Who knows how many outdated regulations are still on the books?
It seems the thing to do would be hire interns to start scouring for every "A married woman shall not chop down a birchwood tree on the day of her wedding while wearing her bridal gown" style law.
If this idea persisted for 50 years maybe they'd have to start repealing actual relevant regulations.
> It seems the thing to do would be higher interns to start scouring for every "A married woman shall not chop down a birchwood tree on the day of her wedding while wearing her bridal gown" style law.
Sure, but how many of those exist at a federal level? Those are often city, county and sometimes state regulations.
Yes the "repeal two regulations before imposing one" is just a gimmick, but there are an insane number of federal laws and regulations that are, at best, unneeded.
Some of those can and should be consolidated - but they're not all quite as flippant as you might think. The prohibition of transport of water hyacinth, for example, is because it's a massively bad invasive species: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichhornia_crassipes#United_St...
Sure, it too should probably be consolidated - perhaps under the Lacey act or the Plant Protection Act or Alien Species Prevention and Enforcement Act. But it's not actually a dumb regulation, just an inefficient expression.
You can probably imagine that the letter carrier uniform one may have been in response to fraud. Same for the false weather reports - it's kind of useful to be able to whack someone on the wrist for publishing a hoax tornado warning.
I'm all for the idea of cleaning up our soup of regulations, but I think it's worth noting that many of them exist for a reason, and it's typically more complex than the famously silly "can't ride a horse in a dress on sunday"-type laws still found on some state books.
Putting my geek hat back on, It'd be cool if we could train an LSTM to de-dup laws... ;) But I guess in the meantime there are interns.
Sometimes it is comparatively easy to effectively ban a certain kind of fraud attempt, whereas actual success of the attempt would be impossible to prosecute because the victims can only be victims when they not even notice any wrongdoing. Not banning the attempt.
In that case, you have a choice between banning attempts, together with everything that is indistinguishable from an attempt, versus effectively giving fraudsters free reign, despite having a law that technically forbids successful execution of an attempt. Classic legal balancing act: how valuable is the freedom of dressing up as a postman compared to not having to question the authenticity of each and every on of them?
Given the staffing decisions proposed, they're probably going to be things around health care, business practice, environmental restrictions, and energy reform.
It's very difficult for States to regulate those effectively because without federal funding, they are medium term losses that inhibit growth. One of the reasons the Federal Government gets such a bad rep is because they're the one who needs to take a tough position on this.
These regulations seem completely reasonable. Several are protecting government-related insignia such as the postal uniform, and presumably serve a similar purpose to trademark law. Then you have a ban on transporting an invasive species (water hyacinth), restriction on the mailing of tobacco (often mailed to avoid taxes or tariffs), a ban on unregistered submarines (this isn't some ridiculous idea, drug smugglers have in fact used submarines to avoid border control), a ban on selling traffic signal preemption devices, ...
Some background on the water hyacinth [1]. You might have a point there. Mailing of tobacco? It is already illegal to avoid taxes and tariffs on tobacco. Why ban mailing it as well? Similarly, it is also illegal to smuggle drugs, why does the fact that someone may have done so with a submarine mean that "unregistered submarines" should be banned?
> It is already illegal to avoid taxes and tariffs on tobacco. Why ban mailing it as well?
Likely because proving intent to avoid taxes and tariffs is much harder than proving you've mailed something. I would bet it's a way to get around having complex expensive investigations for what was a common problem. Pass a law, now it's easy. You mailed tobacco? You're guilty. Case closed, problem reduced, taxpayer money saved.
I agree with much of your statement here. However, an unintended side-effect is you may end up prohibiting a lot of behavior that isn't the one you originally wanted to address and end up with an extremely broad set of laws that have the potential to be applied arbitrarily.
> However, an unintended side-effect is you may end up prohibiting a lot of behavior that isn't the one you originally wanted to address
Sure, but that's literally the case with every regulation. The point is to use them when the negatives of the behavior will likely outweigh the negatives the regulation might introduce. In a perfect world, there would be no laws, and free markets would work at peak efficiency all the time.
Now, I don't have enough information to argue authoritatively about the efficacy of this law, but based on the actual wording, where it says it's okay to do it for business as long as you've met all state and federal requirements means I think it's likely that for the most part it has little impact on individuals (who need to mail tobacco rarely) and businesses operating legally.
I would guess that it's just much easier to enforce a ban on submarines than a ban on submarines carrying drugs (it would be very easy to jettison drugs from a submarine).
