A political party shift in the White House traditionally doesn’t change much for career government lawyers. But the second President Donald Trump administration issued directives that some lawyers who worked in federal government say they couldn’t follow for ethical reasons.
For some government lawyers, the deferred resignation program offered chances to make lifestyle changes. Others were hit with terminations or layoffs they did not see coming. Six who left federal government during the current administration shared their stories with the ABA Journal.
The U.S. Department of Justice did not respond to ABA Journal interview requests.
BY AMANDA ROBERT
After U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi was sworn in last February, Cheyenne Chambers remembers the incessant chime of emails arriving in her inbox.
Bondi sent a slew of memos to Chambers and other Department of Justice attorneys outlining their new priorities. That included one dated Feb. 5, 2025, directing them to “vigorously [defend] presidential policies and actions against legal challenges on behalf of the United States.” Attorneys who refused to sign a brief or appear in court or advance the department’s work and mission could face discipline or termination, the memo added.
“I immediately thought, ‘This is going to be a problem because I take my oath very seriously,’” says Chambers, who had served as a senior trial attorney in the Employment Litigation Section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division since 2021. “To be put in a corner and told, ‘If you don’t sign something, then you may be disciplined,’ I felt like I had no choice but to look for other employment.”
Chambers, who represented job applicants and employees in workplace discrimination complaints, says she also felt cornered when leadership told her and her colleagues to dismiss certain cases. Those cases mostly involved plaintiffs of color, she adds, noting three cases.
One from Georgia, filed in May 2024, alleged that Cobb County violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act by using a written examination and credit check in its hiring process for firefighters that discriminated against African Americans.
The other two cases were filed in Indiana and Maryland in October 2024 and alleged that the city of South Bend, Indiana, and Maryland State Police, respectively, violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act because their written examinations for hiring police officers discriminated against Black candidates, and their physical fitness tests discriminated against female candidates.
The Justice Department dropped all three cases in February 2025, despite previously announcing a consent decree in the Georgia case and a settlement agreement in the Maryland case.
“It felt like a dark cloud was over the entire office,” says Chambers, who became increasingly stressed because of these directives. She noticed many colleagues had similar reactions; people who once came to work smiling instead walked around with their heads down.
Chambers had decided against participating in President Donald Trump’s administration’s deferred resignation program, which placed eligible federal employees on paid administrative leave until their official resignation on Sept. 30. She wanted to leave of her own accord once she lined up a new position. “Part of me wanted to stay and fight for these cases that the new front office directed us to dismiss willy-nilly, because I knew how much work my colleagues and I put into conducting these investigations and putting these complaints together,” she adds. “It felt wrong to give up.”
But last April, a week after the Justice Department circulated a second round of deferred resignation offers, Chambers changed her mind. The final straw was receiving an email—without her boss’s knowledge—that assigned her to another area of the Civil Rights Division, she says. She took the deferred resignation rather than the new assignment, which she says was probably the goal of the administration.
“I had never experienced such a heightened level of anxiety in the workplace until that moment,” Chambers says. “It just felt like I’m fighting, I’m fighting, I’m fighting, and I’m still feeling the pressure to leave. I remember telling my boss in her office, in tears, ‘I can’t do this anymore. I love being a civil rights attorney. ... But I cannot do what I love to do here.’”
Chambers began her paid administrative leave May 3, 2025. By the end of that month, nearly 250 attorneys had left or planned to leave the Civil Rights Division, National Public Radio reported. This comprised about 70% of its attorneys.
Earlier this year, Chambers returned to Charlotte, North Carolina, where she was a partner at a small civil rights firm before joining the Justice Department. Now, as the head of her own firm, she continues to handle civil rights cases.
“Having the time off, I got centered again, and I started thinking about what I find to be most important with my career,” says Chambers, a 2014 graduate of the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law.
She hopes to eventually become a judge, a plan she has had since taking Advanced Placement government in high school. In 2022, the Charlotte Observer named her as a potential judicial candidate for the federal district court in western North Carolina.
“It was actually amazing because I’m only 36,” Chambers says. “It lets me know that I’m on the right path, and I’m doing what I need to do.”
BY ANNA STOLLEY PERSKY
Jeff Kent chose deferred resignation in April 2025 because it “made sense” for his family. A lawyer in the Defense Office of Hearings and Appeals, part of the U.S. Defense Department, Kent’s last day working for the federal government was May 16, 2025. He got paid until the end of September.
“My wife and I were in a place where we were wondering what we were going to do with the rest of our lives,” says Kent, 45.
Back in Honolulu, where Kent was raised, his father’s health was declining. Kent felt guilty that he wasn’t around to help him or his mother.
