Higher education, voting in focus for Utah Legislature in 2025

SALT LAKE CITY — Each new year in Utah brings with it another legislative session — the 45-day sprint when lawmakers fund state government for the next fiscal year and pass hundreds of bills covering nearly every subject imaginable.

Lawmakers convene for the 2025 general session on Jan. 21, and they will do so with a handful of policy priorities in mind. The specifics of most policies have yet to be made public, but top legislative leaders and the governor have already signaled they want to see significant changes in how Utah’s system of higher education operates. Several complaints raised during the 2024 election cycle have also put the state’s election administration in the spotlight, and a pair of court rulings against the Legislature have sparked concern from some about the separation of powers.

Here are several things to watch for on Capitol Hill over the coming year:

Higher ed in the hot seat

After taking aim at diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at state colleges and universities during the last legislative session, lawmakers are expected to consider significant changes to higher education, possibly including budget cuts or directives for schools to evaluate the need for certain degrees.

Utah House Speaker Mike Schultz appeared to question the return taxpayers are getting on their investment in public higher education in an interview with Deseret News in November while saying he’s OK with the spending “as long as we’re getting the right outcomes.”

“But if we’re not getting the right outcomes, the question has to be asked: Do we still subsidize at the same level that we’ve been subsidizing at?'” he said. “I think you can make the argument that you don’t.”

Gov. Spencer Cox hasn’t called for cutting specific programs but said higher education has “lost their way across the country in very important ways” and his proposed budget asks higher education leaders to look at which programs are creating the most value for students.

“A 10% reallocation is really what the discussion is honing in on,” he told KSL.com in December. “That money would be set aside as programs are eliminated, then it can be used to facilitate additional programs.”

Those discussions will certainly continue into the legislative session, with the outcome yet to be seen.

Potential election changes

Utah has seen several election-related controversies over the past year, with some Republicans challenging the signature-gathering path to the primary ballot, late postmarked ballots causing a stir in an extremely close congressional race, and legislative audits raising concerns about signature verification in ballot access petitions and on mail-in ballots.

Schultz used the results of a December audit to argue that “it’s clearly not the case” that mail-in voting is as secure as in-person voting — though the audit found only two votes had been cast by voters believed to be dead — and suggested the state’s mail-in voting system be revisited.

Lawmakers voted in an interim meeting to advance a bill that would criminalize disclosing how individual voters cast their ballots after Utah County Clerk Aaron Davidson admitted to tracking how some politicians voted. Other proposals could change when mailed ballots can be counted as late, require voters to opt in to receive a mail-in ballot, and potentially create an independent office to oversee elections in place of the lieutenant governor’s office.

“I don’t think we need to eliminate mail-in voting, but we should always be doing more to make it more secure,” Cox told reporters in December.

Legislature vs. judicial branch

The Utah Legislature faced a pair of legal setbacks over the summer when the Utah Supreme Court issued opinions that found lawmakers overstepped in changing a 2018 voter-led initiative on redistricting and allowing the state’s near-total abortion ban to remain on hold pending the outcome of a legal challenge.

Republican lawmakers expressed anger at both decisions, and the redistricting ruling prompted a special session in August through which lawmakers passed a resolution to try to amend the state Constitution as it relates to citizen ballot initiatives. That amendment was struck from the November ballot, however, after a court ruled that lawmakers failed to accurately describe the impact of the amendment on the ballot question and failed to publish the text of the amendment in newspapers.

Lawmakers are expected to reintroduce that proposed amendment — possibly as soon as the 2026 midterm elections — and other proposals could make it harder for such citizen-led ballot initiatives to pass in the first place.

Schultz and Senate President Stuart Adams called the redistricting ruling from the court “one of the worst outcomes we’ve ever seen” and some lawmakers have floated the idea of changing state law to elect, rather than appoint judges, in an effort to rein in what they see as overly burdensome checks on the Legislature’s power.

Cox has said he doesn’t support electing judges in the state, but it will be worth watching to see if lawmakers attempt to constrain the state’s judicial branch.