The TRACE Act: counting the missing on federal land
Bipartisan US legislation (House 2022, passed the Senate in 2024) to add a federal-land category to the national missing persons database, NamUs.
2024 CE · 38.89, -77.01 · status: official
The account
Representatives Tim Burchett and Joe Neguse introduced the TRACE Act in 2022; Senators Thom Tillis and Alex Padilla carried a Senate version that passed in September 2024 and was reintroduced in 2025. It would require the Justice Department to mark cases in NamUs where a person went missing or was found on federal land, and to report yearly to Congress on how many people go missing on public lands. Its sponsors wrote that there was no working system to report such cases and that estimates of at least 1,600 were probably too low. The bill confirms the record-keeping gap that Missing 411 highlighted, without endorsing any of its suggested causes.
Connections in the atlas
- No central list of the missing in US national parks
- The FOIA requests and the quoted fees
- 'Missing 411' and Yosemite