President Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to restore “law and order” to U.S. streets, but under his administration, the nation’s top law-enforcement agencies have shed huge portions of their staff.
Overall, the administration has cut more than 4,000 employees from these agencies, according to Justice Department records obtained by Reuters.
“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,” Stacey Young, a former Justice Department lawyer, told the outlet.
The FBI has lost more than seven percent of its staff since the 2024 fiscal year, about 2,600 people, according to the outlet.
The Drug Enforcement Administration, meanwhile, has lost about six percent of workers, while the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives dropped more than double that figure.
Within the main Justice Department, the agency’s national security division lost more than a third of its staff and its civil rights division lost more than half, per Reuters, while about 7,000 DOJ jobs remain unfilled.
The administration has pursued a variety of measures to shrink the size of the government, including the slash-and-burn cuts of Elon Musk’s DOGE program and purges within the DOJ and FBI of officials tied to past investigations into Trump.
In other instances, top law enforcement officials have resigned in protest, as was the case with an exodus from a Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office during the administration’s deadly immigration operation in the Minneapolis area.
“Our country has the lowest murder rate in 125 years, we’ve arrested more than 90 key cartel leaders and removed millions of deadly doses of fentanyl from our streets – all on top of achieving a record 24 successful rulings at the Supreme Court,” DOJ spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre told The Independent. “This is the most efficient Department of Justice in American history, and the Department will continue to deliver for the American people.”
She added that the administration “gave career employees the fork in the road option to allow those who did not want to aggressively and faithfully tackle crime to protect the American people to leave the federal government,” and said, “any suggestion that this reduction in force has hampered our ability to tackle violent crime is not based in reality.”
The Independent has contacted the White House for comment.
In addition to quitting or being fired, staff have been reassigned from their usual duties.
The administration has at times pulled thousands of federal law-enforcement agents off their usual beats to bolster the White House deportation campaign.
Critics warn that the staff cuts could have an impact on national security and crime prevention.
In 2025, the number of people charged with federal drug crimes fell to its lowest level in decades. At the same time, the administration’s immigration agenda has sent border crossings to multi-decade lows, and 2025 homicides are expected to show a similar record drop once FBI crime stats are reported later this year.
In the first six months after Trump took office, the DOJ dropped more than 23,000 criminal cases without prosecutions, according to a review by ProPublica, abandoning numerous cases and investigations pursued by previous administrations. In February of 2025, the administration closed nearly 11,000 cases, the most in a single month since at least 2004, the outlet found.
Some of the cuts within the DOJ have come at highly inopportune times.
FBI Director Kash Patel reportedly fired a dozen FBI agents from an elite global unit that monitors spies, including those from Iran, just before the Iran war began. The agents had reportedly been involved in past investigations into Donald Trump.
The chaos has reached the upper echelons of federal law enforcement as well.
In the last two months, the White House has fired the attorney general and the homeland security secretary.
FBI Director Kash Patel, meanwhile, is locked in a legal battle with The Atlantic magazine, which recently reported he is paranoid, frequently absent, and regularly intoxicated. He has strongly denied these claims and has sued for defamation. The magazine has stood by its reporting.
