# Tiahrt Amendment > [!note] Stub > This is a short entry that hasn't been fully written yet. A provision carried on the annual Commerce-Justice spending bills, named for the member who sponsored it, that forbids the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from disclosing the data it collects when a police department asks it to trace a gun recovered at a crime scene. The data may be used to support a criminal investigation or a federal licensing proceeding and otherwise may not be released. ## Why it matters It is the clearest example in federal law of a statistic ended by a spending bill rather than by a repeal. The rider first applied to a single fiscal year at a time. The version enacted in the 2008 omnibus added the phrase "in fiscal year 2008 and thereafter," which the [[Government Accountability Office]] treats as making the restriction permanent law — so a limitation that no authorizing committee ever reported became permanent through four words in an appropriations act. The carve-out that remains is narrow and instructive: the Bureau may still publish aggregate annual statistical reports on the products it regulates, so the aggregate survives and the detail does not. ## See also - [[Appropriations Process]] — the annual bills these provisions ride on - [[How a Statistical Agency Is Defunded or Discontinued]] — the eight routes by which a federal statistic stops being produced - [[ATF]] — the agency whose data the rider covers