DOJ Rolls Out A Case Quota For The Prosecutors It Hasn’t Lost Yet

At this point, the Department of Justice’s staffing crisis has its own expanding series of soap opera subplots. There were the emergency jump teams, rotating AUSAs in from all 93 US Attorney’s offices to plug holes wherever the latest self-inflicted crisis erupted. There was the suspension of the one-year experience requirement for new prosecutors, because apparently the department decided actual legal experience was the real barrier to hiring. There were the $25,000 signing bonuses, the “forward this to a friend” referral emails, and the begging for AUSAs on Twitter like the department was trying to fill out a kickball roster rather than staff the nation’s top law enforcement agency. All of it in service of papering over what the New York Times eventually put hard numbers behind: DOJ has shed 21 percent of its attorneys, more than 2,600 lawyers, in 16 months.

Now, per Bloomberg Law, Main Justice has found a new lever to pull. Instead of addressing why lawyers keep leaving, the DOJ will just mandate quotas for those who stay.

The deputy attorney general’s office communicated the “25 open matters” threshold to all 93 US attorneys in recent weeks, with an emphasis on driving up public safety and fraud statistics, said four people familiar with the shift.

A formal policy is still “under development,” which is a generous way of describing a rule that already has DOJ leadership in Washington data-mining the case management system to identify which prosecutors aren’t hitting the number, with no enforcement mechanism yet attached. Just the quiet menace of Main Justice watching the dashboard.

Department spokesperson Kiersten Pels was not shy about the framing, telling Bloomberg that “hundreds of AUSAs around the country routinely juggle 100+ open matters,” and that 25 is “the bare minimum,” with the expectation “much higher.” Which is true, as far as it goes — the prosecutors handling routine gun and drug cases blow past 25 without breaking a sweat. It’s also true that plenty of prosecutors are not doing that, because they are three months deep into a single complex white-collar or national security investigation that occupies their entire workload, or because their district covers Indian country or a military base where case flow doesn’t behave like it does in high density areas. A national quota applied uniformly from Manhattan to Guam does not know the difference, and Main Justice does not seem especially interested in learning it.

Former DOJ official Mark Yancey put it plainly to Bloomberg, “I don’t like the idea of putting quotas on prosecutors. I did not want prosecutors to feel pressure to bring cases they shouldn’t bring where the evidence wasn’t sufficient, just to meet a quota.” Pels’s rebuttal is that the policy “will not result in charging bad cases” and will instead just push out “low productivity AUSAs” in favor of “patriotic AUSAs” who will send “terrible criminals to federal prison.”

We’ve already spent a year watching what happens when this DOJ leans on prosecutors to hit political targets instead of legal ones, watching career prosecutors get pushed out for refusing to indict on flimsy theories, watching grand juries hand back no-bill after no-bill on cases that never should have been presented in the first place. Add a raw numeric quota to that environment and the incentive is obvious: charge something, anything, to keep the dashboard green.

And this is all happening on top of a workforce that is, by the department’s own numbers, running on fumes. This is the same DOJ where a line attorney asked a federal judge to hold her in contempt so she could get 24 hours of sleep, telling him flatly that “the system sucks, this job sucks.” Telling the survivors of a 21 percent attrition wave that there’s a new quota in town, with Washington watching the numbers roll in, is not a productivity plan, it’s a pressure test on people who are already at their limit.