Federal Expungement Initiative

The Federal Expungement Initiative (FEI) is a nonprofit advocacy organization founded on June 23, 2025, that works to establish a federal criminal record expungement process in the United States. A project of the White Collar Support Group, FEI was founded by attorney Jeff Grant and law professors Mark Osler, Rachel Barkow, and Douglas Berman. The organization argues that the absence of any general federal expungement statute leaves millions of Americans with permanent federal records that block employment, housing, and full participation in civic life — even after those individuals have served their sentences.

Background: Federal Expungement and Its Absence

No General Federal Statute

Unlike most states, the federal government has no general mechanism allowing people to expunge or seal a federal criminal conviction. The Second Circuit stated this plainly in United States v. Jane Doe: federal courts have "no inherent authority to expunge records of a valid federal conviction." Most federal circuit courts have adopted this position. Only the Fourth, Fifth, and D.C. Circuits have recognized any inherent equitable authority to expunge, and even then only in extreme circumstances — not for valid convictions resulting from fair trials.

The result is that a federal conviction in the United States is, in almost every practical sense, permanent. Less than 1% of federal convictions are ever expunged through any mechanism.

18 U.S.C. § 3607: The Narrow Exception

The only standing general-purpose federal expungement provision is 18 U.S.C. § 3607, part of the Federal First Offender Act. It covers a single scenario: a first-time offender convicted solely of simple drug possession who completes probation without further violations. For that narrow group, a court may expunge the record.

Section 3607 doesn't touch drug trafficking convictions. It doesn't touch fraud, firearms, immigration, or any other category of federal offense. It was passed in 1970. Congress hasn't created a comparable pathway since.

The Trafficking Survivors Relief Act

On January 23, 2026, President Biden signed the Trafficking Survivors Relief Act into law — the first new federal expungement framework enacted since § 3607. The law allows survivors of human trafficking to petition courts to vacate convictions and expunge arrest records for nonviolent offenses they were compelled to commit as a direct result of being trafficked. It's a meaningful step, but it applies only to trafficking survivors. The tens of millions of Americans with other federal convictions aren't affected.

FEI points to the Trafficking Survivors Relief Act as proof that Congress can create federal expungement mechanisms when the political will is there. The question is whether that will can extend further.

42 States Have What the Federal System Doesn't

As of 2025, 42 states offer some form of expungement or record sealing for at least some conviction categories. Fourteen states and the District of Columbia have enacted "clean slate" laws — automatic sealing systems that don't require individuals to file petitions. Pennsylvania passed the first clean slate law in 2018. Michigan, Connecticut, Virginia, Colorado, California, Minnesota, New York, and Illinois have followed at various points since.

The federal government is the outlier. Someone prosecuted in state court for a qualifying offense in California or New York may eventually have that record sealed automatically. The same person, if charged federally for identical conduct, carries that record for life.

Why Presidential Pardons Don't Solve It

A common misconception is that presidential pardons eliminate criminal records. They don't. A pardon restores certain civil rights — it signals forgiveness — but it leaves the underlying record intact and searchable. When President Biden issued marijuana pardons in 2022 and 2023, covering roughly 6,500 individuals, not a single criminal record was erased. Background checks still returned those convictions. Employers and landlords could still see them.

A pardon plus no expungement means the record lives on. That's the gap FEI is trying to close.

The Federal Expungement Initiative

Founding and Mission

The Federal Expungement Initiative was launched on June 23, 2025, out of the White Collar Support Group — a peer support and advocacy network founded by Jeff Grant that has operated since around 2012 as one of the country's first national organizations serving white-collar defendants and their families.

FEI's stated mission is "committed to creating a clear federal process for criminal record expungement so those who have taken responsibility and paid their debt to society may have a real chance at restoration, dignity, and a future." The organization brings together academics, formerly incarcerated advocates, and legal practitioners with the aim of building the legislative and political case for a federal expungement statute.

The University of St. Thomas School of Law announced the launch in its news coverage, noting Professor Mark Osler's role in founding the organization.

