Senators Mount Bipartisan Push to Overhaul PACER and Eliminate Federal Court Record Fees
WASHINGTON — Bipartisan leaders in the U.S. Senate are taking another run at dismantling the federal court system’s long-standing paywall.
Senators John Kennedy, R-La., and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., reintroduced the Open Courts Act, a bipartisan measure designed to replace the federal judiciary’s decades-old public records repository, PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records), with a modern, centralized, and entirely free public database.
The proposed legislation tasks the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts with overhauling both PACER and the Case Management/Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF) system. In its place, the judiciary would be required to build a single, streamlined system that unifies electronic filing and docket retrieval across all federal district, appellate, and bankruptcy courts nationwide.
Tackling an Outdated System
Originally launched in the late 1980s and transitioned online in 2001, PACER has long been criticized by legal researchers, journalists, and advocacy groups as clunky, fragmented, and excessively costly. Under the current model, individual federal court jurisdictions maintain their own separate e-filing and record management frameworks, creating inefficiencies and cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
Lawmakers argue that charging the public to view court dockets and judicial records creates an unjustified barrier to public transparency.
"Americans should not have to sell plasma or wrestle with clunky government websites just to read public court records," Senator Kennedy said in a statement. "PACER is old, very expensive and extremely burdensome to use. The Open Courts Act would drag this outdated system into the 21st century, protect court records from hackers and give taxpayers a better deal."
Senator Wyden highlighted the long-term operational savings the bill promises, noting that consolidating federal record infrastructure could save taxpayers over $60 million annually in operating overhead—funding that could then offset eliminating user fees entirely.
"For far too long, unnecessary paywalls have kept the American people from freely accessing public court records," Wyden stated. "The Open Courts Act will deliver a long-overdue upgrade to PACER..."
Funding and Judicial Scrutiny
To eliminate user-facing paywalls without relying on annual congressional appropriations, the legislation outlines an alternative funding structure. The modernized system would be financed through filing fees and standardized annual fee collections from government agencies that utilize the repository.
The push for reform follows years of legal and legislative battles surrounding how the Judicial Conference uses fee revenue. In 2020, a federal appeals court ruled that the judiciary had misused PACER fee collections to fund unrelated technology initiatives rather than limiting fee usage strictly to covering docketing and record delivery costs.
While past iterations of the Open Courts Act faced pushback from judicial administrators over potential implementation costs, reform advocates argue that modern cloud-based architecture makes a free, secure, and centralized database both operationally viable and overdue.