By Brad Heath and Andrew Goudsward
WASHINGTON, April 23 (Reuters) - The Trump administration has cut more than 4,000 employees from some of the nation’s top law-enforcement agencies, even as it vowed to crack down on crime, according to records obtained by Reuters.
The records, from the U.S. Justice Department’s management unit, show that the total number of employees at the FBI has dropped more than 7% since the government’s 2024 fiscal year, a loss of about 2,600 people. The Drug Enforcement Administration’s
staff has dropped by about 6%, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives lost about 14% of its workers.
Other parts of the Justice Department shrank even more rapidly. Its National Security Division, which handles intelligence and terrorism matters, lost nearly 38% of its staff, the department’s records show. The division’s most recent budget request to Congress noted “unprecedented personnel constraints” in the unit that handles cases involving espionage and the export of sensitive military technology.
"It’s the difference between being proactive and entrepreneurial or purely reactive to the most obvious imperative of the day," Adam Hickey, a former senior official in the National Security Division, said of the loss of staff.
Those records, which Reuters obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, offer the most detailed accounting to date of the extent to which the Trump administration has downsized some of the nation’s premier law-enforcement agencies.
Those agencies have traditionally handled the government’s highest-profile criminal investigations, including efforts to combat terrorism, deter drug traffickers and keep guns away from criminals.
Other records, including detailed information about people who left government jobs, show an increasing pace of departures from law-enforcement agencies after Trump began his second term in January 2025.
“The administration talks a big game when it comes to crime and terrorism, but the fact that it’s hollowing out agencies tasked with addressing them shows that they don’t stand behind their words,” said Stacey Young, a former Justice Department lawyer who leads Justice Connection, a group that supports staff leaving the department.
That contraction, combined with an increased focus on immigration, has caused authorities to pull back from some of their typical work, interviews and agency records show. Last year, for example, federal prosecutions for drug trafficking dropped to their lowest level in more than two decades.
The government is bringing even fewer such cases this year, Reuters found after reviewing millions of federal court dockets from Westlaw, a legal research service that is a division of Thomson Reuters.
Justice Department spokeswoman Natalie Baldassarre said, without offering evidence, that buyouts last year allowed the agency to shed people who “did not want to aggressively and faithfully tackle crime to protect the American people.”
She said that at a time when the U.S. murder rate has fallen to its lowest rate in recent history, “any suggestion that this reduction in force has hampered our ability to tackle violent crime is not based in reality.”
The Trump administration has made deep cuts across the federal government, beginning last year in the first months of his presidency. One of the few exceptions was the arm of the government that handles immigration enforcement, which secured billions of dollars in additional funding as the administration pressed to deport more people.
Trump-appointed officials have also fired or forced out dozens of federal prosecutors and agents who worked on investigations of the president and his political allies, and have launched a series of new cases targeting his adversaries.
Justice Department officials have defended Trump’s ability to influence investigations and assailed past investigations into the president and his allies as a misuse of the legal system. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has said Trump has a right and duty as president to influence investigations, even into political foes.
The records Reuters obtained show the number of filled and unfilled positions in each section of the Justice Department as of early April. All told, they show that the department employs around 107,000 people, about 11,200 fewer people than it did during the fiscal year that ended three months before Trump began his second term.
The cuts came amid both an administration effort to shrink government and upheaval at the Justice Department, where thousands of workers have taken buyouts. Officials also have struggled to fill some of those jobs, leaving about 7,000 positions unfilled, the records show.
“The department has been filled with career public servants with specialized expertise who have served Republican and Democratic administrations over years or decades and to cut that workforce is a huge disservice to our communities and our country,” said Amy Solomon, a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan research organization, and former department official.
The section responsible for environmental law lost about a third of its staff. And the department’s Civil Rights Division lost more than half. And the Bureau of Prisons – which the Justice Department’s internal watchdog has said is in a “staffing crisis” – shed more than 2,200 employees, about 6% of its workforce. The number of inmates in federal custody has remained largely unchanged.
As a result, some guard posts have gone empty and others have been staffed with teachers and nurses pulled from their regular positions, one prison official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
(Reporting by Brad Heath and Andrew Goudsward; Editing by Michael Learmonth and Alistair Bell)
