The civil tax branch of the Justice Department is hiring again after losing more than a third of its staff amid the Trump administration’s effort to downsize the federal government and revamp the department.
The decades-old DOJ Tax Division split at the end of last year, a move that critics said signaled that tax enforcement wasn’t a priority for the Trump administration.
The Tax Litigation Branch of the Civil Division now has 189 full-time employees, said Joshua Wu, deputy assistant attorney general overseeing civil tax, during a Friday panel at the New York University Tax Controversy Forum in New York.
The branch has 129 trial attorneys and 23 appellate attorneys. The staffing is about 30-40% less than what the civil tax division had at the beginning of 2025, Wu said.
“Our primary goal was, we don’t want to break anything,” Wu said of how DOJ leadership approached the reorganization. “We want the tax folks to be able to continue their mission.”
“I think we’ve largely accomplished that,” he added.
Wu said the branch has about 100 more pending trial cases and 50 more appellate cases than a year ago. In the past two years, cases are becoming more complex and more are going to appellate courts, he said.
The civil tax branch is focused on combating promoters of illegal tax schemes and abusive return preparers, Wu said. Some priorities include syndicated conservation easements and micro-captive insurance cases, which are both clogging Tax Court dockets.
