National Cemetery Bill Expands Review Window to 1973, Cleans Up Sex Offender Registry Terminology

The “Restoring the Sanctity of Public Entombments, Cemeteries, and Tributes Act of 2025,” thankfully shortened to the RESPECT Act of 2025, is primarily a statutory cleanup bill focused on how national cemeteries are managed. Its main action is expanding the authority for the government to reconsider past decisions about who gets buried or memorialized in a national cemetery. Specifically, it allows reviews for decisions made on or after June 18, 1973, pushing the look-back period further into the past. Beyond that, the bill makes two technical updates: it cleans up the legal language used to define a “tier III sex offender” across several sections of the law, ensuring consistency with the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act, and it removes an outdated subsection (c) from a previous law.

Opening the History Books on Burial Decisions

Right now, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has the authority to look back and reconsider decisions regarding burial or memorialization, which might involve correcting a mistake or overturning a past denial. This bill, found in Section 2, expands the window for that review. By setting the new cutoff date to June 18, 1973, the VA is now empowered to review decisions that may have been considered final decades ago. For the average person, this means that if your family member had a complicated or denied request for a national cemetery plot or memorial marker sometime in the last 50 years, there might now be a path to have that decision reconsidered, potentially providing closure or correcting an administrative error that occurred long before current standards were in place.

The Fine Print: Cleaning Up the Legal Jargon

While the expanded review period is the most tangible change, the bulk of this bill is dedicated to technical language adjustments—the kind of stuff that only policy wonks and lawyers usually notice. The bill updates the references to “tier III sex offenders” in subsections (b)(4)(A), (b)(5)(A), (d)(2)(A)(ii), and (e)(1)(B) of the national cemetery law. Instead of using a slightly vague phrase, it inserts the precise legal definition found under section 111 of the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act. This isn't changing who is excluded from national cemeteries; it’s just making sure the statutory reference is air-tight and consistent across the board. Think of it as a software patch that fixes a broken hyperlink in the law—it ensures that when the statute refers to a specific definition, it points to the correct, up-to-date source.

Removing the Outdated Rule

The final action of the RESPECT Act is the outright removal of subsection (c) from the Alicia Dawn Koehl Respect for National Cemeteries Act. Without seeing the text of that old subsection, we can only assume it was either superseded by newer laws or became irrelevant over time. This is a common practice in legislative cleanup—getting rid of dead weight in the statute books. For the VA, this means one less piece of legislation to track, simplifying their administrative overhead. Ultimately, the RESPECT Act serves as a statutory tune-up, expanding a review window for historical decisions while ensuring the legal language governing exclusion criteria is precise and accurate.