Even if the concept is reasonable, it seems like these specifics should be treated as data and not their own separate law. Just have laws about trademarks, then store all the specific trademarks (including Smokey the Bear, 4-H, etc.) in the trademark registry. Likewise, there should be a law about invasive species, and a database of the actual species that are covered.
The trouble with listing a dozen very specific laws like this and considering them all reasonable is this: what if the list had 1,000 items? 10,000? And with no way to know which are the actual meaty laws (like trademark law) and which are just specific instances of said laws (like Smokey the Bear).
That's basically what the laws are. They are merge requests into the db you're talking about. It's just that there's not a good interface to the law as it stands now.
This is a perfectly reasonable law that I would not want to see repealed. Don't you agree that it's bad for people to be allowed to impersonate mail carriers? It would facilitate identity theft through rifling mailboxes, make burglary easier, etc. What's wrong with that law?
Identity theft is illegal. Rifling through mailboxes is illegal. Burglary is illegal. I don't see any particular harm from somebody wearing a postman uniform any more than say someone who wants to dress up as the UPS man. Especially for six months in federal prison.
So, is it okay to impersonate a police officer then? The USPS is a government institution, and how ur government often received and sends instructions and funds from its constituents. I don't want people impersonating mail carriers any more than I want them impersonating a police officer. Mail fraud is real, and abusing the mail for more nefarious means happens. [1][2]
> I don't see any particular harm from somebody wearing a postman uniform any more than say someone who wants to dress up as the UPS man.
You don't generally get official correspondence from the IRS through UPS. I'm fine with protecting the mailcarrier uniform. There are government expectations associated with that uniform.
First, the statute we are discussing doesn't make it a crime to impersonate a postal carrier. It makes it a crime to "wear[] the uniform [...] prescribed by the Postal Service to be worn by letter carriers". I think we can both agree there is a fundamental difference between someone impersonating a cop (who has wide discretion to order people to stop, detain them, search them or interrogate them) and someone dressing up like a letter carrier.
Second, it is already illegal to forge correspondence correspondence from the IRS. Why make people who, for whatever reason, want to dress up like Cliff Clavin subject to six months in federal prison? Similarly, I agree mail fraud is real and one can abuse the mail for nefarious means, however again mail fraud is illegal and, in respect to your example, mailing anthrax the people is also already illegal.
I suppose the problem I'm trying to highlight here is a tendency for government, at times, to create laws that are, at best, silly, and, more often, harmfully over-broad in short-sighted attempts to stop behavior that is (or can be) readily addressed by existing laws. It can lead to harmful side effects[1][2].
There's a sense in which simplifying laws merely passes the burden to the Executive Branch. It's far easier to prove that a person wore some federal uniform than it is to prove that they pretended to be a federal employee. Just imagine that you're the prosecutor and think about the difference in the amount of work you would have to do for this case. These are resources that can be used elsewhere, and as a citizen, I gladly and enthusiastically forfeit my right to dress as a mailman if it means that it will help reduce cases of fraud.
I do like the idea of simple laws, though, and I hope that a future civilization may flourish under the Golden Rule as its only law.
The ease of the prosecution proving their cases is not a higher priority to me than the feasibility of an average citizens reading and understanding most laws.
As I see it, the government's only job is to protect its citizens, and anything that gets in the way of it doing its job is counterproductive. I agree that a best-informed populace probably must also be the best-protected, but I disagree that the solution is to limit all legislation to the eighth grade level of diction. Free legal aid as a constitutional right seems like a slightly more practical alternative to me.
> I think we can both agree there is a fundamental difference between someone impersonating a cop (who has wide discretion to order people to stop, detain them, search them or interrogate them) and someone dressing up like a letter carrier.
I don't agree on any specific difference between dressing up and impersonating in general, as I'm not sure how you are defining the difference, but to my mind impersonation is likely hard to prove, and if the desire is to stop the behavior, preventing dressing up is a useful way to make sure the law is enforcable.
I do agree there is a difference in importance between impersonating a police officer and impersonating a mail carrier, but in both cases I think the base reason is the same. To keep specific expectations and abilities granted to the individual as a government employee from being abused by others.
> Second, it is already illegal to forge correspondence correspondence from the IRS. Why make people who, for whatever reason, want to dress up like Cliff Clavin subject to six months in federal prison? Similarly, I agree mail fraud is real and one can abuse the mail for nefarious means, however again mail fraud is illegal and, in respect to your example, mailing anthrax the people is also already illegal.
