Pain of sequestration, shutdown still lingers

Gino J. Agnello feels like a juggler sometimes.

Agnello, the clerk of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, said downsizing — he prefers to call it “right-sizing” — requires him to do a lot more planning nowadays to ensure that all stations in his office are covered.

“You’re really juggling a lot of balls in the air,” he said.

The task becomes even trickier when someone is out sick or on leave, he said.

Agnello said there may come a time when he drops one of the balls.

“We are at the point now where more cuts would be hard to handle,” he said.

He’s not the only person to see the federal courts as a patient who is still ailing.

The budgetary bleeding has stopped, Praveen Fernandes said, after Congress agreed on a $1.1 trillion budget late last year. Fernandes is the director of federal affairs and diversity initiatives at Justice at Stake, a Washington, D.C.-based nonpartisan coalition of more than 50 organizations dedicated to protecting the justice system.

“We in the federal courts community are tremendously grateful for all the work it took to get an omnibus bill passed,” Fernandes said in January.

Congress, in reaching a bipartisan agreement on the budget for the first time in two years, prevented another round of cuts that had been scheduled under sequestration, he said.

Sequestration — automatic, across-the-board government spending reductions — went into effect March 1, 2013, after Congress could not agree on a budget.

But while the passage of the fiscal year 2014 budget bill temporarily stemmed the bleeding, Fernandes said, much of the damage remains.

The $6.5 billion appropriated for federal courts across the nation for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30 is about the same amount of money appropriated every year since 2010, he said.

“This flat funding is not adjusted for inflation, so in functional terms, the courts have dealt with a drop in funding,” he said.

Fernandes is not alone in worrying that money woes will prevent the federal courts from delivering justice.

Chief Judge Diane P. Wood of the 7th Circuit cited the “extremely flat” budgets for the courts over the past several years as her biggest concern.

“As a whole, it’s not something that’s sustainable for the long term,” she said.

Agnello and clerk Thomas G. Bruton of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois both said there is no fat in their budgets to cut.

Bruton acknowledged that the appropriations bill gives the Chicago-based trial court “some temporary relief from the pressure” of meeting its obligations.

But he said “the overall concerns are still there” because of the “drastic” cuts already made to the court’s budget.

Those reductions have left his office with a staff of about 130 people, Bruton said, “significantly lower than where we have been.” There are 200 positions authorized for Bruton’s office.

Agnello said about 35 people work in the 7th Circuit clerk’s office, which is authorized for 46 or 47 employees.

“When you have more staffing, that’s easy to absorb,” Agnello said. “When your staffing is low, you hope it’s not a busy day and that you don’t have a lot of filings.”

But the work must be done even on days that are not busy, he said.

“We’re at a critical mass on staffing,” he said. “If we take another hit, something’s got to give somewhere.”

Something already has given out in federal courts around the country. Worried about the effects of the upcoming sequestration, courts began tightening their belts long before March 1, 2013.

For example, the district court clerk’s office in Chicago froze hiring, eliminated non-essential purchases and shifted around people already on staff to fill vacant positions.

Some federal courts in other parts of the country laid off or furloughed employees, shortened their hours or closed their clerk’s offices one business day a week.

Like the rest of the government, the federal courts were squeezed even more by a partial shutdown for 16 days in October.

The shutdown was triggered by Congress’ failure to pass a continuing resolution that would have kept the government operating.

Across the country, about 800,000 federal employees were furloughed, and many government offices operated with skeleton crews.

In Chicago, most of the assistant U.S. attorneys who handle civil cases in which the United States is a party were forced to take leave.

That prompted Chief U.S. District Judge Ruben Castillo to order the temporary halt of all such litigation.

Attorneys who represent indigent defendants facing criminal charges — both employees of federal defender organizations and private lawyers appointed on a case-by-case basis — already were suffering.

Under sequestration, more than $50 million was cut from the account used to pay these attorneys.

Several months later, the executive committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States announced it was reducing the private lawyers’ pay rate by $15 an hour and delaying certain payments.

The conference is the policymaking arm of the federal judiciary. The executive committee acts on behalf of the conference on emergency matters.

U.S. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. is the conference’s presiding officer.

In his 2013 Year-End Report on the Judiciary, Roberts made his annual pitch for adequate funding for the judicial branch.

Roberts noted that the Judicial Conference had recently asked Congress to appropriate $7.04 billion for the judiciary for fiscal year 2014.

That amount is less than two-tenths of 1 percent of all the government’s outlays, he wrote.

Failing to provide the courts with adequate funds, he wrote, would inflict further harm on a branch of government that was already suffering.

Sequestration slashed 5 percent, or nearly $350 million, from the judiciary’s budget in fiscal year 2013, Roberts wrote.

“And because many of the judiciary’s expenditures, such as rent and judicial salaries, must be paid regardless of sequestration, the 5 percent cut that was intended to apply ‘across the board’ translated into even larger cuts in discretionary components of the judiciary’s budget,” he wrote in the report.

Those larger cuts, he continued, included a 10 percent reduction in allocations to court units.

The combination of sequestration and flat funding led to a 14 percent drop in the number of court employees between July 2011 and the end of fiscal year 2013, Roberts wrote.

He wrote that the approximately 19,000 employees remaining after Sept. 30 were the fewest since 1997.

In Chicago, Agnello and Bruton said they avoided layoffs in their offices last year. Attrition over the years, however, has left their staffs stretched thin.

And they said the possibility of future layoffs or unpaid furloughs — federal employees were paid for the time they were off during the partial government shutdown — has staff members concerned.

But their staffs have risen to the challenge, both men said.

“The people who work in the Northern District of Illinois have pulled together in this difficult time,” Bruton said.

Agnello said some employees offered to take time off without pay if such a move was needed to prevent layoffs.

“It’s brought out the best in them,” he said.

Castillo, who became chief judge of the federal trial court in July, said the money woes made for a tough start.

But things improved, he said in February.

“I’m cautiously optimistic about where we are,” he said.

The budget approved by Congress late last year includes a 5.1 percent, or $316 million, increase in discretionary funds for the judiciary.

Also, effective March 1, the Judicial Conference’s executive committee restored the hourly rate previously paid to private attorneys who represent indigent clients in criminal cases.

In line with the increase that all federal employees received under the Employment Cost Index, the rate was raised an additional 1 percent. That brought it to $126 an hour.

Castillo said the trial court will not replace the employees it lost in 2013. But the court will be able to replace anyone who leaves this year, he said.

And he said the court now has the funds to implement some projects that were put on hold.

Those projects include such technological improvements as putting monitors in jury boxes so jurors can view exhibits more easily, Castillo said.

“For the first time, I can see we have a stable economic floor to operate the court, and that’s a good feeling,” he said.

Fernandes, however, said it may become more difficult for the federal courts and defender organizations to attract dedicated people if Congress doesn’t provide adequate funds in the future.

Because of the constitutional guarantee of a speedy trial in criminal cases, he said, staff shortages will be felt more acutely by litigants involved in civil cases.

Such litigants would have to wait longer to get their cases before a judge, Fernandes said.

“As the old expression goes, justice delayed is justice denied,” he said.