21 February 2025 | Tax and Budget Education Early Learning Economic Security Health

2025 Statehouse Snapshot: Week 6

Kansas Action for Children | February 21, 2025

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Turnaround Deadline Reveals Legislature’s Priorities

We’ve officially reached the halfway point of the 2025 legislative session. The quickened pace of session culminated this week as both chambers debated and voted on dozens of bills in light of the Turnaround deadline, which is when each chamber must pass on most of their bills onto the other side of the Statehouse for further legislative work.

We anticipated action on several bills, including those involving administrative Medicaid processes, food assistance restrictions, K-12, and the state budget. You can view a quick list of what we kept a close eye on here.

What was intriguing this week was not necessarily what passed (of note, not a single bill failed), but rather by what margins certain bills received approval. It takes the Senate 27 votes and the House 84 votes to override a veto by the Governor. As you’ll see in this newsletter, a majority of bills we are concerned with hover around those tipping points.

The vote totals clearly show a well-coordinated docket of legislation concentrated on common themes of legislative control – regardless of the agency expertise required or the ability of local entities to respond to their communities’ needs.

One thing we know: your voice matters. While the KAC team is in the Statehouse to elevate the benefits (or risks) of new policy to Kansas families, our work can only go so far if there aren’t communities sharing their concerns directly with lawmakers. Now is the time to make a plan for reaching out to your state lawmakers. Your voice may be the one needed to tip the scales in the favor of Kansas families.

Slew of Bills Passed Targeting Public Assistance Programs

This year, we’ve elevated how, currently, Kansas child food insecurity is at a staggering 19%, or 1 in 5 kids who may not know where their next meal will come from. But instead of working at reducing this rate, the Legislature prioritized bills that will only cost Kansas taxpayers more money and increase food insecurity even more. In addition to HB 2240 and SB 161 (which are described later in this newsletter), three other bills with tighter controls over programs that could help low-income Kansans were sent on through the legislative process.

SB 79, which would create new categories of food and drinks that cannot be purchased with food assistance, passed the Senate 29-11. If this becomes law, Kansas families will have fewer grocery options of what works for their families. This could also result in downstream economic impacts on communities – especially rural areas – across the state.

SB 85 would require the Department for Children and Families (DCF) to pay an outside vendor (like Equifax) to complete the verification checks the agency is already able to complete at no added cost! The fiscal note shows this would require 113 new full-time employees at a cost of $11 million, wasting taxpayer dollars while adding inefficiencies to DCF. But this costly red tape wasn’t enough to keep the Senate from passing this on a 30-10 vote.

The House pushed through HB 2101, a bill that would prohibit municipalities from implementing guaranteed income programs. While these programs are somewhat novel, research and analysis reveal these programs have effectively provided a hand up to families who are struggling financially. However, the House voted 86-37 to interfere with municipalities’ autonomy and ensure that no such program can ever be implemented in the state.

One bill (HB 2217) we suspected could have come up for debate this week remains a possibility in the coming weeks. This would expand the scope of the Medicaid Inspector General’s Office to also audit food assistance and cash assistance. These programs are already audited by DCF, so this would be a duplicative effort that would cost an additional $1 million per year with little to show for it, based on current results from that Office.

As we continue through the 2025 Session, we hope lawmakers will listen to Kansas voices on how exerting such tight legislative control will hamper the state’s ability to efficiently respond to Kansans’ needs.

A Heavy Hand on Local Education Policy

Creating a policy, let alone a new law, based on rare situations isn’t good governance. Unfortunately, the Senate’s attention on K-12 education focused on these very types of situations.

SB 114 seeks to ensure participation in ancillary high school activities for home school and private school students, which is already allowed by law. Testimony on the bill revealed a story where a student was excluded, and the association governing these sorts of activities was not notified and given an opportunity to fix the concern but voiced they would have worked to resolve the matter in the student’s best interest. Despite bipartisan concern that this bill is not necessary and will erode local control, the bill moved forward anyway.

Similar efforts became apparent in the discussion around SB 47 concerning details about local school boards. Lawmaker discussion and amendments on the bill seek to control a local school board’s ability to manage their meetings and dictate how school buildings will handle visits from school board members.

Senate leadership is also allowing SB 48, which requires demonstration of improvements of student performance in connection with their accreditation status, to still be considered despite the Turnaround deadline. Considering how the K-12 budget lacks appropriate special education funding and other measures that would support students, KAC and other education advocates are worried about the bill’s impact should it become law.

Senators also passed SB 87, which is set to increase the total state cap of contributions toward the low-income tax credit scholarship program to $15 million. The program provides donors with a 75% tax credit, up to the current $10 million capped amount allocated by the state.

