WASHINGTON ― It’s not often that a federal judge pleads with the White House and senators to fill vacancies on his or her court. But in the case of U.S. District Judge Lawrence O’Neill, his court’s workload has become so unmanageable that it’s come to begging for help.

“I write this letter out of concern for some 8.5 million people who live in the Eastern District of California, with my intention to prevent an impending, acute, and judicial catastrophe,” O’Neill wrote in a letter Friday to White House counsel Pat Cipollone and California Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris. “The statement sounds serious and ominous. It is both. It may also sound like an exaggeration. It is not.”

O’Neill, who is the chief judge on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, said his court is about to lose the equivalent of one-third of its district judges to retirement in the next three months. Each of the court’s six district judges handles roughly 900 cases at any given time. That’s more than double the national average caseload for district judges, which is 425 cases.

The court hasn’t expanded its number of seats since 1978, either.

Unless the White House and Senate move quickly to fill two impending vacancies on the court, O’Neill says there is a high probability that some civil jury trials will “cease to exist” in the district and some criminal cases will have to be dismissed altogether because it is taking too long for them to go to trial.

“This result will be abhorrent to everything the judges of our District believe in, including equal justice, due process, and access to the courts,” he adds.

Here’s a copy of O’Neill’s letter: