Objectives We ask whether the requests the federal judiciary makes to Congress are conditioned either on political factors or on its actual institutional needs. Methods. We build a new measure of the yearly well‐being of the federal courts from 1978 through 2013 using factor analysis. We specify two formal models to generate testable hypotheses that help to untangle equilibria behavior resulting from competing claims on judicial preferences for court reforms. We test these claims using data from the chief justice's Year‐End Reports on the Federal Judiciary. Results. We find that requests are not conditioned upon the courts' actual institutional needs but instead upon their ideological proximity to the Senate. Conclusion. We conclude that the federal judiciary views its own administration in a similarly political fashion as its elected counterparts.