House Passes Budget Package

The state’s budget now moves over to the Kansas Senate after House lawmakers added their final tweaks to the package and voted to pass it from their side of the Statehouse. The Senate will have about a month to review, evaluate, and modify the House’s budget.

Last week, we wrote extensively about the House’s budget proposal, and not much changed after floor action this week. During a long debate, six changes were brought up by representatives – two passed and four failed. Because of what’s called the “pay go” rule during floor debates on the budget, any additions to the budget must have a corresponding removal of funds, keeping the cost of the items fiscally neutral.

One (failed) amendment was for Medicaid Expansion, which we discuss elsewhere in this newsletter. Two of the others were of particular interest: one to cover the cost of reduced-price lunches for Kansas students ($3 million) and one to increase new money for special education from the current $10 million extra to $30 million above the current commitment. Both of these amendments also failed.

Debate on these items was of even more interest because of the pay go rule. The reduced-price lunch funding was crafted to shrink the $20 million funding allocated for AI/camera-based gun detection installations in Kansas schools to $17 million, noting this project hadn’t even gone out for bid and had an uncertain cost. The amendment to increase SPED funding was crafted to use the money in the Attracting Professional Sports Teams to Kansas Fund, which is currently being used as a carrot to lure either the Royals or Chiefs to Kansas. Again, both budget amendments failed, leaving the reduced-price lunch program as is (where families still pay the same amounts) and moving backwards on SPED funding the state needs to get the state closer to its statutory funding obligation.

It will be interesting to see the Senate’s opinions and actions on these items, and it’s a good time to reach out to senators about any budget priorities you may have.

Legislature Seeks to Exert Control over Some Medicaid Processes

Lawmakers could have spent time debating policies that would help kids and families improve their health or address maternal and infant health issues. Instead, they focused on restricting agency authority to make changes to the Medicaid program through administrative changes without legislative approval via HB 2240, which passed the House 89-34. The Senate placed the same restrictions on all public assistance programs via SB 161, which passed the Senate 30-10. Removing decision-making authority for complex program changes – particularly for the Medicaid program – threatens federal funding, delays timely responses, and creates additional layers of bureaucracy.

While some may believe these types of bills give the Legislature more options to address potential issues within the programs, they actually force programs to be micromanaged by those without the complex knowledge required. If passed, both of these bills would have wide-ranging impacts on how Medicaid, SNAP, TANF, and other programs are administered, and we could see the Legislature become a bottleneck for the smallest of needed changes.

For the first time since 2020, no anti-vaccine bill was allowed to move forward after the Turnaround deadline. While that is good news, Sub. for SB 29 (removing the authority of local health officials to prohibit public gatherings during infectious disease outbreaks) passed out of the Senate at a vote of 28-12. While a much less bad bill than the original, we remain concerned that if Kansas communities are ever faced with another major infectious disease outbreak (like measles or bird flu), they would no longer have a rare but important tool available to them like in the past.

Both chambers debated Medicaid expansion via amendment attempts this week, but as has occurred for several years, both failed to come even close to a majority vote. If you are frustrated by this lack of action on Medicaid expansion, consider attending the Medicaid expansion rally on March 12 at the Statehouse.

Budget Woes and Future Tax Work

Tax has largely been quiet in recent weeks, but much of their work is just beginning now that the Turnaround deadline is passed.

As we enter this next phase of the legislative session, we’re left wondering about the austerity of the state budget, because even as agencies were directed to cut their budgets as a way to cut government spending, the tax committees are likely to consider several bills with significant price tags that don’t prioritize everyday working families.

Tax relief should be targeted toward those who need it the most – and we’ll be watching the tax committees’ work to see who they prioritize in the tax code.

What to Expect in Week 7

We know of a few committees that will meet next week to hold bill hearings:

On Wednesday in House Tax, we will provide opponent testimony on HB 2336, which would allow single sales factor apportionment of business income for certain types of organizations, setting up a less equitable corporate tax structure.
On Thursday in Senate Federal and State Affairs, we’ll provide opponent testimony on SB 254, which would prevent undocumented immigrants from receiving any state or local public assistance dollars. This is particularly worrisome because Kansas kids with foreign-born parents experience poverty at higher rates than those with parents born in the United States. Preventing these Kansans from receiving assistance they are currently eligible for could lead to heightened food and housing insecurity and lower educational outcomes.
We’re hearing that on Thursday in House Commerce, lawmakers will hear about HB 2294, which would establish the Office of Early Childhood. We’ll plan to present proponent testimony on the bill.

Now that several pieces of legislation have been kicked over to the opposite side of the Statehouse, many committees will hold their own hearings on these bills. We have not heard any of these hearings being scheduled quite yet, but they could take place as committee chairs see fit with little notice.