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DPI Leads Coalition Calling on Senate Judiciary to Advance the Count the Crimes to Cut Act
March 16, 2026—Due Process Institute led a bipartisan coalition urging the Senate Judiciary Committee to support the Count the Crimes to Cut Act (H.R. 2159), legislation that would require a comprehensive accounting of federal criminal offenses. Despite the serious consequences of criminal law, no one—not even Congress—can say with certainty how many federal crimes exist, due in part to the vast number of offenses scattered across statutes and federal regulations.
The bill would direct the Department of Justice to create a detailed, publicly available inventory of federal crimes, including their elements, penalties, and enforcement history. By bringing much-needed transparency to the federal criminal code, the legislation would equip policymakers with the information necessary to evaluate the scope of criminal law, strengthen oversight, and ensure that criminal penalties are applied fairly and appropriately.
We Urge the House to Pass the Count the Crimes to Cut Act
December 1, 2025–Due Process Institute urges members to vote YES on the Count the Crimes to Cut Act, H.R. 2159. This bill would require the Department of Justice to produce a report identifying all federal crimes, including clarifying each law’s legal elements and penalties, as well as the number of prosecutions in the past 15 years. Furthermore, it forces Congress to do the bare minimum any responsible steward of public power should do: inventory its own criminal laws.
When lawmakers don’t know how many crimes their predecessors created, the federal government’s power to police, prosecute, and incarcerate grows without restraint or accountability. The Count the Crimes to Cut Act gives Congress the visibility it needs to identify redundancies, outdated offenses, and provisions that are no longer grounded in any coherent public-safety rationale. It also creates the conditions for real bipartisan wins: fewer duplicative statutes, clearer enforcement authority, and a federal criminal code that ordinary Americans can actually understand. Conservatives and progressives have long agreed that overcriminalization is both wasteful and unjust, but reforms stall without a baseline of facts.
This commonsense reform that restores accountability, enhances public safety, and moves the federal government closer to the transparent, limited institution the Constitution envisioned.
We Support the Count the Crimes to Cut Act
May 17, 2025–The federal criminal system has grown so much that no one currently understands its full scope. To illustrate the breadth of the problem, the House Judiciary Committee’s Over-Criminalization Task Force asked the Congressional Research Service (CRS) in 2013 to update its count of federal criminal offenses—but according to the chairman of the task force, “CRS’ initial response to our request was that they lack the manpower and resources to accomplish this task.”
The best current estimates indicate that there are more than 5,000 federal criminal statutes and at least 300,000 federal regulations that carry criminal penalties. It erodes due process protections to have so many criminal laws in effect that it is essentially impossible for the average person to know what is lawful and what is not. The U.S. Constitution grants protection against wrongful or unfair criminal prosecutions and our federal criminal law must reflect those values.
This problem has been caused by the proclivity of both parties in Congress to react to every social concern or policy challenge by passing new criminal laws without giving sufficient thought to whether putting people in prison—particularly at the federal level—is an appropriate or effective response to the issue at hand. In the rush to do something, there is often little consideration of the impact of the creation of new crimes on the individuals directly affected by them, or on the erosion of states’ authority to regulate criminal conduct in their jurisdictions.
To ensure that we all have constitutionally adequate notice of our criminal laws before our government infringes on liberty, Congress must finally figure out how many federal crimes are on the books, what they actually criminalize, whether they are clearly written, and how often they are used as a basis for prosecution.
Introduced by Reps. Chip Roy (R-TX), Lucy McBath (D-GA), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), and Steve Cohen (D-TN), the Count the Crimes to Cut Act, H.R. 2159, would require the Department of Justice to produce a report identifying all federal crimes, including clarifying each law’s legal elements and penalties, as well as the number of prosecutions in the past 15 years. This will provide Congress and the public with a better understanding of the breadth and use of federal criminal laws and will hopefully chart a path forward to reducing over-criminalization and over-federalization. Therefore, Due Process Institute urges members to cosponsor the Count the Crimes to Cut Act.
We Urge Congress To Protect Nonprofits
May 7, 2024–Due Process Institute and 130 other organizations sent a letter to the United States Senate Committee on Finance urging members to refrain from advancing consideration of H.R. 6408, and its companion bill S. 4136, introduced by Senators John Cornyn and Angus King. This proposed legislation would unconstitutionally harm all Americans’ free speech and due process rights by creating new executive authorities that could be abused by any presidential administration seeking to terminate the tax-exempt status of nonprofit organizations arbitrarily.
If enacted, this act would grant the Secretary of the Treasury broad discretionary powers to terminate the tax-exempt status of nonprofit organizations based solely on a subjective declaration that they are “terrorist supporting organizations.” This proposal lacks sufficient accountability measures and opens the door to potential abuse, especially given the current climate of increased politicization and polarization within the U.S. government.
