The study of court curbing has identified several measures through which political actors (may) influence judicial decisions, including judicial selection, jurisdiction stripping, resource stripping, or court packing. One challenge that impedes our understanding of the consequences of such measures is that it is relatively rare that they are actually implemented. However, in the case of resource stripping, there is one measure that is relatively frequently implemented: reductions in judicial panel size. This paper leverages a natural experiment at the Swiss Federal Administrative Court to gauge the impact of an effective panel size reduction introduced by the federal parliament on asylum appeal decisions. I show that political actors’ decisions about resources can affect judicial outcomes even if the resource cuts only target clearcut cases. This finding sheds light on court curbing outside the US context and draws attention to the role of political actors in structuring judicial decision-making procedures. While “the incidence of significant risk of fundamental changes to the Court’s power” (Clark 2009: 972) may be rare, changing judicial procedures to save resources are not – perhaps particularly in areas of the law that deal with groups with less political clout.