5 Trump Moves That Matter For Lawyers
In his first week in office, President Trump has issued executive orders and taken other actions with significant implications for the legal community.
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Thank God it’s Friday. I’m exhausted—simply from reading all the news, not even writing about it.
During the first week of his second term, Donald Trump signed a slew of executive orders. On his first day alone, he took more than 200 executive actions, including a record-breaking 42 executive orders and 115 personnel actions.
I can’t cover them all, so I’ve picked out five that are particularly significant for lawyers, in terms of their direct effects on the legal profession (as opposed to orders that raise interesting or important legal issues). This is an admittedly subjective selection, so if I’ve missed one that you want to discuss, please raise it in the comments. And this is a Notice and Comment (N&C) post, so comments are open to all, not just paid subscribers.
1. A hiring freeze.
In an executive order issued on his first day in office, Trump announced “a freeze on the hiring of Federal civilian employees, to be applied throughout the executive branch.” Under the freeze, “no Federal civilian position that is vacant at noon on January 20, 2025, may be filled, and no new position may be created, except as otherwise provided for in this memorandum or other applicable law.”
The order states that it does not apply “to positions related to immigration enforcement, national security, or public safety.” Does this exemption protect the Department of Justice (DOJ), and if so, to what extent? My (admittedly cursory) research didn’t produce a clear answer; if you know, please email me.
Here’s what we do know: it at least includes the DOJ Honors Program. As reported yesterday by Perry Stein and Ann Marimow of The Washington Post, “The Justice Department has abruptly revoked recent job offers for the Attorney General’s Honors Program—a prestigious and competitive opportunity for top law school graduates to work in entry-level positions across the department.”
Recipients of Honors Program offers received a four-sentence form email (which I almost expected to end with a request to send Bitcoin to an offshore account):
Good afternoon:
This email is about your application to the Attorney General’s Honors Program. Pursuant to the hiring freeze announced January 20, 2025, your job offer has been revoked.
We appreciate your interest in employment in the Department of Justice.
This email is for informational purposes only. Please do not reply to this email.
Law students holding job offers from other federal agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Communications Commission, received similar communications rescinding their offers, per Tatyana Monnay of Bloomberg Law.
The freeze is scheduled to last for 90 days, while government officials—including some at the new Department of Government Efficiency, which a different executive order officially brought into the federal government and renamed the “U.S. DOGE Service”—develop a plan to trim the federal workforce. But it’s not clear whether or when the Honors Program will return after the 90-day freeze.
If I were in the shoes of these students, I’d start looking for new employment. But I feel for them because they’re in a tough position: given how far in advance legal employers tend to hire, many of the most desirable jobs starting in fall 2025 have already been filled.
[UPDATE (1/25/2025, 11:02 p.m.): In addition to putting the Honors Program on ice, the DOJ “has withdrawn offers for its volunteer legal internship program, with law students being informed that they would no longer have summer positions,” as reported by Zoe Tillman of Bloomberg News.]
2. DOJ personnel moves.
In other job-related news out of the Department of Justice, the Trump administration removed and reassigned at least 15 top career officials in the DOJ’s national-security and criminal divisions, per The Post. The reassigned officials included George Toscas, a former deputy assistant attorney general (DAAG) in the National Security Division (NSD); Eun Young Choi, another DAAG in the NSD; and Bruce Swartz, a DAAG in the Criminal Division who focused on international affairs.
In addition, the new administration installed acting U.S. attorneys in at least three key districts. The new acting U.S. attorneys include Danielle Sassoon, replacing Ed Kim (S.D.N.Y.); John J. Durham, replacing Carolyn Pokorny (E.D.N.Y.); and Ed Martin, replacing Matthew Graves (D.D.C.). This was, as noted by The New York Times, a break from past practice, under which deputies of the outgoing U.S. attorneys would serve in acting capacities until the arrival of their Senate-confirmed replacements.
The personnel moves, at both Main Justice and in the U.S. Attorney’s offices, likely reflect the Trump administration’s desire to exert as much control, as soon as possible, over operations of the Justice Department. In the first Trump administration, acting attorney general Sally Yates refused to defend his travel ban—and was quickly fired and replaced by an acting attorney general, Dana Boente, who did. This time around, Trump presumably wants to avoid any such issue in the first place.
3. A freeze on civil-rights work.
The Trump administration instituted a “litigation freeze” at the Civil Rights Division (CRD). According to the first of two short memos sent by DOJ chief of staff Chad Mizelle to Kathleen Wolfe, who’s currently leading the CRD, lawyers at the Division cannot file “any new complaints, motions to intervene, agreed-upon remands, amicus briefs, or statements of interest,” while the incoming administration decides whether it wants to open any new cases. A second memo ordered a similar freeze on activity related to consent decrees, which often involve the CRD reaching agreement with a local government entity to address issues such as police abuse or racial bias.
The Civil Rights Division is one of the most politically inflected DOJ components, so its work tends to shift significantly when a Democratic administration is replaced by a Republican one (or vice versa). Trump has nominated Harmeet Dhillon—a prominent Republican lawyer whose firm, Dhillon Law Group, has done work for him and his campaign—to lead the CRD. And under Dhillon, cases focused on, say, the voting rights of racial minorities or police brutality against them are likely to be replaced by cases involving so-called “reverse discrimination,” i.e., discrimination against white individuals, and violations of religious liberties.
