S. 1038: TRACE Act

S. 1038 is a data-tracking bill, not a new criminal law. It tells the Justice Department to add a field in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs, showing whether a missing person's last known location was confirmed or suspected to be on covered federal land or in U.S. territorial waters.

That means cases tied to places like national forests, public lands, Army Corps projects, and coastal waters would no longer be buried inside broader missing-person data. The entry must also include any specific location details available, so the record is more useful than a simple yes-or-no tag.

The land covered here includes property managed by the Agriculture Department, most land managed by the Interior Department, and certain land and water projects run by the Army Corps of Engineers. The bill explicitly excludes land held in trust for the benefit of an Indian Tribe from this federal-land definition.

The water side is also specific. The bill covers the U.S. territorial sea out to 12 nautical miles from the coast.

S. 1038 would also require the federal government to send Congress a yearly count of how many NamUs cases involved a last known location on covered federal land or in those waters. That would give lawmakers a national baseline instead of scattered case-by-case attention.

This bill does not provide new money for searches, create a new reporting hotline, or add criminal penalties. What it changes is whether these cases are consistently identified, counted, and visible at the national level.