The Department of Justice

The FBI is the Justice Department's principal investigative agency, with jurisdiction over federal crimes ranging from terrorism and espionage to public corruption, cybercrime, and organized crime. It also serves as the lead domestic counterintelligence and counterterrorism agency in the country.

Created in 1908 and shaped for nearly five decades by its famously long-serving first director, J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI operates 56 field offices across the United States along with dozens of legal attache offices in U.S. embassies abroad, coordinating investigations that cross both state and international borders.

It has roughly 38,000 employees and about 13,000 sworn special agents. It is both a law enforcement and an intelligence agency, a dual role expanded after the September 11 attacks, when the bureau shifted resources toward preventing terrorism and a 2004 commission criticized its earlier failure to "connect the dots."

Since a 1976 law passed after the Church Committee exposed decades of political surveillance, the director serves a single 10-year term to insulate the office from politics. Two directors have been fired by presidents mid-term: William Sessions in 1993 and James Comey in 2017.

The DEA is the lead federal agency for enforcing controlled substances laws, targeting drug trafficking organizations that manufacture and distribute illegal narcotics, including the fentanyl trafficking networks that have driven record overdose deaths in the United States over the past decade.

Created in 1973 by merging several earlier drug enforcement agencies, the DEA also regulates the legal manufacture and distribution of prescription controlled substances, working with the FDA to prevent diversion of legitimate pharmaceuticals into illegal markets.

The DEA classifies drugs into five "schedules" under the Controlled Substances Act of 1970; marijuana was long Schedule I, the most restrictive tier, even as most states legalized it. A final order effective April 2026 moved FDA-approved marijuana products and state-licensed medical marijuana to Schedule III; other marijuana remains Schedule I while a DEA hearing on broader rescheduling, begun in June 2026, is decided.

U.S. overdose deaths rose above 100,000 a year in the early 2020s, driven largely by illicitly made fentanyl, before beginning to decline. The DEA has roughly 10,000 employees and 200-plus domestic offices plus posts in dozens of countries.

The Bureau of Prisons operates the federal prison system, housing more than 150,000 inmates convicted of federal crimes across more than 120 facilities ranging from minimum-security camps to the supermax facility in Florence, Colorado, which holds some of the country's highest-security inmates.

The bureau has faced sustained scrutiny in recent years over staffing shortages, aging infrastructure, and high-profile security failures, including the 2019 death of Jeffrey Epstein in a federal detention facility, which prompted congressional hearings and internal reforms to suicide-prevention protocols.

Founded in 1930, the bureau is the largest single unit in the department by headcount, with about 35,000 employees. Roughly 45 percent of federal inmates are serving time for drug offenses, a far higher share than in state prisons.

The First Step Act of 2018, a bipartisan law, expanded early-release credits for completing rehabilitation programs, eased some mandatory minimum sentences, and required inmates to be housed closer to home; its implementation has been repeatedly criticized by the department's own inspector general as slow and uneven.

The oldest federal law enforcement agency, created by the Judiciary Act of 1789, the U.S. Marshals Service protects federal courts and judges, apprehends federal fugitives, manages the Witness Security Program (widely known as witness protection), and transports federal prisoners.

Marshals also manage and sell assets seized from criminal enterprises through federal asset forfeiture, and the agency's fugitive task forces work closely with state and local police to track down violent offenders wanted on federal warrants.

Historically, marshals conducted the census through 1870, enforced fugitive-slave laws before the Civil War, and escorted James Meredith and Black students integrating Southern schools in the 1960s. The Witness Security Program has protected more than 19,000 witnesses and family members since 1971, and the service says no participant who followed the rules has been harmed.

The agency has about 5,000 deputy marshals and career employees and also oversees roughly 90 presidentially appointed U.S. Marshals, one for each federal judicial district.

When Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox refused to drop his subpoena for Nixon's White House tapes, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire him. Richardson resigned rather than comply, as did his deputy, before Solicitor General Robert Bork ultimately carried out the firing, in an episode remembered as the Saturday Night Massacre.

The crisis intensified public and congressional pressure that eventually led to Nixon's resignation in 1974, and it remains the historical reference point whenever a president is accused of interfering with an ongoing Justice Department investigation into their own conduct.

The public backlash was immediate: Western Union reported the White House received hundreds of thousands of telegrams in the following days, most opposed. A federal court later ruled the firing illegal, and Nixon was forced to appoint a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, who continued the case.

In July 1974 the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in United States v. Nixon that the president had to turn over the tapes, rejecting an absolute claim of executive privilege. One recording revealed Nixon had approved a cover-up, and he resigned weeks later.

Following the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision striking down school segregation, the Justice Department, particularly after the 1957 Civil Rights Act created its Civil Rights Division, took on the difficult job of enforcing school desegregation orders, sometimes over violent local resistance.

In 1957, the department's enforcement effort culminated in President Eisenhower sending federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas to protect nine Black students integrating Central High School, one of the most visible moments of direct federal intervention in the civil rights era.

