WASHINGTON, D.C. (POLITICO) — As the Donald Trump administration ramps up the mass-firings of public servants, it’s not a great time to be looking for work in Washington — unless you’re an attorney who defends public servants against mass firings.
In that case, the job market is red-hot: Openings for employment lawyers are up by four to five times compared to the first half of 2024, according to Amy Savage, a legal recruiter and expert on the ebbs and flows of legal hiring in the capital.
“There are a large number of firms known for representing federal employees who are looking for talent right now,” Savage said. “It’s a very busy time.”
It’s an exception that proves the rule in a region reeling from unprecedented federal cutbacks.
D.C.’s chief financial officer has projected a multi-year loss of 40,000 jobs — a fifth of the 200,000 federal positions currently based inside the city limits. The dynamic has already glutted the market with international-aid specialists, environmental-regulation experts and education-grant administrators — the sort of highly-skilled, narrow expertise that abounds in the public sector.
But now the sheer scale of the cuts means a lot of those folks are going to be seeking yet another type of obscure Washington expert: The specialist in the intricacies of the Merit Systems Protection Board, the body that’s supposed to protect the federal workforce against illegal or political firings. Some of the lawyers jumping into the fray are doing it in order to stick it to the Trump administration. Others are interested for a more old-fashioned reason: It’s where the business is.
“Obviously there’s a tremendous demand,” said Pamela Hicks, a longtime federal lawyer who this year hung out a shingle for a new firm built around representing feds against their bosses. “And it’s a demand that’s being outpaced by the supply of people who’ve been wrongfully terminated, demoted, transferred, harassed, targeted, pick your word.”
Hicks is an interesting case. A former chief counsel of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, she had a 23-year Department of Justice career that included senior jobs like head of the department’s money laundering and forfeiture bureau. It’s a CV that could fetch a big payday at a corporate law firm representing businesses on the wrong side of DOJ investigations.
Instead of doing that, Hicks, who herself was ousted by the Trump administration shortly after the inauguration, said she wasn’t interested in big law. “It just didn’t speak to me the way trying to protect the federal workforce and my former colleagues and serving the American public did,” she told me. But Hicks also figures that this particular form of idealism would not have led to all that many clients at a different moment in history.
As it happens, she’s hardly the only ex-fed to set up shop representing government employees caught up in the Trump-era downsizing. “The scale is unprecedented,” said Clayton Bailey, a former Justice Department litigator who launched a firm this spring that brings class-action suits on behalf of federal workers. “There are things about the area that make it difficult to litigate in, and we thought we could bring sort of an interesting new litigation perspective to the problem as a whole.”
The established players in the formerly quiet field of federal employment law are also seeing a spike in business. “We’ve been very very busy since January,” said Stephanie Rapp-Tully, who has handled employment cases for a decade. She said that some weeks in 2025, she’s had double the hours she did a year earlier. “There were months, and I’m still going through it, where I feel like I didn’t sleep. I’ve never stopped working.”
Rapp-Tully said she’s also seen a spike in interest from job-seekers, motivated by wanting to be where the action is in a newly newsy sector. A lot of the recent entrants are themselves former federal attorneys who until recently may have been on the other side of employment cases. The firm has just taken in its largest-ever class of summer law clerks coming out of law school.
In a District where the unemployment rate eclipses all fifty states, it’s not universally bad for job seekers. Savage, the legal recruiter, said plenty of sectors of law are still holding their own, even if reduced Trump administration prosecutions have lessened demand for some white-collar defense specialties.
But the particular surge in this one sector of the law is a bit like how soup-kitchen employment grew like gangbusters during the Great Depression. In the process, it provides an early glimpse of the scale of job losses. According to the dozen or so employment attorneys I spoke with, a lot of their calls are from people who remain employed but are worried about getting their documentation together before the axe falls.
