Congress will fund the courts it has. It won't create the judges it needs.

Money and judges are appropriated by two different mechanisms, and only one of them is working.▸ Congress can raise the judiciary's operating budget with a line in an appropriations bill, and mostly does. Creating a new judgeship requires a separate act of Congress — and the last one Congress actually passed for its own courts, in full, was in 1990. Everything since has been attempted and stalled, including the bill sitting in committee right now.

The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts' FY2026 Congressional Budget Summary requests $10.3 billion total ($9.4 billion discretionary plus $872.4 million in mandatory retirement obligations) to run the federal judicial branch for the year — a 9.3% increase over the FY2025 enacted level, most of it just absorbing pay raises, inflation, and deferred maintenance after what the AO itself calls a second straight "hard freeze" year.

Two-thirds of the money — $6.9 billion — pays for the courts' own salaries and expenses: clerks, probation and pretrial services, courtroom IT.▸ Another $1.8 billion funds Defender Services, the lawyers appointed under the Sixth Amendment to represent defendants who can't afford one. Not one line in that budget can buy a new judge. Judgeships aren't a budget item; they're a headcount set by statute, and the statute hasn't kept pace.

That's the part money can't fix.▸ Federal district court filings have grown 30% since 1990, when Congress last passed a comprehensive judgeship bill — but the number of authorized district judgeships has grown just 4% since 1991, per the Judicial Conference of the United States. The backlog that mismatch produces shows up directly in case files sitting untouched.

The number of civil cases pending more than three years rose 346% in twenty years — from 18,280 in March 2004 to 81,617 in March 2024.▸ In fiscal year 2024, 20 of the 25 district courts the Conference flagged for new judgeships were already carrying more than 500 "weighted filings" per judge — a workload measure that accounts for how long different case types take to resolve; the Conference's own threshold for recommending relief is 430. Twelve of those courts exceeded 600 filings per judgeship; five exceeded 700. On March 11, 2025, the Conference asked Congress for 71 new judgeships — 69 district, 2 appellate — to close the gap.

Congress has tried this before and failed.▸ A bipartisan bill to add new judgeships passed both chambers in 2024, the first comprehensive judgeship legislation in over three decades — and President Biden vetoed it on Dec. 23, 2024, after House Republicans delayed a floor vote until after the election changed who would get to appoint the new judges. Representatives reintroduced it in February 2025 as the JUDGES Act of 2025 (H.R. 1702), and the House Judiciary Committee voted to advance it on March 5, 2025. It has not moved since. Meanwhile the seats that already exist keep emptying out: 29 are vacant today, with 9 nominees awaiting confirmation, and 13 district courts carry a formal "judicial emergency" designation — a measure combining vacancy length with caseload that flags where the shortage is actively hurting litigants.

Budget figures are the FY2026 request as published by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts in April 2025, not final enacted appropriations; Congress can and often does change these numbers before the fiscal year starts. Vacancy and emergency counts are current as of July 9, 2026, and change with every confirmation, retirement, and death.