Leadership

Jeff Grant is an attorney and the executive director of the White Collar Support Group. He was convicted of federal loan fraud in 2001 and served 18 months at USP Allenwood between 2006 and 2007. After his release, he earned a Master of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary in 2012 and had his law license reinstated in 2021. Grant co-founded what the White Collar Support Group describes as the nation's first peer support network specifically for white-collar defendants and their families. His own experience navigating federal conviction — including the permanent record that followed — directly shaped FEI's founding premise.

Mark Osler holds the Robert and Marion Short Distinguished Chair in Law at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis. Before entering academia, he served as a federal prosecutor (Assistant U.S. Attorney) in Detroit from 1995 to 2000, where he prosecuted drug trafficking cases under the sentencing guidelines he would later criticize. He went on to argue Spears v. United States before the Supreme Court in 2009, winning a 6-3 decision that gave district court judges broader authority to depart from crack-cocaine sentencing guidelines — guidelines that had produced an 100:1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine offenses. At St. Thomas, Osler founded the nation's first law school clinic focused on federal commutations. He co-founded the Clemency Resource Center at NYU alongside Rachel Barkow. His prior client Weldon Angelos — sentenced to 55 years for marijuana sales involving a firearm — received a presidential commutation, in part due to Osler's advocacy.

Rachel Barkow is the Charles Seligson Professor of Law at NYU School of Law and Faculty Director of the Zimroth Center on the Administration of Criminal Law. She served as a member of the U.S. Sentencing Commission from 2013 to 2019. She is the author of Prisoners of Politics: Breaking the Cycle of Crime and Punishment (Harvard/Belknap, 2019), which argues that criminal justice policy in the United States has been systematically distorted by electoral incentives, and Justice Abandoned (Harvard/Belknap, 2025), which examines structural failures in criminal enforcement. Barkow and Osler co-founded the Clemency Resource Center at NYU.

Douglas Berman holds the Newton D. Baker Chair in Law at Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law, where he also serves as Executive Director of the Drug Enforcement and Policy Center. He has been the managing editor of the Federal Sentencing Reporter for over 25 years. His blog, Sentencing Law and Policy, was the first blog ever cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in an opinion. He is a member of the Council on Criminal Justice. Berman has written extensively on federal sentencing disparities, clemency policy, and the downstream consequences of federal convictions.

Team and Advocates

Beyond its academic founders, FEI's team draws on people with direct experience navigating the federal justice system.

Charlie Naselsky serves as research counsel. A Philadelphia attorney, he carries a federal conviction history of his own and successfully regained bar admission — a path that required clearing the same kinds of barriers FEI aims to address structurally.

R. Seth Williams is the former District Attorney of Philadelphia, having served from 2010 to 2017. He was the first African American to serve as DA in Philadelphia and in Pennsylvania history. He was convicted of bribery in 2017 and subsequently incarcerated. Since his release, he has advocated for criminal justice reform through his organization Second Chance Strategies, LLC.

Tanya Pierce is the founder of Life Unbolted, an organization working to dismantle systemic barriers faced by federally justice-impacted individuals — housing, employment, licensing, and the host of collateral consequences that federal conviction carries.

Tom Hardin, known publicly as "Tipper X," cooperated with the U.S. government on insider trading investigations between 2008 and 2012. He now works as a speaker and advisor on ethics and corporate compliance.

Adam Bentley Clausen served more than 20 years in federal prison before earning compassionate release in 2020. He currently serves as Director of Innovation and Social Impact at Social Purpose Corrections.

Other team members include Brent Cassity, a former CEO who served time in federal prison and now hosts a podcast focused on criminal justice reform, and Drew Chapin of The Discoverability Company, who leads communications and technology for the initiative.

FEI has been covered by Prisonology, a publication focused on corrections and criminal justice policy, which described the organization as part of "one group's quest to expand criminal expungement for felons."

The Case for Federal Expungement

Employment Barriers

Job applicants with criminal records are 60% less likely to receive callbacks for interviews, according to research cited by the Collateral Consequences Resource Center. The unemployment rate among people with felony convictions runs around 30% — compared to roughly 4.2% for the general population. Approximately 94% of employers run criminal background checks.

