Justice Elena Kagan and Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
Reuters
Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett are scheduled to testify next week to a House Appropriations subcommittee about the high court’s fiscal 2027 budget request, according to an agenda released Tuesday.
Their testimony on July 14 will be the first time Supreme Court justices have testified to Congress since 2019, when Kagan and Samuel Alito testified about the court’s budget request to the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government.
Kagan and Barrett will appear before the same panel.
Kagan has served on the court since 2010, after her appointment by then-President Barack Obama, a Democrat. Barrett has been a justice since 2020. She was appointed by President Donald Trump, a Republican.
CNBC has requested comment from a spokeswoman for the Supreme Court about the scheduled testimony.
The hearing will come two weeks after the Supreme Court issued its final opinions for the 2025-26 term.
The opinions, which neither justice is expected to discuss in their testimony, included a ruling upholding the constitutional right to birthright citizenship, which Trump sought to undercut with an executive order. Barrett and Kagan were among the majority in that holding.
Kagan was also part of a 5-4 majority opinion holding that Trump could not fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook while her lawsuit challenging her termination continues in a federal district court. Barrett was in the minority in that case.
But Barrett was in the majority, and Kagan was in the minority, in the ruling that Trump had the authority to fire Federal Trade Commission Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter. That decision gave presidents the power to remove members of nominally independent agencies.
In his 2019 opening statement to the subcommittee, Alito thanked its members “for providing the Court with a substantial amount of additional security funding last year.”
“We are carefully and deliberately putting those new funds to work based on a top-to-bottom review of our current practices by highly regarded and experienced security experts,” Alito said.
Since that testimony, concerns about the safety of the Supreme Court’s nine justices have grown.
In May 2022, security measures and protection for the justices were increased after the leak of a draft opinion Alito wrote that reversed the nearly half-century Supreme Court precedent in Roe v. Wade that had said there was a constitutional right to abortion.
In response to that leak, protests occurred outside of the homes of Alito and two of his fellow conservatives on the court, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
On June 8, 2022, a 26-year-old California man armed with a handgun, knife, pepper spray and burglary tools was arrested outside of Kavanaugh’s home in Maryland after telling police he had traveled there to kill the justice, according to court records.
The man, Nicholas Roske, told police he was upset over the likelihood that the Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade, which it did weeks later when Alito’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was officially released.
Roske pleaded guilty in April 2025 to attempting to kill Kavanaugh and was sentenced that October to eight years and one month in prison.
