Hours into its first day, the government shutdown has already started to exert drag on cases moving through the federal judiciary.
In a raft of new filings made at courthouses across the country on Wednesday, Justice Department lawyers asked judges to pause their cases, arguing that the department didn’t have enough personnel to handle them because of the lack of Congressionally-approved funding.
And in Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, one of the judiciary’s most prominent trial courts, Chief Judge James E. Boasberg issued on Wednesday a new standing order extending deadlines through the duration of the shutdown for the government to meet filing and discovery deadlines. The purpose of the order, he wrote, was to “minimize expenditures of scarce judicial resources” on individual requests for extensions.
The extension order in the District of Columbia has some significant loopholes. It applies to civil, not criminal matters. And regular deadlines will still be enforced for litigation around temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions, which means most of the high-stakes lawsuits seeking to block President Trump’s second-term agenda will not be affected.
The court slowdown does not pose an immediate emergency, said David Super, a law professor at Georgetown University. But he said that if the shutdown drags, some litigants, including organizations dependent on federal funding, may feel pressure to settle so as to resolve their cases by certain deadlines.
“The federal courts are heavily overloaded as it is, so the judges are not going to have any difficulty finding other things to do with their time,” Mr. Super said. “But at some point, having issues tied up in litigation indefinitely is going to slow everything down.”
On the same day as Judge Boasberg’s order, the Justice Department asked to pause a major antitrust case against Google in Washington. In the Central District of California, it asked to pause a lawsuit that seeks to force the state government to turn over its voter registration rolls. The government has filed similar motions in Minnesota in a case contesting state education funding for undocumented immigrants, and in Rhode Island, in a case brought by nonprofits over funding for victims of domestic violence.
In another case in the District of South Carolina, contesting the administration’s termination of environmental grants, Judge Richard Mark Gergel found that the government had shown “good cause,” and granted a stay through the shutdown.
A memo dated Oct. 1, sent by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, said that all court employees would receive their paychecks on Oct. 10 and Oct. 24 as planned, but that there would be cutbacks if the shutdown continued through Oct. 17. “We are hopeful that this lapse in appropriations is quickly resolved,” wrote the office’s director, Judge Robert J. Conrad Jr.
A spokeswoman for the Supreme Court said that the court would rely on permanent funds not subject to annual approval by Congress and would be unaffected during a short-term shutdown.
Seamus Hughes and Ann E. Marimow contributed reporting.
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