Welcome to the Friday, Aug. 29, 2025, Brew.
By: Lara Bonatesta
Here’s what’s in store for you as you start your day:
- Lawmakers in 42 states have adopted or enacted 337 administrative state-related bills and resolutions in 2025
- Something truly impressive is happening inside Ballotpedia, by Leslie Graves, Ballotpedia Founder and CEO
- Come to Office Hours with Leslie Graves in our new episode of On The Ballot
Lawmakers in 42 states have adopted or enacted 337 administrative state-related bills and resolutions in 2025
Earlier this week, we looked at some of the data from our latest report on election administration legislation. Today, we’re featuring another new report: our Administrative State 2025 Legislation Report.
The administrative state refers to executive branch agencies at the state and federal levels, staffed by unelected officials. These agencies have the authority to create, interpret, and enforce regulations.
Ballotpedia covers the administrative state extensively to help readers understand how agencies use this authority and to stay up-to-date on changes to it. For example, changes that decrease agency control might include policies that give a state’s legislature or judicial branch more power to oversee or review agency actions. Changes that increase agency control include policies that give the agency more control or influence over agency functions, such as rulemaking and adjudication proceedings.
Through Aug. 20, Ballotpedia has identified 2,038 bills and resolutions related to the administrative state introduced in state legislatures. Lawmakers in 42 states adopted or enacted 337 (including six through veto overrides).
- Thirty-seven states passed 144 laws that decreased agency control.
- Thirty-seven states passed 128 laws that increased agency control.
- Fifty-six bills and resolutions did not clearly increase or decrease agency control.
- Nine bills and resolutions increased agency control in some ways and decreased it in others.
Many bills that increase or decrease agency power do so for a specific topic, agency, industry, or program. Others – such as those addressing REINS, judicial deference, rulemaking processes, and oversight – apply to all or most agencies in the state.
Partisanship
States with Republicans passed the majority of laws both increasing and decreasing agency control, but passed more laws decreasing agency control than increasing agency control. States with Democratic trifectas passed more laws decreasing agency control than increasing agency control. States with divided governments passed the same number of laws decreasing agency control as Democrats (26 laws) and fewer laws increasing agency control (19 laws). See the breakdowns below:
Partisan breakdown of new laws decreasing agency control:
- 19 Republican trifectas passed 92 bills (64%).
- 10 Democratic trifectas passed 26 bills (18%).
- 8 divided governments enacted 26 bills (18%).
Partisan breakdown of new laws increasing agency power:
- 18 Republican trifectas enacted 73 bills (57%).
- 11 Democratic trifectas enacted 36 bills (28%).
- 8 divided government enacted 19 bills (15%).
Trends
There was more legislative activity in 2025 than in 2024 regarding REINS-style state laws, judicial deference, government efficiency, and regulatory reduction.
- Five states enacted REINS-style state laws in 2025, three more than in 2024.
- REINS-style state laws permit or require state legislative review or approval of agency regulations or rules with associated costs above a certain monetary threshold.
- Five states enacted legislation prohibiting or limiting judicial deference, one more than in 2024.
- Judicial deference is an administrative law principle that courts may yield to an executive agency’s interpretation of a statute, regulation, or policy under certain conditions.
- Four states enacted nine government efficiency bills in 2025, five more than in 2024.
- Bills in this category require agencies to implement what the bills call government efficiency initiatives, requirements, reductions, or programs.
- Ten states enacted 15 regulatory reduction bills in 2025, five more than in 2024.
- Bills in this category propose mechanisms to reduce regulations, such as a regulatory reduction task force.
Read the full report here.
Something truly impressive is happening inside Ballotpedia
One of the first columns I wrote in this space was about the key role volunteers play in one of Ballotpedia’s biggest initiatives: providing voters with comprehensive information on every candidate for every office across the country by 2034.
In this column, I’d like to share with you an update on that story — one that shows some incredible things are happening at Ballotpedia. Let’s start with the data.
