First-order effects

• Federal agencies and police departments would face an immediate halt to facial recognition deployments under their control, freezing procurement and existing pilots until the moratorium lifts.
• Vendors whose government business centers on identification tech lose their primary public-sector channel, pushing sales conversations toward the private sector.

Second-order effects

• Corporate restraint and legislative bans start competing to define the norm: once Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft had withdrawn from police sales, the marginal cost to lawmakers of codifying a ban fell, and laggard vendors faced pressure to match both moves.
• A federal moratorium sharpens the patchwork problem — cities and states setting their own rules would sit under a national freeze, giving opponents of fragmented local regulation a reason to back federal action instead.

Third-order effects

• If the pattern holds — audit-first bills like the Algorithmic Accountability Act, then use-specific bans like this one, then later proposals such as the AI Kill Switch Act granting DHS shutdown authority over dangerous models — US AI governance drifts from transparency tools toward direct federal control over which systems may operate.
• Whether bans are enacted federally or left to corporate moratoria and local rules determines whether facial recognition becomes a regulated technology or a de facto prohibited one in American policing.