Sponsors (6)
The bill strengthens privacy protections, accountability, and technical standards for facial-recognition use—reducing wrongful IDs and creating remedies—while imposing compliance costs, potential investigative delays, increased litigation risk for jurisdictions, and a risk that federal standardization and funding could legitimize broader deployments.
Racial and ethnic minorities and the general public will face lower risk of wrongful identification because the bill bans indiscriminate facial-recognition searches, requires court orders for most searches, and mandates accuracy testing.
Arrestees, minors, and people who were released or acquitted will have greater privacy protections because certain photos are removed from facial-recognition databases every six months.
Law enforcement agencies and people whose data are analyzed will get more reliable and less biased systems because the bill establishes uniform definitions, operational testing (measuring false positives/negatives and variability), NIST benchmarks, independent annual testing, and training standards (backed by federal funding).
Racial-ethnic minorities, urban communities, and the general public may face expanded biometric surveillance and greater privacy risks because broad statutory definitions plus explicit coverage of law enforcement/prosecutors can enable wider government and prosecutorial use.
State and local governments (and ultimately local residents) will lose 15% of certain grant funding if they fail to comply, reducing resources for crime prevention and public-safety programs.
State and local budgets and residents could see reduced police services or cut programs if grant shortfalls are passed on, harming public safety and services.
Based on analysis of 5 sections of legislative text.
Requires court orders and agency approval for law-enforcement facial-recognition searches of reference photo databases, mandates biannual removal of many arrest photos, authorizes NIST standards and $5M/year (FY2026–29), and enforces penalties for noncompliance.
Introduced July 23, 2025 by Ted Lieu · Last progress July 23, 2025
Requires law-enforcement agencies to get a court order (with agency-head approval and narrow emergency exceptions) before running facial-recognition searches against driver’s-license, passport, and arrest-photo databases. It forces biannual cleanup of arrest-photo databases to remove images of people under 18, people released without charge, and those acquitted or whose charges were dismissed, starting 180 days after enactment. The Attorney General must cut certain DOJ grant awards by 15% for states or localities that fail to substantially comply. The bill also directs NIST to create testing, bias-benchmarking, and training standards for facial-recognition systems with $5 million per year authorized for FY2026–2029, requires covered federal agencies to publish use policies within 90 days, and removes state sovereign immunity for violations of the law.