The Department of Labor’s top attorney has ordered staff to halt all official engagement with the American Bar Association, citing what he described as the organization’s persistent liberal activism and outsized influence over the legal profession.
In a Monday email, Trump-appointed Solicitor Jonathan Berry instructed the department’s hundreds of attorneys not to use taxpayer funds to participate in ABA events or to use their government titles in connection with the organization, according to a copy of the message reviewed by Fox News Digital.
“The ABA is strategically equivocal about its ideological stance,” Berry wrote. “Equivocal in that the ABA holds itself out as non-ideological at certain times, but takes decidedly radical ideological positions at others.”
The directive marks the latest move by the Trump administration to weaken the ABA’s institutional clout. The organization is the nation’s largest association of lawyers and legal professionals and has long played a central role in shaping legal norms, judicial nominations, and law school accreditation.
The Department of Justice adopted a similar policy last year and cut more than $3 million in federal grants to ABA programs. A federal judge later ruled that the funding termination was unconstitutional. The Federal Trade Commission also severed ties with the ABA’s antitrust arm, arguing that it “promotes the business interests of Big Tech.”
Republicans have long criticized the ABA as a de facto arm of the Democratic Party, arguing that its dominance within the legal establishment disadvantages conservative lawyers and jurists. While the ABA brands itself as the “national voice of the legal profession,” its own website highlights advocacy for “LGBTQ+” initiatives, abortion access, stricter gun control, and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
The organization has also openly opposed President Donald Trump, with its president condemning what he described as the administration’s “wide-scale affronts to the rule of law.”
Beyond public advocacy, the ABA exerts significant behind-the-scenes power. It weighs in on federal judicial nominations, engages in litigation, influences hiring practices across the legal industry, and oversees law school accreditation through one of its arms.
In a major break from decades of precedent, Attorney General Pam Bondi informed the ABA last year that the Department of Justice would no longer provide advance notice of judicial nominees. The change stripped the ABA of its longstanding ability to pre-rate nominees before their names were made public.
Berry acknowledged in his email that Labor Department attorneys can benefit professionally from ABA programs but argued that participation ultimately strengthens an institution he views as fundamentally biased.
“There is genuine benefit to our attorneys engaging with the employer bar in ABA programs, but the benefit genuinely feeds the problem too,” Berry wrote. “Our participation in ‘neutral’ ABA events contributes to institutional stature the ABA leverages to advance radical goals as if they were ‘neutral.’ No more.”
