Federal court records cost $1 a page, and the system collects $150M a year (eff.org)
The Open Courts Act of 2026 would scrap PACER and CM/ECF for one free platform, ending the fees that pull in over $150 million a year from people reading public documents. A near-identical bill cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee once and then died.
The thread's most-upvoted voice wasn't cheering. "Nothing is actually free," he wrote: make records free and you fund a profession used mostly by well-paid attorneys out of the general tax pool.
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