On April 11, the U.S. Sentencing Commission adopted proposed amendments to the Sentencing Guidelines.  The amendments will become effective November 1, 2025, unless there is some (unexpected) Congressional intervention.  The biggest change is the adoption of the "simplification amendments," which revise the current "three-step" approach sentencing courts must employ to a "two-step" analysis.  The omitted "step" is consideration of upward and/or downward departures from the Guidelines. This is a natural evolution in sentencing law since the Supreme Court's decisions in United States v. Booker and its progeny, which changed the Sentencing Guidelines from mandatory, to merely "advisory." Since Booker, very few federal judges even consider Guidelines departures anymore and instead 99/100 times opt to apply a "variance" from the Guidelines, both because it is a simpler way of determining a sentence, and because doing so is far less likely to result in a reversal on appeal due to some technical misapplication of the departure rules.  The simplification amendments remove nearly all references to "departures" (the main exception being downward departures for "substantial cooperation") and instead formally shift the sentencing analysis to the factors described in 18 U.S.C. Sec. 3553(a), where it should be.