Because if something is routed through the mail system we have a record of it, and information regarding it's origin. If someone dresses up as a mail carrier and puts it in your mailbox, not only is that record lost, but likely nobody around will pay any attention. Some random person putting something in your mailbox may attract attention, if only because those around might think they are trying to steal mail. Which takes us to stealing mail It's harder to steal mail when you have no business in anyone else's mailbox because it's illegal. Neighbors seeing a stranger rifling through a mailbox may be likely to call thge person out or even call the police. Preventing people from impersonating a mail carrier is very useful here.
It's worth noting that other carrier services are legally prevented from using your mailbox. Your mailbox/mail slot is considered federal property. There is thus a chain of custody when things are shipped through USPS, unless someone breaks the law.
> I suppose the problem I'm trying to highlight here is a tendency for government, at times, to create laws that are, at best, silly, and, more often, harmfully over-broad in short-sighted attempts to stop behavior that is (or can be) readily addressed by existing laws. It can lead to harmful side effects.
Sure, those exist. I don't think this is a good case of that.
You're describing a fraudulent behavior which is already covered by criminal laws related to fraud.
If the goal is to aggressively double down on every single possible fraud case, where are the laws prohibiting dressing up as a forest ranger, environmental protection agent, President of the United States and various members of Congress (via those realistic-looking masks they sell before Halloween), USDA inspector, SEC controller, four-star Army general or any other government-related position of authority?
A lot of the "Why is X illegal if doing Z, which itself is X & Y, is also illegal" argument reminds me entirely of the software developer's fallacy in code reduction.
I can easily re-engineer a core business application in a couple weeks. It'll do most of what the existing solution does, will be unit tested, and easily extendable. But, it won't cover all those edge cases we've all forgotten exist and that one exception that's required for client 2 who needs red buttons instead of blue buttons and remember that time we ran into the problem where the year-end report took 3 days to run, and locked up the weekly reports because new years eve landed on a Friday which made Justin stay in the office until 2AM trying to get the database back online?
I'm not a law professor, or a lawyer, or in any way involved in law, but the similarities between a 200+ year old set of rules that govern our society and a legacy application that we can't simply turn off for 6 months why we re-engineer it to be "better, but does exactly the same thing" is frightening. We've got a piss poor track record as software developers being able to take on a massive refactor and not introduce more bugs, what the hell makes us think we can consolidate hundreds of thousands of edge cases in law and not miss a bunch of actually useful things?
"In the U.S., responsibility for food safety is divided among fifteen federal agencies. The most important, in addition to the F.S.I.S., is the Food and Drug Administration, in the Department of Health and Human Services. In theory, the line between these two should be simple: the F.S.I.S. inspects meat and poultry; the F.D.A. covers everything else. In practice, that line is hopelessly blurred. Fish are the province of the F.D.A.—except catfish, which falls under the F.S.I.S. Frozen cheese pizza is regulated by the F.D.A., but frozen pizza with slices of pepperoni is monitored by the F.S.I.S. Bagel dogs are F.D.A.; corn dogs, F.S.I.S. The skin of a link sausage is F.D.A., but the meat inside is F.S.I.S.
“The current structure is there not because it’s what serves the consumer best,” Elisabeth Hagen*, a former head of the F.S.I.S., told me. “It’s there because it’s the way the system has grown up.” Mike Taylor, the highest-ranking food-safety official at the F.D.A., said, “Everybody would agree that if you were starting on a blank piece of paper and designing the food-safety system for the future, from scratch, you wouldn’t design it the way it’s designed right now.”
And yet... when you dig into the history you often find a justified reason why the redundancy exists.
For example, the United States has seven uniformed services with commissioned officers. Can you name them? Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, typically people can get immediately. Given a moment to think, most people also come up with the Coast Guard. But what are the other two?
The Public Health Service Commissioned Corps is the sixth. Which most people kind-of get and realize that's why the Surgeon General wears a vice-admiral's uniform (in fact he is a commissioned vice-admiral -- not of the Navy, of the Public Health Service). They have a commissioned corps because part of their job is being deployed -- often alongside combatant officer corps from other services -- into emergency situations. They were organized for that duty along military lines by the first Surgeon General.
