Approximately $349 million more would be spent as the U.S. Judges expansion cost if the U.S. Senate approved a plan that would assign 66 more judges to the nation's understaffed federal district courts.

This estimate comes from the Congressional Budget Office judge estimate. These projections were included in a report that the nonpartisan CBO, which serves as Congress's budgetary referee, released late last week. On August 1, the Senate unanimously approved the measure that would constitute the first significant judicial expansion since 1990.

The bipartisan JUDGES Act, which seeks to help address long-standing concerns from the judiciary to help handle mounting caseloads and staffing shortages in districts with insufficient staff in states like Delaware, Texas, and California, is now awaiting consideration in the U.S. House of Representatives. Since 2003, no new judgeships have been established, since members of a Congress that is becoming more and more partisan worry that new vacancies may be created and then filled by the president of a rival party.

The Senate-passed plan aims to allay those worries by gradually adding new court seats every two years for ten years, beginning in January 2025 following the presidential election on November 5. There are three interim judgeships in addition to the sixty-three permanent ones. The CBO projected that, if passed, direct spending that is not subject to congressional authorization would rise by $98 million until 2034 to support the salaries and perks of judges, which are guaranteed by the Constitution. According to the CBO, the average salary for a federal judge in 2024 was $270,000.

The law would also allow the annual appropriation of certain sums for administrative costs, including those associated with hiring judges, maintaining courts, providing facilities, and utilizing technology. According to the CBO's assessment, if Congress approves funding to meet those expenses, spending would rise by around $250 million between 2025 and 2034. The CBO estimated that the bill's requirement that the watchdog group of Congress, the Government Accountability Office, report to Congress on the backlog of cases that judges are handling and the amount of space that federal agencies require for detention would cost $1 million over that time.