The Justice Department Offers America’s Least Employable Lawyers $25,000 to Humiliate Themselves In Public

For many law students, working at the Justice Department is the dream—a career goal that requires years of careful planning and comes with no guarantee of success. There are several reasons that ambitious twentysomethings consider these jobs so desirable, which are not mutually exclusive: They offer the chance to prosecute Bad Guys; they involve high-stakes work on cutting-edge legal issues; they come with titles that look cool when printed in the ten-year high school reunion program; and they provide a path to perhaps becoming a BigLaw partner someday, but without having to spend a decade grinding out 2400 billables per year first.

President Donald Trump, who has spent the last year tasking the Justice Department with settling his stupidest, pettiest grievances, has inverted the traditional prestige pyramid in a hurry. Across the country, federal prosecutors have been leaving their posts in droves, concluding that it is better for their careers and/or their souls not to spend their waking hours cranking out randomly capitalized court filings and then helping to disappear noncitizens in the dead of night. In March, the Justice Department quietly relaxed a requirement that newly hired prosecutors have at least one year of legal experience, much to the delight of the least employable dues-paying member of the Federalist Society chapter nearest you.

On Monday, May 4, the DOJ decided to try and juice its application volume with some timely Star Wars-themed content, tweeting out a recruitment ad that, as Joe Patrice points out at Above the Law, appears to have been made by someone who has never actually seen a Star Wars film.

U.S. Attorneys@USAttorneys

Hiring, we are! ⚖️ We need citizens ready to join the Force in pursuit of justice. Great talent, we seek. ✨ USAO.USAJOBS.GOV #MayThe4thBeWithYou

11:35 AM · May 4, 2026 · 71.8K Views

121 Replies · 527 Reposts · 1.6K Likes

In January, the staffing shortages apparently got dire enough that a former Trump DOJ official, Chad Mizelle, urged lawyers who “support President Trump’s anti-crime agenda” and are “interested in becoming an AUSA” to reach out to him, personally, on X. Just like that, what used to be one of the most sought-after jobs in the legal profession was accessible to anyone willing to DM a guy named Chad on a platform flooding the internet with nonconsensual pornography generated by an AI chatbot that occasionally goes by “MechaHitler.”

Alas, Mizelle’s social media overtures were not enough to solve the problem: Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that the DOJ is now advertising signing bonuses of up to $25,000 for new hires in a division that defends, among other things, the Trump administration’s anti-trans and anti-immigrant policy initiatives. Between now and Thanksgiving, lawyers in the Civil Division will also receive “retention incentive bonuses” ranging from $60 to $220 per pay period.

I invite you to consider, for a moment, the implications of the Justice Department’s determination that in order to continue to function (?), it has no choice but to attach five-figure bonuses to jobs for which thousands of lawyers would have crawled over broken glass just a few years ago. If you are a staff attorney at the Robert H. Bork Center For Bringing Back Jim Crow who aspires to make the jump to the public sector, your prospects for success have not been this good since, well, Jim Crow. When the applicant pool is this shallow, it should not be especially difficult for Chad to identify the remaining cohort of people who (1) have a law degree, (2) want a fancy job, and (3) abhor nonwhite people as much as the Big Boss does.

Now, though, the prospect of working as a Trump lawyer is so unappealing—even among those who would otherwise jump at the opportunity—that the administration has to offer the cash equivalent of a brand-new Toyota Corolla in order to (maybe) get butts in seats, and biweekly infusions of gas money in order to (possibly) keep them there, at least until after the November midterms are over.

Candidly, if the powers that be are this desperate, prospective applicants would be smart to hold out for even more money. In a profession that places such a premium on one’s reputation for competence and success, it is no small thing to take a job that entails getting your ass handed to you by annoyed federal judges on a near-daily basis. If Trump is going to ask his employees to publicly humiliate themselves for a living, he is going to have to compensate them for it.

As always, you can find everything we publish at ballsandstrikes.org, or follow us on Bluesky at @ballsandstrikes.org. You can get in touch by emailing us at contact@ballsandstrikes.org. Thanks for reading.

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