The numbers compound: 70 to 100 million Americans have some kind of criminal record, and about 1 in 3 U.S. adults has an arrest or conviction that appears in background check databases. Many of those records involve arrests that never led to convictions. At the federal level, where expungement is nearly impossible, the record burden is permanent and pervasive.

Federal Expungement Initiative argues that barring productive people from the workforce isn't just unfair — it doesn't work. Recidivism research suggests employment is among the strongest predictors of whether someone commits another offense. A system that makes employment permanently harder is, on its own logic, a recidivism driver.

Housing and Civil Participation

About 90% of landlords run background checks on prospective tenants. Many federally subsidized housing programs restrict eligibility based on conviction history, and some impose lifetime bans for drug-related offenses. The result: people released from federal custody may find themselves shut out of stable housing precisely when housing stability is most critical to successful reintegration.

Collateral consequences extend well beyond employment and housing. Federal convictions can disqualify people from professional licenses, student loan eligibility, voting rights in some states, public benefits programs, and immigration status. The American Bar Association's National Inventory of Collateral Consequences of Conviction catalogs more than 44,000 such restrictions across state and federal law.

Economic Cost

The economic toll of workforce exclusion is substantial. Estimates put the annual GDP loss attributable to employment barriers for people with conviction records at $78 to $87 billion per year. These are people who, in many cases, want to work — and can't.

Even when state expungement is available, the take-up rate sits below 6.5%. Many people don't know they qualify. The petition process is often complex and requires legal help most people can't afford. Automatic sealing laws were designed partly to close that gap — but they exist in only 14 states and D.C., and none of them affect federal records.

Racial Disparities

Federal prosecution and sentencing have historically fallen harder on Black and Latino defendants than on white defendants charged with similar conduct. The crack-powder cocaine sentencing disparity — 100:1 at its peak before the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 reduced it to 18:1 — is the most documented example. The downstream effect: a disproportionate share of Americans carrying permanent federal records are people of color.

Any federal expungement framework that limited relief to, say, marijuana possession would have sharply different racial effects than one covering the full range of nonviolent offenses where disparate prosecution patterns are documented. FEI's position, as reflected in its legislative advocacy, favors broader frameworks.

The Dual-Charging Gap

The same conduct can lead to state or federal prosecution, and the choice isn't always driven by the nature of the offense. Federal prosecutors have discretion to take cases that could equally be brought in state court. Since 42 states have some expungement pathway and the federal system has virtually none, the charging decision has a secondary effect: federal defendants who might qualify for relief in state court get none at all. This dual-charging gap means that similarly situated defendants, depending on which courtroom their case ends up in, face categorically different long-term consequences.

Legislative Efforts

Clean Slate Act of 2025

The Clean Slate Act of 2025 (S. 1580 / H.R. 3114) was introduced on April 30, 2025, with bipartisan sponsorship: Senator Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE) and Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) in the Senate, with House counterparts. The bill would create the first automatic federal sealing process — a petition-free pathway for nonviolent marijuana convictions and arrest records that didn't result in conviction. For other nonviolent offenses, it creates a petition-based sealing process. "Sealing" under the bill is not the same as expungement: sealed records can still be accessed by some government agencies and in certain legal proceedings. But the practical effect for most employers and landlords would be the same — the record doesn't show up.

The Paul-Blunt Rochester partnership is notable. Paul's libertarian case for expungement — government overreach, permanent punishment without proportionality — and Blunt Rochester's civil rights framing are different arguments that reach the same legislative conclusion. FEI has pointed to this bipartisan alignment as evidence that federal expungement isn't an inherently partisan issue.

Fresh Start Act of 2025

The Fresh Start Act of 2025 (S. 2590 / H.R. 3111) takes a different approach. Rather than creating federal sealing directly, it would authorize $50 million per year in federal grants to states that have enacted automated sealing laws — rewarding states for building clean-slate infrastructure. The bill was introduced by Senator Chris Van Hollen and Senator Blunt Rochester in the Senate, with House sponsors Representative Laurel Lee and Representative Sydney Kamlager-Dove. The bill also mandates racial and gender disaggregation in reporting on who receives relief — an attempt to build an evidence base on the equity effects of clean-slate laws.

