Some federal agencies have imposed furloughs to implement the federal sequester under the Budget Control Act of 2011. Lucky for the Justice Department, Attorney General Eric Holder announced in April that the DOJ would have no furloughs this year, even though he had previously said that 14 days of unpaid leave per employee was likely. For the 93 U.S. attorneys and the hundreds of assistant U.S. attorneys and support staff who filed 63,188 criminal cases against 85,621 defendants last year, it is business as usual.

For federal public defenders, things are not so good. On April 18, the Executive Committee of the Judicial Conference, which determines the spending policy of the federal judiciary, announced that it planned to impose furlough days, but not more than 15 per person. The District of Columbia office of the federal public defender was relieved because it had expected 27 furlough days. The federal public defenders should not have counted those chickens before they hatched, however, because less than a month later, on May 10, Fourth Circuit Chief Judge William Traxler Jr., chairman of the Executive Committee of the Judicial Conference, issued a memorandum reporting that the committee looked beyond the initial numbers, reconsidered its April decision, and decided to up the number of furlough days to 20. That is four full work weeks, a mandatory month off, if it were taken all at once.

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