Somehow, President Donald Trump found a way to be smug about a new report revealing over 10,000 lawyers have abandoned their federal jobs since he was reelected in late 2024.

Trump celebrated the D.C. brain drain as a victory against the so-called “deep state” in a Sunday afternoon Truth Social post, where he knocked a New York Times deep dive into the flight for being framed as if it was a “bad thing.”

Claiming the exodus fit perfectly into his “Make America Great Again” agenda, he said, “The people that are leaving are Radical Left Deep State Lunatics, who are destroying our Country, and Weaponizing Government. Many of them didn’t leave, but were fired!”

Trump continued his contrarian take, writing, “The Failing New York Times writes this, but makes it sound like it’s a terrible thing when actually, it’s just the opposite.”

“We want people that will, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, not people that are trying to destroy our Country, that were put in by Obama and Biden and, in many cases, they shouldn’t have been representing the U.S.A. in the first place,” the president went on.

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

In an analysis of federal employment data, the Times found about 17% of lawyers who were working for the government at the end of 2024 had left their positions by this March.

Though the story attributed some of the hemorrhage of legal talent to typical turnover reasons like retirement, it also cited deep staffing cuts and people who decided they’d rather resign than help carry out Trump’s policies, both problems paired with hiring levels which were drastically lower than the amount of departures.

The Trump government’s reputation as ethically questionable and notoriously unstable has reportedly had a chilling effect on recruiting early-career lawyers into working for the government, which the Times said was formerly the “the gold standard ” for those seeking roles in public service.

Andrew Mergen, the director of the Emmett Environmental Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School, told the paper he was seeing a real shift in both the prestige and credibility once linked to federal legal work.

“A lot of people I’ve spoken to just in the last few months have said that they would look down on a person if they had a federal job on their résumé that they started during this administration,” he explained. “And some people have explicitly said they would see a person willing to go to work at this D.O.J. as somebody they couldn’t trust.”

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