This bill directs the Attorney General and the heads of many federal agencies to create a comprehensive inventory of federal criminal statutory and criminal regulatory offenses, and to report that inventory to the Judiciary Committees. The reports must identify each offense’s elements, mens rea requirement, potential criminal penalty, and years of enforcement activity.
The public-facing component requires agencies and the Department of Justice to publish searchable indexes on their websites. The inventory aims to give Congress, practitioners, and the public a single source to assess duplication, enforcement frequency, and the clarity of criminal liability across federal law and regulation.
At a Glance
What It Does
The bill requires the Attorney General to produce a single, itemized list of federal criminal statutes and their elements and requires agency heads to produce similar lists for criminal regulatory offenses the agencies enforce. Each listing must also report penalties, mens rea, and historical enforcement/referral counts.
Who It Affects
The Department of Justice, cabinet and selected independent agencies (including enforcement and rulemaking bodies), federal prosecutors, regulated entities subject to criminal regulatory offenses, compliance officers, defense counsel, and congressional oversight staff.
Why It Matters
By turning scattered statutes and criminalized regulations into a centralized, searchable inventory, the bill creates a baseline for oversight, legislative reform, and compliance risk assessment—and it will change how stakeholders quantify and compare criminal exposures across federal law.
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What This Bill Actually Does
The bill sets out three linked duties: (1) the Attorney General must assemble and submit a comprehensive list of criminal statutory offenses; (2) specified federal agency heads must assemble equivalent lists of criminal regulatory offenses that their agencies enforce; and (3) both the Department of Justice and those agencies must publish searchable, freely accessible indexes online. The reporting task is not symbolic: each entry must identify the offense’s elements, the mens rea requirement (if any), the maximum criminal penalty, and historical enforcement data.
For enforcement history the bill asks for counts spanning the 15 years before enactment—prosecutions for statutes and referrals for regulatory violations. The statute defines “criminal statutory offense” and “criminal regulatory offense” narrowly to distinguish between offenses created by statute and those created by regulation but enforced with criminal penalties.
The agency list in the bill covers a long roster of executive and independent agencies, so the collection task reaches across the federal regulatory state rather than residing solely with law-enforcement agencies.The bill imposes concrete deadlines: the initial reports to the Judiciary Committees are due within one year of enactment, and the public indexes must be available within two years. The indexes must be published on the DOJ or respective agency websites and be freely accessible; the bill explicitly disclaims any new appropriation authority, meaning agencies must carry out the tasks within existing budgets.Operationally, agencies will need to reconcile rule text, penalty schedules, and referral records; DOJ will need to compile statutory text and historical prosecution data.
The mens rea field will force agencies and DOJ to make discrete choices about how to characterize state of mind requirements where statutory language or case law is ambiguous. Taken together, the mechanics push agencies toward a standardized presentation of criminal exposure that becomes a tool for lawyers, compliance teams, and Congress to compare offenses across titles and programs.
The Five Things You Need to Know
The Attorney General must list every federal criminal statute and, for each, provide the statutory elements, the mens rea requirement, and the potential criminal penalty.
Agency heads must list criminal regulatory offenses the agency enforces and report, for each offense, the number of referrals to DOJ for prosecution in each year during the 15-year lookback period.
Initial reports to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees are due within one year of enactment; public, searchable indexes must be posted on agency or DOJ websites within two years.
The bill names a long roster of covered entities (e.g.
EPA, SEC, FTC, DHS, Labor, Treasury and many independent commissions), bringing both cabinet departments and independent regulators within scope.
Section (e) states that nothing in the law authorizes appropriations, so agencies must implement the inventory and indexing with existing resources.
Section-by-Section Breakdown
Every bill we cover gets an analysis of its key sections.
Short title
Designates the measure as the "Count the Crimes to Cut Act." This is purely nominal, but it signals the bill’s intent to treat criminal law mapping as a tool for potential statutory and regulatory pruning.