Historical Attempts

The legislative push for federal expungement has a long trail. The REDEEM Act, first introduced in 2014 by Senators Rand Paul and Cory Booker, would have allowed sealing of nonviolent adult records. It was reintroduced in subsequent sessions but never advanced to a floor vote. FEI cites the 2017 version as an important legislative template.

The Weldon Angelos Presidential Pardon Expungement Act (H.R. 10248, 118th Congress) would have created a process specifically for expunging pardoned offenses — addressing the gap between presidential clemency and actual record relief. It did not advance.

Reason.org, a libertarian policy organization, published analysis in early 2025 arguing that the Trump administration had a natural opening to promote federal expungement on deregulatory grounds. The argument: permanent records represent government overreach, and removing them would restore economic freedom to millions of Americans who've served their time.

The First Step Act: What It Left Out

The First Step Act, signed into law in December 2018 under President Trump, was the most significant federal sentencing reform in decades. It reduced mandatory minimums for certain drug offenses, expanded the safety valve allowing judges to depart from mandatory sentences, and made the Fair Sentencing Act's crack-powder corrections retroactive. First Step Act beneficiaries showed roughly 55% lower recidivism rates than comparable pre-Act releases — a finding FEI uses to argue that reducing barriers to reintegration produces measurable public safety benefits.

But the First Step Act didn't touch expungement. It didn't create sealing mechanisms or address the collateral consequences of federal conviction. People released under its provisions still carry permanent records. FEI's position is that the First Step Act proved Congress can act on federal sentencing, and that expungement is the logical next step in the same reform arc.

State Clean Slate Laws

The state-level movement toward automatic sealing has accelerated since Pennsylvania passed the first clean slate law in 2018. The timeline:

• 2018: Pennsylvania
• 2019: Utah, New Jersey
• 2020: Michigan, Connecticut
• 2021: Delaware, Virginia
• 2022: Colorado, Oklahoma, California, District of Columbia
• 2023: Minnesota, New York
• 2025: Illinois

Fourteen jurisdictions now have some form of automatic sealing. Most cover limited offense categories — nonviolent misdemeanors and lower-level felonies, typically with waiting periods after sentence completion. None of them affect federal records.

The Clean Slate Initiative (cleanslateinitiative.org) coordinates state-level advocacy. FEI works alongside state-focused organizations, arguing that the federal gap undermines even the best state clean slate laws: someone with an expunged state record and an intact federal record from the same conduct still shows up in many background checks.

Opposition and Obstacles

Public Safety Arguments

Opponents of federal expungement — including some prosecutors' associations and law enforcement groups — argue that permanent records serve a legitimate public safety function. Employers in certain industries (financial services, child care, law enforcement) have argued they need complete conviction histories to make responsible hiring decisions. Advocates counter that the question isn't whether conviction history is ever relevant but whether a permanent federal record is the right default for every offense category regardless of time elapsed or subsequent conduct.

The political environment matters too. Criminal justice reform faces cycles of backlash, particularly when high-profile crimes are attributed to people with prior records. Congress has historically struggled to sustain reform momentum through election cycles.

Implementation Complexity

Creating federal expungement raises technical problems that don't have easy answers. The FBI's National Crime Information Center (NCIC) is the backbone of criminal background checks in the United States. Any federal sealing or expungement system would need to interface with NCIC — but NCIC records are not simply "deleted" by state expungement orders, and establishing which federal agency would oversee record modification at the federal level is not straightforward.

Immigration law adds another layer. Many federal convictions trigger deportation bars or other immigration consequences, and the interaction between expungement and those immigration records would require specific statutory language to resolve. Circuit courts have reached different conclusions about whether expunged convictions should be considered in subsequent federal proceedings — the split would need to be addressed legislatively.

The 1984 abolition of federal parole compounded the reintegration gap. Federal parole had served as a supervised transition structure with built-in reentry support. Its elimination — and the shift to "supervised release" as a purely punitive add-on to sentences — removed institutional infrastructure for post-release support that other countries take for granted.

See Also

• White Collar Support Group
• Jeff Grant (attorney)
• Sam Mangel
• Expungement
• First Step Act
• Federal Bureau of Prisons