The Federal Vacancy Count 3/25/2015
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March 25, 2015
This week's Federal Vacancy Count includes nominations, confirmations and vacancies from March 18, 2015, to March 24, 2015. Nominations, confirmations and vacancies occurring on March 25 will be reflected in the April 1 report.
The United States Senate remained inactive on nominations this week. No nominees have been confirmed since the Senate took office in January 2015.
The vacancy warning level remained at blue this week after no new vacancies, no new nominations and no new confirmations. The vacancy percentage remained at 6.3 percent, and the total number of nominees waiting for confirmation remained at 16. The number of vacancies of Article III judges remained at 55 out of 874. A breakdown of the vacancies on each level can be found in the table below. For a more detailed look at the vacancies on the federal courts, see our Federal Court Vacancy Warning System.
Vacancies by court
| Court | # of Seats | Vacancies |
| Supreme Court | 9 | 0% or no vacancies |
| Appeals Courts | 179 | 4.5% or 8 vacancies |
| District Courts | 677 | 6.3% or 43 vacancies |
| International Trade | 9 | 44.4% or 4 vacancies |
| All Judges | 874 | 6.3% or 55 vacancies |
Growing vacancies
Since the 114th Congress has taken office, they have confirmed no judges. In contrast, the following table shows the number of confirmations for January through March dating back to 2010.
| Year | # of Confirmations | Vacancy percentage at the end of March |
| 2014 | 19 | 9.5% |
| 2013 | 9 | 9.8% |
| 2012 | 15 | 9.1% |
| 2011 | 14 | 10.5% |
| 2010 | 6 | N/A |
The three-month span in 2014 had the largest number of nominees confirmed. This happened after the Democratically controlled Senate changed the filibuster rules. Despite requiring a 60-member vote to end debate on nominees prior to the 2013 filibuster reform, the Senate confirmed at least six judges in each of the previous four years. Inaction in confirming nominees will allow the number of vacancies to continue to grow. With nine more vacancies scheduled to take place over the next three months, and 19 scheduled by the end of the year, the vacancy percentage will continue to grow if nominees are not moved through the nomination process.[1] While the current vacancy percentage of 6.3 is low in comparison to previous years, adding 19 more known vacancies would raise that number to 8.5 percent.
New vacancies
There were no new vacancies in the past week.
New confirmations
There were no new confirmations in the past week.
New nominations
There were no new nominations in the past week.
Weekly map
The weekly map is updated every week and posted here and on the Federal Court Vacancy Warning System analysis page.
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See also
Footnotes
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