Jefferies’s trade association believes this is a “national issue that demands a unified federal response to protect our supply chains and economy,” he said. Congress ought to respond to the rise in crime by putting a CORCA in it, in other words.

The AAR was emphatic to the Washington Examiner that rail is only one of many victims of organized theft. In making a full-court press for congressional action, the AAR held a joint press conference in March with competitor the American Trucking Associations, for instance, as well as the Retail Industry Leaders Association.

Retail theft is technically a separate issue, but the two are linked in important ways. Estimates of cargo theft run between $15 billion and $35 billion a year. Retail theft is probably greater.

Christian Hardman, who leads eBay’s North America Criminal and Regulatory Investigations team, wrote that shoplifting has climbed 93% from 2019 to 2023 in an op-ed published in Fox News. Much of that increase was due to organized theft, where multiple criminals coordinate to make off with and sell the merchandise.

As a result, Capital One Shopping estimates a $45 billion loss to retail theft nationally for last year. Put cargo theft and retail theft together and it makes for a loss of between $60 billion and $80 billion annually for American businesses.

What do those figures mean for consumers and investors? The costs pencil out to higher prices for consumers, higher insurance premiums for those who move and sell the goods, higher security costs, and lower profits.

There are also other knock-on bad effects of these trends. Many stores have responded to increased retail theft by putting a good chunk of their goods behind lock and key. Gating goods can cut down on theft, of course, but the added inconvenience of having to go and get a worker to free a stick of deodorant from the case, for instance, has convinced many would-be customers not to bother. This added friction has further dragged down sales in an already fragile economy.

On the issue of cargo security, the Eno Center for Transportation reports on “one of the fastest growing trends in cargo theft,” called “strategic theft,” that has ballooned from a negligible 3% of the problem to about one-third of cargo thefts today.

“While cargo theft has been a problem since the 1800s,” a phenomenon that has been memorialized and dramatized in countless stagecoach and train robberies on the screen, “in the past few years, rates of cargo theft have significantly grown, becoming an unavoidable problem for those in the freight industry.”

Eno analyst Grace Truslow wrote that in a May report that centered on expert congressional testimony. She added that the “convergence of criminals exploiting weaknesses in security, infrastructure, and law enforcement along freight routes and the increased capabilities of new technologies for more sophisticated criminal activities have drastically increased rates of cargo theft.” 

In the case of strategic theft, criminals use “advanced cyber tactics to pose as carriers or brokers to get cargo directly delivered to them,” Truslow explained. The added distance makes it harder to track and capture said criminals. This difficulty is “especially [true for] those higher up in criminal organizations,” making it harder to get at the bigger fish to disrupt operations.

Cargo thieves have also embraced current technology with gusto. These criminals, for instance, are now “utilizing drones to remotely track freight travel and identify vulnerable portions of the supply chain,” the Eno analyst warned.

What’s in the bill?

In making the case for CORCA 2025, supporters are touting greater federal coordination, more resources, and better tools for combating cargo and retail theft.

The most visible sign of increased coordination and resources would be a new agency, the Organized Retail and Supply Chain Crime Coordination Center, to be housed within the Department of Homeland Security, an agency with an annual budget north of $110 billion and thus the resources to staff it. The coordination center would also have to make regular reports to keep tabs on the problem.

The “tools,” in addition to better coordination at the federal and state levels, would be increased federal penalties for cargo and retail theft. For instance, under current law, such theft does not rise to the level of a federal crime until it involves $5,000 worth of goods. CORCA would make that a cumulative amount, amending the relative statutes to read “or of an aggregate value of $5,000 or more during any 12-month period.”

Will Congress act?

CORCA’s chances in the 119th Congress are likely good but not great. On the one hand, most people are unhappy about the recent rise in five-finger discounting, and this seems like a layup in the more populist, GOP-controlled House of Representatives. On the other hand, the Senate Democratic Caucus has enough votes, 47, to filibuster legislation that its members do not like.

Absent political pressure, Senate Democrats would likely rubber-stamp legislation to deal with cargo and retail theft. But they could face pressure from activists to hold the line against this legislation.

The bill’s predecessor, CORCA 2023, likely died for just that reason. An umbrella group called the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, with members including the American Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP, the National Council of Negro Women, and the Southern Poverty Law Center Action Fund, sent a letter to Congress objecting to the legislation in no uncertain terms.

“This bill relies on old, outdated data and, as a result, reacts to fear over facts to promote failed punitive policies that would further criminalize poverty and potentially cause disproportionate harm on Black and Brown communities,” the letter charged.

The groups added that the CORCA $5,000 aggregate theft provision “likely increase the criminalization of poverty” because “those living in poverty without access to adequate programs or services that would help them to afford basic needs could easily surpass this new threshold during the course of one year.”

PAM BONDI CELEBRATES ARRESTS THAT ‘MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN’

If the same progressive groups circle the wagons again during the present Congress, Republicans will have to get around filibuster threats by passing the bill through the reconciliation phase of the budget process to get it to President Donald Trump’s desk. Such reforms have to be deemed significant for budgeting purposes, which is one reason why proponents of CORCA 2025 are playing up tax and other revenues lost due to theft.

“Retail crime has cost Iowa billions, and it’s even worse across the nation,” the bill’s chief sponsor, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), said in a statement accompanying the rollout. He added that CORCA “improves the federal response to organized retail crime and establishes new tools to recover stolen goods and illicit proceeds, and deter future attacks on American retailers.”

Jeremy Lott is author of The Warm Bucket Brigade: The Story of the American Vice Presidency.