2025 State Legislative and Policy Preview

11 things I'll be watching at the state level this year.

Jan 06, 2025

map of the United States — Photo credit: Dave Winer

This is Boondoggle, the newsletter about how corporations rip off our states, cities, and communities, and what we can do about it. If you’re not currently a subscriber, please click the green button below to sign up. Thanks!

Happy 2025 everyone! The arrival of a new year means that state legislative sessions — which is when legislatures meet to discuss and debate new laws and adopt state budgets — are either already underway or are set to start over the next few weeks. Thus, it’s time for my annual state legislative and policy preview, where I try to lay out the trends and priorities that state legislators, governors, and attorneys general will be working on over the coming weeks and months. This preview is informed by discussions I’ve had with various lawmakers, staffers, and advocates over the previous few months, as well as my experience watching and participating in state politics over the years.

2025 sessions can’t help but be colored by the change in administration at the federal level, with so-called “blue” states taking steps to counteract the incoming Trump administration and preserve some of the things the Biden administration did, and so-called “red” states taking steps that may have been blocked under Biden, as well as attempting to curry favor with both Trump and (more importantly) the folks who vote for him.

But states are still political arenas all their own, distinct (and in many ways better, to be honest) from the federal one, with issues that need addressing regardless of which way the national wind blows. States are also often leaders on emerging issues, forcing the federal government to catch up later.

That latter fact is going to be particularly important this year, I think, as a lot of legislating will be done on new technologies that are potentially dangerous and provide potent avenues for advancing scams and fraud, such as artificial intelligence and various algorithmic tools.

With that in mind, below are 11 things that I will be watching with particular interest at the state level this year. My usual caveats apply, as they do every year: Circumstances can change quickly, and with them political and policy priorities, so don’t take any predictions here as written in stone. And of course I will inevitably miss some stuff, because this is a big country.

But you can check my previews from the last three years here, here and here to see how close I came — not too bad, I think! Let me know in the comments what you think is coming down the pike or what I may have missed.