Ballotpedia is privileged to have more than 350 volunteers who contribute approximately 10,000 hours of service every year. That’s an astounding number of people who devote five, ten, or fifteen hours helping us build and refine a nationwide database of candidates for local office.
About 100 of these volunteers fall into a category of their very own. We call them “super volunteers.” These highly motivated people dedicate 100 hours or more each year to supporting our candidate research or have personally researched more than 100 candidates. These individuals are so good at what they do that we offer them roles supervising and mentoring other volunteers.
Kaley Platek, who runs our Volunteer Program, told me that people devote so much time and effort to our work because “they believe in our mission.”
“Our mission is a unifying factor that many people support and want to contribute to. Volunteers know they are contributing to a resource voters can trust, making their work meaningful and motivating.”
That’s part of the reason why more and more people want to become Ballotpedia volunteers.
“In 2020, we had 16 Ballotpedia Fellows,” Kaley said. “By 2022, with the launch of the Community Researcher Program, that number had grown to 143 volunteers. In 2024, with the addition of the Trusted Researcher and Student Researcher Programs, 281 individuals volunteered with us. This year, we have already surpassed 350 unique volunteers contributing in various roles.”
We could easily have 800 volunteers contributing 20,000 hours or more to our local candidate research projects, but we simply don’t have the internal resources to handle it. At least, not yet.
But this got me thinking: What if we had 1,500 or 2,500 volunteers working on local candidate research each year? Not only would these volunteers learn a lot about how elections work, they would take away a greater sense of pride and purpose in our civic life.
What might Ballotpedia achieve with the equivalent of almost 30 full-time staffers working every day to gather, process, and share information on the people running for those 500,000 local elected officials?
You might think we’d be able to do it all, not only providing robust information on all the candidates running for every office, but also being able to do it again and again.
But we’ve discovered a surprising wrinkle about candidates for local office. Many of them — perhaps as many as half — are what we call “digitally invisible.”
They don’t have campaign websites, social media accounts, or sometimes not even local media coverage. In short, they are invisible in a world that’s increasingly interconnected, online, and on demand.
How can we share information on our website and through our Sample Ballot Lookup Tool that doesn’t exist?
It will take all the analog tools at our disposal — and an army of dedicated and determined volunteers to help bring those currently invisible candidates to life. I’ll have more about that in a future column.
Ballotpedia’s founder and CEO, Leslie Graves, joins On the Ballot to discuss our Virtual School Board Listening Tour
In the latest installment of On the Ballot’s Office Hours series, Ballotpedia’s founder and CEO Leslie Graves joins host Norm Leahy to discuss our Virtual School Board Listening Tour.
With approximately 83,000 school board members governing 13,500 school districts across the U.S., this initiative started with a question: What makes school board members tick? To answer this question, our staff interviewed 100 school board members nationwide in 2024 and 2025 about how they see their role.
In this episode, Leslie will explain this initiative, how our staff accomplished it, and its biggest takeaways.
Here’s a sneak peek at one such takeaway (edited lightly for length and clarity):
Norm: If there was one major takeaway you could have from that discussion, what would it be?
Leslie: School boards struggle with getting past conflicts that may emerge in the course of doing their business. Many people would think, ‘Leslie, when you say conflict, surely you mean the big conflicts that we read about, about whether they should have closed down during COVID, or some of the books in the library. Surely you mean that kind of conflict.’
But in fact, conflict happens on most school boards, most of the time, about issues that have nothing to do with that. It might be as seemingly inconsequential as, ‘We need to do a budget cut. So are we going to cancel the French program? Or are we going to cancel fifth-grade band?’ Making choices like that. Just like in any kind of a friend relationship or a marriage relationship, some people can get past the conflict and get back to where they wanted to be in that relationship. Some people struggle with that, and that turns out to be true on school boards, which is really interesting.
Click here and here to listen to our first two Office Hours episodes. To hear more from Leslie, check out this page featuring a full list of her weekly Brew columns, like the one featured above in this newsletter.
You can subscribe to On the Ballot on YouTube or your preferred podcast app, or click here to listen. Plus, click here to learn more about the initiative and read the full report.