Recently, a data analysis by The New York Times refreshed the legal community's understanding: under the strong push of the Trump administration, over 10,000 lawyers have been laid off from the US federal government. As of March 2026, approximately 20% have been laid off. This is not merely a personnel adjustment, but a large-scale purge of internal administrative staff.

What are Government Lawyers?

Before discussing this round of layoffs, we need to clarify the difference in the role of "lawyers" within the Chinese and American administrative systems.

In China, we have about 200,000 "public lawyers." But to be honest, most of them are part-time, working in departments like public security, urban management, and natural resources. Essentially, they are administrative law enforcement officers who happen to have obtained a certificate. Their main job is handling the procedural compliance of administrative penalties. Once complex civil lawsuits arise, the government generally chooses to outsource them to law firms.

American government lawyers are completely different. They are core nodes in the administrative process; they are not just the ones fighting lawsuits, but also the gatekeepers of policies. Before any executive order is issued, it must first pass through their hands to check for legal risks.

However, American government lawyers are not all at the federal level. The federal government only has about 44,000 lawyers, accounting for about 20% of the total number of government lawyers nationwide. The real "main force" is at the state and local levels, which combined could number between 180,000 and 200,000 people.

It is worth noting that there is one major characteristic in the composition of American government lawyers: it encompasses all prosecutors and assistant prosecutors. Whether federal or local, all prosecutors must hold a lawyer's license. This is why many people used to joke that the US Department of Justice is actually the world's largest law firm. The reason is simple: the American prosecutorial system falls under the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice.

Why Did the Department of Education Become a Disaster Zone?

To be honest, when I first saw this news, my immediate reaction was that the "Department of Education" on the table stood out glaringly, ranking first in layoffs with a layoff rate reaching 50%.

In my impression, departments like the Ministry of Education manage schools and teachers. They have very few law enforcement matters throughout the year and generally do not have departments like "Regulations Sections" or "Legal Affairs Sections," so where would they need lawyers?

But America has its own national conditions. After checking, I discovered it is truly ridiculous beyond belief (literally: ridiculous mom opening the door for ridiculous—ridiculous to the extreme).

The US Department of Education is absolutely not the "Ministry of Education" as we understand it. It doesn't handle teaching, doesn't compile textbooks, and doesn't even really manage how schools conduct classes. Its biggest chunk of business is: issuing loans. It might be the largest "shadow bank" in the US, holding over $1.6 trillion in student loans.

With this in mind, the Department of Education's lawyers make sense—they are all-in debt collectors engaging in professional collection. Their daily responsibilities involve processing student loan contracts and preventing students from defaulting or going through bankruptcy proceedings.

The reason why the Department of Education's lawyers became a disaster zone for these layoffs lies in a core issue: Trump introduced a new policy, essentially wanting a large number of loans to be directly "voided" or significantly lowering repayment requirements.

However, this kind of policy is almost unworkable in financial law. The lawyers were blocking it, citing legal statutes one by one. Want to forgive debt? According to the Higher Education Act, you, Trump, do not have this power. Want to lower interest rates? That requires Congressional approval.

So, the most direct solution arrived: lay off the lawyers blocking the way, and the path becomes clear.

Interestingly, after the Department of Education laid off staff, the Department of Homeland Security was instead expanding its recruitment of lawyers. The reason is that Trump wants to launch a massive illegal immigrant deportation plan and needs more lawyers to help with the "legwork."

Scraping the Bone to Cure the Poison, or System Collapse?

To be honest, looking at this from a Chinese perspective, laying off this type of Department of Education lawyer does indeed seem like a good thing.

An education department that doesn't focus on learning or helping students, but instead employs countless professional debt collectors studying day and night how to make students repay money—these positions shouldn't exist in the first place.

But the problem is, these layoffs in America weren't fundamentally for social equity, nor for improving efficiency.

It was purely because they were blocking the way. You want to quote legal statutes at me? Fine, I'll fire you, and then no one will be left to recite the legal statutes.

From a results perspective, it did eliminate a bunch of positions that shouldn't exist; but from a motivation perspective, it only wanted to purge dissidents, completely disregarding which positions were reasonable and which were not. Those truly useful lawyers who acted as compliance gatekeepers were cut down just the same.

This has created a situation of "accidental coincidence." Ordinary people see government layoffs and think it is taking a knife to bloated bureaucracy and improving efficiency; in reality, this is just a byproduct of policy gaming. The efficiency improvement is purely coincidental.