Three weeks into Donald Trump’s breakneck effort to remake the federal government, the rapid pace of lawsuits pushing back against his orders — and a number of legal setbacks for the Trump administration — have challenged the Department of Justice, seemingly overwhelming the government lawyers tasked with defending the president in court.

In a court filing Monday night, Justice Department lawyers acknowledged making two significant errors last week during a court hearing about the dismantling of the foreign aid agency USAID. While DOJ attorneys last week claimed that 500 employees at USAID had been put on leave and that only future contracts had been put on pause, more than 2,100 employees had actually been placed on leave while both future and existing contracts were frozen, according to the filing.

“Defendants sincerely regret these inadvertent misstatements based on information provided to counsel immediately prior to the hearing and have made every effort to provide reliable information in the declaration supporting their opposition to a preliminary injunction,” DOJ lawyers wrote to the judge overseeing the case.

During the USAID hearing last week, Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, expressed frustration that the government had not provided him sufficient information.

“I need to know what the government’s official position is right now. What is happening?” Nichols said. “Is the government paying people or not?”

The Trump administration has faced a torrent of lawsuits over the last two weeks, with judges over the last two days blocking them from enforcing a federal buyout program, cutting funding for health research, and removing public health data from government websites.

After a New York judge blocked Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency from accessing Treasury Department records on Saturday, both DOGE head Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance began to publicly float the idea of defying the court orders.

Justice Department representatives did not respond to a request for comment from ABC News.

During a hearing in the Treasury Department case, the DOJ claimed that Marko Elez — a SpaceX employee-turned-DOGE cost-cutter who briefly resigned last week after the Wall Street Journal reported on racist social media posts — was a “special government employee” within the Department of the Treasury.

In a filing Monday, the DOJ corrected themselves to note that Elez was actually a full-fledged Treasury Department employee — a “Special Advisor for Information Technology and Modernization” according to the filing — who is subject to additional ethics requirements.

During a hearing last week on whether the DOJ should be blocked from disseminating a list of federal agents and employees who worked on cases involving the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, a DOJ attorney was unable to say with confidence whether the government might eventually release the list, frustrating the judge overseeing the case.

“You represent the government,” U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb said sternly. “The White House wants this information. Does the government have present intent to publicly release names of FBI agents that worked on Jan. 6 cases?”

“People who have the list don’t have present intent,” replied the attorney, Jeremy Simon, who then had to ask for a series of short recesses as he was pressed to provide answers on the government’s stance.

At one point Simon needed to excuse himself into the hallway to speak by phone with his superiors.

The legal challenges began immediately after Trump ignited his barrage of Day-1 executive orders. During a hearing on the administration’s short-lived federal funding freeze, a DOJ attorney appeared unable to provide a clear answer about the extent of the White House’s new policy.

“It seems like the federal government currently doesn’t actually know the full scope of the programs that are going to be subject to the pause. Is that correct?” U.S. District Judge Loren L. AliKhan asked the attorney.

“I can only speak for myself, which is just based on the limited time frame here, that I do not have a comprehensive list,” replied DOJ lawyer Daniel Schwei. “It just depends.”

And during the first court hearing about Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship, the position of defending Trump’s order put Brett Shumate, the acting assistant attorney general for the DOJ’s civil division, in a federal judge’s firing line.

“In your opinion, is this executive order constitutional?” U.S. District Judge John Coughenour asked Shumate during the hearing.

“Yes, we think it is,” Shumate said, drawing the judge’s rebuke.

“I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar can state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It boggles my mind,” Coughenour said. “Where were the lawyers when this decision was being made?”

A constitutional law expert told ABC News that DOJ attorneys have been rebuked by judges of all stripes.

“They are doing this regardless of geography and regardless of who appointed them,” said Loyola Marymount University law professor Justin Levitt. “So you’ve seen pushback from Reagan appointees, you’ve seen pushback from Bush appointees, you’ve seen pushback from Obama appointees and Trump appointees and Biden appointees, and that’s going to continue.”

Levitt said the results have generally not been in the Trump administration’s favor.

“As far as I can tell, they’re winless in the courts,” he said.