In 2024, 187 bills were passed by the Iowa legislature. As the 2025 legislative session comes to a close, we’ll be taking a look at some of the bills introduced by Iowa state legislators that are objectively dumb, stupid, or funny.
HF 927 prohibits intentionally releasing air contaminants within state borders for the purpose of influencing temperature, weather, and sunlight. In other words, it…bans chemtrails. Chemtrails, or the idea that airplanes spray hazardous chemicals that control the weather, are the type of conspiracy theory your great aunt Doris says she learned from Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Facebook posts. Actually, this bill doesn’t surprise me at all, given that one of the co-sponsors of this bill describes himself as a “mushroom evangelist” in his official legislator bio. I’m not insinuating that a politician was in another world while writing this bill, but I’m not…not saying that.
An amendment to the chemtrail bill calls for investigating Bigfoot. This obviously isn’t necessary–everybody knows that Bigfoot lives under JD Vance’s MAGA hat.
This bill directs the Department of Transportation to test new biodegradable resources as road de-icers. However, it doesn’t mention any specific substances…except for beet juice. I don’t judge peoples’ hobbies, but Annette Sweeney, the Republican senator who introduced this bill, is now probably the number one fan of beets in the Iowa State legislature. I, for one, can’t wait to see our roads stained pink from beet juice in the winter. It’ll be almost like our legislators respect women by choosing Elle Woods’ favorite color!
SJR 4 designates the Iowa Cream Draft Horse as the official state horse of Iowa. While legislation like this isn’t unusual–there’s also a joint resolution for a state butterfly and one for a state fish–this one sets itself apart because the text of the resolution says that the horse breed can trace its lineage back to a mare named “Old Granny.” I don’t know about yours, but I’m not sure my grandma would like being described as “having a wide chest; sloping shoulders; a short, strong back; well-muscled hindquarters with strong, well-proportioned legs set well apart; strong hooves; and a gentle disposition” like the resolution says.
HF 53 would have turned a US highway in the northwestern corner of the state into “President Donald J. Trump Highway.” Though I don’t agree with the premise of putting Trump on a highway name, I do think we should be renaming more of our highways to something more interesting, like potentially changing part of I-80 to “Free Luigi Now Highway,” or a section of US-6 to “The Little Hawk Speedway.” Maybe bill sponsor & Republican representative Skyler Wheeler can get to some of those after he finally leaves Trump’s orange shadow.
No Iowa Hospitals for North Korea
SF 572 makes it illegal for the Chinese, Russian, and North Korean governments to operate a healthcare facility in Iowa. Additionally, it expressly prohibits companies and citizens of China, Russia, and North Korea from starting hospitals. Maybe there’s something to be said about isolationist dictatorships creating hospitals and clinics in a different, historically opposed country, but I just can’t get over the genius reasoning by our state senators that leads to North Korea opening a hospital in the middle of an Iowa cornfield.
This bill would allow the state of Iowa to invest in NFTs and cryptocurrency. The crypto proposed would be “Stable Coin.” (Do I even need to make a joke here, or is the name Stable coin enough?) Don’t worry, not all of our tax dollars will go into this. Only a maximum of five percent of Iowa’s general fund would be able to be invested under this bill. To put that into context, you could buy 5,774 brand-new, top-of-the-line Tesla Cyber Trucks with the same amount of money.
Ah, and NFTs. I know what you’re thinking: didn’t the idea of NFTs fail miserably? Well yes, they did–the value of a standard NFT is a whopping $0.0064. But think about it this way: we could buy 4,666,161 Donald Trump NFTs at $99.00 each and admire our digital trading cards of him as a superhero with lasers shooting out of his eyes.
This ingenious bill calls for the annexation of Minnesota’s row of counties along its southern border with Iowa. Obviously, Minnesota must agree to the purchase, and its nine southernmost counties must agree with the loss of Medicaid (boohoo). The bill doesn’t name a specific price, but I can only assume this will be paid in the NFTs our state was supposed to invest in, or at least out of bill sponsor and Republican senator Mike Bousselot’s pocket. After all, he’s already helping to bankroll private, religious schools across the state.
The very first bill Governor Kim Reynolds signed in the 2025 session removed gender identity from the Iowa Civil Rights Act.
Before this change, discrimination based on gender identity in areas like employment, housing accommodations, and education was prohibited. Now, however, an employer can decide not to hire somebody because they are transgender. This new law makes Iowa the first state to strip gender identity protections and also took away the ability for Iowans to change the sex on their birth certificate if they receive gender-affirming medical care. Additionally, it makes sex synonymous with gender, as opposed to gender also being gender identity, experienced gender, gender expression. It also updates the 2023 law prohibiting kindergarten through sixth grade education on gender identity, to prohibit education on gender theory. In short, the 2025 Iowa Legislative Session began by taking away basic civil rights and further shrinks the scope of what teachers can teach.
No matter how funny and dumb some of these bills may be, many of the ones that do get passed can be extremely harmful and even dehumanizing to some Iowans. While it’s important to have fun while looking at these, it’s really just a testament to how our legislature is actively running Iowa into the ground and how we need to be taking as much action as possible, as soon as possible.
