Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett testified before a House subcommittee on Tuesday about the high court’s 2027 budget request, saying the “level of threat” against her and other federal judges is “very high.”
“These statistics sound abstract, but being on the receiving end of those statistics is not abstract,” Barrett told the House Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Subcommittee before sharing some anecdotes about the threats that affect her and her family.
The Supreme Court is asking Congress to appropriate $228.4 million in fiscal year 2027, an increase of nearly 10% from the $207.8 million appropriated in fiscal year 2026. This increase reflects increased spending on security-related measures aimed at both the protection of judges and cybersecurity.
Justice Elena Kagan, who testified alongside Barrett, noted that the chief of the U.S. Capitol Police recently testified that threats against Congress have increased by 50% this year compared to 2025.
“Supreme Court Police expects threats against courts and judges to increase by a smaller, but still very significant, annual 38 percent this year, following last year’s 25 percent increase,” Kagan said.
“For some of us, those threats are very close. We all live with the knowledge that they may become reality again,” she said.
Since the beginning of 2026, there have been a total of 512 investigations into threats against federal judges, including 2,600 active judges, according to U.S. Marshals Service data. This equates to 807 threats investigated in all of 2025.
Barrett and Kagan are the first Supreme Court justices to testify before Congress since 2019. That same year, Kagan and Justice Samuel Alito testified on the court’s budget request.
Both justices are scheduled to testify Tuesday afternoon before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government.
Barrett said the increased threat has “forced kids to think and see things that they don’t need to see and think about.”
She told the panel that in the spring of 2022, when the draft Supreme Court opinion that overturned a 1973 ruling that held abortion was a constitutional right was leaked to the media and threats to her life escalated, “security guards sent her home with bulletproof vests.”
“I carried it home, put it in my bedroom, dropped it on the table, turned around, and my 12-year-old son was standing in the doorway of my bedroom. And he wanted to know what it was and why I had it,” Barrett said.
“Maybe I lack imagination, so I didn’t know how to answer, but I never expected that doing this service would put me in the position of explaining to children what a bulletproof vest is and why they have to wear it.”
Barrett, who was appointed to the court during President Donald Trump’s first term, also spoke about recently being the target of a “swatting” attack.
“When one of my teenage sons opened the door to go out with friends, he looked out to the street and saw it filled with police cars responding to a false alarm of gunshots and calling out his home,” Barrett said.
“I was very grateful that the Supreme Court police were outside my house. They stopped the county police and met with them and explained that it was a false alarm, so the police never actually tried to enter the house.”
She also said: “All of us, including myself, have received threatening anonymous deliveries intended to intimidate or harass us.”
The hearing comes nine months after 29-year-old California man Nicholas Rosk was sentenced to more than eight years in prison for plotting to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in his Maryland home in 2022. After his arrest, Roethke told police he was angry that the Supreme Court’s decision on abortion had been leaked.
“The bulk of last year’s funding increase went toward shifting responsibility for judges’ housing security from the Sheriff’s Department to the Supreme Court Police Department,” Kagan said in her testimony.
Kagan said that when she first joined the court in 2010 after being nominated by President Barack Obama, “our national security was very different then.”
“The Supreme Court Police Department focused almost exclusively on protecting the building, and our IT department focused on supporting the latest BlackBerry devices,” she said.
“I didn’t have my own security team and only had security personnel accompany me when I went to work-related public events,” Kagan said. “We began expanding our security program in earnest in 2017, initially at the request of members of Congress.”
In addition to increasing threats to judges personally, Barrett said, “Cybersecurity attacks…are growing in scale every year.”
“With rapid advances in AI, that is becoming increasingly possible,” Barrett said. “We haven’t had the kind of paralyzing attacks that some of the lower courts have had, but looking at that, we’re trying to ramp up our cybersecurity protections very quickly. So some of the funding we’re seeking is for additional cybersecurity experts.”
“Regardless of one’s view of a particular Supreme Court decision, judicial officers up to and including Supreme Court justices must be able to perform their duties without fear for their safety or the safety of their families,” Rep. Dave Joyce (R-Ohio), the subcommittee chairman, said at the beginning of the hearing.
