The Count the Crimes to Cut Act directs the Attorney General to produce a comprehensive list of every federal criminal statutory offense, including each offense’s elements, mens rea requirement, and potential criminal penalty, and to provide annual DOJ prosecution counts for each offense over the 15 years preceding enactment. Separately, heads of 35 named federal agencies and independent commissions must deliver parallel reports listing criminal regulatory offenses the agencies enforce, the potential penalties, the mens rea for each offense, and annual counts of referrals to DOJ for prosecution over the same 15-year lookback.
Within two years the bill requires the Department of Justice and each named agency to publish freely accessible online indexes of the offenses they reported. The statute expressly does not authorize new appropriations.
The law creates a single, centralized transparency exercise that could reshape how lawmakers, defense counsel, compliance teams, and agencies view the universe of federal criminal liability — and raises immediate questions about data quality, classification rules, and agency capacity to compile consistent historical records.
At a Glance
What It Does
The bill requires the Attorney General to submit a report listing all federal criminal statutory offenses with their elements, mens rea, potential penalties, and DOJ prosecution counts for each of the 15 years before enactment. Heads of 35 specified federal agencies must submit analogous reports for criminal regulatory offenses, including annual counts of referrals to DOJ for prosecution over the same 15-year period. Within two years, the DOJ and each agency must publish searchable public indexes of the listed offenses on their websites.
Who It Affects
The Department of Justice, the 35 named federal departments and independent agencies, federal prosecutors, defense attorneys, compliance officers at regulated entities, and congressional Judiciary Committees. Indirectly, regulated industries and individuals face greater public visibility into the criminal law landscape.
Why It Matters
This is a comprehensive data-gathering and transparency mandate that could change oversight and reform debates by turning statutory and regulatory criminal exposure into countable, comparable data. It creates a factual basis for policymakers to identify overlaps, rarely used offenses, and mens rea standards — but it also risks producing misleading metrics if agencies use inconsistent definitions or incomplete historical records.
More articles like this one.
A weekly email with all the latest developments on this topic.
What This Bill Actually Does
The Act creates two parallel reporting tracks. First, the Attorney General must compile an itemized list of every federal criminal statutory offense and, for each one, identify the statutory elements, the mens rea requirement, the ‘‘potential criminal penalty’’ (i.e., the criminal sanctions that the statute authorizes), and DOJ’s annual prosecution counts for the 15 years before the law passed.
That list is intended to be exhaustive as to federal statutes that create criminal liability.
Second, the bill requires heads of a long list of executive-branch departments and independent agencies to produce similar inventories for criminal regulatory offenses — that is, regulatory provisions enforceable by criminal sanctions. For each regulatory offense the agency lists, it must state the potential criminal penalty, the mens rea requirement, and the number of times the agency referred that offense to DOJ for prosecution each year during the same 15-year lookback.
The agencies named in the bill include large departments (Justice, Treasury, Homeland Security, EPA, etc.) and numerous independent commissions.Beyond the reports, the Act requires publication: within two years the Attorney General and each listed agency must publish a publicly accessible index of the offenses they reported on their official websites. The statute also contains a short rule of construction clarifying that nothing in the Act creates an appropriation; agencies must comply within existing resources unless Congress provides funding.
Practically, the work will require agencies to pull historical datasets, reconcile divergent recordkeeping systems (prosecutions vs. referrals vs. administrative actions), and make legal judgments about what counts as an offense and how to summarize mens rea and elements in machine- or human-readable form.Those implementation choices matter. A faithful inventory will require consistent definitions (for example, what precisely constitutes a ‘‘criminal regulatory offense’’), clear guidance on how to count multi-count indictments or consolidated prosecutions, and decisions on whether to include ancillary criminal provisions embedded in broader statutes or regulations.
The Act does not prescribe a methodology for those choices, leaving substantial discretion to the Attorney General and agency heads while creating a single public record that others will rely on for policy, litigation, and compliance purposes.
The Five Things You Need to Know
The Attorney General must submit, within 1 year of enactment, a list of all federal criminal statutory offenses with their elements, mens rea, potential criminal penalties, and DOJ prosecution counts for each year during the prior 15 years.
Heads of 35 named federal departments and independent agencies must, within 1 year, report all criminal regulatory offenses they enforce, providing the potential penalties, mens rea, and annual counts of referrals to DOJ for prosecution for the 15 years before enactment.
The bill sets two deadlines: agency and DOJ reports due within 1 year; public, searchable indexes of the reported offenses required on DOJ and agency websites within 2 years.
The statute defines a ‘‘criminal regulatory offense’’ as a federal regulation enforceable by a criminal penalty — shifting the reporting task to agencies that maintain regulatory criminal provisions rather than to a single central cataloger.
Section 2(e) forbids construing the Act to authorize appropriations, so agencies must assemble and publish these reports and indexes without a statutory funding authorization.
Section-by-Section Breakdown
Every bill we cover gets an analysis of its key sections.
Short title
Provides the Act’s short title: the 'Count the Crimes to Cut Act.' This is purely nominal but signals legislative intent: the central policy instrument is data transparency about criminal laws and regulatory offenses.
Key definitions
Defines two operative terms: 'criminal regulatory offense' (a federal regulation enforceable by a criminal penalty) and 'criminal statutory offense' (a criminal offense under a federal statute). Those definitions delimit which provisions agencies and DOJ must include. Because the bill ties reporting obligations to these definitions, agencies will need to resolve edge cases where statutory language, regulatory text, or implementing guidance create ambiguous criminal exposure.
