Federal white-collar crime prosecutions generally have fallen both nationally and in Texas over the past three fiscal years, according to U.S. Sentencing Commission data.
A Texas Lawbook review found that for crimes ranging antitrust to tax fraud, the numbers have steadily declined both nationally and in the four judicial districts in Texas.
Extortion and racketeering cases have seen a sharp drop in recent years, with such prosecutions becoming increasingly rare. Tax cases of all sorts have also trended downward, with declines seen across the country.
Environmental prosecutions present a more mixed national picture, dipping before a slight rebound, but in Texas, they have continued to fall.
Paul Coggins, a former U.S. prosecutor for the Northern District of Texas, said that he was troubled by the pattern. “Looking at these numbers, I would say white-collar is being hampered,” said Coggins, who is now a partner at Troutman Pepper Locke in Dallas specializing in white-collar defense.
He was particularly troubled by the drop in federal environmental and tax sentences. “That is a reflection of the EPA in bringing these cases,” Coggins said. “And frankly, a reflection that the IRS has been starved of resources.”
The DOJ has redirected tax investigators and FBI agents from their traditional duties to immigration enforcement, he said.
“It shows this is the golden age of tax fraud. We used to make a lot of tax cases because the [Criminal Investigation Division] was the best in the world at tracking money,” Coggins said. “But they have been starved of funding.”
The DOJ’s ‘Brain Drain’ and Resource Cuts
Former federal prosecutors like Jeff Ansley and Ashlee Martin said the drop-off in white-collar sentences also coincides with the loss of several thousand prosecutors nationwide.
“You’re seeing an incredible brain drain,” said Ansley, with Vedder Price in Dallas. “… From what I’ve seen, I think easily 25 percent of federal prosecutors have left their offices — from Washington, D.C., down to the smallest office in the department.”
The DOJ has not publicly released a definitive attrition rate for prosecutors alone, but reports and watchdog agencies estimate that about 2,800 DOJ attorneys have left. As a result, the number of DOJ attorneys has fallen from about 10,000 to 7,000 — one of the largest declines in several decades.
“In some cases, it’s because they’ve been fired,” Ansley said. “In some cases, because they resigned or retired early, or just left and did something else because they weren’t satisfied with the work they were doing.”
Martin, a partner with Gerger Hennessy Martin & Peterson in Houston, said the “institutional knowledge and expertise” lost because of the exodus of thousands of prosecutors cannot be easily replaced.
“They left,” she said. “So, it will take a long time for someone who hasn’t done these white-collar cases to learn how to do them.”
With the turnover, Martin said, inexperienced prosecutors are more likely to make mistakes in preparing a criminal case, ultimately leading to more dismissals.
“We’re seeing more examples of cases that were not fully investigated before they were brought,” Martin said. “They have not done a thorough review of the evidence during discovery. Things that normally would not meet a federal threshold.”
Ansley said that even simple fraud cases are “at least relatively complex,” he said.
“White-collar prosecutions are also hampered when field agents are assigned elsewhere. Every prosecution begins with the agents,” Ansley said. “The FBI, Postal Inspection Service and IRS. They investigate. … They are the ones who find the evidence.”
“When so many of them have either left or deployed to immigration cases,” Ansley said, “you’re going to see the pipeline of cases that are brought to prosecutors to even consider prosecuting — that’s going to be reduced significantly.”
The decline in white-collar prosecutions has been ongoing.
“No one has emphasized what I would consider traditional white-collar crimes in a long time,” said Matt Orwig, a former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas.
“There have been a lot of cuts in the Department of Justice, except for the border districts,” said Orwig, now retired.
Although the Southern and Western judicial districts of Texas cover the 1,254-mile Texas-Mexico border, Orwig said the Northern and Eastern judicial districts of Texas also are considered border districts.
The Eastern District extends from Beaumont and Tyler to Texarkana and Collin County, including Plano, McKinney and Frisco. The Northern District of Texas includes Dallas, Fort Worth, Lubbock and Amarillo.
Through “cuts by attrition,” he said, all four Texas districts may have lost resources.
Deferred Resignation Program
Many prosecutors also left after receiving an email, known as the “Fork in the Road” memo, by the Office of Personnel Management to roughly 2 million federal civilian employees on Jan. 28, 2025. It offered eligible employees the opportunity to voluntarily resign through a “deferred resignation program.” Employees could choose to resign but continue receiving full pay and benefits through Sept. 30, 2025.
In all, some 154,000 federal employees ultimately accepted deferred resignation or related buyout offers, representing about 6.7 percent of the civilian federal workforce.
“There are people who took this opportunity — this ‘fork in the road’ — to essentially leave the office and continue to get paid for a period of time,” said Andrew S. Robbins, a former federal prosecutor in the Northern District. “Maybe some of those people were leaving regardless, and others may not have, and decided it was a good opportunity. They could leave and put some money in their pocket and go into something different.”
Robbins, now with Vedder Price in Dallas, said he decided to leave the civil division of the Northern District of Texas in November 2025, but struggled with the decision.
Robbins said attorneys in the private sector can make $200,000 plus bonuses in their first year, compared to a federal prosecutor with a starting salary of some $90,000. “There was always a gap, and I think it has become much more dramatic,” he said. “Then layer upon that inflation, growing housing costs and other factors.”
Shifting Enforcement Priorities
Various prosecutors said they struggled as they believed the mission and principles of the DOJ had changed.
Orwig said a Justice Department memorandum by then-U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi in May 2025 highlighted the focus away from white-collar crime prosecution.
The memo — “Focus, Fairness, and Efficiency in the Fight Against White-Collar Crime” — outlined the DOJ’s enforcement priorities and policies of its Criminal Division for prosecuting corporate and white-collar crimes in the new administration.
The memo acknowledged that white-collar crime posed a significant threat to U.S. interests. It added that “unchecked fraud in U.S. markets and government programs robs hardworking Americans and harms the public. …”
But the memo added: “However, overbroad and unchecked corporate and white-collar enforcement burdens U.S. businesses and harms U.S. interests. The vast majority of American businesses are legitimate enterprises working to deliver value for their shareholders and quality products and services for customers.”
The memo said, “Prosecutors must avoid overreach that punishes risk-taking and hinders innovation. For these reasons, the Division’s policies must strike an appropriate balance between the need to effectively identify, investigate, and prosecute corporate and individuals’ criminal wrongdoing while minimizing unnecessary burdens on American enterprise.”
Ansley said he questioned Bondi’s claim that prosecutors overreach. “I think that has happened,” Ansley said. “I’ve seen it happen before, once or twice myself. But it is a statistically irrelevant percentage of cases in which that happens.”
Instead, he said he believed the memo was “code speak” intended to reduce focus on fraud cases and “protect people and companies who are friendly to this administration.”
Coggins said he was concerned that the drop-off in federal white-collar prosecutions in Texas was more troubling than in other states, such as New York. In Texas, he said, county district attorneys rarely handle white-collar prosecutions.
“The DA’s offices in Texas, unlike the New York Manhattan district attorney’s office, do mainly reactive crime: murder, robbery, rape, burglary, theft, those types of crimes,” he said. “That consumes those offices. That means if a white-collar case is going to get worked, it is likely going to get worked in the U.S. attorney’s office. If the U.S. attorney’s offices are not handling much white-collar work, that means nobody is doing it.”