Evaluating Efforts to Reform Equitable Sharing

In the past decade, both the federal government and several states have implemented reforms aimed at curbing equitable sharing. With the passage of time, we have enough data to evaluate the effectiveness of most of these measures. Notwithstanding some successes, the data paint a mixed picture.

Federal reform

On the federal side, the most important reform has been a 2015 executive order issued by former Attorney General Eric Holder affecting one of the two main types of equitable sharing: adoptions. Adoptions occur when a state or local agency seizes property with no federal involvement and turns the property over to the federal government to forfeit under federal law. The state or local agency then receives up to 80% of the forfeiture proceeds. An adoption was how the NHP tried to forfeit Stephen Lara’s savings. ¹  

Adoptions are in contrast to joint investigations, the other main type of equitable sharing. By far the most common type, joint investigations are, as the name suggests, collaborative efforts between federal and state or local agencies that result in forfeiture. Agencies receive a share of the proceeds proportional to their contribution to the investigation, with at least 20% going to the federal government.

The so-called Holder reform focused squarely on adoptions, banning the DOJ from adopting seized property from state or local agencies with an exception for items related to public safety. ²  The Treasury quickly followed suit. ³  The result of these reforms was that the percentage of adoptions plunged, from 26% of all forfeitures in 2014 to only 5% in 2016, the first full year after the change. (See Figure 28.)

Although the Holder reform has since been officially reversed, it has had staying power. In 2017, Holder’s successor as attorney general, Jeff Sessions, issued a new executive order reinstating adoptions at the DOJ with some restrictions, and the Treasury again immediately did the same. ⁴  Following this about-face, the percentage of adoptions rose some, but it never rebounded to 2014 levels. Instead, it has remained constant at around 10% of equitable sharing forfeitures since 2019. ⁵  

Figure 28: Adoptions plunged following the Holder reform and never fully rebounded after the Sessions reversal

In addition to a simple analysis of the raw percentages, we conducted a more sophisticated regression analysis to evaluate the impact of the Holder reform on equitable sharing. Through this analysis, we found that the reform resulted in a statistically significant drop in the number of shared assets immediately following its implementation. In other words, equitable sharing as a whole decreased as a result of the Holder reform. Furthermore, the decline in the number of shared assets continued long after the reform’s initial implementation, suggesting the change has had lasting effects despite Sessions’ reversal of it. These findings are consistent with those from a recent study finding that the Holder reform reduced the number of both administrative forfeitures and forfeitures that generated revenue. ⁶  For further details about our findings and methodology for this analysis, see Appendix C.

State reforms

At the state level, reforms have been aimed at restricting state and local law enforcement agencies’ ability to participate in and receive funds through equitable sharing. Often, the motivation has been to restrict agencies’ ability to benefit from forfeitures in a way that would be disallowed under state law.

This concern was recently voiced by a Nevada court in Stephen Lara’s case. After the federal government received Stephen’s savings from the NHP, it held the money in limbo for seven months, missing its own statutory deadlines for moving forward with the forfeiture. Fed up, Stephen sued the DEA with IJ’s help. ⁷  The very next day, the agency announced it would return Stephen’s money. ⁸  

Stephen and IJ also sued Nevada to stop law enforcement agencies in the state from using equitable sharing to sidestep state-law protections for property owners. In January 2025, a state trial court ruled that Nevada law enforcement agencies cannot engage in adoptive forfeitures “until and unless they achieve full compliance with Nevada’s statutory requirements.” ⁹  In other words, agencies are not allowed to skirt “unfavorable” state law using adoptions. ¹⁰  

Thus far, 11 states and the District of Columbia have attempted to curb equitable sharing through legislative reforms in one or more of the following ways: establishing a minimum threshold for either transferring funds to the federal government or receiving equitable sharing funds; requiring a criminal charge or conviction; banning adoptions; or sending equitable sharing proceeds to the general fund. ¹¹  Exceptions are frequent, however. Table 8 provides more detail on the reforms, including major exceptions and effective dates.

Table 8: Equitable sharing reforms, 11 states and D.C.

Minimum threshold reforms
Arizona July 2017	Prohibits transferring property worth up to $75,000 to a federal agency unless there is federal involvement in the seizure (e.g., through a task force) or only a violation of federal law is alleged; also bans adoptions.
California January 2017	Prohibits sharing of all tangible property and cash of $40,000 or less under drug laws unless (i) there is an associated state or federal criminal conviction; or (ii) the defendant is charged and fails to appear as required due to death, flight, or other circumstances; also bans adoptions under drug laws.
Colorado August 2017	Prohibits sharing unless the assets are worth more than $50,000 and there is an associated criminal case.
Maryland October 2016	Prohibits transferring cash under $50,000 and other seized property to a federal agency unless (i) there is an associated federal criminal case; (ii) the owner consents to the forfeiture; or (iii) a federal seizure warrant is used to take custody of the asset.
Nebraska July 2016	Prohibits transferring property of $25,000 or less to a federal agency unless (i) the property is seized by a federal agent; or (ii) there is an associated federal prosecution.
Ohio April 2017	Prohibits transferring property under $100,000 to a federal agency unless the property is being referred for federal criminal forfeiture proceedings.
Criminal reforms
Maine* October 2023	Prohibits property of any value from being shared unless it is part of a federal criminal case.
Wisconsin April 2018	Agencies may only accept sharing proceeds if there is an associated criminal conviction unless the defendant died, fled, was deported, or was granted immunity in exchange for testimony or the property is unclaimed after nine months.
Reforms exclusive to adoptions
Alabama January 2022	Bans adoptions unless property includes cash over $10,000.
Pennsylvania July 2017	Bans adoptions.
Reforms directing proceeds to general fund
District of Columbia October 2018	Requires that proceeds from sharing go to the District’s general fund; also bans adoptions.
New Mexico July 2015	Requires that proceeds from sharing go to the state’s general fund; also prohibits transferring property to a federal agency if doing so would circumvent state protections for property owners and prohibits transferring property valued at $50,000 and under to a federal agency subject to exceptions.

