The Department of Justice DOJ

The Attorney General came first and the department eighty years later. The Judiciary Act of 1789 created a part-time Attorney General to argue the government's cases before the Supreme Court and give legal opinions to the President, a job Edmund Randolph did from his private law office. As the government grew, its legal work scattered across departments that each hired their own lawyers. The Act of June 22, 1870, created the Department of Justice to consolidate it, placing the Attorney General over a staff of lawyers and, in time, a growing set of federal police.

The department does two very different things. As the nation's law office, it represents the United States in court through the Solicitor General, who handles Supreme Court cases, and the ninety-three U.S. Attorneys, who prosecute federal crimes and defend the government in the district courts. Its litigating divisions specialize: Civil, Criminal, Civil Rights, Antitrust, Tax, Environment and Natural Resources, and National Security. The Office of Legal Counsel writes the binding opinions that tell the executive branch what the law allows. As a law enforcement department, it houses the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the U.S. Marshals, and the Bureau of Prisons.

About 115,000 people work for the department, nearly forty thousand of them in the Bureau of Prisons alone. The Attorney General, seventh in the line of presidential succession, is the only cabinet officer whose title is not Secretary and the only one who leads both a policy department and a prosecutorial agency. That combination gives the office a double character: a member of the President's cabinet who is also expected to enforce the law without regard to the President's interests. The department also runs the immigration courts, the pardon office, and grant programs that fund state and local police.

The question of how independent the Justice Department should be from the White House is as old as the department and sharper than ever. After Watergate, both parties accepted norms limiting contact between the President and prosecutors on specific cases. Those norms, never written into law, have been tested repeatedly since 2017 and openly rejected by critics who argue the department is part of the executive branch and must follow the President's direction. The 2025 firings and reassignments of career prosecutors, the dismissal of cases, and the department's role in investigating the administration's opponents and allies alike made that argument the defining fight over the institution.