By Nate Raymond
(Reuters) -The U.S. federal court system starting on Monday will begin curtailing non-essential functions and furloughing some employees after exhausting what funds it had left to sustain paid operations during the U.S. government shutdown.
The announcement, in a Thursday internal memo reviewed by Reuters, means the federal judiciary will for the first time in nearly three decades be forced to send some of its over 33,000 employees home and require others to work without a paycheck
after Congress failed to pass legislation keeping the courts and the rest of the government funded.
The shutdown has already caused widespread delays in civil lawsuits involving federal agencies, as many of their employees have been furloughed. However, judges overseeing numerous legal challenges to Republican President Donald Trump's policies have frequently denied government requests to pause those cases.
Unlike executive branch agencies operating under Trump's purview, the judiciary had after the government shutdown that began on October 1 been able to sustain its paid operations for a few weeks by using fees and other funds not dependent on Congress authorizing new spending.
But tight budgets in recent years meant the judiciary entered the shutdown with less cash available than it had during a 2019 shutdown in Trump's first term in office, during which the courts sustained paid operations for the full five weeks. Funding was, as a result, projected to be exhausted on Friday.
Courts will remain open, and judges and Supreme Court justices will still get paid, thanks to a bar in the U.S. Constitution against a diminution in their pay. Officials in various district courts said they had been informed they could continue paying jurors, at least for now.
JUDICIARY TO START SENDING FURLOUGH NOTICES MONDAY
But Judge Robert Conrad, the director of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, in Thursday's memo told judges and others that the courts had done what they could to maintain operations by deferring planned spending and would enter into a new phase of the shutdown starting at midnight on Monday.
Furlough notices will be distributed that morning, and "orderly shutdown activities will commence," Conrad wrote.
The last time such furloughs occurred within the judiciary was during government shutdowns that occurred during Democratic President Bill Clinton's tenure in 1995 to 1996.
Exactly how many court employees will be furloughed is not clear. Officials in various trial courts said most if not all of their staff would be deemed exempt under the Antideficiency Act as they provide essential services that help them fulfill their core duties under the Constitution of resolving cases and facilitating criminal defendants' right to a speedy trial.
But probation officers, judicial clerks and administrative staff still on the job are set to receive their last paychecks on October 24, a possibility that "is extremely stressful to our employees," said Chief U.S. District Judge Randy Crane of the Southern District of Texas, which covers Houston.
Federal public defenders, who represent indigent defendants who have a right to a lawyer, working in offices that are part of the judiciary likewise will not get paid, nor will private lawyers who do the same under the Criminal Justice Act.
Those private lawyers' pay has already been delayed since July after funding for them ran out, a development the courts deem a "crisis."
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Alistair Bell)
