The United States needs to hire a lawyer. In fact, it needs to hire at least 7,000 lawyers to replace the attorneys who have streamed out of federal agencies since the beginning of President Trump’s second term in office.

And the United States is trying. On March 13, the Department of Justice eliminated its work-experience requirements for junior prosecutors, opening those positions to new law school graduates, and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management launched an Attorney Talent Network that encourages lawyers to enter federal service. It frames government legal work as a chance to “Defend Freedom” and “Join the Fight.”

If you are graduating from law school and you want to work in the public interest, you might reasonably consider whether to accept such an invitation. Historically, federal service has had much to offer lawyers, including early in their careers. The work has been varied and interesting, touching every corner of life in America; the hours usually have been more manageable than in private practice; the pay (while paling in comparison to the Cravath scale) has often exceeded prevailing rates in the nonprofit sector; and the career attorneys who supervise younger lawyers’ work have been, as a rule, sharp practitioners and generous mentors.

That said, here are a few points to bear in mind when deciding whether to pursue federal legal employment.

First, the executive branch is less a single institution than a network of hundreds of agencies, more diverse in their size and activities than the menagerie of a zoo. As a lawyer at the Securities and Exchange Commission, you might go after lawbreakers directly; at the Department of Transportation, you might work collaboratively with industry players and public stakeholders on major projects; in the intelligence community, you might analyze the legal limits on agency activity at home and abroad; and so on.

Most agencies are bound by many of the same laws and policies, of course, and most ultimately answer – directly or indirectly – to the president. But the sort of experience you have in the federal government will largely depend on what part of the federal government you experience.

Second, the executive branch is more political today than it has been in recent memory. Traditionally, it was common for career attorneys to serve under administrations of both political parties. An agency’s priorities would often vary from one administration to the next, but its overall mission would remain the same. (After all, it is Congress, not the president, that determines each agency’s official purposes and equips it with legal authority.) Since staff attorneys work to carry out an agency’s legal responsibilities, changes in administration did not overly disrupt their federal service from day to day.

Both the president’s supporters and the opposition, I think, would agree that the current administration has a different ethos. For example, President Trump has issued executive orders at a faster clip than any other president since World War II. Many of these orders direct federal agencies to take actions that appear to contravene their statutory authorities. Federal judges of both parties have criticized the conduct of agencies across the current administration as contrary to law.

Or consider the attorney general’s memorandum of February 5, 2025, which cautioned that Department of Justice attorneys could face “discipline and potential[] termination” for dissenting from the president’s personal priorities.

The president’s advisors and allies take a different view, of course, and frame these actions as necessary and proper correctives to corruption and malfeasance throughout the federal bureaucracy. But the upshot is that, as a junior federal lawyer, you can anticipate having to carry out much more of the president’s personal agenda than previous generations of junior career attorneys.

Third, consider that employment as a federal civil servant is more precarious – that is, less secure – than it has been in some time.

This is for two reasons. First, the Trump administration has subverted or eroded legal protections for career employees, dating back to the 1880s, that prohibited firing civil servants except for misconduct or poor performance. The Administration has made wholesale dismissals of employees throughout government, with little explanation. (This includes many of the generous mentors and expert colleagues I cited above as one of the main attractions of federal service.)

Second, the president has sought to exert control over independent agencies that historically operated with a degree of insulation from the White House – even institutions outside the executive branch, such as the Library of Congress. Civil servants in these agencies used to have two layers of protection from politically motivated removal; now they may have none.

Both moves advance the contention of the president and his advisors that the framers of the Constitution meant for the president to have absolute control, more or less, over every agency and official that carries out federal law. Judges, scholars and elected officials continue to fiercely debate the validity of the “unitary executive theory,” but whether it is right or wrong is beside the point. If you join the federal government now, you can expect the president’s vision of an unchecked executive to shape the conditions of your employment.

These developments raise the risks for new attorneys who sign up as feds. You may find yourself having to carry out (or defend) actions that depart from your agency’s traditional role or statutory mission, and you may have limited employment protections if you object.

And yet it is true that the United States needs all the good lawyers it can get, now more than ever. Ultimately, only you can decide if it is the right time for you to become one of them.

But know this: the complexities of this particular moment in history will undoubtedly pass, if only to be replaced by future challenges we can’t yet even imagine. If you decide not to join the government now, I hope you will take this time to delve deep into a policy subject, to hone your cross-examination technique, or to learn how to write a regulation – in short, to develop the skills and expertise that the lawyers of the United States will need in years to come.

July 2026