Today is the deadline by which, under law, the judiciary must post all 2,300-plus federal judges’ 2024 disclosures online.

But only about one-quarter of them are in the database.

Why is that? Turns out, there are several reasons:

1. Understaffing. The judiciary’s budget has been tight for years, and when you add that to the fact the law requiring online disclosures, the Courthouse Ethics and Transparency Act, did not include any new funding, it’s somewhat understandable that the AO’s Financial Disclosure Office doesn’t have the resources it needs to get the job done. At the same time, there’s some self-sabotage, with the AO not asking Congress to fund any new full- or part-time FDO positions since FY24.

2. Frivolous redactions. Judges can ask that information in their reports be redacted. But since FDRs require that, depending on how you read the instructions, between zero and close to zero private details be disclosed, 90 percent of judges don’t ask for them. When they do — say the name of a spouse’s employer or the city in which they own a second home — they have to indicate their proposed redaction when they initially file with the FDO, which then works with FD Committee judges and the Marshals to determine if it’s warranted. This is a protracted process, so when a judge asks to redact her husband’s public–facing job or her participation in a conference, despite being on the conference poster, or when a judge asks to redact his university side-job while having a university website, they’re wasting the Marshals’ valuable time, which factors into the posting delays.

3. A move to a new system. I don’t have a ton of details on this, but I do know the FDO is working toward transitioning from an old reporting and posting system to a new one, so in the future, judicial disclosures will look more like congressional disclosures and can, purportedly, be uploaded more quickly. Compare W.D. Mo. Chief Judge Beth Phillips’ 2024 FDR (new software) to CJ Roberts’ 2024 FDR (old) to see what appears to be the difference in what the new software spits out.

4. All carrot, no stick. The law does not mete out any sort of punishment if the AO fails to meet today’s deadline. It was hard enough getting Supreme Court justices and magistrate and bankruptcy judges into the bill in 2022 (that was me; sorry not sorry) that some type of rescission to the AO’s budget if the Aug. 13 deadline was not met wasn’t in the offing, though I wouldn’t be against that in the future.

(Judges are permitted to get a filing extension, but typically, less than 10 percent of them take the extension each year, meaning the “in the database” number should be way higher than 26 percent.)

Where things stand (denominators come from the AO annual reports):

2024
557 annual disclosures, with 1 duplicate=556 actual annual disclosures
+ 48 final disclosures and 13 initial disclosures, with 1 duplicate
= 617 total disclosures
Assuming 2,369 total judges, that’s 26% posted, or 1,752 missing disclosures

2023
2,032 annual disclosures, with 43 duplicates=1,989 actual annual disclosures
+75 final disclosures and 31 initial disclosures
=2,095 total disclosures
Assuming 2,336 total judges, that’s 90% posted, or 241 missing disclosures

2022
2,178 annual disclosures, with 36 duplicates=2,142 actual annual disclosures
+ 66 final disclosures and 40 initial disclosures
=2,248 total disclosures
Assuming 2,322 total judges, that’s 97% posted, or 74 missing disclosures

2021
>99% are in the database