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I've seen postings for jobs working for a government agency (like Social Security, Environment, etc), but out of a US Attorney office. Does anyone have any insight into these types of jobs? They're described as special assistant US attorneys and seems like they work closely with the USAO, but are employees of another agency. Pay seems to be on par with USAO.

SAUSA jobs are usually temporary details (usually 6 months, 1 year at most) from other agencies for their attorneys to get direct litigation experience. These aren't jobs that you can apply to unless you already work for the federal government (except for the SAUSA positions that are unpaid, but those are different than what you're describing).

They're not always temporary - both offices I've worked in have had essentially permanent SAUSAs hanging out from other agencies. So while the internal detail is definitely one kind of SAUSA, you could see a job posting for this kind of gig.

Basically they're like employees of the USAO but they do only one kind of case related to their home agency - like social security fraud for the SSA or certain categories of illegal re entries for CBP. So they tend to have a much narrower caseload than your average AUSA, and I'm sure they have obligations and connections of some kind to their home agency. They're technically supervised through the USAO but the home agency probably sets prosecution priorities. I think the biggest issue is whether you'd go nuts doing (say) the same kind of routine SSA fraud cases every day, because often the caseload is very repetitive with not a lot of variety. And you're not going to work with other AUSAs on general crime stuff.

OP: Thanks, that's what I was envisioning. Sounds like a pretty decent gig- if you find the cases interesting enough

Some of the agency SAUSAs at my office end up doing a lot of non-agency cases too. They generally fall into two camps: (1) those that do everything their agency wants PLUS their more interesting cases on the side, and (2) those that blow off agency cases (at least for some period of time) while they're busy on other litigation or investigations.

One person in camp 2 has told me that he's been expecting his employing agency to ask why he isn't doing more of what he's supposed to be doing, but it never does---perhaps because his USAO supervisors really appreciate the other work he's doing and make that clear to the agency.