How about the seventh? Oh, that's NOAA. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. You know, the people who do the weather forecasts. They have a commissioned officer corps, and the director is a rear-admiral (again, not of the Navy -- a rear-admiral of NOAA). Why do they have a commissioned corps? Because they've historically rendered assistance to the military in situations where land and coast surveys and weather information were necessary, and commissioning them gave them protection under the laws of war (otherwise, if captured, they could be executed as spies).
Similarly, why is it that certain financial crimes get you investigated by the Secret Service and not the FBI? The Secret Service protects the President, after all, and that has nothing to do with finance. But originally they were chartered for the narrow purpose of fighting counterfeiting, back when Congress was reluctant to authorize a general-purpose federal law-enforcement agency. Then, since they had a good intelligence network across the country as a result of the anti-counterfeiting mission, presidential protection got tacked onto their charter (at that time, Congress didn't want to proliferate federal enforcement agencies). Today, they investigate some types of frauds and other financial crimes because it still falls under their original anti-counterfeiting charter.
You can literally write books about this stuff if you dive into the history of it, and you'll often find that there were good, rational, justifiable reasons for why things were set up the way they were.
You say "and yet..." but it sounds like you're just elaborating on what the GP said. Was that a disagreement?
GP's point was that redundancy has been accumulated over the years. Of course there's usually a rational justifiable reason, but that doesn't mean it's still a valid one.
Really interesting stuff on the uniformed services.
Of course there's usually a rational justifiable reason, but that doesn't mean it's still a valid one.
And yet... consider the Secret Service thing. Congress was reluctant to concentrate federal law-enforcement power in one agency. And the history of the FBI shows that may have been the right idea.
I'm not sure what you're saying. Sometimes it's valid, sometimes it's not -- are we disagreeing or does "and yet..." mean something completely different than what I think it implies?
I was speaking in general terms. You gave two very specific (and interesting) examples; among all the examples you can give, plenty of them will "no longer be valid".
How in the world can you apply that to everything on the list though? Using the 4-H logo? How is that not just a special case of trademark law? Presumably there isn't US code specifically saying that you can't use the Twitter logo (except for fair use, of course, which is fine).
Which is why DJT's ideas are terrifying. He wants to take a machete to the forest of legislation that is our government, and he has practically no idea why any of these laws were put in place.
Hmm, I don't know how many of those truly are unneeded, at least without context on why they were created in the first place.
There may have been real problems with the Water Hyacinths as an invasive or endangered species, for example. And we certainly don't want to make it legal for people to change traffic signals at will!
I had actually expected to find oodles of needless cruft and "dead code", but I'm starting to think that it might be possible that most regulation is there for a reason... who'd a thunk it!
One reform that most countries could make, would be for laws and regulations to start with a justification, and a test for outcomes that would see the law or regulation automatically become invalid if it can be proven that the outcomes are not met.
Both because it would help with the problem where people don't understand the intent of a law or regulation and so assumes they are stupid, and because it would make passing genuinely stupid laws and regulations harder if you have figure out ways to set out the intent and an "outcome test" in a way that doesn't xpose how bad it is.
A lot of laws would fall due to having been passed due to ignorance.
A lot of others would fail to pass in the first place because legislators would be forced to use legislators laying bare intent to punish based on morality rather than provable benefits to society - it's hard to get people to oppose laws where someone claims massive harm if a law isn't passed; it'd be easier to get people to oppose laws justified by a view of morality they may not share.
And even if they still pass, it provides a much clearer attack surface for people campaiging for a repeal.
But conversely it also provides a strong defense for laws with good purpose that actually work.
The question is more one of costs and benefits. Anyone can argue a regulation is useful in the abstract.
There's a lot of regulation around internet services and people under the age of 13. The primary effect of these rules has been that American internet services ask for your DoB and then ineffectively try to ban you from signing up if you say you're under 13. Do parents really need this?
To me, this sounds like a quarantine law. All countries have these, e.g. it is not allowed to transport certain meat products or other foods across German borders.
A ban on "drug subs", commonly used on the southern border these days. Gangs actually manufacture high-sea-worthy subs in the jungle.
> Yes the "repeal two regulations before imposing one" is just a gimmick, but there are an insane number of federal laws and regulations that are, at best, unneeded.
Unfortunately, you picked out the worst examples of "unneeded" laws.
Ah. I remember long ago reading an article where someone... pranked public transport with changing the direction of a railroad tramway switch - basically, right before the train would lock the switch by passing over a detector, the prankster would switch the switch, and the train had to reverse in order to switch the switch to the correct direction.