Definitions — criminal statutory vs. criminal regulatory offenses
Creates two operative definitions: criminal statutory offenses (crimes created by statute) and criminal regulatory offenses (criminal penalties attached to regulations). The distinction matters for how reporting responsibilities are split—DOJ compiles statutory offenses while agencies compile regulatory ones—and for who holds records of enforcement activity (prosecution counts vs. referral counts).
Report on criminal statutory offenses (DOJ)
Requires the Attorney General to deliver to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, within one year, a list of all federal criminal statutes and for each provide the elements, potential penalties, prosecutorial counts for the previous 15 years, and mens rea requirement. Practically, DOJ will have to harmonize statutory text, internal prosecution databases, and possibly consult U.S. Attorneys’ Offices to ensure the counts and mens rea characterizations are accurate and consistently presented.
Reports on criminal regulatory offenses (agency heads)
Directs each named agency head to deliver within one year a list of criminal regulatory offenses the agency enforces, and for each identify penalties, mens rea, and yearly counts of referrals to DOJ for the prior 15 years. The bill enumerates a broad set of agencies—cabinet departments and many independent commissions—so responsibility is dispersed, and agencies will need to mine enforcement and referral logs and map regulatory provisions to criminal penalty authorities.
Public index requirement
Requires DOJ and each covered agency to publish a publicly accessible index of the offenses listed in their reports within two years. The practical implication is a searchable, web-based repository for attorneys, compliance officers, and oversight staff; agencies will need web-publishing capabilities and a standard metadata scheme to make the indexes useful and comparable across sites.
Rule of construction — no new appropriations
States explicitly that the statute does not authorize any appropriations. That places the administrative and technical implementation burden on existing agency budgets and may limit the depth or quality of the deliverables if agencies lack resources to compile and publish comprehensive, validated inventories.
This bill is one of many.
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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
- Congressional oversight committees: Gain a centralized, structured dataset to identify duplicative or rarely-used criminal provisions and to prioritize reform or oversight inquiries.
- Defense attorneys and public defenders: Receive an authoritative reference to check statutory elements and mens rea characterizations that can affect charging decisions, plea negotiations, and sentencing analysis.
- Compliance officers and in-house counsel: Obtain a searchable inventory to map corporate policies to criminal exposure across statutes and regulatory programs, improving risk assessments and remediation planning.
Who Bears the Cost
- Department of Justice and component U.S. Attorney’s Offices: Must extract, validate, and present 15 years of prosecution data and statutory element characterizations—an administrative and analytic task that will consume staff time and IT resources.
- Covered federal agencies (cabinet and independent): Need to identify regulatory provisions with criminal penalties, compile referral histories, define mens rea for each offense, and publish indexes without additional appropriations.
- Regulated entities, particularly small businesses: May face increased compliance costs and legal exposure as clearer public inventories make criminal liability easier to spot and enforce; smaller firms may lack resources to respond to newly highlighted risks.
Key Issues
The Core Tension
The bill balances two legitimate goals—public, comparable information about criminal law and a minimal congressional imposition on agency budgets—but tension arises because full, accurate transparency requires resources, standardized methods, and legal judgments (about mens rea and offense elements) that agencies must make without added funding and with little direction, potentially trading uniformity and accuracy for speed and cost savings.
The bill mandates transparency but leaves key implementation choices undefined. It requires mens rea to be reported, yet many statutes and regulations have ambiguous or evolving mens rea standards; agencies and DOJ will have to choose how to characterize judicially developed standards, which creates variation and potential disputes about the inventory’s accuracy.
Enforcement counts are useful but blunt: prosecution and referral numbers do not reveal case complexity, declination reasons, plea practices, or resource constraints that shape enforcement—raw counts could be misread as a measure of seriousness or priority.
The absence of appropriations both reduces the political friction of passage and creates a practical tension: agencies must produce technically competent, searchable indexes without guaranteed new funding. That increases the risk of uneven quality across agencies—some may deliver full, well-structured databases while others offer minimal, text-heavy lists.
Finally, the statute does not prescribe a standard data format, dispute-resolution process for contested characterizations, or guidance on how to treat overlapping offenses, which raises questions about comparability and long-term maintenance of the indexes.
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