While alarm over Trump’s return is widespread throughout the federal bureaucracy, it is perhaps most acute at the Justice Department, which was at the center of many of the major controversies of his first term.

Most of the department’s 115,000 employees were around for those controversies. Critics believed the Trump White House meddled in some of the department’s high-profile prosecutions. Both of Trump’s attorneys general, Jeff Sessions and William Barr, eventually lost the president’s confidence. And his first term ended with a stunning showdown between Trump and nearly all of his DOJ appointees as they resisted his attempts to cling to power.

But department veterans say those events pale in comparison to what they expect when Trump gets a second chance to try to remake the DOJ in his vision. They also know Trump’s anger at the department has only deepened in the past four years as it launched two unprecedented criminal prosecutions against him.

“Many federal employees are terrified that we’ll be replaced with partisan loyalists — not just because our jobs are on the line, but because we know that our democracy and country depend on a government supported by a merit-based, apolitical civil service,” said Stacey Young, a trial attorney in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division who won an award from Barr in 2020 and is president and co-founder of the DOJ Gender Equality Network.

It all adds up to a feeling of trepidation for many of the department’s rank and file.

“We’ve all seen this movie before and it’s going to be worse,” said one former DOJ official who served under Trump and several of his predecessors. “It will be worse. It’s just a question of how much worse it’s going to be.”

Stigma over ties to special counsels

The Justice Department announced Friday that it is ready to process security clearances for incoming Trump personnel. As DOJ officials brace for the arrival of the transition team that will dictate assignments and prepare policy changes, some are fretting about the possibility of being sidelined over ties to the prosecutors most reviled by Trump: special counsels Robert Mueller and Jack Smith.

Mueller, who investigated ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign, left in 2019. Smith, who charged Trump with two federal criminal cases in 2023, is expected to exit before Trump’s inauguration. But what becomes of the lawyers and other staff who worked with them? Some fear being blackballed once Trump takes office.

Most of Mueller’s top deputies have left government or returned to lower-profile jobs. But other lower-ranking lawyers with ties to the Mueller probe remain at the department. Staffers who offered even peripheral or routine assistance to either Mueller’s team or Smith’s team now harbor concerns that they will be frozen out by a president who campaigned on exacting revenge.

Trump’s AG pick could set the tone

With some prominent lawyers in Trump’s camp talking of “gulags” and turning the tables on Smith by prosecuting him for his actions against Trump, it can be difficult to know how much of the anti-DOJ rhetoric is political bravado and how much anyone with authority seriously intends to carry out.

One early indicator of how much disruption Trump plans at the Justice Department will be his attorney general pick. Vice President-elect JD Vance said on the campaign trail that the job will be second only to Trump in significance in the upcoming administration.

Current and former employees said a more conventional pick — like Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) or former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe — would signal more upheaval than eight years ago but perhaps not tectonic changes. A more radical choice — like Ken Paxton, the ultra-conservative Texas attorney general, or Kash Patel, a former Trump National Security Council aide and frequent Trump attack dog — would portend extreme turbulence for the department, the veterans said.

Another decision many will be watching: whether Trump gives a senior DOJ post to Jeffrey Clark. In the weeks after the 2020 election, Trump briefly considered installing Clark as acting attorney general in order to persist in efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s victory. Trump backed off after other Trump DOJ appointees threatened to resign en masse, and Clark has since been indicted in Georgia and faces discipline from the D.C. bar.

“It is absolutely a part of the calculus,” one former senior DOJ official said. “If you have one of these type of extreme candidates … you will see a significant amount of career staff say, ‘I don’t want to be a part of this. This is antithetical to who this department is. I think that will absolutely inform whether or not a good chunk of career staff — whether people stay or go.”

Differing impacts across DOJ divisions

Trump’s impact may be most pronounced in Justice’s National Security Division, which he blames for the Russia-related woes of his first term, as well as places like the Civil Rights Division, long a target of hard-right lawyers closest to Trump.

In other parts of the sprawling department, including those that do mundane, non-ideological legal work, Trump’s changes will be milder or more routine, many department veterans say. For instance, defending the federal government against slip-and-fall claims probably won’t change much under the new Trump administration.

In addition, some parts of the department, like the Environment and Natural Resources Division and the Voting Rights Section, typically see some attrition whenever a Republican administration replaces a Democratic one, because those areas have not typically been Republican priorities.

One place that might not see much change is the Antitrust Division. President Joe Biden’s antitrust enforcers have been extremely aggressive, particularly against the tech industry. Trump’s team sees most of the big tech firms as ideological opponents, something that has prompted a growing number of conservatives to embrace antitrust enforcement. So, lawyers and others in that area may decide to stay put.

“Many of the cases that are now before a judge started under the Trump administration,” the former senior official noted. “Writ large, what we’ve seen take place in that space, in the antitrust space, that’s going to keep going. … I think the ship is going to keep sailing in the right direction.”

Some Trump critics urge career staff to hang on

Many career staff mulling their options have stories from the previous Trump administration of toning down objectionable policies or legal arguments. Now, they are mulling whether such quiet resistance will be possible in the next go ’round.

“You need career people there to make sure that the maniacs in charge just can’t, like, run roughshod over federal laws and DOJ practice,” one current DOJ lawyer said. “I was able to tone down…briefs in a way that people who would have replaced me, would not have.”

Norm Eisen, one of Trump’s most prominent critics in the Washington legal community, strongly urged the Justice Department’s career staff to keep doing their jobs, as long as their personal and family circumstances permit.

“They should absolutely stay,” said Eisen, who served as ethics counsel in President Barack Obama’s White House. “That’s easy for me to say because I don’t have to deal with a boss who’s appointed by Donald Trump every day, but I know from my own experience in government that you can’t just show up and snap your fingers. And the continuity of that career civil service staff will be very, very important to the preservation of the republic.”

Eisen said he also expects the Justice Department’s career staff to be more challenged this time around in large part because Trump now has the experience of his previous four years wrestling with what he derisively branded the “deep state.”

“Donald Trump has learned about how to manage the federal bureaucracy, so, sure, it’s going to be worse,” Eisen said. “But that doesn’t mean it will be easy for him, so I think it will be important for people to stay put.”