Washington Cut Public Defenders' Caseloads Nearly 70%. It Funded One-Sixth of the Bill.

The Washington Supreme Court did not soften the diagnosis: the state's system for defending people who can't afford a lawyer is in crisis, and the remedy is a hard numerical ceiling on how many cases a public defender can carry.▸ Order No. 25700-A-1681, issued December 15, 2025, cut the felony caseload cap from 150 cases a year to 47 — a two-thirds reduction — effective January 1, 2026. The court gave counties up to ten years to fully comply. It did not say who pays for the attorneys that compliance requires. That question went to the Legislature, and the Legislature answered it with about one dollar for every six the state's own counties said they needed.

Standard 3.4 of the court's indigent-defense rules used to let a full-time felony public defender carry 150 cases a year and a misdemeanor defender carry 400.▸ Under the amended standard, those numbers drop to 47 and 120 — cuts of 68.7% and 70%, respectively. Appellate caseloads fall too, from 36 cases a year to 25 starting in 2027. Jurisdictions must cut at least 10% of the gap to the new standard every year, with full compliance required no later than January 1, 2036.

Hold the docket steady and the arithmetic is blunt: a jurisdiction that needed one felony attorney per 150 cases now needs roughly 3.2 of them to cover the same volume.▸ Multiple outlets covering the order — including the Washington State Standard and InvestigateWest — describe the standard as effectively tripling the number of public defenders the state needs. The order doesn't fund a single one of them; it only sets the ceiling.

Washington's Office of Public Defense (OPD) — the state agency that administers grants to county and city public-defense systems — got a real budget increase for 2025-27.▸ Almost all of it was already spoken for.

Of the enacted $186.5 million, $148.6 million — 80 cents of every dollar — is "maintenance level" spending: the cost of running the programs the agency already runs, unchanged.▸ The single largest piece of genuinely new money, $13.5 million, is the "Public Defense Grants" line meant to help counties and cities actually hire toward the new caseload standard. The rest is scattered across smaller fixes — resentencing lawyers for people affected by State v. Blake, an appellate backlog, rate increases for contracted attorneys — none of it aimed at the core problem: too few lawyers to cover the docket at 47 felonies a year instead of 150.

Gov. Jay Inslee's outgoing proposed budget for 2025-27, prepared by the Office of Financial Management, had asked for $80.9 million in that same Public Defense Grants line — nearly six times what the Legislature ultimately enacted.

The Washington State Association of Counties called the shortfall what it is: an unfunded mandate.▸ "This order, without significant state support, is an unfunded mandate that will devastate county finances," WSAC executive director Derek Young said when the caseload order came down, warning that compliance costs would "at least triple" for the counties that already carry the system. That's because counties were never the state's junior partner in this budget — they're effectively the whole thing. Per Cascade PBS reporting on 2024 spending, Washington's cities and counties covered essentially all of the state's $207.2 million public-defense bill, with state funding averaging less than 3% — as low as 1.5% in King County, and never higher than 15% anywhere in the state. Washington is one of only 13 states that provide little or no state funding for trial-level indigent defense.

The gap is already showing up in courtrooms.▸ Spokane County's public defender's office hit its caseload ceiling and stopped taking new cases nine days into September 2025, fifteen days into October, and three days into November — WSAC documented defendants waiting up to 72 hours for an attorney before being released with no counsel assigned at all.

Dollar figures cover Washington's Office of Public Defense budget and the Cascade PBS-reported 2024 statewide total; they do not capture the full universe of county general-fund spending on public-defense contracts outside OPD grant programs, which varies by jurisdiction and isn't centrally reported.