The Supreme Court’s Security Budget Has Doubled. Our Oversight Has Not
Imagine a recruitment video. Agents in dark suits and sunglasses stride in slow motion, bomb-sniffing dogs work a perimeter, and officers cradle rifles while a smooth voiced narrator promises a calling higher than any other. It plays like the trailer for a Secret Service thriller. It is actually a hiring reel for the people who guard nine robed lawyers most of us will never see do their jobs.
According to POLITICO, the Supreme Court is quietly more than doubling its own police force, which sat below 200 officers for years and is now pushing well past that. The reasons are not invented. In 2022 a person arrived near Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home carrying a pistol and 37 rounds of ammunition, an episode that ended in an attempted assassination charge and, according to NBC News, a sentence of just over eight years even though prosecutors asked for 30. Last year, according to POLITICO, an Alaska man was arrested for sending nearly 500 threats to six justices. This is also a moment of rising political violence that has claimed lives across the spectrum, and nobody serious wants a justice harmed.
Here is the harder part. We are paying for all of this, and we are barely allowed to know how. The court’s budget for salaries and expenses has climbed from $98.3 million in 2022 to a request of $210.3 million for 2027, a 114 percent jump in five years, according to POLITICO’s review of budget documents. Congress has added tens of millions more in emergency money, including a $28 million infusion last November and another $30 million this spring. Yet no justice has appeared before Congress to defend the court’s budget in more than seven years.
Representative Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said it plainly this spring, according to POLITICO. She is glad to fund the security, but the court has never come up to explain what it does with the money. A hearing that might have finally broken that silence was postponed last month, with no new date set.
This matters because this is no sleepy institution. This is the same court that, by a vote of six to three, struck down the centerpiece of President Trump’s tariff agenda in February, that has narrowed the Voting Rights Act, that rewrote abortion law overnight. It reaches our wallets, our ballots, and our bodies. An institution with that kind of power over our lives owes us more than armored SUVs and a slick video. It already bans cameras from its courtroom and cloaks its deliberations. Now it is wrapping a growing and secretive security force around itself too.
There is a quieter cost here as well. As the justices retreat behind details and barricades, several admit they now travel mostly to friendly rooms full of people who already agree with them. When the people who hold final say over our laws only ever hear from their own side, the law stops feeling like justice and starts feeling like a ruling written by people who only ever listen to half the room.
So here is the deal we should insist on. Protect the justices, fully. But protection funded by us comes with one basic condition, the same one we ask of everyone else in government. Show up, open the books, and answer the question. We can keep nine people safe without letting them vanish from public view. The day we stop asking where our money goes, and who these justices actually are, is the day we trade our place as citizens for a seat as subjects. Go beyond the headlines…
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