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.
There are also a number of new philanthropic initiatives that link feds with free legal help. “The federal sector labor bar is very small, just a handful of firms concentrated in D.C. even though federal sector workers are for the most part not in the DMV,” said Deborah Greenfield, the executive director of Rise Up: Federal Workers Legal Defense Network, launched earlier this year by a coalition of labor unions. “They’re absolutely swamped.”
Every lawyer has a colorful story about a firing booboo: The plaintiff in the NOAA case who had probationary status merely because she had just gotten a promotion; the workaday employees whose dismissals were based on errors in their resumes or job descriptions. “The injustice that’s going on is unbelievable,” said Greg Pinto, Hicks’ co-founder at the firm they’re calling DC Law Collective.
The work, though, isn’t always just about litigating terminations. In serving people cast out of what many had assumed would be career-long vocations, lawyers also find themselves playing job-hunt advisor, financial strategist and psychologist. Living in a region built on a bedrock of stable federal jobs, D.C.-area feds are particularly ill-equipped for the turmoil that hits private-sector industries more often.
As the lion’s share of federal reductions in force have yet to happen, the sorts of reactions the employment lawyers are seeing also offers an early sense of what the capital may experience as the Trump job cuts go into full effect. Right now, a reported 154,000 departing feds are still being paid under the fork-in-the-road deferred resignation plan. But that will end next month.
“I kind of expected more anger and was surprised that it was more just a deep, deep sadness,” said Jessica Samuels, a former Justice Department litigator who now working with Bailey on class-action suits on behalf of employees ousted from the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “There’s a deep grief on behalf of these people who have poured their heart and soul into these careers that aren’t going to be there anymore.”
That’s a feeling that will be familiar in parts of the country where once-robust manufacturing industries cratered in the late 20th century. Since cities like Washington prospered even as the rust belt struggled, there likely won’t be a lot of sympathy for people going through the same thing.
Another cohort wonders whether they should even push back. “There’s a very destructive thing where a lot of people are saying, ‘Do I really want my job back?,’ which is really what [administration leaders] want,” said Greenfield. She said she counsels against this because she thinks the chaotic terminations often mean people have pretty good cases if they want to be reinstated.
All the same, Rapp-Tully, who’s been in the field awhile, cautions against thinking of the administration as a gang who can’t shoot straight.
“What I thought months ago is we would see a huge influx of RIFs, quickly done and with a lot of error,” she said. “Instead, we saw two rounds of the [deferred resignation program]. We saw many emails that said ‘RIFs are coming, resign now, get out. But if you’re looking at the whole federal government, there are not a lot of actual RIFs, which tells me that the administration is aware that these are things that get litigated. … They keep telling us it's coming, but not every agency has had one yet. That tells me that many agencies are taking that into consideration and trying to work through that process.”
Which isn’t to say there won’t be grounds to litigate when the biggest RIFs come.
“It's a very complicated process,” Rapp-Tully said. “So even when you are trying to do it correctly, there still are many opportunities to make mistakes.”
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