Trump responds to NYT article, says it’s ‘very good’ administration is losing legal talent

Ryan Mancini

President Trump on Sunday said it is “very good” that thousands of lawyers have chosen to no longer work for the administration, referring to The New York Times’s reporting on the exodus.

The Times story reported that more than 10,000 lawyers working for the federal government have left since the end of 2024 to March 2026. Many of these lawyers are “flocking to the offices of Democratic state attorneys general and nonprofits that are challenging administration policies in the courts, boosting Mr. Trump’s opponents with seasoned lawyers,” the report reads.

Trump wrote on Truth Social that the outlet “wrote a story today entitled, ‘Trump Administration Sees Striking Exodus of Legal Talent,’ as though that’s a bad thing, when actually, it’s very good.”

“The people that are leaving are Radical Left Deep State Lunatics, who are destroying our Country, and Weaponizing Government,” the president continued. “Many of them didn’t leave, but were fired! The Failing New York Times writes this, but makes it sound like it’s a terrible thing when actually, it’s just the opposite.”

Trump said that in “many cases, they shouldn’t have been representing the U.S.A in the first place.”

“Let them go on to ‘bigger, better, and brighter’ things in the future — I fully support that, and wish them all well!” he added.

Many of the lawyers who departed the administration in 2025 either retired, left as a result of staffing cuts or resigned in opposition to Trump’s policies, the Times reported. The federal government employed 17 percent less lawyers than it did at the end of 2024, with about 37,000 civilian lawyers working for the government as of March.

The Department of Education lost 53 percent of its lawyers since December 2024, followed by 40 percent who left the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) during the same timeframe.

The loss of lawyers working for the administration means that there are fewer to defend the administration’s policies in court, the Times wrote. Former HUD lawyer Erik Heins, who was fired last year after he raised concerns about fair housing lawyers being reassigned to other offices, said that without lawyers, “there are a lot of things that just can’t get done.”

The Times added that the president’s “willingness to blow through traditional guardrails and upend the mission of federal agencies has created a volatile environment far different than what many career lawyers said they experienced in his first administration.”

The outlet stated that the White House did not respond to questions about the climate that has led so many lawyers to leave the government.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/trump-responds-nyt-article-says-221223044.html