# Court of Federal Claims The **United States Court of Federal Claims** is the court where people sue the federal government for money. It sits in Washington, D.C., with nationwide jurisdiction, and its authority comes mainly from the [[Tucker Act]]. It is an **Article I** court: its sixteen judges are nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate to fifteen-year terms, not life tenure. Appeals go to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Its line of descent runs from the Court of Claims (1855), through the Claims Court created by the Federal Courts Improvement Act of 1982, to its current name, adopted in 1992. ## What it hears - **Government contracts**, including [[Bid Protest]]s by losing bidders and contractor claims after a [[Termination for Convenience]] - **Takings claims**: compensation when the government takes or restricts property - Tax refunds, military and civilian back pay, and Indian trust claims - **The "vaccine court."** Its Office of Special Masters has exclusive jurisdiction over the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. The statute caps it at eight special masters, and petitions reached 1,301 in FY2025, up 62% from a decade earlier. ## Why it matters now: the court that cannot say stop The court's defining limit is remedial. It can award money judgments, but it has no general power to order an agency to keep doing something. It cannot reinstate a grant, restart a program, or unwind a policy. That limit became the operative fact of 2025–26 funding litigation. In [[Department of Education v. California]] (April 2025) and [[NIH v. American Public Health Association]] (August 2025), the Supreme Court signalled that challenges to terminated grants are contract claims that belong here, not in district court under the [[Administrative Procedure Act]]. Grantees who had been getting injunctions restoring their money were redirected to a forum that could at best pay them later. The claims court bar's own leaders described the resulting wave of unfamiliar grant cases as "an avalanche." How damages would even be measured for a terminated research program remained unsettled into 2026. Only the grantee institution, not the individual researcher, can sue. The routing is not settled. On August 4, 2026, the en banc D.C. Circuit held 6–4 that the $20 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund cancellations were not contract claims and could stay in district court. The government is seeking Supreme Court review. See [[Tucker Act]] for the full sequence. ## The vaccine-court front The same court is the target of a separate campaign. In July 2025, HHS Secretary [[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]] said he was working with the Justice Department to "fix" the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. He said it had "devolved into a morass of inefficiency, favoritism, and outright corruption," and accused the special masters of protecting the trust fund at claimants' expense. Reporting since then has raised the possibility of bringing COVID-19 vaccines into the program and of adding autism or other conditions to the Vaccine Injury Table, the list of presumed injuries the special masters apply. The Secretary can amend the table by rule, and any change could be challenged in court (per CRS). A vaccine-skeptic HHS rewriting the table would change what this court pays out without any change in the law. ## See also - [[Tucker Act]] · [[Sovereign Immunity]] · [[Federal Judiciary Tree]] - [[Department of Education v. California]] · [[NIH v. American Public Health Association]] · [[How a Federal Agency Is Dismantled]] - [[Federal Grant Lifecycle]] · [[Bid Protest]] · [[Termination for Convenience]] - [[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]]