Kent had been considering moving back to Hawaii to be near his family. He and his wife had been living with their two young children in Alexandria, Virginia, but his wife was retiring from the Air Force over the summer.
“I thought, ‘Well, maybe this could be an amazing way to transition to Hawaii,’” Kent says. “I was a little worried that it was too good to be true.”
He liked the idea of having a “buffer” of pay while they moved and started looking for jobs.
“Ideology was not our big driver” for signing up for the deferred resignation deal, Kent says. “It was a means to an end.”
The family moved to a Honolulu apartment in July. Kent was able to help care for his father for a few months before he died in early October.
“I was so grateful that I could be here when that happened to help shoulder the load with my brother and my mom,” Kent says.
He started a new job in October as a Hawaii state deputy attorney general in the employment law division, but he left that position four months later as it was not a “good fit” for him.
A film studies major who spent a year in Hollywood, Kent graduated from the William S. Richardson School of Law at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 2007. He worked at legal aid and in public policy, and he met his wife when she was stationed in Hawaii. After they got married, he joined her on assignments. When the couple was in Australia, he found employment as a security clearance investigator for the U.S. State Department and then took other contracting jobs. He joined the U.S. Defense Department in 2019, where he represented the government in security clearance hearings.
Before leaving the government, Kent worked for several months on a detail with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where he helped handle a heavy criminal caseload.
Kent says things have been “very hectic” since moving to the Aloha State.
“There are a lot of adjustments to our new life,” he says. “I’m still kind of shocked we are here, but we were able to balance it all and do what was right for our family.” So far, he adds, “It’s working and has been the right decision.”
BY JULIANNE HILL
Michael Romano is grieving.
After devoting four years to investigating and prosecuting people involved in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Romano says it stings to watch President Donald Trump pardon those he helped convict, including James Mault and Cody Mattice, who were convicted for assaulting law enforcement officers at the Capitol.
“When Jan. 6 happened, I watched it on TV, horrified by what I saw,” Romano says. “I was very afraid that rioters would just leave D.C. and nothing would happen; no prosecutions, no consequences.”
He’d spent 17 years at the Department of Justice, starting as part of its honors program directly out of Washington University School of Law, working for the Tax Division in criminal enforcement. Later, he moved to the U.S. attorney’s office for the District of Columbia.
When the DOJ was looking for people in 2020 to join the Capitol Siege Section, he raised his hand, serving first as a detailee before moving to a deputy chief post.
“We worked really, really hard to charge more than 1,500 people. It was a huge achievement, beyond my wildest expectations,” Romano says. “We did that on behalf of all the citizens of the United States.”
As the 2024 presidential election drew near, Romano grew concerned as Trump downplayed the insurrection on the campaign trail.
“We had all heard the things about his agenda, the retribution that he wanted, the way he felt aggrieved by the Special Counsel’s Office,” he says. “I wasn’t excited about it, frankly.”
When Trump won, Romano reassured himself that he’d lived through several different administrations, including Trump’s first term, and he could continue doing good work.
“I loved my job, and I was trying to adopt an attitude of ‘let’s see how this goes’—even though I imagined there’d be a lot that I don’t like.”
That evaporated on Inauguration Day of 2025 when Trump granted blanket clemency to all the people convicted or awaiting trial for offenses related to Jan. 6. Another memo disbanded Romano’s unit.
Romano wondered what to do. “I basically figured from Inauguration Day on, I needed to look for another job,” he says. “I thought, if I stay, I will be fired or forced to resign or instructed to do something I found unethical. I felt like I was under threat every day, all the time.”
Romano took a pass on the deferred resignation program offered in the early weeks of the new administration.
He watched as Danielle Sassoon, then-acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, resigned after refusing to dismiss the corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Romano’s boss John Keller, then-acting head of the public integrity section, called an emergency staff meeting to announce that he too refused and resigned, Romano says.
After about two months, a co-worker who landed a job at Lichten & Liss-Riordan contacted him about joining. He quit his job at the DOJ, and in April he became of counsel there, working on civil litigation regarding labor and employment disputes.
He says he feels relieved and safe.
“It’s not a place where the administration can do much to me. Maybe I’m naïve,” he adds. “I like the work, the people. It’s meaningful and important. I’m adjusting.”
Still, he fears where the justice system is headed. “I’m worried about autocratic takeover of the system so that the Department of Justice isn’t actually promoting even-handed, fair application of the law for Americans.”
And he mourns the loss of the work he and his DOJ colleagues did on the Jan. 6-related convictions.
