President Donald Trump’s administration has been accused of “hollowing out” federal law enforcement agencies and of firing their employees by the thousands, a new analysis has found.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives has suffered the biggest cuts among law enforcement agencies, losing about 14 percent of its workforce since the 2024 fiscal year, Reuters revealed Thursday.
The FBI has lost nearly 2,600 people, about seven percent of its workforce, and the DEA’s staff has dropped by six percent, according to records Reuters obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
In total, the report says more than 4,000 law enforcement workers have exited in MAGA 2.0 despite Trump touting his administration as “tough on crime.”
The president boasted during a March 2025 speech from the Justice Department, “Under the Trump administration, the DOJ and the FBI will once again become the premier crime-fighting agencies on the face of the Earth.”
However, some federal officials say their ability to stop and prosecute crimes is slowing.
The DOJ’s National Security Division, which handles intelligence and terrorism matters, has lost nearly 38 percent of its staff in Trump‘s second term, department records show. One former official in the division said these “unprecedented personnel constraints” mean it is no longer proactive in handling espionage cases or other critical matters.
“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, told Reuters.
Stacey Young, a former Justice Department lawyer who leads a group that supports staff leaving the department, told the wire service that Trump’s tough-on-crime rhetoric is not being backed by action.
“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,” she said.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump, 79, was criticized by many in federal law enforcement after he pardoned nearly 1,600 Jan. 6 defendants on day one of his second term, including more than 600 of his supporters who were convicted of assaulting or obstructing Capitol police officers.
ICE has added officers en masse in Trump’s second term—but insiders tell Reuters that the White House’s emphasis on immigration has led to enforcement falling short elsewhere.
One reported example of this is federal drug trafficking prosecutions dropping to their lowest level in more than two decades in 2025. Reuters reports that the government is bringing even fewer such cases this year.
Reuters also reports that, as of early April, the DOJ has 11,200 fewer employees than it did during the fiscal year that ended three months before Trump began his second term.
An insider at the Bureau of Prisons told the wire service that the situation has become so dire there, “some guard posts have gone empty, and others have been staffed with teachers and nurses pulled from their regular positions” at federal prisons.
