The Sixth Amendment Ran Out of Money in 2025

The right to a lawyer isn't optional.▸ It's a constitutional guarantee, funded every year through the same appropriations process that funds the Coast Guard and the National Park Service. In 2025, that funding lapsed — not for the courts themselves, but for the more than 12,000 private attorneys who take on the federal government's poorest defendants when public defenders can't, according to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. They kept working. They just didn't get paid.

The judiciary saw this coming.▸ In its own FY2026 budget request, published in April 2025, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts warned that the FY2025 enacted level for Defender Services — $1.5 billion, frozen at the prior year's amount under a continuing resolution — would be enough to keep federal defender offices staffed, but not enough to pay everyone on time. About ten weeks of payments to CJA panel attorneys, a projected $92.6 million, would have to be pushed into the next fiscal year.

Reality was worse than the projection.▸ Payments to panel attorneys stopped entirely on July 3, 2025. The judiciary told Congress it needed $116 million in supplemental funding just to cover the deferrals and avoid a deeper crisis; Congress didn't send it before the fiscal year ended. Then a government shutdown in October extended the drought further. By the time Congress finally acted, per Virginia Lawyers Weekly, the lapse had run from July 3 to mid-November — four and a half months — and $98 million in submitted attorney vouchers sat unpaid the entire time. Roughly 85% of CJA panel attorneys are solo practitioners or small firms; several told reporters they covered the gap with personal savings or gig work. Final FY2026 appropriations, enacted February 3, 2026, gave Defender Services $1.766 billion — a 21.7% increase over FY2025 — including a one-time "anomaly" to pay off every outstanding voucher. Hourly rates for panel attorneys rose too, from $175 to $177 for non-capital cases and $223 to $226 for capital cases — the first increase in years, and still below typical market rates for defense counsel.

Money wasn't the judiciary's only 2025 shortage.▸ The bench itself has been thinning. As of July 9, 2026, there are 29 vacant Article III judgeships — lifetime-tenure seats on the circuit and district courts — and only 9 have a nominee pending at all.

Thirteen of those vacancies are rated a judicial emergency — a designation the Judicial Conference applies when a seat has sat empty long enough, and the remaining judges' weighted caseload has climbed high enough, that the court can no longer be expected to keep up.▸ It isn't a partisan label; it's an arithmetic one, driven by the same case-weighting formula (a defaulted student loan counts as 0.16 of a case, an antitrust suit as 3.72) the judiciary has used since 2016. Every emergency seat means the judges left behind are doing more than one judge's share of work, for as long as the seat stays open.

The two shortages share a root cause.▸ Both the CJA panel and the bench depend on the same annual appropriations bill, and the same 2025 continuing resolution that froze Defender Services funding at prior-year levels also put courthouse staffing broadly at risk: the AO's own FY2026 budget request warned that 130 of the judiciary's 356 clerk-of-court, probation, and pretrial services offices could not afford to keep their current staff under that funding level. A judiciary running on flat or lapsed funding doesn't only fail to hire — it starts failing to pay people already doing the work.

Dollar figures for the FY2025 payment deferral and the FY2026 appropriation come from different Administrative Office documents published at different points in the crisis, as dated in the prose above; they describe overlapping but not identical measurements of the same shortfall. Judicial vacancy and emergency counts are a same-day snapshot (July 9, 2026) and change as nominees are confirmed or judges take senior status.