After watching the House Energy & Commerce hearing on “protecting kids online,” I was reminded that Congress is debating the wrong crisis. Congressional leaders spent hours discussing platform design tweaks, age-verification schemes and so-called “duties of care.” Still, not one moment was spent discussing the only thing that actually protects children: arresting sexual predators and putting them in jail.

The government cannot lecture about child safety while ignoring the basic math of this emergency. Last year, electronic service providers filed more than 20 million CyberTipline reports to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children; 13 million of those came from Meta. Think about that: a private company calling 911 13 million times. And law enforcement bodies, starved of personnel, training and digital forensics capacity, answered only a fraction of those calls.

Every expert knows this bottleneck is not detection. The bottleneck is investigation, prosecution and incarceration. Until Congress funds the people who actually put predators behind bars, these hearings are unfortunately performative.

Lawmakers in the 119th Congress have been revisiting a familiar slate of bills (KOSA, COPPA 2.0, RESET and their legislative cousins) that promise online safety but deliver none. They create new liabilities, new bureaucracies, new mandates and new censorship risks. Everything except the one thing that matters: taking predators off the street.

Not one of the bills discussed includes serious law-enforcement funding. There was no mention of codifying or expanding the vital work the DHS Cybercrimes Unit has done. Not one suggested disseminating their Know2Protect  public awareness program, a free, readily available tool for parents, kids and schools. Not one expands the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Forces. None of them gives the U.S. marshals the digital forensics teams they need. Not one modernizes NCMEC’s overwhelmed systems.

None of these bills aims to solve the core problem: the near-total impunity that online predators enjoy.

Predators worldwide are watching the House Energy & Commerce hearing and breathing a sigh of relief because they get another year of freedom. Another year to exploit, coerce, extort and re-victimize children. Another year where millions of CyberTips go unassigned, uninvestigated, unanswered.

Absolute child safety is not mysterious. We know what works: funded investigations, trained prosecutors, digital forensics teams, and a criminal-justice system capable of acting on the leads tech companies already provide.

That is why Stop Child Predators supports reintroducing the Invest in Child Safety Act. It is the only proposal that would shrink the predator population rather than expand the federal bureaucracy. Everything else proposed in Congress is noise. None of it gets a single offender off the street.

The truth is simple: If your “child-safety” bill does not fund law enforcement, it is not a child-safety bill. It is a gift to criminals.

Maureen Flatley is the president of Stop Child Predators/InsideSources