DOJ Internal Investigations Get a Procedural Clean-Up: What the 'Inspector General Access Act' Changes

If you’re not a lawyer who deals with the inner workings of the Department of Justice (DOJ), this bill might sound like pure bureaucratic noise. But even technical changes can matter, especially when they touch on how government accountability works. The Inspector General Access Act of 2025 is essentially a statutory clean-up operation focused on Section 413 of title 5, U.S. Code, which governs how the DOJ handles internal investigations of its own personnel.

The Bureaucratic Broom: Removing a Carve-Out

Think of the current law as a checklist for internal investigations, where certain types of allegations had their own dedicated lane. This bill removes one of those lanes entirely. Specifically, it strikes out paragraph (3) from subsection (b). We don't know exactly what type of allegation that former paragraph (3) covered just by reading the bill text, but its removal means that whatever was once treated separately under that specific rule now has to be handled under the remaining general procedures.

This is the biggest practical change here. When you remove a specific exception or category, you’re either simplifying the process or potentially broadening the scope of the remaining rules. For the average person, this matters because the speed and rigor of internal investigations—whether involving misconduct or ethical issues—depend on these procedural rules. If the removed category was something critical requiring special oversight, its elimination could change how those cases are handled going forward.

Reorganizing the Rulebook

Because Congress removed paragraph (3), they had to renumber everything else to keep the statute readable. What was paragraph (4) becomes (3), and (5) becomes (4). This is the equivalent of deleting a slide from a PowerPoint presentation and then having to update all the slide numbers in the references section—pure administrative housekeeping. They also made a technical tweak in the newly renumbered paragraph (4) to reference the newly renumbered paragraph (3), ensuring the internal cross-references still work.

Broadening the Scope of Review

Finally, the Act adjusts subsection (d), which deals with the scope of certain investigations. Previously, subsection (d) included an exception that specifically referenced the category of allegations listed in the now-deleted subsection (b)(3). By striking that exception, the rules laid out in subsection (d) now apply more broadly. Essentially, the bill ensures that whatever investigative rules are in subsection (d) are no longer limited by the carve-out related to the removed category of allegations. While this is primarily a procedural fix to match the earlier deletion, it confirms that the goal here is to streamline the statute by removing specific exceptions and making the remaining rules more general in their application to DOJ personnel investigations.