The 2025 government shutdown did not stop federal criminal investigations or prosecutions, but it did damage the system in ways that are now visible in hard numbers and court orders.
Under the Department of Justice’s FY 2026 contingency plan, most criminal work is designated “excepted” and continues during a shutdown under the Antideficiency Act. Criminal prosecutions, grand jury work, and core investigative activity keep going even when other functions are frozen, with DOJ explicitly authorizing a very large share of its workforce to work without pay to protect “life and property.”
On the judicial side, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts announced that courts could operate using fee balances and other non-appropriated funds only through a specific date (October 17, 2025). After that, if Congress did not restore funding, only “essential” functions—primarily criminal matters—would continue with staff working unpaid and civil dockets curtailed.
The most concrete damage showed up in the indigent-defense system. The federal Criminal Justice Act (CJA) program, which pays private panel attorneys who represent about 40% of federal criminal defendants, ran out of money on July 3, 2025—months before the shutdown—and never recovered because Congress froze judiciary funding at FY 2024 levels.
The shutdown turned that budget problem into a constitutional one. In New Mexico, a federal judge halted a death-penalty prosecution of Labar Tsethlikai, explicitly finding that the shutdown and the lack of funding for specialized capital defense counsel made it impossible to protect the defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to counsel. At the same time, more than 50 CJA panel lawyers in New Mexico announced they would no longer accept new federal appointments because they had not been paid since early July.
A broader analysis from the Death Penalty Information Center, focusing on the judiciary’s budget crisis, describes how the shutdown compounded the existing CJA funding collapse and warns of “serious constitutional concerns” as courts try to keep criminal dockets moving while defense resources are effectively unfunded.
For federal criminal practice, the implications are straightforward:
- Criminal cases nominally continued, but quality and fairness suffered. DOJ and the judiciary can honestly say that prosecutions, grand juries, and criminal trials did not stop. The record shows that they continued under extraordinary strain—with unpaid AUSAs, judges, and staff, and with defense teams unable to function in complex or resource-heavy cases.
- Indigent defendants bore most of the risk. The “excepted” designation protected the government’s ability to prosecute; it did not protect the defense side. When CJA payments stopped, panel lawyers either worked for free or walked away. Capital and complex cases were the first to hit a wall because they require specialists and experts who cannot work indefinitely without compensation.
- Shutdown delays are now tied to explicit Sixth Amendment findings. The New Mexico death-penalty stay it is a written order tying the shutdown directly to a violation of the right to counsel. That is the kind of record future defendants and courts can point to when arguing that prolonged funding lapses are not just “inconvenient” but constitutionally intolerable.
- Speedy Trial and due-process issues are no longer abstract. Although courts have tools to exclude time under the Speedy Trial Act when “ends of justice” require it, those exclusions are supposed to be justified case by case. The hard data from this shutdown—halted trials, unpaid panels, documented delays—gives defense counsel more to work with if the government tries to treat systemic neglect as a free pass.