Donald Trump’s desperate Department of Justice is dangling $25,000 signing bonuses to entice lawyers to join an organization that keeps losing in court.
The cash sweeteners, reported by Bloomberg Law, come amid a brutal exodus of career attorneys and a string of judicial defeats over the administration’s most politically charged prosecutions.
They include the bungled cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James and a procession of botched subpoenas targeting children’s hospitals.
The cash incentives are, the outlet says, a first for an agency that, until last year, was deluged with applications from lawyers happy to slash their own salaries for the prestige of federal service.
Even by last summer, around two-thirds of the lawyers in the DOJ’s Federal Programs Branch defending Trump’s policies in court—69 out of 110—had walked, as the Daily Beast reported.
As a result, three of the Civil Division’s most embattled offices began advertising the $25,000 signing bonus for “well-qualified candidates” on the DOJ’s job site this week.
And in an email sent on Monday and obtained by Bloomberg Law, Brett Shumate, the assistant attorney general running the DOJ’s Civil Division, told his lawyers they would all begin receiving a retention bonus of $60 to $220 per pay period through Thanksgiving. “I hope this incentive provides some tangible recognition of your efforts and the value we place on your continued service to the Civil Division,” Shumate wrote.
One of the offices now advertising the bonus is the division’s enforcement and affirmative litigation branch, set up last fall to probe pediatric hospitals over gender-affirming care for minors. That campaign has been pulverized in court, with federal judges in Boston, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Colorado quashing or narrowing the DOJ’s subpoenas—with one ruling the department was “motivated only by bad faith.”
A second office offering the cash, the immigration litigation branch, has been bleeding cases over Trump’s drive to deport non-citizens to nations they have no ties to, and to lock up others before they ever see a bond hearing. It is also leading the administration’s push to strip naturalized Americans of their U.S. citizenship.
The development comes as the DOJ struggles to recover from a string of high-profile court defeats over Trump’s politically charged prosecutions of perceived enemies.
Twin indictments against Comey and James—both rushed through last fall by Trump’s hand-picked prosecutor Lindsey Halligan, 36, a former Miss Colorado USA contestant with no prior prosecutorial experience—were thrown out in November.
As the Beast reported in January, the Bill Clinton-appointed federal judge Cameron McGowan Currie ruled Halligan had been unlawfully appointed.
The DOJ has since failed to persuade two grand juries to re-indict James, while Comey was indicted again in April over a deleted Instagram post of seashells spelling “86 47,” which prosecutors claim amounted to a death threat against Trump, 79. First Amendment scholars have largely written off the new charges as unwinnable.
The Department of Homeland Security has been offering similar signing bonuses—reportedly worth up to $50,000—to ICE recruits as it scrambles to staff Trump’s mass-deportation drive. Yet even those eye-watering sweeteners are failing to attract quality recruits.
The Daily Beast has contacted the DOJ and the White House for comment.
