Sponsors (6)
Official title: Increase the number of judgeships for the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and certain district courts of the United States, and for other purposes.
Introduced October 21, 2025 by Daniel Scott Sullivan · Last progress October 21, 2025
The bill aims to reduce appellate backlogs and improve court capacity by creating a new circuit and adding judges, but it increases federal costs and creates significant administrative, logistical, and legal transition risks that could delay benefits and produce short-term disruption.
Litigants and courts in the affected circuits will see lower caseloads and faster appellate decisions because the bill creates a new circuit, authorizes additional judgeships, and enables temporary panel staffing to address backlogs.
Judges, court staff, and litigants get a clearer, managed transition—reassignments by duty station, preserved seniority dates for certain judges, deadlines for wind-down, and administrative procedures—to reduce chaos when the circuits are reorganized.
Parties with pending filings or rehearing petitions will generally have their matters handled without interruption and by the tribunal appropriate under the new structure, preserving finality and predictable review paths.
Taxpayers will face substantially higher federal costs over time for new judgeships, additional court staff, facilities, and related operations to stand up and sustain an extra circuit and expanded bench.
Courts, clerks, and court staff will face heavy administrative burdens, logistical disruptions, and short-term staffing uncertainty during the multi-year transition—creating risks of scheduling delays, lost institutional knowledge, and temporary drops in processing capacity.
Some litigants and attorneys may face legal uncertainty and inconsistent outcomes because cases moved between circuits or decided by judges unfamiliar with local caselaw could lead to confusion about which precedents apply.
Based on analysis of 17 sections of legislative text.
Splits the Ninth Circuit into two circuits, reassigns judges, creates many new appellate and district judgeships, permits temporary judge exchanges, and authorizes implementation funding.
Reorganizes the federal courts by splitting the existing Ninth Circuit into a newly defined Ninth Circuit and a new Twelfth Circuit, assigns active and senior judges to one of the two circuits based on duty station or judge choice, and creates many new circuit and district judgeships to increase judicial capacity. It also authorizes temporary reciprocal judge assignments between the Ninth and Twelfth Circuits, allows transitional case handling rules, directs administrative actions to implement the split, designates Seattle as the Twelfth Circuit executive/clerk location, and authorizes unspecified funds for implementation and court facilities.