Barrett and Kagan will testify on the Supreme Court's budget Tuesday, the first justices to face Congress since 2019

Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Elena Kagan are scheduled to testify Tuesday before the House and Senate Appropriations subcommittees on Financial Services and General Government, which write the bill that funds the Supreme Court. It will be the first time a member of the court has testified before Congress since 2019, when Kagan and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. appeared before the same House subcommittee to discuss the fiscal 2020 request.

The subject is the court's fiscal 2027 budget. The money that matters most in it is security.

What the court is asking for

Roll Call, working from the court's request, reported the Supreme Court is seeking $225.1 million for fiscal 2027, about 10 percent above the fiscal 2026 enacted level, with $207 million for salaries and expenses and $18.1 million for care of the building and grounds. Fox News, citing the same request, put the total at $228 million and the increase at $20.5 million.

Of that increase, according to Fox News, $14.6 million is designated for protection of the justices and another $2 million for security at their homes. The additional money would pay for 25 more full-time Supreme Court Police officers.

The judiciary as a whole is asking for more. Its fiscal 2027 congressional budget summary requests $9.7 billion in discretionary funding, a 4.9 percent increase over the current level, plus $826.5 million in mandatory appropriations for judicial salaries and retirement funds. The court security account inside that request is $920.9 million, up 3.2 percent, most of which is transferred to the U.S. Marshals Service to pay for court security officers at federal courthouses. The request also includes roughly $20 million for a program that removes judges' and their families' personal information from the internet.

Sources: Roll Call and the judiciary's fiscal 2027 congressional budget summary.

The numbers behind the ask

The judiciary says security incidents of significant concern involving judges rose 57 percent in the last fiscal year and are on pace to rise again. Federal authorities logged 564 threats against federal judges over that period.

The U.S. Marshals Service has provided round-the-clock protection at the justices' homes since May 2022, after the draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization leaked and protesters appeared outside their houses. Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh was the target of an abandoned assassination attempt outside his Maryland home the following month.

Barrett has been the subject of two recent incidents. In May, a false report of gunshots at her Virginia home brought a police response, which Fox News reported officers determined was a hoax after coordinating with the Supreme Court Police detail assigned to the house. Last year, authorities investigated a report of a pipe bomb in the mailbox of Barrett's sister in South Carolina, which was also determined to be a hoax.

Congress approved a separate $30 million increase for the court's security budget in January, money that is expected to last through September 2028.

What the House has already written

The House Financial Services spending bill would give the judiciary $10 billion, including $207 million for the Supreme Court, according to a Republican summary of the bill. Senate appropriators have not released their version.

Why the hearing is unusual

Justices are not required to appear, and they mostly have not. Kagan and Alito's 2019 appearance was the last before the House. The last Senate hearing with justices was in 2011, when Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Antonin Scalia testified before the Judiciary Committee about the constitutional role of federal judges, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Democrats asked justices to come during the Biden administration over questions about ethics and undisclosed travel. Sen. Richard J. Durbin of Illinois asked Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. to meet with senators about the court's ethics rules. Roberts declined.

The hearings were scheduled twice before and did not happen. The Senate Appropriations Committee expected justices in May and rescheduled. House Financial Services Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman David Joyce, an Ohio Republican, said at the time that a May hearing would not fit the schedules of the chamber or the justices.

The term they are walking away from

The hearing lands two weeks after the court finished a term in which it ruled against President Donald Trump's worldwide tariffs and against his executive order restricting birthright citizenship, and ruled for him in Trump v. Slaughter, which cleared the way for a president to remove the heads of independent agencies. Appropriators are free to ask about any of it. The bill in front of them is about money.