Politics
The DOJ Assets Forfeiture Fund grew from $93.7 million in 1986 to $4.5 billion in 2014. The government does not need to charge you with a crime to seize your property. $9 billion went to local law enforcement through equitable sharing between 2000 and 2019. Congress has limited oversight of any of it.
NewsOnScale Staff
September 20, 2026
Most Americans have never heard of the DOJ Assets Forfeiture Fund or the Treasury Forfeiture Fund. They are not in the annual federal budget debate. They are not subject to normal congressional appropriations. They are not fully audited in the way most federal accounts are.
They are funds built from money seized from Americans — and they have accumulated billions of dollars operating largely outside the public's view.
What Civil Asset Forfeiture Actually Is
Civil asset forfeiture is the legal process by which federal and state law enforcement agencies seize property — cash, vehicles, real estate, bank accounts — that they allege is connected to criminal activity. The critical word is allege. Under civil asset forfeiture the government does not have to charge the owner with a crime. It does not have to convict them. It seizes the property and the owner must fight to get it back.
The Institute for Justice has documented hundreds of cases in which Americans had property seized and were never charged with any crime. In many cases the cost of fighting the seizure in court exceeds the value of the property seized. People give up. The government keeps the money.
The Funds Nobody Talks About
The DOJ Assets Forfeiture Fund receives the proceeds of federal civil and criminal forfeitures handled by DOJ agencies — including the FBI, DEA, and ATF. The Treasury Forfeiture Fund receives proceeds from seizures by Treasury agencies including the IRS.
These funds have held between one and three billion dollars annually in recent years for the DOJ fund alone. The IRS seized over one billion dollars in assets in a single recent year before scaling back operations following public backlash.
Across all federal civil asset forfeiture programs the annual total runs into the tens of billions. Since these programs were dramatically expanded in the 1980s and 1990s the cumulative total seized from Americans over decades runs significantly higher.
Congress does not appropriate these funds in the normal budget process. The agencies collect the money, hold it, and spend it — on equipment, personnel, operations, and other expenses — through a process that receives less public scrutiny than regular appropriations.
The Equitable Sharing Problem
Federal law allows local and state law enforcement agencies to participate in federal forfeiture cases and receive up to 80% of the proceeds through a program called equitable sharing. This means local police departments can bypass state laws that restrict civil asset forfeiture by partnering with federal agencies and receiving a share of whatever is seized.
Between 2000 and 2019 the Justice Department paid out over $9 billion to state and local law enforcement through equitable sharing. That money flows to local agencies with minimal federal oversight of how it is spent.
States that have passed laws restricting civil asset forfeiture find those restrictions undermined by the federal equitable sharing program. The federal pipeline provides a workaround.
What Congress Has and Has Not Done
The Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution states that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Civil asset forfeiture — in which property is seized without a criminal charge, let alone a conviction — sits in constitutional tension with that guarantee that courts have never fully resolved.
The FAIR Act — the Fifth Amendment Integrity Restoration Act — has been introduced multiple times with bipartisan support. It has never passed.
The Scale of What Is Not Counted
The Department of Justice published a report showing that between 1986 and 2014 the amount of money in the DOJ Assets Forfeiture Fund grew from $93.7 million to $4.5 billion. That growth — nearly 5,000 percent in 28 years — represents money taken from Americans that has accumulated in a fund Congress does not control through normal appropriations.
Add the Treasury Forfeiture Fund. Add the equitable sharing payments to state and local agencies. Add the decades of accumulation since the 1980s expansion of these programs.
The total is not a rounding error in the federal budget. It is a significant pool of money that has been taken from Americans, held in funds outside normal congressional oversight, and spent without the public accountability that the Constitution requires of government expenditures.
What Accountability Would Look Like
A full independent audit of every federal civil asset forfeiture fund would tell Americans how much has been collected, from whom, under what legal authority, and how it has been spent.
Requiring a criminal conviction before the government can permanently seize property would bring civil asset forfeiture into alignment with the Fifth Amendment's due process guarantee.
Ending equitable sharing — or subjecting it to genuine congressional oversight and state law compliance — would close the federal workaround that undermines state-level reforms.
These are not radical proposals. They are what the Constitution already requires if taken seriously.
DISCLOSURE: NewsOnScale is an independent media publication owned and operated by AMILLI AI CORP. JJ Johnson is the founder of AMILLI AI CORP and a declared candidate for President of the United States in 2028. All facts in this article are drawn from the Institute for Justice, the Department of Justice Asset Forfeiture Program annual reports, the Washington Post, and publicly available congressional testimony on civil asset forfeiture reform.