4. An order calling for an end to “the weaponization of the federal government.”
In another executive order issued on his first day in office, Trump accused the former administration of engaging in an “unprecedented, third-world weaponization of prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process.” The order then outlined “a process to ensure accountability for the previous administration’s weaponization of the Federal Government against the American people.”
Declaring that it is “the policy of the United States to identify and take appropriate action to correct past misconduct by the Federal Government related to the weaponization of law enforcement,” the order directed the attorney general to review the activities of the DOJ, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over the past four years. The AG must then prepare a report that identifies instances of possible weaponization and provides “recommendations for appropriate remedial actions to be taken.”
The order, per Michael Schmidt and Mark Mazzetti of The Times, suggests that Trump “has every intention to seek out and possibly punish government officials in the Justice Department and America’s intelligence agencies as a way to ‘correct past misconduct’ against him and his supporters.” At her confirmation hearing to serve as attorney general, Pam Bondi largely demurred when asked whether she would prosecute specific officials who have been condemned by Trump. The order could be seen as a directive to Bondi—assuming she’s confirmed, which looks likely—to investigate these Trump antagonists (such as former special counsel Jack Smith).
5. The January 6 pardons.
In the “weaponization” order, Trump complained that “while the Department of Justice has ruthlessly prosecuted more than 1,500 individuals associated with January 6, [it] simultaneously dropped nearly all cases against BLM [Black Lives Matter] rioters.” Consistent with this, as explained by Alan Feuer of The Times, Trump “granted three different types of reprieve on Monday to all of the nearly 1,600 people who faced prosecution for the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021”:
Trump issued formal pardons to hundreds of rioters, convicted of crimes ranging from trespassing and disorderly conduct to assaulting police officers and seditious conspiracy. The pardons effectively erase the convictions of their recipients—including Enrique Tarrio, former leader of the Proud Boys, who was convicted at trial of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to 22 years in prison.
Trump commuted the sentences of 14 members of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers—including Stewart Rhodes, the Yale Law graduate turned Oath Keepers leader. Although their convictions remain on the books, their sentences—such as Rhodes’s 18-year sentence for seditious conspiracy and other charges—are now over. (And they’re probably all free by now, since Trump also directed the Bureau of Prisons to “immediately implement” his clemency grants.)
Trump directed the DOJ to dismiss any criminal indictments still pending against January 6 defendants.
Over the past few years, lawyers and judges have spent countless hours working on January 6-related cases. And while they had to give effect to Trump’s pardons, some judges took the opportunity to criticize the January 6 defendants, the pardons, or both—including Judges Tanya Chutkan, Beryl Howell, and Colleen Kollar-Kotelly (D.D.C.).
There are many other executive orders and actions from this first week with implications for lawyers and the legal community. They include Trump’s birthright-citizenship order—already blocked by at least one federal judge, Judge John C. Coughenour (W.D. Wash.), who called it “blatantly unconstitutional”—and two orders related to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) and affirmative action, titled Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing and Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.
I couldn’t cover all of Trump’s activity here (and neither could Sarah Isgur and David French, in a 90-minute episode of Advisory Opinions, or Josh Barro and Ken White, in a 45-minute episode of Serious Trouble). So please add your own thoughts on law-related orders and actions from Trump’s first week in office—as well as those from former president Joe Biden’s last week in office, including his final pardons—in the comments to this post. To quote Linda Richman (Mike Myers) of Saturday Night Live’s classic “Coffee Talk,” “Discuss amongst yourselves.”
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The last several days have clarified why I’m happy to be an old guy – I won’t be around to see the destruction of the country that has been so good to me.
I’m a “birthright” citizen. My parents emigrated from Canada just before WWII, and I was born before they became naturalized citizens. I was fortunate to contribute to and benefit from what historians will likely view as the apogee of innovation in the United States.
We did the impossible, putting a man on the moon in less than ten years, start to finish. We made incredible advances in medicine, some of which are why I’m alive today. I have more computing power in my Apple watch than was present on the first mainframe I programmed, and we made the Dick Tracy wrist radio a reality. Even when I was in college, no one envisioned the reach of the Internet, for better or worse.
What I fail to understand is why your fellow lawyers are so eager to destroy the country that gave them the opportunity to succeed…and to speak freely.
This isn’t about Trump. He’s the shill, the carny barker. He’s too stupid to realize how he’s being used. The real culprits are behind the scenes.
Your fellow lawyers polished and promoted the careers of the Supreme Court justices who abandoned stare decisis, the foundation principle of common law, and blithely extended the legal convenience that “corporations are people” to enable the wealthy to purchase control of our government.
Your fellow lawyers are the authors of every foolish executive order Trump has issued, some of which may have disastrous consequences for our country.
Don’t be surprised when the puppet masters order Trump to ignore the law. And don’t be surprised when Trump anoints the Proud Boys with police powers; they’ll happily wear jackboots.
Follow the money!
Isn't the creation of federal departments a constitutional prerogative of Congress? Have presidents ever created them by fiat?