That's the kind of "prank" that's likely to kill people. I am at a loss as to how this is a prank. I understand different people have different senses of humor, but is there a context I'm missing in which it's funny?
Most of those laws are very useful and are there for a clear reason. Fingers crossed that Donald Trump and Paul Ryan are more thoughtful about which regulations to throw out.
The past few Congresses have done a good job of passing large numbers of resolutions, but the President has not been signing them into law.[1] It seems to me that the 'problem' (if you believe there should be more laws) is a disagreement between branches or obstinancy by the President.
It's both comical and sad that I think you're correct in that assessment, but only because it's been so gridlocked already, that it's just the continuation of what we know and what we know it to be pretty shitty.
It will just lead to lawmakers getting more creative about merging laws together into monstrosities that meets the "quota" without actually achieving any real change and/or that uses the oportunity to expand the reach.
I'd actually be surprised if there were many of those. Regulations are constantly being codified into the Code of Federal Regulations. It's about 175,000 pages. It's printed at about 55 lines per page, which makes it about 10 million lines. About the same size as the Linux kernel. That's big, but it's not "we don't even know what's in here" big.
The information density of federal regulations is much much higher though. It's written in a higher level language and even shells out to precedence to interpret a lot of it.
I keep seeing this mistake made over and over again. Regulations are not laws like the above, which are written by the legislature. The vast majority of regulations are written by experts in the relevant fields working for agencies in the executive branch. The legislature grants regulatory agencies jurisdiction and provides general guidance/intent but the most of the specifics are left to the regulatory body to decide.
The job of the SEC, for example, is to provide a framework for the public to safetly invest in and own parts of corporations while providing qualified investors more freedom to invest in riskier ventures. The SEC decides what financial disclosures best fulfill its job requirements and imposes fines on violators. However, the laws that actually punish executives for breaking SEC rules are written by Congress and the courts are the last step that decides whether Congress or the agency are overstepping their bounds.
Regulations as a landscape change much faster than laws and are consolidated all the time so there's a lot less cruft than the rest of our legal code would lead you to believe.
You're right, I read "USC section ..." and skipped to the description. Should have posted my rant elsewhere in the topic :)
Still though, I think it's helpful to point out that the legal nature of regulations allows them to move faster and reduce internal complexity while the legal code is mostly append only.
I'm just shaking my head at all the Hacker News armchair law professors who fervently believe each and every one of these is critical to the functioning of civilized society.
And that's why we have so much red tape. Apparently there's a type of person who can't abide not having all possible minutia of life legislated.
Heh. I'd have thought the armchair law professors are the ones claiming that large portions of US law are mistakes, not the ones saying that things are the way they are for good reason.
Also, I don't think anyone is saying that they're critical to the functioning of civilized society, just that they're not ridiculous and outdated, and that being truthful about the topic of discussion is important in a discussion. We can, and should, debate whether they're needed! But we first need to understand what arguments there are in favor of keeping them.
This is one of a large number of sections of the law that define what food products mean, for every food product on the market, and lead to a consistent UX at markets. It's not like someone passed the Turkey Ham Font Sizes Act of 1947 or something.
Trump has complained about "the FDA Food Police, which dictate how the federal government expects farmers to produce fruits and vegetables and even dictates the nutritional content of dog food."
So, expect to see corn sugar in your sodas as soon as a new federal regulation gets passed. And something else, as soon as people figure out what "corn sugar" is.
I'm not sure why I'm meant to be alarmed by "corn sugar". Sucrose is extremely unhealthy for you in the quantities consumed in naturally sweetened soda. High fructose corn syrup is "high in fructose" relative to corn syrup, not to sugar, which is itself naturally high in fructose.
More important context for the "ham" law is that the criminal penalty statute they're citing is actually meant to pair with this offenses statute:
... it captures a bunch of other regulations by reference, including labeling laws, but that doesn't mean someone passed a law saying it should be a federal crime to use the wrong font for ham.
It's a euphemism for HFCS, which is a name that consumers have slowly come to recognize, independent of the validity of either the phrases "high-fructose corn syrup" or "corn sugar". Without regulation, there's nothing preventing a euphemism treadmill for products that consumers don't want. (Whether consumers are correct to not want HFCS is tangential, since all I'm arguing is that consistent labeling is a good thing for the law to be enforcing in the general case, but for my own edification - I thought that HFCS was strictly worse than sugar, which is pretty bad; is it equal to / better than sugar?)
