Assistant United States Attorney
attorney employed by the Federal government of the United States and working under the supervision of a United States Attorney
An assistant United States attorney (AUSA) is a career civil servant lawyer in the United States Department of Justice who serves under the United States Attorney for a federal judicial district. AUSAs represent the U.S. federal government in civil and appellate litigation and in federal criminal prosecutions. Those assigned to the criminal section of a U.S. Attorney's Office are commonly known as federal prosecutors.
AUSAs are rarely hired directly out of law school and often have significant experience before entering the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Personnel and duties
AUSAs are career civil servants. In 2008, the U.S. Department of Justice employed approximately 5,800 AUSAs. As of 2022, there were approximately 6,300 AUSAs. The various U.S. Attorney's Offices vary significantly in size and in number of AUSAs employed. For example, approximately 280 AUSAs work at the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California, which covers the Los Angeles area (the largest DOJ office outside Washington). By contrast, approximately 62 AUSAs work at the U.S. Attorney's Office for South Carolina.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Assistant United States Attorney” as attorney employed by the Federal government of the United States and working under the supervision of a United States Attorney. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as attorney employed by the Federal government of the United States and working under the supervision of a United States Attorney. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q48767438. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2008 and 2022.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Assistant United States Attorney”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Assistant United States Attorney primary sources, Assistant United States Attorney archive and Assistant research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Assistant United States Attorney”?
- What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
- Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Assistant United States Attorney” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.