The Gazette offers audio versions of articles using Instaread. Some words may be mispronounced.
DES MOINES — A key deadline designed to entice Iowa state lawmakers to finish their work for the year has arrived, yet many significant policy questions remain unanswered.
Friday is the 110th calendar day of the 2025 session of the Iowa Legislature. It is the last day that state lawmakers will receive their stipend for daily housing and meal expenses.
Iowa does not have a required end date for legislative sessions, so the per diem expiration was created to give lawmakers an incentive to have their work completed for the year — the idea being that it will motivate legislators to complete their work before they lose the reimbursement for their meals and temporary housing costs.
Lawmakers have reached that point in the 2025 session. And while their work is nearing completion, many significant tasks remain.
First and foremost, legislators in the Republican-led Iowa Legislature — in coordination with Gov. Kim Reynolds — must set state spending for the budget year that begins July 1.
Significant policy questions remain also. Here is a look at what lawmakers — Republican leaders, in particular — will be working on in the coming days and weeks as they attempt to finish their work for 2025.
State budget
While both Iowa House and Senate Republicans released their 2026 state budget projections Monday, the chambers have yet to reach an agreement on a final proposal.
Senate Republicans and Gov. Kim Reynolds released a proposal in tandem, proposing to spend $9.417 billion, down from Reynolds’ previous proposal of $9.433 billion that she presented in January.
Across the rotunda, House Republicans released their own spending proposal of $9.453 billion.
Although the proposals are separated by $36 million — just 0.3 percent of the total proposed spending — the chambers are divided on a few aspects of the budget, including the House’s commitment to continued appropriations for paraeducators, according to Republican House Speaker Pat Grassley of New Hartford.
Similar to appropriations made last year, the House budget proposal would allocate $14 million for paraeducator pay.
“That’s one of the pieces right now that, I would say, is one of the biggest sticking points. Our caucus feels extremely strong that if we’re going to provide that level of support that we did with that bill last year, that we’re not going to go back and just cut that and leave our schools in a situation to find the difference,” Grassley told reporters Thursday.
Property taxes
Addressing Iowans’ rising property taxes has been a primary goal of many legislative Republicans, and two bills have been produced over the second half of the session. But neither has made it to either chamber’s floor for a vote.
The second and latest version of the bill includes a $50,000 property tax exemption for every household; elimination of the state’s “rollback” for residential and commercial properties; a 2 percent cap on most revenue growth; and a shift of about $426 million in funding for K-12 schools from local property taxes to the state.
Each of the twin bills, Senate Study Bill 1227 and House Study Bill 328, has passed only the first legislative step.
Sen. Dan Dawson, a Republican from Council Bluffs, recently said that he and Rep. Bobby Kaufmann, a Republican from Wilton, continued to work on the bill after receiving feedback from tax policy advocates and local government leaders whose budgets would be impacted. Dawson said if an agreement cannot be reached on the entirety of the legislation, lawmakers could pass the portions on which there is agreement and address the remaining issues during next year’s session.
“We’re still hopeful that we can find ourselves in a position where we can at least try to alleviate some immediate impacts that Iowans are going to see, whether it’s through significant assessments, whether it’s through increases,” Grassley told reporters Thursday. “I’m hopeful that we can find a path to do something.”
Eminent domain
The issue of eminent domain and hazardous liquid pipelines has only been addressed in previous years in the Iowa House, where Republicans have passed bills each of the past three years. Republicans in the Senate have declined to move them.
But in recent weeks, an increasing number of Senate Republicans have advocated — including by speaking on the chamber floor — for their party’s leaders to bring up the House-passed eminent domain bills for debate in the Senate.
House File 943 would ban the use of eminent domain for hazardous liquid pipelines. House File 639 contains multiple provisions, including insurance requirements for pipeline projects, public meeting attendance requirements for state regulator meetings, restricting when and how pipeline companies and sue landowners, and prohibiting the renewal of a pipeline project’s permit after 25 years.
