The Trump administration has cut more than 4,000 employees from some of the nation’s top law-enforcement agencies even as it has pledged to get tough on crime, according to U.S. Justice Department records obtained by Reuters.

Records obtained via a FOIA request from the department’s management unit show the FBI has lost more than 7 percent of its workforce since fiscal year 2024, a reduction of roughly 2,600 people. Reuters reported Thursday. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) shed about 6 percent of its staff, while the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives lost approximately 14 percent of its workers.

The cuts run deeper in other parts of the department. The National Security Division, which handles intelligence and terrorism matters, lost nearly 38 percent of its staff. The division’s most recent budget request to Congress cited “unprecedented personnel constraints” in the unit responsible for espionage and sensitive military technology export cases, Reuters said. 

The department’s Civil Rights Division lost more than half its staff. The section handling environmental law shed about a third. The Bureau of Prisons lost more than 2,200 employees, or roughly 6 percent of its workforce, even as the federal inmate population has remained largely unchanged. A prison official told Reuters that some guard posts have gone empty while teachers and nurses have been pulled from their regular duties to fill gaps.

Altogether, the Justice Department now employs around 107,000 people, roughly 11,200 fewer than during the fiscal year that ended three months before Trump began his second term in January 2025. About 7,000 positions remain unfilled, according to records cited in the report. 

“The administration talks a big game when it comes to crime and terrorism, but the fact that it’s hollowing out agencies tasked with addressing them shows that they don’t stand behind their words,” Stacey Young, a former Justice Department lawyer who now leads Justice Connection, told Reuters. 

The cuts have had measurable operational consequences. Federal prosecutions for drug trafficking dropped to their lowest level in more than two decades last year, and the pace of such cases has fallen further still in 2025, Reuters found after reviewing millions of federal court dockets.

The reductions stand in contrast to immigration enforcement, one of the few corners of the federal government that has received a significant funding increase under the Trump administration as it has pressed to accelerate deportations.