The Stealthy Way State Politicians Kill Bills

The tyranny of the fiscal note.

Photo credit: Qabluna

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State legislatures considered more than 135,000 bills in 2025 (and the year isn’t technically over for a few legislatures). Of those, about 29,000 were enacted, meaning most pieces of legislation that were introduced did not make it into law, dying a legislative death somewhere in the process.

There are many legitimate ways in which state-level bills, good and bad, meet their demise. Maybe their sponsor was ineffective or too busy with other priorities, so never pushed for a vote. Maybe the majority party’s leadership wouldn’t get on board because other matters were considered more pressing. Maybe a bill was never meant to become law, but was introduced simply to prove a point about the political moment (making it a so-called “messaging bill").

Or maybe it was an idea whose time simply hadn’t come, or it simply couldn’t garner majority support and was voted down either in committee or on a chamber floor.

But there are also more insidious ways good, popular pieces of legislation kick the proverbial bucket, without public debate or fair votes, even though they’d likely pass under a transparent process.

One of them is the abuse of something called a “fiscal note.”

Fiscal notes have a noble goal: To provide state legislators with cost estimates for pending pieces of legislation. Nearly every state uses them in one way or another to outline not only how much a bill will cost in direct outlays or revenue losses — depending on whether it’s a spending or tax measure — but how much implementation and enforcement will cost in terms of time for public employees or if new hires are required at certain state agencies.

That goal — accurately assessing the true costs of a bill — can be easily subverted to kill otherwise popular measures by making them seem prohibitively expensive, or by simply rerouting them to budget or appropriations committees that already have far too much on their plate or that want to kill a measure for reasons having nothing to do with its spending impact.

This can be particularly problematic when executive agencies don’t like a bill for their own internal reasons, or are taking direction from a governor who wants to see a bill die a quiet death. They nail a large, scary fiscal note on it for barely justifiable reasons, by claiming, for example, that a new law will require far more public hires than it actually would to implement, thereby dooming it.

Remember, most state legislatures are only in session from one to six months annually, and they have very little in terms of staff or resources dedicated to legislating, so they have to depend on the more centralized, permanent bureaucracy to write and analyze bills. Those “ central staff” members, who I’ve written about before, have their own agendas or are at the beck and call of certain elected officials, either in the governor’s mansion of the majority party’s leadership, and do their bidding.

As the Nevada Faculty Alliance explained:

Fiscal notes can be misused in a variety of ways. For example, those seeking to kill a bill or extract concessions can attach unrealistically high dollar amounts. Agencies may use fiscal notes to request staffing increases denied in the normal budget process. Short deadlines for agencies’ fiscal notes also contribute to inflated estimates — it may be easier to calculate a worst-case scenario than to do a full analysis. Ongoing staffing shortages likely mean that some agencies struggle to carry out this analysis even if they want to.

Weaponized fiscal notes are especially problematic in sessions with a budget shortfall, when bills with fiscal notes often die in budget committees. If agencies submit exaggerated fiscal notes, there is no mechanism for an independent review and modification of fiscal notes other than a hearing in front of a budgetary committee. The bill’s sponsor and proponents then must attempt to negotiate away the fiscal notes, either by conversations with the agencies or by amending the bill to avoid the fiscal impact.

Or, as one Montana legislator succinctly put it, “Death by fiscal note, it’s not a secret.”

It may not be a secret to legislators, bureaucrats, or the lobbyists who are used to the process, but I think it is a secret to many voters, who believe the more Schoolhouse Rock version of legislating is how it actually goes. And it’s those who are in the know — again, the lobbyists and bureaucrats — who are most able to twist fiscal notes to their own ends.

The process is not exactly the same in every state, but the result is: Bills quashed for reasons having nothing to do with their merits or their level of support, but because someone in power attached a fiscal note as justification to make it go away.

One glaring example of this is California, where tons of bills that get tagged with fiscal notes wind up in a process known as the “suspense file” where legislators plow through hundreds of bills with little to no debate. Triggering the suspense file only requires a fiscal note of $50,000. So legislators and bureaucrats know that putting that cost onto a bill, even if it’s nonsense, provides an easy way to quietly snuff it out without allowing for public organizing or opposition.

In other instances, such as this one in Colorado, different parts of the state government didn’t even agree on the cost of several environmental bills, dooming them from the outset — which may have been a legitimate difference of opinion, or may have been an agency balking at doing extra work and throwing a fiscal note temper tantrum.

The stories I’ve linked to throughout this piece are some of the few times that someone in the press decided to cover fiscal note abuse and misuse. 99 percent of the time, though, fiscal note shenanigans go unremarked upon. The bills in question just “died” or “didn’t receive a vote” and that’s it for an explanation.

The process can also work in reverse, with legislators either hiding the fiscal note to prevent acknowledging the costs a bill they want to pass, as in Kentucky, or putting a $0 cost on a bill that no one actually believes will have zero cost, in order to speed it through the process. But in my experience, that happens far less frequently than fiscal notes that inflate the cost of a proposed bill in an attempt to kill it.

Now, I’m not saying that every bill that went down in flames due to a bogus fiscal note was worthy of passage or enactment. But in many, many instances, due to the bogus fiscal note, we’ll simply never know the merits or demerits of the bill, because someone who wanted it to go away found a way to kill it without adequate public debate.

I’m also not saying that fiscal notes need to be abolished: Obviously some insight into how much a piece of legislation will cost over time is valuable information.

But I am saying that this is a process that can and is abused, regularly, and that voters need to be on the lookout for it.

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SIMPLY STATED: Here are links to a few stories that caught my eye this week.

• Three new Super PACs have launched to fight state-based regulations on artificial intelligence.

• Five state attorneys general sued Zillow and Redfin for colluding to prevent competition in online rental housing markets.

• An Ohio state legislator introduced legislation to prevent “AI personhood.”

• Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed a bipartisan bill that would have applied the state’s corporate tax to internet services such as Netflix that make sales in the state but don’t have any physical presence there.

• Colorado’s XCel Energy will pay a $640 million settlement for its alleged role in a 2021 wildfire.

• The Department of Transportation is rescinding grants that were awarded to localities for bicycle lanes and recreational walking trails.

• A new study found that reductions in noise pollution increase home values.

• Data centers around Columbus, Ohio, are putting a strain on emergency response services.

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— Pat Garofalo