“A number of Republican Senators are working on policy surrounding eminent domain and pipeline issues and I am optimistic we will find a legislative solution,” Iowa Senate Majority Leader Jack Whitver, a Republican from Grimes, told The Gazette in a statement.
Governor’s priorities
Lawmakers have yet to advance some of the legislative priorities proposed by Gov. Kim Reynolds, including bills focused on energy policy, unemployment insurance rates, child care and rural health care.
Many of Reynolds’ legislative proposals, including natural disaster relief, hands-free driving legislation and restricting cellphone usage in K-12 schools, have gone to her desk. But at least four of the governor’s bills have yet to be advanced through the House and Senate.
Each of the stalled proposals contains at least one provision on which legislators have not yet reached agreement: a right of first refusal law in the energy bill; spending on programs in the rural health care bill; a proposed shifting of funds and how that would impact existing programs in the child care bill; and concern over national economic uncertainty with the unemployment insurance bill.
Grassley said the chamber is currently prioritizing the budget before it moves forward with Reynolds’ proposals.
“The priority is finding … some common ground in the budget so we can get the budget process moving the direction that I’ve been tasked from our caucuses. Let’s make progress before we’ll be taking up significant pieces of policy,” Grassley told reporters Thursday. “Our focus right now is finding agreement on the budget. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that those bills may not be considered.”
Pharmacy benefit managers
Legislation designed to help rural pharmacies by further regulating pharmacy benefit managers — health care companies that function as intermediaries between insurance providers and drug manufacturers — has passed the Senate but not yet been considered in the House.
The bill, Senate File 383, would require all prescription drug contracts to use a pass-through pricing model — in which the amount paid by the PBM to the pharmacy is passed through to the plan sponsors — employers, insurers, government agencies, or managed care organizations — and the PBM is compensated through administrative fees, according to the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association, which represents PBMs.
The bill also prohibits PBMs from disincentivizing individuals from selecting a pharmacy or from requiring customers to purchase any prescription drug through a mail order pharmacy, or from reimbursing small pharmacies less than the national or Iowa average drug acquisition cost, among other provisions.
Broadly speaking, pharmacists and other health care organizations are supportive of the legislation, while PBMs, insurance companies, business organizations, worker unions and local governments are opposed, according to state lobbying records.
“My expectation is we will leave session trying to do something that will continue to provide relief for those rural pharmacies,” Grassley said. “But where we stand specifically on the bill as a whole? We’ll have to caucus on that again.”
Pesticide lawsuits
The chances of legislation that would shield pesticide manufacturing companies from lawsuits coming up in the Iowa House this session appear to remain low.
Opponents argue Senate File 394, which was advanced by the Iowa Senate in March, would shield Bayer, the company that owns glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup, which is used by farmers across the state, from liability over failure to warn about the product’s health risks including cancer.
The House failed to take up the bill before the second legislative deadline of the session in April. While Grassley said he recently met with pesticide company Bayer to discuss the legislation, he remains uncertain whether the chamber will take it up this session.
“I always just want to make sure that Iowans are aware of the impacts that this may have, not just for agriculture, but also jobs,” Grassley told reporters Thursday. “There’s that continued push and why Iowa is probably getting more attention because of the unique situation we find ourselves in. But again, the bill did not have a level of support. But that doesn’t mean … it’s not something we may discuss further, but as we sit here right now, I don’t think it’s something that’s actively moving through the process.”
The bill would shield Bayer from lawsuits claiming the company failed to warn consumers of health risks if the product label complies with federal labeling requirements. Bayer argues that since the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has determined glyphosate is not carcinogenic, the company should not be required to put cancer warnings on Roundup.
Comments: (515) 355-1300, erin.murphy@thegazette.com
Get the latest Iowa politics and government coverage each morning in the On Iowa Politics newsletter.
