Gaveling out of the 2025 legislative session early Thursday morning, Iowa lawmakers ended the session with a flurry of bills, yet did not take action to lower property taxes — a top priority for Iowa Republicans this year.
After two weeks of legislative overtime, the final gavel came down at 6:31 a.m. Thursday, marking the end to the 123rd session.
Iowa Republicans took President Donald Trump’s resounding win in the Hawkeye state and their expanded majority as a mandate to continue a conservative agenda.
The Republican party held a trifecta and the largest majority since 1971, and aimed their leverage to enact historic legislation, such as removing civil rights protections for transgender Iowans and ending a years-long stalemate on the state’s opioid settlement funds.
Iowa lawmakers finally reached a compromise on how the $56 million in opioid settlement funds will be spent and made plans on how to award future funds.
The bill lasted until the late hours of the 2025 legislative session and will go to the governor’s desk for final approval.
The compromise legislators agreed to will direct $29 million to the Iowa Department of Health and Human Services to distribute to organizations across Iowa and an additional $27 million for the state’s seven new behavioral health districts.
Both parties said they were not content with the bill. Rep. Gary Mohr, R-Bettendorf, said the bill is not exactly what House lawmakers were aiming for, but a compromise needed to be struck.
Mohr said there were significant differences between the original bills in the House and Senate and if compromise was not made, Iowans would have gone another year without funds to address opioid abuse.
Sen. Janice Weiner, D-Iowa City, said while she understands the money needs to get out to door to reach Iowans, the legislation is a “last-minute compromise” that failed to take in expert opinions
More than 1,000 Iowans died from opioid abuse, Weiner said, and while Iowa’s fatality rate has declined, it remains above surrounding states who have utilized opioid settlement funds.
“You’ve argued about it for three sessions, so here we are racing to adjourn, and we couldn’t take the time to craft a good bill,” Weiner said.
State lawmakers stripped transgender Iowans of civil rights protections
The Iowa legislature made history this session, creating a law to strip civil rights protections from transgender Iowans. The move made Iowa the first state to remove a protected class from its civil rights code.
The law ended nearly 20 years of civil rights protections for transgender Iowans enacted by a Democratic trifecta in 2007. It removes gender identity as a protected class from the Iowa Civil Rights Act, which will open transgender Iowans up to discrimination.
The law, Senate File 418, was pushed through the process quickly, with Reynolds signature coming less than 24 hours after the bill was passed by the legislature a little over a week after the bill was introduced.
Reynolds said the bill will safeguard the rights of women and acknowledges the “biological differences between men and women.”
Iowa Republicans tried to remove gender identity from the Iowa Civil Rights code last session, however, lawmakers on the panel considering the bill decided unanimously to shelve the legislation.
State lawmakers also passed legislation that would prevent Iowa Medicaid from covering surgical procedures and hormone therapy. The Republican-backed bill is on its way to the governor’s desk.
The legislation will prohibit money allocated from Medicaid from being used for sex reassignment surgery or any associated procedures. The bill clarifies that it will not prohibit Medicaid reimbursement for mental health counseling.
Property taxes pegged as goal, Iowa lawmakers fell short
Iowa Republican lawmakers also set cutting property taxes as a session priority, although the party did not take action to lower property taxes.
The details of how to provide property tax relief were unclear at the beginning of the session, and remained hazy until days before the legislators gaveled out.
The Republican party passed a nearly $100 million property assessment reduction in 2023, however, the move may have cost local governments nearly $30 million, according to the Legislative Services Agency at the time.
This session, two drafts of a proposed property tax overhaul were tossed back and forth between the Iowa House and Senate.
The reform would have made the largest changes to Iowa’s property tax system since the 1970s.
The second draft of Senate Study Bill 1227 would eliminate the state’s rollback system for all property classifications residential. Residential properties would have its taxable value capped at 75 percent of its assessed value under the bill.
The legislation would have gradually phased out the rollback completely over 10 years.
Despite not making the big reforms lawmakers set their sights on at the beginning of the session, Iowa lawmakers held a number of hearings to garner feedback on the proposal as they worked on the bill. However, they failed to cross the finish line leaving Iowa’s property tax system unchanged for another year.
Senate Majority Leader Jack Whitver, R-Grimes, said in prepared remarks that the lawmakers addressed issues brought to them by Iowans, despite not passing a property tax overhaul.
“We passed bills on the biggest priorities of Iowans, including education, health care and public Safety,” Whitver said. “We always are putting the taxpayers first, and it consistently showed as we passed bills to protect our freedoms, budget responsibly and fund important priorities.”
Iowa lawmakers aimed to reform immigration policies
Iowa Republicans also pinned combating illegal immigration as a priority for the session, and the party pushed several reform bills through bills signed into law, while others failed.
Iowa had roughly 75,000 unauthorized immigrants living in the state in 2024, which is about 2 percent of the state’s total population, according to the Pew Research Center.
Illegal border crossings reached record highs under the Biden administration, averaging 2 million per year from 2021 to 2023. December 2024 observed the highest illegal border crossing ever recorded — 250,000.
Iowa Republicans failed to pass a human smuggling bill in the party’s second effort to create a law enforcing jail time for the act of human smuggling.
Another bill, House File 946, which only passed through the Iowa House, would have required law enforcement officers who knowingly or intentionally fail to comply with immigration laws to be investigated by the attorney general.
Legislation requiring Iowa’s state and local law enforcement to partner with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement also failed.
The bills faced opposition from lobbyists, Democrats, and Iowans who came to speak at the subcommittee hearings, and ultimately the bills did not pass.
Iowa lawmakers’ push to reform immigration follows Trump’s efforts to enact the “largest deportation in U.S. history.”