Politics

The DOJ’s Misconduct Office Lost Half Its Staff While Complaints Hit a 20-Year High

By Mike Harper · August 6, 2026

The office that polices the Justice Department shrank from 29 employees to 16. In the same period, complaints about government lawyers hit their highest level in two decades.

A Reuters investigation published Wednesday found that the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility opened just seven new investigations during the 2025 fiscal year — the lowest number in 20 years — even as it received 1,666 complaints, the most in any year since 2005.

The office, which investigates allegations of misconduct by DOJ attorneys, has lost nearly half its workforce since Trump returned to office. Many employees retired or accepted buyout offers the administration extended to shrink the federal workforce. The administration also fired the office’s director, Jeffrey Ragsdale, and has not named a replacement.

“It sends a message to the workforce that ethics is not important or that ethics is subordinate to the wills or interests of the political administration.” Benjamin Grimes, a former DOJ ethics official now at Columbia Law School, said.

The separate Office of Inspector General, which investigates broader misconduct across the department, lost 99 employees since Biden left office — reducing its staff to 477. A former official who left the IG’s office late last year told Reuters it had begun avoiding “the high-profile stuff.”

The watchdog decline comes as federal judges have increasingly called out government attorneys for alleged misconduct in court. One judge found what he described as a disturbing pattern of DOJ errors in the prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey, including improper evidence handling and fundamental misstatements of the law to a grand jury. Other judges have accused government lawyers of making false representations in immigration and civil rights cases.

In one case Reuters examined, OPR investigators had interviewed former Special Counsel Jack Smith by last spring and expected to complete a probe into his conduct by summer 2025. A year later, the investigation remains unfinished. One person familiar with the matter told Reuters that political appointees asked for the probe to be suspended. The department has since opened a separate criminal investigation into Smith, who denies wrongdoing.

The pattern is straightforward: the number of complaints is rising, the number of investigators is falling, and the investigations that do exist are stalling. The government watchdogs tasked with ensuring DOJ attorneys follow the law are, as one former official put it, “afraid of doing any watching.”