Trump's judicial push stalls as vacancies run dry, confirming only 26 judges in 2025

Trump ended 2025 with 26 lifetime judicial confirmations — six on circuit courts and 20 on district courts. Biden secured 40 in his first year. The gap matters because each seat is filled for life, meaning a slower pace early in a term can cost the president years of ideological influence on the bench.

By February 2026, the Senate had confirmed 33 of Trump's 42 nominees for his second term. That's a faster clip than his first term started, when he had zero confirmations through July 1 of his first year — a historic low at that point. But the bottleneck is no longer the Senate: it's the vacancy supply.

Federal judges have been slow to retire under Trump's second term. With only 37 open district court seats nationwide, the administration is running out of vacancies to fill. Creating new judgeships requires an act of Congress — and no new district court seats have been authorized since 1990, a 35-year drought that's left courts struggling with a 724,000-case backlog.

Trump publicly attacked Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society in 2025, accusing them of producing judges who would rule against him. Leo, who helped build Trump's first-term judicial legacy of 234 confirmed judges including three Supreme Court justices, is no longer involved in vetting nominees. That's a seismic shift — the Federalist Society has been the de facto Republican judicial farm team since the Reagan era.

The Article III Project, led by MDMike Davis — a former clerk to Justice Neil Gorsuch and a combative Trump ally — has stepped into the role of vetting nominees in Trump's second term. Davis's approach prioritizes executive power maximalism and loyalty to Trump's legal positions over the Federalist Society's emphasis on originalist legal philosophy and elite credentials.

The blue slip tradition — a Senate Judiciary Committee practice since 1917 where home-state senators can effectively block nominees from their state — has been weakened but not eliminated. Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley's handling of blue slips will determine whether Democratic senators from red states retain any leverage over nominees that would serve their constituents.

Trump's nomination of EBEmil Bove III to the Third Circuit was widely read as a signal of the new direction. Bove, a former Trump personal attorney, lacks the traditional conservative legal pedigree that Federalist Society vetting demanded. Legal observers across the spectrum read the pick as prioritizing loyalty over judicial philosophy.