“I watched hours and hours and hours of video. They saw themselves as revolutionaries and their cause as just. But any revolutionary has to accept that if the revolution loses, the existing regime sees them as criminals or traitors,” he says. “They obviously didn’t see themselves that way.”
BY JULIANNE HILL
Jen Swedish had her dream job.
For more than 15 years, she served in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, first as a senior trial attorney in the division’s employment litigation section, then as a deputy chief of the 60-person department.
“My job was to help protect state and local government employees and applicants for employment from illegal discrimination at work,” she says. “I loved the job.”
The bulk of her work focused on enforcing Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Over the years, she’d weathered the ups and downs of various administrations, including President Donald Trump’s first term, but she continued to investigate and litigate cases involving the law, which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or
national origin.
“We were able to do good work during the first Trump administration,” she says. “So I naïvely entered the second thinking the same would be true.”
But when Trump returned, the tone changed dramatically.
On Feb. 5, 2025, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued the memo “General Policy Regarding Zealous Advocacy on Behalf of the United States,” which stated that DOJ attorneys must defend the president’s interests against legal challenges. It threatened discipline and even termination for not doing so.
“The traditional separation between the Department of Justice and the White House that had existed since the Watergate era was pretty quickly destroyed,” Swedish says.
Meanwhile, the president issued several executive orders opposed to diversity, equity and inclusion policies, stating they violate the spirit of long-standing federal civil rights laws. One such order from Jan. 21, 2025, ordered agencies to enforce civil rights laws and “combat illegal private-sector DEI programs and policies.”
“It’s chilling to see the transformation of a once-independent Department of Justice into something that is more like the president’s law firm,” Swedish says.
And then in April 2025, a third executive order called “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy” stated that disparate-impact liability is inconsistent with the Constitution.
The barrage damaged morale, Swedish says. The comment by Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, “about putting federal employees in trauma was absolutely accurate. It was an onslaught, chaos,” Swedish says.
A few employees took the first offer for a deferred resignation early in the year. Another was extended in April. With the second offer, the bulk of Swedish’s section ultimately left.
“We were given a message that if you chose to remain in the section rather than taking the deferred resignation program, your job may not be safe,” Swedish says.
Additionally, colleagues were reassigned out of the department and “it sent a very clear message that, sadly, they do not want us here.”
Swedish debated leaving as she headed to spring break with her kids. On that trip, she received a concerning email regarding the mission statement from Harmeet Dhillon, the DOJ’s new assistant attorney general for civil rights.
“This administration started using civil rights laws to go after the marginalized communities that they were meant to help. And that was really disheartening,” Swedish says.
She messaged former colleague Stacey Young, saying she was going to take the deferred resignation program. Young, who started the Justice Connection, a network of department alums who aim to protect and support DOJ nonpartisan workforce members, offered Swedish a job.
“I was thrilled,” Swedish says. She resigned in May, taking a pay cut and walking away from the benefits the federal government provides. “It was essentially a no-brainer.”
Meanwhile, the majority of her section’s colleagues took the deferred resignation.
As deputy director of Justice Connection, Swedish helps provide pro bono representation to current and recent DOJ employees who have been fired, face criminal or congressional investigations, or want to blow the whistle, she says.
“We’re making it clear as possible to the American public what happens when you no longer have an independent Department of Justice,” she says. “We are less safe. We are less secure. Our civil rights laws are going unenforced, and that is a big problem.”
BY ANNA STOLLEY PERSKEY
David H. Wetmore checked his email on Jan. 20, 2025, the day of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, to find his position had been terminated. At the time, he was serving as the chief appellate immigration judge for the Board of Immigration Appeals.
“There was no reason given,” says Wetmore, 50.
Wetmore says he was surprised he and other senior leadership at the Justice Department’s Executive Office of Immigration Review were pushed out of their roles.
“I thought we were doing a great job,” he says. In addition, during the first Trump administration, Wetmore had served as a career employee in the White House and was later appointed chief judge.
Within four months of losing his job, he landed a role as senior counsel at Grossman Young & Hammond, an immigration firm with offices in Silver Spring and Bethesda, Maryland.
Wetmore graduated from the George Washington University Law School in 2002. While in law school, he worked as an intern at the Justice Department, where he was drawn to its “mission to do public good.”
After law school, Wetmore had two federal clerkships and then went on to litigation roles at large law firms like Sidley Austin and Jenner & Block, he found himself drawn back into the idea of government work and being part of a “broader mission.”
