices nationwide.

The DOJ retains authority to set its own internal hiring standards without congressional action or public comment. The experience requirement was never codified in law. It was department policy, which is why the department could suspend it with a single internal memo.

Approximately 5,500 Justice Department employees have left since the start of the Trump administration in 2025, according to , a nonprofit founded by former DOJ career attorneys that has tracked departures through public records and attorney reports. placed total departures at over 6,400 against a department workforce of roughly 108,000 at the end of 2025. The DOJ said it had hired more than 3,400 career attorneys in the same period.

The departures have been concentrated in some of the department's most complex units:

| Division / Unit | Reported Impact | |---|---| | Civil Rights Division | Over 200 left; roughly 75% of attorneys gone | | Public Integrity Section | Significantly depleted | | Counterterrorism Unit | Experienced prosecutors departed | | January 6 Prosecution Team | Multiple assigned prosecutors terminated |

More than 230 attorneys, agents, and staff were fired, apparently because of their work on assigned cases, past public criticism of Trump, or no disclosed reason. The departures include career prosecutors from the counterterrorism, public corruption, and civil rights units that handle the most sensitive federal cases.

PKPeter Keisler, a senior DOJ official under President George W. Bush, called the scale "completely unprecedented in both its scale and scope." SGStuart Gerson, who served at DOJ under Presidents Bush and Clinton, said: "To lose people at that career level...is immensely damaging to the public interest."

Federal prosecutors handle some of the most complex criminal cases in the U.S. legal system, including drug trafficking conspiracies, public corruption, national security matters, and major financial fraud. The caseload demands command of evidentiary rules, constitutional law, and courtroom advocacy that most law school graduates don't yet have. Inexperienced prosecutors make errors that violate defendants' rights and create grounds for successful appeals that reverse convictions and require retrials. Federal courts have overturned convictions when prosecutors failed to meet evidentiary or constitutional standards. The risk of those outcomes rises directly with inexperience.

The American Bar Association doesn't set a national minimum experience standard for federal prosecutors. () The one-year floor has always been an internal DOJ policy, not a federal law. What changed on March 13, 2026 is that a standard the department built into decades of hiring practice was set aside under the pressure of mass institutional attrition. Supervisory prosecutors are supposed to mentor and oversee new hires, but staffing shortages have strained those oversight structures in many districts.

The Justice Department was established by Congress in 1870 to centralize the federal government's legal functions. For most of its history, a defining principle has been the separation between career attorneys and political appointees. The replaced the patronage system, where federal jobs were distributed as political rewards, with merit-based competitive hiring. The reinforced those protections, shielding career federal employees from dismissal based on political affiliation or their assignment to sensitive cases.

The closest historical precedent is Watergate's Saturday Night Massacre in October 1973, when President Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox. Richardson and his deputy William Ruckelshaus both resigned rather than comply. The rank-and-file corps of career DOJ attorneys remained intact. PKPeter Keisler, who served as Assistant Attorney General under President George W. Bush, said the current scale of departures is "completely unprecedented in both its scale and scope" and surpasses anything in the department's 150-year history.

The department hasn't publicly disclosed how many positions remain unfilled across U.S. attorneys' offices, or what supervision standards apply to new hires who've never practiced law.