Reuters documented at least 470 people, organizations and institutions targeted for retribution since Trump took office in January 2025, “an average of more than one a day.” The count excludes foreign individuals, institutions and governments, as well as federal employees dismissed as part of force reductions. Reuters reached out to every person and institution that Trump or his subordinates singled out publicly for retribution and reviewed hundreds of official orders, directives and public records, calling the result “the most comprehensive accounting yet of his campaign of payback.”
Reuters identified two broad groups. At least 247 individuals and entities were singled out by name, either publicly by Trump and his appointees or later in government memos, legal filings or other records. Another 224 people were caught up in broader retribution efforts without being named individually; nearly 100 of them were prosecutors and FBI agents fired or forced to retire, and the rest were civil servants, most of them suspended for publicly opposing administration policies. The most common form of retribution was punitive acts such as firings, suspensions, investigations and the revocation of security clearances: Reuters found at least 462 such cases, including the dismissal of at least 128 federal workers and officials.
Reuters also found that at least 17 of the 60 people FBI Director Kash Patel named in his 2023 book “Government Gangsters” as members of an “Executive Branch deep state” have faced some sort of retribution. Patel denied at his 2025 confirmation hearing that the list was an “enemies list.” According to 13 political scientists and legal scholars interviewed by Reuters, the scale and systematic nature of the effort “mark a sharp break from long-standing norms in U.S. governance.”
The reporting series won Reuters the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, which Reuters described as stories on Trump's “campaign of political retribution.”
Correction (October 14, 2026): This entry previously described all 247 named targets as individuals; Reuters counted “at least 247 individuals and entities.” It described the 224 as swept up in “broader crackdowns against institutions and organizations”; Reuters says they are people, mostly prosecutors, FBI agents and civil servants, caught up in broader retribution efforts against groups of perceived opponents. It called the 60 people Patel named his personal “enemies list”; they are people he named in his 2023 book as an “Executive Branch deep state,” and Patel has denied it is an enemies list. Sentences calling the campaign “an unprecedented use of presidential power” and a “government-wide apparatus of retribution operating at the direction of the president” have been replaced with the characterization Reuters reported, because no cited source used those phrases.