When lawyers argued before the D.C. Circuit in 2025, the court was considering disputes over the attempted downsizing of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the President’s power to remove members of independent agencies, access to billions of dollars in federal climate grants, and the procedures available to migrants facing removal. These were appeals with immediate consequences for federal programs, regulated businesses and the structure of the executive branch. They also produced some of the court’s longest and most sharply divided opinions.
The wait for those decisions has been growing. Federal judiciary statistics show that, among cases terminated on the merits during the year ending September 30, 2025, the D.C. Circuit took a median of 5.4 months to move from oral argument to its final opinion or order. The national median was 3.2 months. No other regional circuit reported a longer median interval.
An unresolved D.C. Circuit appeal can leave federal grants frozen, agency personnel decisions unsettled, regulatory obligations uncertain or an injunction governing executive action in place. The timing can affect reserves, compliance plans, settlement leverage and preparations for rehearing or Supreme Court review.
A review of 219 matters argued before the court during calendar year 2025 provides a closer look at that wait. It also permits a preliminary examination of who sat on the panels, whether panel composition corresponded with decision time and where partisan divisions became most visible. The results show a court whose panels generally reflected the Democratic-leaning composition of its bench, although the relationship between panel partisanship and decisional speed was considerably less straightforward.
A Timing Gap That Has Widened
The D.C. Circuit has long required more time after argument than the national appellate median, but the distance between the two has increased. In fiscal year 2015, the court reported a median argument-to-disposition interval of 3.7 months, compared with 2.1 months nationally. By fiscal year 2025, those figures had risen to 5.4 and 3.2 months, respectively.