We Oppose The SHIELD Act
September 29, 2023–Due Process Institute and other civil liberties organizations urged members of Congress to oppose the Stopping Harmful Image Exploitation and Limiting Distribution (SHIELD) Act of 2023 (S. 412), which would create a new federal crime carrying a one-to-five-year prison sentence for sharing intimate photos of a person without that person’s consent. This bill is well intentioned, but it will sweep in and criminalize innocent conduct and worsen the trial penalty that many criminal defendants—including many people who are actually innocent—face in our justice system.
For example, if a person receives, unsolicited, an intimate image from an acquaintance and in turn forwards the image to a friend or family member—not for the purpose of “seeking support or help”—but instead to express surprise or displeasure, then that person will have committed a crime under the current version of the SHIELD Act. And that should not be. The communication in this example is plainly innocent conduct. Equally plainly, it is protected speech. Yet, under the SHIELD Act, the victim of an unsolicited sexual communication could easily find themselves prosecuted.
This version of the SHIELD Act still places too much discretion in the hands of law enforcement and prosecutors for fair application, and potentially criminalizes innocent conduct. The bill’s goals of protecting privacy could be better advanced by a more narrowly tailored proposal that does not unnecessarily sweep up protected speech on both public and private matters.
We Urge Congress to Protect Access to Information and Secure Online Communication
February 9, 2022–Due Process Institute and a bipartisan coalition expressed strong opposition to the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act of 2022 (EARN IT, S. 3538). While we support curbing the scourge of child exploitation online, EARN IT will actually make it harder for law enforcement to protect children, will result in online censorship that disproportionately impacts marginalized communities, and will jeopardize access to encrypted services.
Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934 (as amended, 47 U.S.C. § 230) generally shields online intermediaries from liability for the content users convey on their platforms. This helps to promote free expression online, which is further supported by the use of strong end-to-end encryption. But EARN IT would vastly expand the liability risk of hosting or facilitating user-generated content by permitting states to impose criminal liability when providers are “reckless” or “negligent” in keeping CSAM off their platforms; EARN IT also exposes them to civil liability under state laws with similar mens rea requirements but subject to much lower standards of proof.
The EARN IT Act would have devastating consequences for everyone’s ability to share and access information online, and to do so in a secure manner. We urge Congress to oppose this bill and instead consider more tailored approaches to deal with the real harms of child sexual abuse material online.
Due Process Institute Expresses Concerns with the “ILLICIT CASH” Act
July 19, 2019–Due Process Institute supports reasonable and necessary measures to combat money laundering and terrorist financing, but oppose those efforts that undermine due process rights, privacy protections, the attorney-client privilege, and other sound public policies. We hope lawmakers share our concerns and work to make meaningful improvements to the draft legislation before it is introduced.
DPI Shares its Concerns on Beneficial Ownership Reporting with Senate Banking Committee
May 20, 2019–Due Process Institute continues to share its bipartisan concerns regarding proposed new criminal laws and unintended consequences of proposed beneficial ownership reporting requirements.
DPI, ACLU, and FreedomWorks Oppose Beneficial Ownership Bill
May 7, 2019–Due Process Institute, the American Civil Liberties Union, and FreedomWorks oppose certain provisions of H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act of 2019 , because of serious concerns regarding privacy and the use of criminal penalties. Five new federal crimes would be created for first-time paperwork violations, using vague terms and complicated reporting regimes that are likely to trap many small business owners.
Due Process Institute Raises Concerns with H.R. 6729
September 25, 2018–Due Process Institute has concerns about H.R. 6729 “Empowering Financial Institutions to Fight Human Trafficking Act of 2018” and opposes its placement on the suspension calendar. Joined by FreedomWorks, NACDL, and Defending Rights and Dissent, we oppose this fast-track measure for a bill that will negatively affect privacy rights of individuals and increase surveillance based on mere suspicions of wrongdoing.
DPI President Speaks at ABA International Law Conference
April 10, 2019–Due Process Institute President and Founder Shana-Tara O’Toole was one of the featured speakers at the ABA’s Section of International Law 2019 Annual Conference held in Washington DC. O’Toole spoke on the panel titled, “Corporate Requirement or Getting Thrown Under the Bus? The Prosecution of Individuals in the Anti-Corruption Boom.” Her comments specifically addressed the existence of compliance defenses used in certain OECD countries and how that may have an effect on the prosecution of individuals.
Due Process Institute Co-Sponsors Abacus Screening
May 31, 2018–Due Process Institute, in conjunction with NACDL, hosted a screening of Abacus: Small Enough to Jail at the E Street Cinema in Washington DC. Afterwards, President + Founder Shana O’Toole moderated a Q&A Session with members of the Sung Family and one of the documentary’s producers, Mark Mitten. Nominated for Best Documentary Feature at this year’s Academy Awards, the film centers on a small family-owned bank in New York City’s Chinatown that was the only financial institution to face criminal charges following the subprime mortgage crisis. The documentary serves as an engrossing legal thriller, as well as a compelling portrait of the Chinese-American community in New York City as it intersects with a deeply flawed criminal legal system.