Attorney General report on criminal statutory offenses
Requires the Attorney General to submit, within 1 year, a report to House and Senate Judiciary Committees that lists all federal criminal statutory offenses and, for each, provides the offense elements, potential criminal penalty, DOJ prosecution counts for each year of the 15-year lookback, and the mens rea requirement. This provision places the DOJ in the role of central cataloger for statutes, and it compels DOJ to translate statutory provisions into a standardized inventory — a task that will involve legal analysis to identify elements and mens rea across diverse criminal statutes.
Agency reports on criminal regulatory offenses and enumerated agencies
Directs the head of each named agency to submit a report, within 1 year, identifying all criminal regulatory offenses enforceable by that agency and, for each offense, listing the potential criminal penalty, the mens rea requirement, and the number of violations referred to DOJ for prosecution in each year of the prior 15 years. The bill explicitly names 35 departments and independent agencies — from Agriculture and EPA to the SEC and the Federal Trade Commission — making this a broad cross-section of federal regulatory actors. Practically, agencies must extract historical referral data from case management and legal offices and reconcile those figures with the legal text of regulations to summarize mens rea and penalties.
Public indexes on DOJ and agency websites
Requires the Attorney General and each head of an enumerated agency to establish a publicly accessible index of the offenses they reported and to post it on their websites within 2 years of enactment. The indexes must be freely accessible, exposing the compiled information to researchers, regulated entities, and policymakers. The section does not specify format or metadata standards, so the usefulness of the indexes (searchability, machine-readability, cross-agency comparability) will depend on implementation choices by DOJ and agencies.
No appropriation authorized
A rule of construction clarifies that nothing in the section authorizes or requires appropriations. Agencies are therefore expected to comply within existing budgets and staffing unless Congress separately provides funds, which raises practical questions about timetables and data completeness given varying agency capacities.
This bill is one of many.
Codify tracks hundreds of bills on Criminal Justice across all five countries.
Explore Criminal Justice in Codify Search →Who Benefits and Who Bears the Cost
Every bill creates winners and losers. Here's who stands to gain and who bears the cost.
Who Benefits
- Defense attorneys and criminal practitioners — The public indexes and offense inventories provide a single reference for statutory elements, mens rea, and historical prosecution counts that can streamline legal research and support defenses, sentencing arguments, and motions challenging the rarity or prosecutorial patterns of particular offenses.
- Congressional Judiciary Committees and policymakers — The compiled data gives lawmakers empirical footing to identify rarely used or duplicative criminal provisions and to prioritize statutory or regulatory reform.
- Compliance officers and legal teams at regulated entities — A publicly accessible catalog of regulatory criminal offenses and their mens rea will help compliance programs map criminal exposure, design controls, and prioritize risk areas.
- Academics, public interest researchers, and journalists — Standardized lists and historical prosecution/referral counts create new datasets for empirical research on prosecutorial priorities, regulatory criminalization, and mens rea variation across the federal landscape.
Who Bears the Cost
- Federal agencies and independent commissions named in the bill — Agencies must allocate staff time, legal analysis, and records searches to identify offenses, summarize elements and mens rea, and extract 15 years of referral data, all without an authorized appropriation.
- Department of Justice — DOJ must both produce the statutory inventory and process referral-count requests and indexes from many agencies, creating significant coordination and data-cleaning burdens for the Criminal Division and related components.
- Regulated entities and industry compliance teams — Although they benefit from transparency, these stakeholders may face short-term costs updating compliance programs and public disclosures in response to new visibility into criminal exposure.
- Congressional staff and oversight offices — Committees receiving the reports will need staff capacity to analyze large datasets and to reconcile methodological inconsistencies across agency reports.
Key Issues
The Core Tension
The bill pits transparency and accountability — producing a searchable inventory so lawmakers, defense counsel, and the public can see what conduct federal law makes criminal — against the practical risks of oversimplification and administrative burden: creating an apparently objective 'count' of crimes may mislead policy decisions if agencies adopt inconsistent definitions, historical records are incomplete, or mens rea summaries flatten legally complex provisions.
The Act creates a data-driven transparency exercise but leaves crucial methodological decisions unaddressed, producing risks on three fronts. First, classification and scope: the definition of 'criminal regulatory offense' is terse; agencies will face borderline cases (e.g., civil penalties with potential criminal referral, criminal provision embedded in a complex statutory scheme, or hybrid enforcement regimes).
Without standardized rules, agencies could adopt inconsistent inclusion criteria, making inter-agency comparisons misleading. Second, counting methodology: the statute requires 'number of prosecutions' for statutes and 'number of violations referred to DOJ for prosecution' for regulations over a 15-year period.
Those two metrics are not symmetrical. Agencies report referrals while DOJ reports prosecutions — double-counting, undercounting, or differing attribution rules (single indictment covering many violations, plea bargains, declinations) will affect the dataset's reliability.
Third, mens rea and elements require legal synthesis. Some offenses have ambiguous or layered mental-state standards (e.g., strict liability clauses, knowledge-based exceptions, or cross-references to other statutes).
Summarizing mens rea into a short label risks oversimplifying thorny interpretive questions that courts have not definitively resolved.
Implementation capacity is another unresolved problem. The bill does not provide funding or technical standards (format, machine-readable schema, or quality-control processes), so agencies with weak historical recordkeeping are likely to produce uneven outputs.
That gap raises the prospect that policymakers and the public will draw consequential reform conclusions from incomplete or non-comparable datasets. Finally, there is a political economy risk: converting criminal exposure into a raw count invites simplistic comparisons (e.g., 'X many criminal provisions exist in Agency A vs. Agency B') that ignore differences in statutory purpose, enforcement necessity, and public-safety rationale.
The data could be weaponized to pursue blunt deregulatory agendas if readers treat counts as a proxy for unnecessary criminalization rather than as a starting point for nuanced analysis.
Try it yourself.
Ask a question in plain English, or pick a topic below. Results in seconds.