After the chief of the attorney general’s Civil Medicaid Fraud Division was forced out last year, two-thirds of attorneys have quit the unit, leaving it at its smallest size since Paxton took office.

For years, an elite team of lawyers at the Texas attorney general’s office went toe-to-toe with some of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world, on a mission to weed out fraud and abuse in the Medicaid system.

And the team was wildly successful, securing positive press for the attorney general’s office and bringing in money for the state — lots of it. In a little more than two decades, the Civil Medicaid Fraud Division has helped recover a whopping $2.6 billion. Of that, $1 billion went to the state’s general fund, which pays for critical services like education and health care.

The cases the team handled weren’t necessarily the kind to rouse the conservative base of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who gained prominence for his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and for regularly suing the Biden administration. But still, they were legal victories Paxton touted amid a host of scandals that have dogged him since he was first elected in 2014.

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But over the last year, the team of lawyers responsible for pursuing this and other big lawsuits like it has shrunk to its smallest size since Paxton took office.

Nearly two-thirds of the lawyers who were on the team a year ago have quit. Despite some replacements, the division is down from 31 attorneys last January to 19 at the beginning of this year, according to an analysis of staffing records by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. Together, those departing lawyers represented a combined 180 years of experience with the attorney general’s office.