*Repealed and replaced a 2021 reform prohibiting transferring property to a federal agency unless it includes currency of over $100,000.

Of these reforms, the most effective have unequivocally been New Mexico’s and the District of Columbia’s. Since the federal government requires that shared revenue directly benefit the participating agency, their reforms sending all equitable sharing proceeds to the general fund effectively banned agencies from participating in the program.

For two other states, Alabama and Maine, it is too soon to tell whether their reforms will make a difference, as they were enacted in 2022 and 2023.

To assess the impact of the other eight states’ reforms, we built regression models comparing each state’s pre- and post-reform equitable sharing data to data for a control group of 40 states with no reforms. ¹²  Through the regressions, which cover the period 2000 to 2021, we controlled for state-specific variables that might affect equitable sharing, such as the unemployment rate, the crime rate, the population, and the number of sworn law enforcement officers. Importantly, we also accounted for the Holder reform to isolate the effects of state reforms. For a full breakdown of the methodology we used for these regressions, see Appendix C.

Overall, we found the reforms’ effectiveness to be a mixed bag. In Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—the only two states we evaluated whose reforms did not involve setting a minimum threshold—we observed no immediate reduction in the number of shared assets compared to the control group following those states’ reforms. In fact, the number of shared assets in Pennsylvania actually increased immediately after its reform. In the long term, the state’s reform, an adoption ban, had no effect, likely because of the Holder reform banning most adoptions. And while Wisconsin’s law had no immediate effect on the number of shared assets, the longer-term trend in Wisconsin was an increase in shared assets relative to non-reform states following its institution of a criminal conviction requirement. This is likely because of an exception for assets without claims, effectively exempting administrative forfeitures. Indeed, in the years after Wisconsin’s reform, an average of nearly 84% of shared assets were forfeited administratively.

Among the six reform states with minimum threshold reforms, Colorado’s appears to have had the broadest impact. Following the reform, Colorado saw an immediate drop and a declining trend in the number of shared assets relative to the control group. Moreover, the composition of shared assets immediately changed to include fewer assets below the reform threshold, and the trend away from lower-value assets continued in the years following the reform. Similarly, California experienced an immediate, if less substantial, reduction and a declining trend in assets shared, combined with an immediate decrease in shared assets below the threshold.

Maryland’s reform also had a modest beneficial effect, with both immediate and longer-term reductions in the number of shared assets compared to the control group following its reform. In addition, there was an immediate shift toward higher-value assets, as the percentage of below-threshold shared assets immediately dropped following the reform.

The other three states with threshold reforms—Arizona, Nebraska, and Ohio—saw mixed effects. While all three saw immediate reductions in the amount of sharing relative to the control group, they also all showed an increased long-term trend in sharing. In addition, while all three states saw an immediate shift away from below-threshold assets, Arizona and Nebraska saw the percentage of lower-value assets rebound close to pre-reform levels in the years that followed. (For a summary of the findings for each state, see Figure 29. For more detailed results, see Appendix C.)

Figure 29: Impact of equitable sharing reforms on number of shared assets, eight states

Moreover, in all six states, assets below the reform thresholds were still consistently shared: In the post-reform period, the states collectively shared 4,415 assets with values below their respective thresholds. Concerningly, 87% of below-threshold assets were forfeited administratively on average across the six states.

While available data are somewhat lacking, it appears that the exceptions built into the threshold reforms blunted their impact. Four states—Arizona, Maryland, Nebraska, and Ohio—permit the sharing of below-threshold assets if there is federal involvement in the seizure or, in Ohio’s case, the property was referred for federal criminal forfeiture proceedings. We cannot directly determine whether there was federal involvement that would have triggered these exceptions, but we can use the seizure method as a proxy.

On average across the four states, 33% of below-threshold assets shared after the reform were seized pursuant to a federal warrant, denoting clear federal involvement. Meanwhile, only 9% were seized via a state warrant, with the remaining 58% having unknown federal involvement. Thus, at least a third of below-threshold assets seized in these states—but probably many more—would be exempted from the thresholds based on federal involvement. ¹³

In addition, the total number of warrants (state, federal, or unspecified) spiked from an average of 28% pre-reform to 56% post-reform. This finding, in conjunction with the lack of significant change in the number of shared assets overall, suggests that agencies changed their behavior following the reforms to continue sharing assets under the thresholds.

In short, despite recent reforms, equitable sharing continues to give state and local agencies an incentive to pursue property, potentially bypassing state forfeiture restrictions and certainly bypassing democratic accountability for spending. And New Mexico and the District of Columbia aside, agencies in most states continue to take advantage, reaping hundreds of millions of dollars—usually without any judicial sign-off.