1/3 Of Lawyers At DOJ Environmental Division Gone Since 1/25; Gridlocked Cases And Failed Enforcement Remain
One year after President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, at least a third of the lawyers on staff at the Justice Department’s environment division have walked out the door, gutting the government’s capacity to defend its own energy and climate policies and kneecapping its power to keep polluters in check. Over the last 12 months, at least 140 lawyers have departed — by force or by choice — DOJ’s Environment and Natural Resources Division, according to interviews with 11 former attorneys across the division’s 10 sections and analysis by POLITICO’s E&E News.
Those departures have cost ENRD, which at the start of 2025 employed about 400 attorneys, hundreds of years of institutional knowledge. Among the 11 senior attorneys and managers interviewed for this story alone, the division lost more than 260 years of legal expertise last year. “Of all the many issues that trouble me about this administration, their treatment of our extraordinary career workforce is first on the list. The brain drain from the environment division that I served in for over 20 years and then led, has been extraordinary,” said John Cruden, who led ENRD during the Obama administration. “Many of the best and brightest have already departed, and those exceptional stalwarts who remain now have an overwhelming workload — often doing the work of several others who have departed.”
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While DOJ’s environment division has discretion to pursue — or not — enforcement cases, there are some elements of ENRD’s work that it cannot choose to set aside. When the government is sued over climate rules, such as its regulations for power plant emissions, ENRD’s Environmental Defense Section must respond. Since Trump’s return to the White House, at least half of the section’s roughly 60 attorneys have departed, including the team of lawyers that defended the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, as well as Trump’s repeal rule. The strain is reflected in recent court filings from ENRD. In one court document in a lawsuit launched by young climate activists against Trump’s energy executive orders, ENRD attorneys cited “limited availability of staffing resources” in a request for an extension to a filing deadline.
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Now, recent law school graduates are dispirited by Trump’s attacks on DOJ’s independence and the gutting of programs that helped jump-start new attorneys’ careers at the department, said Christophe Courchesne, director of the Environmental Law Center at Vermont Law and Graduate School. He recalled the high regard with which he held ENRD lawyers, even when he battled them in court while he served at the Massachusetts attorney general’s office during the first Trump administration. “Even if we disagreed with their position in litigation or were on the opposite side of the ‘v,’ we absolutely looked to the line attorneys and the nonpolitical parts of that division as honest brokers, credible advocates and hard workers,” Courchesne said. “That perception among students that that’s the type of workplace that DOJ is right now has been gravely damaged by the way the administration has approached DOJ generally and the hollowing out of ENRD,” he continued.
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https://www.eenews.net/articles/staff-exodus-case-gridlock-doj-environment-division-under-trump-2-0/