Kagan and Barrett Tell Congress Threats Against Justices Jumped 38% This Year, Seek 10% Security Budget Hike

Justices Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett appeared before Congress on Tuesday, July 14, the first time sitting Supreme Court justices have testified on Capitol Hill outside a confirmation hearing since 2019, according to the Straits Times.

The two testified before both the House Appropriations subcommittee and the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government, pressing lawmakers to approve the court's fiscal 2027 budget request of roughly $230 million, according to Fox News. Kagan told senators the increase is needed almost entirely because of security costs, not court operations.

Supreme Court police expect threats against justices to rise 38% this year, on top of a 25% increase in 2025, Kagan testified. "For some of us, those threats have come very close indeed," she said, adding that "all of us live with the knowledge that they may again materialize," per Fox News.

Barrett's Two Stories

Barrett gave the most personal testimony. She described bringing home a bulletproof vest after threats intensified following the 2022 leak of the draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson, the ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade. Her then-12-year-old son saw it and asked what it was.

"I didn't expect that performing this service was going to put me in the position of explaining to my children what a bulletproof vest was and why I had to wear one," Barrett testified, according to KNPR and confirmed by the Straits Times and Fox News.

She also disclosed, for the first time publicly, that her home was targeted in a swatting attack roughly six weeks before the hearing. Local police responded to a false report of gunshots and raised voices. One of her teenage sons opened the door to leave the house and was met by a heavy police presence outside, the Straits Times reported.

Barrett said her own Supreme Court security detail was on scene and intercepted the responding local officers, explaining the call was fraudulent before it escalated. "I was grateful that Supreme Court police were stationed outside her residence because they were able to intercept responding local officers," the Straits Times reported her saying.

Barrett also referenced a disturbing pattern: unsolicited pizza deliveries sent to federal judges' homes under the name of Daniel Anderl, the son of U.S. District Judge Esther Salas who was fatally shot in 2020 by a gunman targeting the judge. Barrett called the deliveries deliberate intimidation, saying they "are meant to intimidate and they're meant to harass," according to KNPR.

The Budget Context

Kagan put the request in historical perspective. She told lawmakers that when she joined the court in 2010, security was minimal and the IT department's biggest job was supporting BlackBerry devices, according to Fox News. Expansion began in 2017 and accelerated after threats spiked in 2022.

KNPR reported that a decade ago, it was Republican Darrell Issa and Democrat Elijah Cummings who pushed the court to increase security following Justice Antonin Scalia's death in 2016, when he died on a hunting trip with no security nearby. Before that, justices drove themselves to work and shopped at grocery stores unaccompanied.

Kagan noted the court's full budget request, even after this increase, would remain less than one-tenth of one percent of the entire federal budget, per KNPR.

Where the Threats Come From, and a Contested Framing

ZeroHedge's coverage framed the threats almost entirely as a product of left-wing political violence, citing the 2022 plot against Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the 2025 assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk as evidence of a one-directional pattern. Fox News similarly highlighted protesters marching outside Kavanaugh's Maryland home hours after police arrested a man allegedly planning to kill him in June 2022.

The Kavanaugh plot ended in an arrest, and Fox News's own video confirms protesters gathered outside his home that same day. The congressional testimony itself, per the Straits Times and KNPR, did not attribute the current wave of threats to any single political direction, and neither Kagan nor Barrett named an ideological source for the swatting attack or the pizza deliveries during their testimony.

KNPR reported that Sen. Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat, used the hearing to ask whether President Trump's public attacks on the court after adverse tariff and birthright citizenship rulings could contribute to the threat environment. That question remains unresolved in the public record. No source here identifies who was behind Barrett's swatting incident or the pizza deliveries invoking Judge Salas's murdered son.

What Happens Next

The hearing also touched on judicial ethics enforcement. The Straits Times reported that Kagan backed creating a judicial panel to oversee compliance with ethics rules, while Barrett voiced concerns about how such a panel would work in practice. Neither justice offered a detailed proposal during the exchange described in the sourcing.

Congress has not yet voted on the court's FY2027 budget request. The identity of whoever placed the swatting call on Barrett's home roughly six weeks before the hearing has not been disclosed, and no arrest in that case has been reported.