In 2009, he moved to the Justice Department’s Office of Immigration Litigation, where he defended the government in appellate proceedings. During Trump’s first administration, Wetmore was detailed to the White House as an adviser to the Domestic Policy Council. He was also detailed to serve as senior counsel to the deputy attorney general and then promoted to associate deputy attorney general.
When he was appointed to be chief appellate immigration judge in May 2020, it was the middle of the pandemic.
“It was possibly the worst time to start a massive new job—when everybody’s at home on computers,” he says.
One thing he noticed right away was that the case files weren’t digitized. Wetmore made it his mission to ensure a transition to a new and streamlined digital system for handling immigration appeals.
“Our guiding principle through all of it was to increase efficiency without sacrificing due process or fundamental fairness,” he says.
Wetmore, who lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and two children, says that “while nobody wants to be unexpectedly out of work,” he had a relatively quick transition into private practice.
Today, he’s handling litigation and appellate cases, including appeals before the Board of Immigration Appeals. He also advises clients on the intersection of criminal and immigration law.
“I love to dig into complicated legal issues,” he says.
BY AMANDA ROBERT
Beth Gellman-Beer was drawn to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights for personal reasons.
Growing up, she had multiple learning disabilities. Her mother, an educator, pushed the school district to provide her with special education services for years. In fourth grade, when Gellman-Beer finally received those services, her teacher teased her in front of her classmates.
“You can imagine how that affects a kid’s psyche and how it affected how my classmates treated me because she was very cruel to me that whole year. It deeply impacted who I am,” says Gellman-Beer, who became a staff attorney in the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights in Philadelphia in 2007.
During her decades of service, she was promoted to supervisory attorney and then chief attorney. In 2022, she became the regional director of the Philadelphia office, where she led a nearly 40-member team in investigating and resolving discrimination complaints in public schools in Pennsylvania and four other states. She also helped instruct schools about their obligations under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other federal nondiscrimination laws.
On March 11, 2025, Gellman-Beer received notice that all Education Department buildings would be closed the next day. She had dinner plans with some co-workers, and despite rumors that mass layoffs were imminent, she didn’t cancel them.
During dinner, Gellman-Beer stepped away to take a call from her union representative, who told her the Education Department had announced a reduction-in-force initiative.
“She started reading off the names, and it was everyone in the office,” Gellman-Beer says. “I went back to the dinner table and told everyone to open their computers. We opened our computers, and the RIF notice was in there.”
“I don’t remember a lot about that night,” she adds. “There were a lot of tears. There were a lot of drinks.”
In the end, the Education Department shuttered seven of the 12 Office for Civil Rights locations. According to ProPublica, nearly 250 union-represented employees in those offices were laid off that day, and in total, nearly 1,300 of the department’s employees lost their jobs.
Gellman-Beer describes feeling “shell-shocked.” She thought her office, which handled a significant number of cases involving antisemitism after Hamas’ attack on Israel in 2023, would be valued by President Donald Trump’s administration.
One Office for Civil Rights investigation in 2024 found the Philadelphia school district failed to protect Jewish students from harassment despite “repeated, extensive notice” that other students, teachers and administrators engaged in ongoing antisemitic behavior. It was alleged that students performed Nazi salutes and drew swastikas on school property, but administrators did not address or even document those incidents, the office said in its resolution letter. As a result of the investigation, the district agreed to provide schoolwide training, improve its process for documenting complaints and issue an anti-harassment statement.
“It was very clear that [the Trump] administration wanted to make antisemitism a priority,” Gellman-Beer says. “I thought, OK, great, we have the expertise to do that. They need us. But that was so naïve.”
Those “horrifying” cases stick with her, Gellman-Beer says. She also won’t forget egregious harassment cases, including one in which a fifth grader sexually harassed and assaulted his classmates. Students reported the incidents, but the school district “swept it under the rug,” she says.
“As we dug into the investigation, we realized it was a really deep, systemic issue, and the remedy that we provided was so significant,” says Gellman-Beer, noting that the office’s resolution letters and agreements also provide guidance to other schools and districts.
Gellman-Beer decided to continue this work, especially as the enforcement of federal civil rights laws in schools is now “entirely contingent upon ZIP code,” she says. In April, she launched Evergreen Education Solutions with her former chief attorney, Amy Niedzalkoski. The consulting firm is based in the Philadelphia area and provides similar services to those offered by the Office for Civil Rights.
Because of ongoing litigation, Gellman-Beer was still on paid administrative leave in December. She was among the laid-off Office for Civil Rights staff members from the Education Department who were asked to return temporarily to help with school discrimination cases earlier in December, but she resigned Jan. 9.
Corrected April 2, 2026, to note that Gellman-Beer was a chief DOE lawyer.
