With Tenth Circuit Judge Tim Tymkovich (right) scheduled to testify tomorrow at 10 a.m. ET before the House Judiciary’s Courts Subcommittee on the “significant and lasting shortage of [federal] judges,” Fix the Court is imploring members in the committee room to look beyond judgeships deficiencies, which is a problem, and talk about bolstering security for the judicial branch, which without intervention could be headed toward a crisis.

FTC rang the alarms over the ignominious end to the JUDGES Act last year and called out the White House for its dishonest veto message. That said, the safety of judges today is far more important than the spring release of new judgeship recommendations or whether, say, the Northern District of California should get six or seven new judgeships over the next decade.

Judicial security is the top priority:
The precipitous rise in threats against judges has been punctuated in 2025 by the fact that so many of them are now coming from government officials, or quasi-government officials — just search Elon Musk’s tweets and retweets over the last month. The number of cases that involve those officials, and the number of judges hearing those cases, already numbers in the several dozen. According to the U.S. Marshals’ FY25 budget, the Service was planning at most 13 round-the-clock protection details (p. 20) for lower court judges this year, and that may not nearly be enough.

On top of that, the Marshals were already facing budget cuts, with judiciary security spending flat (i.e., a decrease given inflation); the federal hiring freeze is potentially impacting security services; DHS has deputized USMS to help ICE round up immigrants; recruiting new deputy U.S. Marshals to the Service has been a challenge; and the general attitude of the administration that government service is somehow less than is not making the situation better. This is all before President Trump starts nominating Marshals (there are 27 vacancies, but he could fire any of the 94 at any time), who, like other Justice Department appointees, are likely to be loyal to him above all else and contrary to the mission of the Department.

Of course, threats against judges are not new — they’ve been on the rise since at least 2017. More recently, Judges Cannon, Chutkan and Kacsmaryk have sadly been under constant threat, and serious threats against Justices Kavanaugh and Sotomayor must not be forgotten.

What’s more, two of the judiciary’s most critical security programs — data-scrubbing and home alarms — remain opt-in and thus liable to leave serious gaps in coverage. The public has yet to see numbers from the judiciary on the extent to which the scrubbing permitted on the Anderl Act is working and whether the judiciary is winning the proverbial game of whack-a-mole (e.g., a judge’s home address disappears from one data broker and pops up the next week on a new or different site). And a year ago we learned only 72% of judges were using the judiciary-reimbursed (i.e., free) Home Intrusion Detection System, and it’s unclear why the other 28% are not opting in (i.e., they can’t all be paying for their own alarm systems). On top of that, it appears that the rate of judges arming their HIDS is not where it needs to be.

“There is nothing more important to address tomorrow than ensuring our 2,300 federal judges and justices are able to do their jobs without fearing for their safety,” FTC’s Gabe Roth said. (Read Gabe’s Feb. 21 op-ed in Bloomberg Opinion on judicial security here or non-paywalled here.)

Back to judgeships:
In terms of judgeships, the bottom line for Fix the Court has always been that there’s enough blame to go around in terms of why the JUDGES Act wasn’t passed by the Senate until August and by the House until November. To review, from the time markup-ready version was introduced (Apr. 19) to the June 13 markup was 25 session days, and it took another 19 session days to get from markup to the floor when it was passed by UC (Aug. 1).

On the House side, the House was only in session 13 days between that Aug. 1 and the election, during which the House GOP was shoring up support and trying to pass a budget — and, maybe, biding some time to see who won the election. The White House’s veto message in December — saying, among other things, that the judgeship numbers didn’t calculate how magistrates and senior judges could chip in — was divorced from reality.

Other topics Judge Tymkovich should address tomorrow:
1. Slush funds: Given all the lawsuits against Trump administration policies and all the lawyers waiving in to these courts, what are the courts doing with all this new pro hac vice money? Is it staying in each court and being used as a slush fund, or is it headed to Washington to pay for, well, who knows what?

2. Gifts: Despite his insistence that he didn’t have to report a fancy set of customized skis on his disclosure last year because they were, per the judge, “made in connection with a special occasion” under JCUS reg. 620.35(b)(4) (p. 4), does Judge Tymkovich not see the issue with accepting them, seeing as how it’s likely the gift-givers practice before the 10th Circuit, so the identities should be known for the public to trust he’s not hearing cases brought by those trying to curry favor before him? Does he not agree that the branch would be better off with a gift ban, per this bill?

3. Workplace conduct: Tymkovich is a member of the Workplace Conduct Working Group that Chief Justice Roberts convened after the Kozinski scandal in Dec. 2017. But it’s been three years since the Working Group last released a report. What have they been doing, and to what extent does the judge believe the problems identified throughout this work — from not enough avenues to file complaints about judges to the inherent conflicts in the EDR process to a lack of rights for third branch workers in federal law – have been solved or at least improved upon?