Scrapping Pacer Fees Would Add $77 Million to Deficit by 2032: CBO

A bill that would make case searches free on the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (Pacer) service is estimated to add $77 million to the federal deficit by 2032, reported the Congressional Budget Office Monday. The bill, titled the Open Courts Act, would require the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (AOUSC) and the General Services Administration to develop a centralized case management system for all federal court records that the public could access at no cost. To help pay for it, the judiciary would temporarily increase some fees for access to court documents for high-volume Pacer users, though the fees would be completely eliminated in 2026. Also in this year, the judiciary would be authorized to impose a new fee structure for filing civil and bankruptcy cases in federal courts to account for the lack of Pacer case viewing revenue. The bill also imposes mandates on entities that file federal cases or use the case management system. Developing the new system would require $230 million over 10 years, CBO said. The money would be spent on private vendors to help develop the software, plus more judiciary information technology staff to manage the deployment and maintenance of the system, and other costs including cloud storage and software licenses. As a result of the elimination of Pacer fees in 2026, CBO estimated, the AOUSC would require more money to continue providing public access to the court documents. In the years 2017-2021, AOUSC spent around $80 million annually to provide these services. Though those expenses are expected to decline by a third over the next decade via the efficiencies of the new system, AOUSC still would need about $82 million in 2026 and $496 million over the decade ending 2032 to continue to provide the services.