Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

17. Department of Justice · Minor

Discipline attorneys who pursue litigation contrary to the President's agenda

Attempted

559 17. Department of Justice

“Ensure that, consistent with this principle, the department’s leadership is prepared to impose appropriate disciplinary action as circumstances arise.”

What has happened

  1. Attempted

    The zealous-advocacy memorandum states the policy: an attorney who because of personal political views declines to sign a brief or appear in court, refuses to advance good-faith arguments on behalf of the Administration, or otherwise delays or impedes the department's mission "will be subject to discipline and potentially termination". A stated consequence, with nothing yet imposed under it. No allowlisted record shows discipline of a line attorney for litigation contrary to the President's agenda, and the Office of Professional Responsibility's own record now bounds that (read-queue ticket 07, 2026-09-06). OPR's FY 2025 Annual Report, covering 2024-10-01 to 2025-09-30 and so the first eight months under the memorandum, records 10 completed investigations and 41 completed inquiries, with the allegations "ranging from lack of candor, misleading the court, failure to report misconduct, conflict of interest, failure to comply with Department rules, and abuse of prosecutorial authority" — the words "zealous", "political", "agenda", "President" and "decline" appear nowhere in its 1,881 lines. OPR's published investigative summaries say the same case by case: ten matters listed for 2025 and three for 2026, every one a conflict of interest, a candor or disclosure failure, a policy or plea-agreement breach or an improper closing argument. Not one is an attorney declining to sign a brief, refusing to appear, or refusing to advance the Administration's arguments. **How far that reaches:** OPR investigates professional misconduct, so this is a strong negative about ethics discipline and a weak one about ordinary personnel action, which a component could take without publishing anything. Nothing in the published record fills that gap in either direction. The one published personnel action arising from the department's reviews — against those responsible for the FACE Act prosecutions, announced 2026-04-14 — was for prosecutorial misconduct, not for declining to advance the Administration's arguments; and the department's other move on attorney discipline ran the opposite way, proposing a rule in March 2026 to interpose departmental review before a state bar may investigate its lawyers.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

Attempted rather than partial: the memorandum is a directive with no documented effect on this ask. The FACE Act personnel action and the bar-complaint rule are attached because they are the nearest things on the record and neither is this ask.

  • The Office of Professional Responsibility’s reports (reviewed 2026-09-06). justice.gov opens normally; only its search engine, search.justice.gov, could not be used. The addresses justice.gov/opr/annual-reports and justice.gov/opr/reports do not exist; the reports are at justice.gov/opr/opr-annual-reports (FY 2005 through FY 2025) and justice.gov/opr/investigative-summaries (case-by-case summaries by year, 2026 back to 2003). The FY 2026 report is not out — the annual-report page was last updated 2026-05-01 and stops at FY 2025 — so the last twelve months of the window are covered only by the investigative summaries, which carry three 2026 matters.
  • Read but not written as Evidence: OPR reports its FY 2025 misconduct finding rate as 90 per cent of the ten investigations, and separately notes a proposal to change OPR’s jurisdiction. Neither bears on this Quote.
Action
other
Object
discipline of DOJ line attorneys
ID
1560