H.R. 59, Mens Rea Reform Act

H.R. 59 would establish a default mens rea—or state of mind—requirement for prosecution of federal criminal offenses. To obtain a conviction, prosecutors would need to prove that a defendant acted knowingly, including for offenses that do not currently require proof of a person’s mental state. In general, prosecutors would need to prove that a defendant knew the facts and circumstances that constitute an offense but not necessarily that they were aware that their conduct was unlawful. Under current law, people charged with certain crimes, regulatory crimes in particular, can be convicted even if criminal intent is not proven. The new requirement would apply unless a law specifically states otherwise or its application would violate constitutional limits on prosecution.

By establishing a default requirement, H.R. 59 would increase the burden of proof for some prosecutions. CBO expects that the bill would result in fewer criminal charges being brought by federal prosecutors and that, among those, fewer still would result in convictions.

Information from the Sentencing Commission indicates that under current law, about 2,000 people are convicted each year of the type of crimes that would be affected by the bill and that criminal fines were imposed in roughly 10 percent of those cases. Criminal fines are recorded in the budget as revenues, deposited in the Crime Victims Fund, and spent without further appropriation.

CBO expects that, under H.R. 59, prosecutors would decline to bring charges or defendants would be acquitted in a few hundred of those cases each year, some of which would result in criminal fines under current law. In cases where they declined to bring charges, CBO expects that prosecutors would shift resources toward investigating other crimes and cases, resulting in no significant effect on overall caseloads. However, altering the type of cases that prosecutors would litigate could reduce both the number of convictions and the average amounts of resulting fines relative to current law. On that basis and using information from the Sentencing Commission, CBO estimates that enacting H.R. 59 would reduce revenues from the collection of criminal penalties by $1 million over the 2026-2036 period. Because the spending of those penalties lags their collection, CBO estimates that, on net, enacting the bill would increase the deficit by an insignificant amount over the 2026-2036 period.

Because CBO expects that the bill would not significantly change prosecutors’ caseloads, we estimate that implementing H.R. 59 would affect the operating costs of the Department of Justice and the federal judiciary by an insignificant amount over the 2026-2031 period.

Significant uncertainty surrounds CBO’s estimate, in particular because of the difficulty assessing the effects on annual caseloads, how the new requirement would affect prosecutorial decision-making, and what legal outcomes might occur.

The CBO staff contact for this estimate is Jon Sperl. The estimate was reviewed by H. Samuel Papenfuss, Deputy Director of Budget Analysis.