Congress Stopped Paying the Government's Own Defense Lawyers. Fixing It Cost $315 Million.

The Sixth Amendment obligates the federal government to provide a lawyer to anyone it prosecutes who cannot afford one.▸ It does not obligate Congress to fund that lawyer on time. On July 3, 2025 — with three months left in the fiscal year — the money to pay Criminal Justice Act (CJA) panel attorneys ran out, and the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts said so plainly: private lawyers appointed to defend indigent clients in federal court would not be paid for the work until October 1. More than 12,000 private panel attorneys take CJA assignments nationwide, 85% of them solo practitioners or at small firms, and together they handle roughly 40% of federal cases with publicly financed defense — over 90% of all federal criminal defendants rely on some form of appointed counsel. The freeze wasn't a computer glitch. It was the arithmetic of a judiciary budget held flat at the FY2024 level for a second consecutive year running into a Defender Services account that, unlike most government line items, cannot simply defer its bills without someone going unpaid for finished work.

The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts' own FY2026 budget summary lays out, line by line, what it took to move Defender Services from its FY2025 enacted level of $1,450.68 million to its FY2026 request of $1,766.01 million — a $315.3 million, 21.7% increase that subsequent reporting on the enacted compromise spending bill shows Congress funded essentially as requested.▸ Two of those line items are identical, twinned, and tell the real story: $92.6 million to "restore" the base funding panel attorneys actually need, and another $92.6 million to repay the specific vouchers deferred out of FY2025. Combined, $185.2 million — 59% of the entire FY2026 increase — exists solely to undo a hole the government dug in the previous fiscal year. Everything else in the request (pay adjustments, inflation, caseload growth, a shrinking carryforward cushion, and new positions) is ordinary budget growth.

Read the other way, the same document shows a budget that quietly reclassified how it pays its own lawyers.▸ In the FY2026 request, spending on "contractual services" — the category that includes panel attorney payments — jumps from $460.2 million enacted in FY2025 to $677.7 million requested for FY2026, the single largest dollar increase in any obligation category, larger even than the raise in compensation and benefits for the salaried Federal Defender organizations that make up the other half of the system.

The final number understates how bad this nearly got.▸ By mid-September 2025, the Judicial Conference was told that $76 million in panel-attorney reimbursements had already gone unpaid, and that the House's FY2026 appropriations proposal — a $120 million increase over FY2025 — still landed $196 million short of what the judiciary said it needed. At that funding level, the Defender Services program warned it would have to defer panel attorney payments for 77 days beginning around June 11, 2026, the longest deferral in the program's history, and shed more than 600 positions from federal defender offices already under a hiring freeze. None of that happened. The compromise spending bill that emerged in January 2026 funded Defender Services close to the full request, and by May 2026, panel attorneys nationwide had received full compensation with no deferral anticipated for the rest of the fiscal year.

The one number that barely moved is the one a defendant's lawyer actually takes home.▸ Effective January 1, 2026, the CJA hourly rate rose from $175 to $177 for non-capital cases and from $223 to $226 for capital cases — a roughly 1% cost-of-living adjustment, set by statute and unrelated to the funding fight. The program's budget grew 21.7%. The pay of the person doing the work grew about 1%. The increase bought back the government's ability to pay its bills on time; it did not raise what those bills are worth per hour.

Dollar figures for the FY2026 build-up and category obligations come from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts' own April 2025 Congressional Budget Summary, which frames FY2026 as a request; secondary reporting cited below confirms Congress funded Defender Services close to that request when the FY2026 appropriations act was finally enacted in early 2026.