Sponsor
Mark Harris
Representative · R-NC
Representative · R-NC
This bill primarily cleans up and modernizes statutory citations and definitions—reducing legal ambiguity and improving administration across many programs—but the heavy reliance on strike‑and‑insert edits and unspecified replacement text creates substantial short‑term legal uncertainty, administrative costs, and risks of altered eligibility or unfunded expansions that could harm beneficiaries and impose costs on governments and taxpayers.
Federal, state, and local agencies, courts, grant applicants, and program administrators will face clearer statutory citations and corrected cross-references, reducing legal ambiguity and making administration, compliance, and dispute resolution easier across many programs.
Congress, GAO, CBO, Treasury, and OMB (and therefore taxpayers) get clarified reporting and information-access rules that can improve oversight and enable timelier fiscal and programmatic decisions.
Tribal communities and tribal justice systems will gain expanded emergency shelter and substance‑abuse services, clearer juvenile detention planning authorities, and clarified law‑enforcement roles that can improve public safety and culturally appropriate services on tribal lands.
Many Americans — beneficiaries, agencies, courts, and taxpayers — face legal uncertainty and higher litigation risk because numerous sections rely on strike‑and‑insert edits or unspecified replacement text, leaving ambiguity about the substantive effects of the changes.
State and local governments, nonprofits, schools, and service providers could incur substantial administrative and transitional costs updating guidance, forms, IT systems, trainings, and compliance processes to reflect widespread citation and definitional changes.
Several amendments could expand program eligibility or authorize activities without providing new funding, creating unfunded mandates that strain state, local, tribal, and nonprofit budgets or raise expectations for federal support that may not materialize.
Based on analysis of 20 sections of legislative text.
Makes widespread citation updates, replaces definitions and eligibility language across many statutes (tax code, WIOA, justice, trafficking, tribal, education), mixing technical recodification with substantive replacements.
Official title: To make technical amendments to update statutory references to provisions reclassified to title 34, United States Code, and to correct related technical errors.
Introduced July 17, 2025 by Mark Harris · Last progress July 17, 2025
Makes many targeted changes across federal law by updating citations, revising definitions, and replacing specific statutory text in roughly 20 titles of the U.S. Code. The bill modifies tax-code cross‑references, revises definitions used for fallen‑heroes flag displays, updates workforce program definitions and eligibility, adjusts numerous criminal‑justice and trafficking cross‑references, amends tribal substance‑abuse and Indian law provisions, and revises scattered provisions affecting patent fees, education safety reporting, and grant and reporting statutes. Most edits are framed as strike‑and‑insert replacements or citation modernizations; some are purely technical (renumbering or recodifying citations), while many replace whole paragraphs or definitions and thus change legal meaning, program scope, or eligibility where they touch definitions or program criteria. The measure is omnibus in nature: it affects many unrelated statutory areas rather than creating a single new program or a consolidated funding package.