Governor Finishes Work on 2025 Bills
The 2025 Iowa Legislative session, which ended on May 15, broke the record in the number of bills filed. In fact, there has never been a House File 1000 in the history of the State of Iowa (since records were kept from 1876). This year we got to House File 1055. If it felt like there were a lot more bills than usual, it is because there actually were a lot more bills than usual.
Tensions ran high this year with deep divisions on early childhood reform, pharmacy benefit manager reform, and most significantly, banning the use of eminent domain for private carbon pipeline companies. Of the 171 bills sent to the Governor, she signed all but two and she line-item vetoed one budget:
- House File 383 (veto): Legalizing crystalline polymorph psilocybin upon FDA approval/rescheduling. The Governor’s veto message indicated this was putting the cart before the horse and taking away state decision-making on the matter.
- House File 639 (veto): Restricting use of eminent domain for carbon pipeline projects. The Governor’s veto message states that she agrees with the intent of the bill but it goes much further and could destabilize Iowa’s energy industry.
- Senate File 647 (line-item veto): The Governor took out one line-item appropriation to charge UNI students from border states in-state tuition. The rest of the budgets were signed as passed by the Legislature.
You can see the final status (with effective dates) of bills in the LWVIA Bill Tracker. All bills that are on the “inactive” list will come alive again in 2026. They begin where they ended in the legislative process.