Protecting kids from Big Tech addiction: Several states have taken steps to regulate children’s ability to access social media platforms and to rein in some of the addictive features and tactics those platforms use to keep kids coming back for more. These have included age restrictions, new design codes, eliminating the ability of social media corporations to use algorithms to suggest new content to kids, and eliminating their ability to target specific ads to children. Despite many of these laws having been tied up in court — based on the (absurd, I think) argument that addictive social media features are protected by the First Amendment — I think many more laws like these are coming this year. Already, a Utah legislator has proposed a bill to require tech platforms to take age verification measures in app stores. This is such a vital area that I expect legislators will keep whacking away until they land on something that passes judicial muster, or the judiciary surrenders in the face of widespread public support for new regulations.
A whole new world of “artificial intelligence” bills: State legislators across 45 states introduced more than 700 bills in 2024 related to artificial intelligence, and more than 100 of them were signed into law. (The only state that held a 2024 session, but did not have an AI bill introduced, was Arkansas.) Many of those laws had to do with election-related protections, protections specifically for children, or were aimed at preventing algorithmic discrimination (i.e., using AI for hiring in a way that would discriminate against certain job applicants). This work will very much continue this year, but it’s a difficult policy area to follow — or even describe — as the term “AI” covers many real things, and many things that aren’t actually artificial intelligence at all, but that tech proponents want to slap the label onto in order to gain notoriety or legitimacy. The real question is: How much of what is accomplished will be real and useful and how much will be just vaporware or simply entrench already existing dominant corporations?
Action against algorithmic price-fixing in rental housing: I’ve written several times about how a few corporations, of which RealPage is the most prominent, sell software that enables corporate landlords to fix the price of rental housing across local markets via the use of algorithms, resulting in double-digit rent hikes in some locations and billions in higher rent prices across the country. San Francisco, California, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, have already passed local statutes limiting the use of these systems, and similar state-wide legislation is actively under consideration in New Jersey. I expect many more states and cities to move on similar bills, and for more antitrust enforcers to follow the examples of Arizona, Washington, D.C., and the Department of Justice in suing the corporations that enable these price-fixing practices.
Limits on Wall Street investments in local housing stock: Speaking of housing costs, I also expect states will seek to limit the ability of private equity firms and other institutional investors to buy up local housing stock to either re-sell or turn into rental properties. One study claims private equity firms were responsible for 44 percent of single family home flips in 2023, while The Wall Street Journal claimed that investors bought more than 25 percent of the available homes across the country in 2022. Some cities, including Pittsburgh, Atlanta, and Newark, have seen wide swathes of their housing stock purchased by investment firms. There have been some half-hearted federal efforts to rein in these practices, but I suspect many state legislators will be interested and more successful.
More states trash junk fees: Last year, Minnesota became the second state, after California, to adopt a broad ban on junk fees — those mandatory, undisclosed fees that can’t be avoided by the consumer. Similar legislation was considered in another dozen states, and passed one legislative chamber in New York, Illinois, Virginia, Colorado, Hawaii, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. Especially following an election in which cost of living was extremely top of mind for voters, I expect more states to pass broad bans on junk fees, as well as the adoption of more targeted measures eliminating fees in areas such as rental housing and utilities. (For more on this, check out the End Junk Fees campaign hub here.)
Scrutiny on political spending by monopoly utilities: Three states in 2023 — Colorado, Maine, and Connecticut — adopted laws to limit the ability of monopoly utilities to charge ratepayers for political activities, such as lobbying or participating in trade associations, as well as for other activities that have nothing to do with their core business of keeping the lights or water on. By all early accounts, those laws are working as intended. Again, with cost of living such a potent political issue, and utility costs rising, those bills will become very attractive to state legislators, and I’d expect several of them to be introduced across the country. Now, this next part is more of a wish than a prediction, but I’d also love to see more general attention on state public utility commissions, since they have a lot of power to make life instantly better (or, more often, worse) for all the residents of a state.
The life and potential death of Free File: As part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration got the ball rolling on a free, public tax-filing tool, known as Direct File, to compete with the likes of TurboTax (which is owned by Intuit) and other leeches who profit off our civic duty to pay taxes. Taxpayers in a dozen states used the Direct File system in 2024, to generally positive reviews. 24 states are on tap to allow access this year — from across the political spectrum, including California, Texas, New York, and Florida — but Congressional Republicans are attempting to push the Trump administration to repeal the program. It will be interesting to see if red state voters and politicians raise a stink about a game-changing public service potentially going away so that the likes of Intuit and H&R Block can continue to nickel and dime the public.
State Attorneys General take on the merger boom: There will be a lot of action and headlines about Democratic state AGs taking on the Trump administration in various high-profile areas, such as immigration or crime policy. But an under-the-radar issue is how those AGs, along with their Republican counterparts, will address the expected Trump merger boom. While the Trump team will likely continue some high-profle antitrust cases, especially in the tech space, its expected that they will generally be more lenient toward big mergers and acquisitions than the Biden team was, leaving states to fend for themselves. Already, some AGs have signaled that they’ll continue to use state law to block continued corporate consolidation, and as this is generally a bipartisan issue, I’d expect AGs of both parties to do so, even if they’re not trumpeting their intentions to the press right now.
Action against various health care middlemen: Several states took a whack at trying to limit the ability of private equity middlemen to acquire and gut health care facilities last year, with none coming closer than Oregon, which almost pushed a decent bill across the finish line. That bill will be back, and I expect other states to follow suit, looking to beef up what are known as “corporate practice of medicine” laws to eliminate the loopholes that allow investors to get involved in medical doctrine and decision making. States will also continue their push to regulate pharmacy benefit managers, in order to bolster the ability of independent pharmacies to stay afloat.
The downside of data centers: As regular readers know, many states have been wasting taxpayer dollars on attracting data centers, subsidizing Big Tech while receiving very little in return. As more communities wake up to the downsides of those centers, state legislators are now starting to swing the other way, looking at how they can limit the impact of data centers on public resources, such as water and power, and on the environment. Previous efforts to rein in the data center machine haven’t been successful, but I’m slightly more optimistic they have legs this year, as the problems data centers bring have become more widespread and well known.
The next step in the grocery store wars: One of the biggest wins for state-federal antitrust enforcers last year was the successful blocking of a proposed merger between Kroger and Albertsons, which would have been the largest grocery merger in American history, with significant downsides for shoppers and workers. Plenty of politicians are touting and running on the positive politics of blocking that deal, but grocery costs remain high, so there will likely be other efforts focused on grocery prices, including: reforms to price discrimination laws, efforts to reduce or eliminate grocery taxes, and attempts to challenge some of the monopoly land practices of retailers such as Walmart.

Boondoggle

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?