Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free
Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world
US government lawyers are clamouring for jobs at corporate law firms in anticipation of vast cuts to the administrative state under Donald Trump.
Hundreds of employees from agencies including the Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Federal Trade Commission have been sending prospective applications to major firms, their leaders told the Financial Times.
“The last couple of weeks have been chock full of meetings with law firm leaders . . . telling me they are seeing applications from all different agencies,” said Michelle Fivel, a recruiter at Hatch Henderson Fivel, who has also been contacted directly by government employees.
One department chair at a leading New York firm, who asked not to be named, said they were “deluged” by resumes, including from lawyers with decades of government experience.
While such churn is common whenever the White House changes hands, this year’s is higher than average, Fivel and the law firms leaders said.
Political appointees in the upper echelons of critical agencies tend to resign or be forced out under a new administration, but the attempted exodus from government is now extending to career civil servants, the people said, as lawyers expect whole teams to be culled and regulations to be slashed.
The president-elect has vowed to eliminate the Department of Education in its entirety, while his allies have floated the prospect of downsizing the DoJ, closing the FBI and shrinking other agencies.
Elon Musk, who Trump has asked to co-lead an effort to improve government efficiency, has supported his co-chair Vivek Ramaswamy’s plan to fire 75 per cent of the federal workforce, although those previously tasked with slimming down the state are sceptical this can be achieved.
However large the cull ends up being, “it will be an interesting time for the firm to pick up really talented people”, Frank Ryan, chair of DLA Piper, said of the transition period.
Despite Trump’s pledge to cut red tape, “our analysis is that there will be [more] regulation in some segments of the economy”, Ryan added, singling out the administration’s planned tariffs and restrictions to global trade.
Widge Devaney, a former federal prosecutor who leads Baker McKenzie’s North American litigation and government enforcement group, said that after Trump’s initial nomination of controversial former congressman Matt Gaetz as attorney-general, “you saw a bit more concern on what would the change be like” and a hurry by some career lawyers at the DoJ to exit government.
The withdrawal of Gaetz from the process, and Trump’s subsequent nomination of former Florida attorney-general Pam Bondi to the post, has led to “more of a sense of normalism” at the DoJ, he added. “I don’t know if career employees will necessarily be rushing for the door.”
For those who do decide to flee federal agencies, their challenge is that they “are not coming with a ready book of business” common among lawyers already in private practice, Fivel said.
Firms “only have a certain amount of bandwidth” for people coming directly from the government, even though some of them “do have very impressive Rolodexes”, she added.
After a slow few years, dealmaking was also expected to rise sharply under a Trump administration, due to lower interest rates and more favourable tax structures, which could have a knock-on effect on recruitment, Fivel said. “When M&A deal flow picks up, that’s when we really see hiring of all kinds picking up across even all other practice areas.”