Commentary: Congress Rearranging Deck Chairs as Predators Roam Free

The Misplaced Focus on Online Safety

After watching the House Energy & Commerce hearing on “protecting kids online,” it became clear that Congress is addressing the wrong issue. Lawmakers spent hours discussing platform design changes, age-verification systems, and so-called “duties of care.” However, not a single moment was dedicated to the most critical factor in safeguarding children: arresting sexual predators and ensuring they face legal consequences.

The government cannot claim to prioritize child safety while ignoring the fundamental realities of this crisis. Last year, electronic service providers submitted over 20 million CyberTipline reports to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Out of these, 13 million came from Meta alone. This means a private company has essentially called the police 13 million times. Yet, law enforcement agencies, which are already understaffed, undertrained, and lacking in digital forensics capabilities, have only managed to respond to a fraction of these calls.

Every expert understands that the real challenge isn’t detecting abuse—it’s investigating, prosecuting, and incarcerating those responsible. Until Congress invests in the people who actually put predators behind bars, these hearings remain performative rather than meaningful.

The Flawed Approach to Legislation

Lawmakers in the 119th Congress have been revisiting a familiar set of bills that promise online safety but deliver little in return. These proposals introduce new liabilities, unnecessary bureaucracies, and additional mandates—along with risks of censorship. What they fail to address is the one thing that truly matters: removing predators from the streets.

None of the bills discussed include serious funding for law enforcement. There was no mention of codifying or expanding the vital work done by the Department of Homeland Security Cybercrimes Unit. No bill suggested distributing the Know2Protect public awareness program, a free and accessible resource for parents, children, and schools. None of them expanded the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Forces. No legislation provided U.S. marshals with the digital forensics teams they need. And none modernized the overwhelmed systems currently in place.

These bills miss the core issue: the near-total impunity that online predators enjoy. They repeat a long-standing mistake by assuming that the federal government should act as America’s digital parent. Parents—not Congress, state legislatures, or city councils—decide when a child is ready for a phone, a platform, or a social-media account. When Congress tries to override this principle, which has been part of federal and state law for decades, it does two things: it undermines family autonomy and creates a massive surveillance and data-collection system that criminals will exploit.

The Risks of Data Collection

In October 2024, nearly 70,000 Discord users had their driver’s licenses, IP addresses, and private messages exposed online after a third-party age-verification vendor was breached. Last year, one of the largest verification companies in the world left its login credentials exposed for 12 months, allowing anyone with a browser and malicious intent to access the selfies and driver’s licenses of users across Uber, TikTok, and X. The idea that private companies should hold onto this data—or hire another company to do it—is simply not reasonable in today’s environment.

Predators around the world are watching the House Energy & Commerce hearing and breathing a sigh of relief. They get another year of freedom to exploit, coerce, extort, and re-victimize children. Another year where millions of CyberTips go unassigned, uninvestigated, and unanswered.

A Clear Path Forward

Absolute child safety is not a mystery. We know what works: funded investigations, trained prosecutors, digital forensics teams, and a criminal-justice system capable of acting on the leads tech companies already provide.

That is why Stop Child Predators supports reintroducing the Invest in Child Safety Act. It is the only proposal that would reduce the number of predators rather than expand federal bureaucracy. Everything else proposed in Congress is noise. None of it removes a single offender from the streets.

With 2025 coming to an end and a new year approaching—a presidential election year—Congress has a choice: It can continue producing laws that generate headlines without making a real difference… or it can finally take the hard step that would protect kids. Arrest predators. Prosecute predators. Incarcerate predators.

Because the truth is simple: If your “child-safety” bill does not fund law enforcement, it is not a child-safety bill. It is a gift to criminals.