In 1962 the department sent hundreds of U.S. Marshals to escort James Meredith as he became the first Black student at the University of Mississippi; a riot that night killed two people and injured hundreds, and federal troops were deployed to restore order.

The Civil Rights Division still enforces the Fair Housing Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the ban on discriminatory policing ("pattern or practice" investigations of police departments), and hate-crime and human-trafficking laws, making it one of the most policy-consequential parts of the department.

The department's special counsel regulations, adopted in 1999 after the earlier independent counsel law expired, have been used in several high-profile investigations into potential wrongdoing connected to sitting or former presidents, giving prosecutors a degree of independence from ordinary department chain of command.

These investigations have repeatedly tested the boundary between prosecutorial independence and presidential authority over the executive branch, a tension inherent in the fact that the Justice Department, unlike some other democracies' justice ministries, sits directly inside the president's own Cabinet.

Under the regulation a special counsel is appointed by the Attorney General, works within the department but with day-to-day autonomy, and can be removed only for cause. Recent examples include Robert Mueller (2017-19, Russian election interference), John Durham (2019-23, review of that investigation's origins), and Jack Smith (2023-25, two cases against former President Trump), as well as counsels examining the handling of classified documents by Presidents Biden and Trump.

Two long-standing Office of Legal Counsel opinions, from 1973 and 2000, conclude that a sitting president cannot be indicted or prosecuted while in office; that position, which no court has ruled on, shaped how several of these investigations were resolved.

The 93 U.S. Attorneys' offices across the country and its territories prosecute the vast majority of federal criminal cases and represent the government in federal civil litigation within their districts, from bank robbery to healthcare fraud to public corruption cases.

U.S. Attorneys are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate for each judicial district, and while they report to the Attorney General, they also exercise substantial independent prosecutorial discretion over which cases to bring within their district.

By custom, U.S. Attorneys resign when a new president of the other party takes office, and the incoming administration nominates replacements; interim appointments can be made by the Attorney General or, after 120 days, by the local federal district court. The offices handle roughly 60,000 to 70,000 federal criminal defendants a year.

Some districts wield outsized influence: the Southern District of New York, covering Wall Street, handles a large share of major financial-crime and public-corruption cases and has a tradition of guarding its independence, while border districts in Texas and Arizona carry enormous immigration caseloads.

The Antitrust Division enforces federal laws against anticompetitive business practices, including price-fixing conspiracies and mergers that would substantially reduce competition, working alongside the Federal Trade Commission, which shares jurisdiction over much of federal antitrust enforcement.

The division has brought landmark cases against dominant firms across multiple industries over the decades, from the 1980s breakup of AT&T's telephone monopoly to more recent litigation challenging the market power of major technology platforms.

Its authority rests on the Sherman Act of 1890 and the Clayton Act of 1914. Historic cases include the 1911 breakup of Standard Oil and a decades-long case against IBM that was dropped in 1982; in 2000 a court ordered Microsoft split in two, though an appeals court reversed the remedy and the case settled.

In the 2020s the division and the FTC won a 2024 ruling that Google had illegally monopolized internet search, and both agencies issued tougher merger guidelines in 2023. Criminal antitrust violations, chiefly bid-rigging and price-fixing cartels, can carry prison time for executives.

Established after passage of the Violence Against Women Act in 1994, this office administers grant programs that fund domestic violence shelters, law enforcement training, and legal assistance for survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking across the country.

The office has distributed billions of dollars in grants since its creation, and the underlying law it administers has been reauthorized by Congress multiple times, most recently in 2022, generally with substantial bipartisan support.

The original 1994 law also created the National Domestic Violence Hotline and made it a federal crime to cross state lines to commit domestic violence or violate a protective order. A 2013 reauthorization extended protections to LGBTQ survivors and, controversially, restored limited tribal-court jurisdiction over non-Native abusers on reservations.

The 2022 reauthorization added funding for restorative-justice and prevention programs and left the so-called "boyfriend loophole" to the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which partially closed it three months later; it also reauthorized the office's roughly two dozen grant programs, which fund thousands of local organizations.

The Civil Rights Division and FBI jointly track and prosecute federal hate crimes, offenses motivated by bias against a victim's race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or disability, under federal statutes including the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009.

The FBI's annual hate crime statistics report, compiled from data voluntarily submitted by thousands of state and local law enforcement agencies, is the most widely cited national dataset tracking these offenses, though researchers note it likely undercounts actual incidents due to inconsistent local reporting.

The 2009 Shepard-Byrd Act was the first federal law to cover crimes based on sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or disability, and it removed an earlier requirement that the victim have been engaged in a federally protected activity such as voting or attending school.

Federal hate-crime prosecutions are relatively few, on the order of a couple dozen a year, because most such crimes are charged by states; the department typically steps in for the most serious cases or where local authorities decline, as it did in prosecuting the killers of Ahmaud Arbery and the gunman in the 2015 Charleston church shooting.