True. They're both simple sugars. HFCS has a higher fructose/glucose ratio than cane sugar. There are several varieties of HFCS which differ in their fructose percentage. It can be useful to know this distinction as fructose and glucose are metabolized differently.
This is mostly a misconception. Depending on the type of HFCS, it may have slightly more or slightly less fructose than table sugar, which the human body is especially adept at breaking into glucose and fructose.
HFCS is probably not significantly different from table sugar as far as human metabolism goes.
Thanks for pointing that out. The two common forms of HFCS are HFCS-42 (42% fructose) and HFCS-55 (55% fructose); the latter is generally what we find in soda.
The longitudinal nutrition studies in humans necessary to tease out the differences are difficult to perform well. I think it's worthwhile to at least keep in mind that these different sugars do have different effects on the body, especially given the levels of consumption we're seeing in the US.
Table sugar is 50%. HFCS-55 is 55%. This is not a significant difference. There is no evidence that sucrose has a different metabolic impact in humans than HFCS-55 --- any evidence would be surprising, because the human body is a ninja at separating glucose from fructose.
What is dangerous is the suggestion that sucrose is safer than HFCS; it misleads people into believing they are making a healthy choice when they drink sugared soda made with cane sugar. They are not. Sucrose in significant quantities is extraordinarily bad for you, for the same reason HFCS is!
We are in complete agreement that sugar in significant quantities is bad. I also don't see where I'm suggesting that one is worse or better than the other. I've actively worked not to make that suggestion.
The metabolic pathways are different. If you want to argue that this is not a meaningful difference given the evidence we have, that's fine. I can understand that. I clearly stated that doing the kinds of studies that would be able to show such evidence are difficult to do. Do you think this is a fair assessment? I get the impression that you think I'm trying to muddy the waters. That's not the case.
The metabolic pathway for table sugar and HFCS is not significantly different. We have an enzyme specifically designed to liberate the fructose from sucrose, and it acts at the same location --- the small intestine, which is the start of the pathway from your alimentary canal to the liver, where all fructose (whether it came from sucrose or from HFCS) is metabolized.
"The following are prohibited: (c) Cleaning or washing any personal property, fish, animal, or food, or bathing or washing at a hydrant or water faucet not provided for that purpose."
This is the sort of thing that would just be a normal rule, in a contract or something, in a privately-managed park. For a federal park, it's perfectly reasonable for it to just be a federal law.
You could also imagine a world where it's simply illegal to be in a federal park without signing a contract with the government, which would get these sorts of things out of the CFR, but that seems like it would be worse for the American people at zero benefit. And personally, I'd still call things in those contracts "federal regulations".
You could also imagine a world where national parks become privatized.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic but in case you're not, the question is not whether it should be forbidden (e.g. by park rules) to "wash a fish at a faucet if it's not a fish-washing faucet, in a national forest" but whether there should be a law that makes such thing a federal crime.
Putting "Do not wash fish in faucet" signs up would probably go a long way. If the problem gets completely out of hand, make it a civil offense that carries a fine.
Here's the thing, though: federal lands are administered directly by the federal government. The only avenues they have for rule-making are Congressional statutes and agency regulations. There is nothing else available to them to achieve the goal of making and enforcing a rule, because that's how they're legally set up.
So to forbid washing fish at a faucet in a national park... you literally do have to make a federal law (or a regulation with the force of federal law).
This is also why they have their own law-enforcement agency (the United States Park Police): Congress was, for a very long time, reluctant to authorize a general federal police force, so many agencies have their own specific police force operating solely within that agency's jurisdiction. It also creates fun inter-jurisdictional issues since the U.S Capitol building has its own separate police force, but the Capitol building is on the National Mall, which is Park Police territory.
According to 16 USC 551, a fine is indeed what you're likely to get for violating this regulation.
The issue here is that the statute authorizing criminal penalties covers a whole range of national park regulations, some of which clearly merit stiff penalties, and some of which are just about washing fish safely.
But is it a "crime" (one that gets you a criminal record) as opposed to something like a parking ticket? This is what I thought we were arguing about but IANAL and might have misunderstood what OP meant.
It's a misdemeanor and gets you a criminal record. But so does a speeding ticket in states like Maryland or Georgia where all moving violations are misdemeaors.
It seems the thing to do would be hire interns to start scouring for every "A married woman shall not chop down a birchwood tree on the day of her wedding while wearing her bridal gown" style law.
If this idea persisted for 50 years maybe they'd have to start repealing actual relevant regulations.