To make technical amendments to update statutory references to certain provisions which were formerly classified to chapters 14 and 19 of title 25, United States Code, and to correct related technical errors.

Fixes hundreds of outdated legal citations to tribal self-determination law across the U.S. Code — no policy change.

The details

Hundreds of outdated legal citations scattered across federal law would be corrected. Nothing about what the law does would change. Only the numbers used to point at it would. The cause is a bookkeeping move made years ago. The Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 used to sit at section 450 and following in title 25 of the U.S. Code. It was relocated to section 5301 and following without altering a word of the law itself. The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 moved the same way, from section 461 to section 5101. Dozens of unrelated statutes still cite the old numbers. The definition of "Indian tribe" is the biggest culprit. It sits inside the self-determination law and is borrowed by statutes across roughly thirty titles of the U.S. Code. Everything from the Lobbying Disclosure Act to the Homeland Security Act to food, drug, and highway law points at the old citation. Each of those pointers would be updated one at a time. For tribes and tribal programs, daily operations would look identical. Contracts, eligibility, and funding all stay exactly where they are. The practical gain is that anyone reading these statutes can follow a reference to a section that actually exists. The bill also cleans up a handful of typographical and cross-reference errors along the way.