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For the last 60 days, state lawmakers have had the chance to tackle the biggest challenges facing West Virginians: clean, reliable drinking water; affordable electricity; cheaper housing; better jobs; well-funded public education; transportation and finding reasonably-priced health care and treatment for addiction.
At the stroke of midnight, time was up.
The Republican-controlled Legislature ended its 2025 legislative session having eroded drinking water protections, prioritized private education, failed to address child care or transportation for workers and considered ways to cut Medicaid.
State employees won’t get pay raises but will pay more for health insurance. They lost the office meant to protect them from harassment and discrimination.
Practices that promote fair treatment and full participation of all people will no longer be part of state agencies or schools.
Here’s what happened:
Less government, less transparency
The governor and legislative leadership outlined their priorities at the beginning, setting out to bring more jobs, businesses and workers. To get it done, they focused on shrinking the government.
During the session, lawmakers haggled over how to allocate funding to services to sustain previous tax cuts and avoid additional spending. The Republican supermajority expanded its powers by passing a set of rules that limited public input.
House Speaker Roger Hanshaw, R-Clay, tried to make oversight more difficult by exempting the Legislature from the state’s robust Freedom of Information Act. The Senate proposed a broader weakening of the state’s public record law. But the bill died quietly.
A concerted campaign to allow a religious exemption to the state’s vaccination laws was thwarted not once but twice.
Low-income West Virginians losing health care
Nearly a third of West Virginians are insured by Medicaid.
And as the U.S. Congress moves forward with Medicaid cuts, with the support of West Virginia’s Republican congressional delegation, some states plan to or have set aside money to keep people enrolled in the program.
But following years of lawmakers’ tax cuts and tight budgets, West Virginia health officials are already planning ways to cut services for the sick, disabled and low-income Medicaid population, including cutting treatment options. Lawmakers briefly considered kicking people off the program altogether.
Starting to meet the needs of the state’s seniors
Seniors in the state are on waitlists for home-delivered meals, and families of more than 100,000 seniors with dementia are struggling to take care of them. Debbie Elkins, of Putnam County, quit her job to be a full-time caregiver for her husband when he was diagnosed.
Her story is not uncommon.
Those who care for people with dementia need in-home help, so they don’t have to leave the workforce and experience declines in their own health.
Lawmakers passed a budget with extra funding for home-delivered meals, but only if the state lottery brings in more money during the upcoming fiscal year than anticipated.
And more Meals on Wheels funding cuts due to Trump administration lay-offs are anticipated.
One bill that passed, designating a state official to oversee services for people with dementia, could help.
Changing the foster care system in hopes of protecting kids
Before the dismissal of a five-year lawsuit over the state’s troubled foster care system earlier this year, lawmakers commissioned a work group to focus on fixing foster care.
Around 11 p.m. on the last night, senators and delegates agreed to pass a bill making multiple changes to the system, including assigning workers to biological families to give them the support and resources they need to get their kids back.
The bill also calls for state health officials to give children’s medical records to those who are fostering them. And it calls for a regular review of incidents in the system where children are harmed or killed with accompanying recommendations to prevent future occurrences.
Sen. Mike Woelfel, D-Cabell, a member of the committee that worked to reconcile House and Senate versions of the bill, said just after midnight that while both agreed on final language, he anticipated there could be possible problems with enactment of the bill later on because there are slight discrepancies between the bill’s title and its content.
Banning health care that protects at-risk transgender kids
On the final morning of the session, lawmakers considered whether or not to remove an exemption to the state’s prohibition on gender-affirming care for transgender kids.
The bill removed permission for doctors to offer the care in cases where a person would be at risk of hurting or killing themselves.
Del. Bill Flanigan, R-Ohio, had tried to offer an amendment giving kids a year to taper from treatment, but other lawmakers argued those youth could become sterile.
“And that is very unfortunate,” Flanigan said. “I’d never want to see that. You know what’s worse? A kid being dead.”
The bill passed anyway.
Criminal penalties instead of more help for people with addiction
West Virginia has been among the nation’s leaders in overdose death rates for 15 years.
A new committee focused on substance use disorders proposed another year of study and spent much of its time proposing requirements for treatment facilities that ultimately failed to pass.
The committee did not address expanding needed services, like recovery residences or quick response teams.
Lawmakers did stiffen up the penalties for drug distribution, imposing mandatory sentences on dealers selling large amounts of drugs.
Rolling back clean water, environmental protections
West Virginians from Wheeling to Welch need clean drinking water.
There were a few attempts by lawmakers to address issues impacting access to clean and reliable drinking water, but those efforts also fell short of the finish line.
Instead, the Legislature approved a measure that chipped away at some of West Virginia’s clean water protections and could worsen water quality.
At the end of session, the state’s flood protection fund remained empty even though the southern coalfields were devastated by floods days into the start of the 60-day session.
Multiple lawmakers from both parties supported funding mitigation efforts.
They were overruled.
The state’s manufacturers association introduced a pared down version of last year’s controversial bill to limit community air monitoring. It didn’t go anywhere.
And environmentalists and coal advocates made an unusual team in successfully opposing a measure that would have excluded data collected by state agencies in favor of peer-reviewed studies and science in creating new regulations.
Lawmakers did push through an amended version of Gov. Patrick Morrisey’s microgrid bill despite concerns that it will increase power costs for ratepayers across West Virginia. The legislation is intended to encourage the development of data centers.
No relief for high utility costs
In the last year, state residents, who have faced rapidly rising electricity increases, have complained about their bills and rate hikes. One Raleigh County resident’s bill went from the mid-$300 range to over $700 in February.
However, most of the legislation aimed at tackling that issue — including one to freeze rate increases — didn’t go anywhere. And the one measure that lawmakers did take up, would have discouraged renewable energy options in favor of coal.
During testimony, one power company administrator told lawmakers that the increasing cost of burning coal was largely responsible for the company’s rate hikes. In the end, the bill stalled in the House after clearing the Senate chamber.
A measure that requires utility companies to notify their customers of outages, both planned or unexpected, did make it through both chambers this year after last year’s version stalled in the Senate.
Money for private schools, not public schools
Teachers will not get pay raises. The Senate briefly considered a proposal for locality pay, but shelved it. Lawmakers did not address the rising cost of health insurance for public employees, so state employees will pay 14% more in premiums beginning later this year.
Funding for public schools will largely stay the same as schools close and teachers are laid off due to declining enrollment.
But, lawmakers allocated nearly $100 million to the Hope Scholarship, a program that gives parents the money for private school or homeschooling that would otherwise go to their county’s public schools.
Next year, tens of thousands of kids will become newly eligible for the program. Its total cost could reach $315 million.
Addressing school discipline issues
Meanwhile the resources to help kids in public schools aren’t adequate. Before the legislative session, teachers and principals described to lawmakers being kicked, punched and headbutted by elementary students.
Early ideas would have given elementary school teachers more power to kick kids out of the classroom. The final behavior law is less punitive, laying out steps for school staff to work with kids, and if that doesn’t work, send kids to an alternative learning center.
But, more than half of counties do not have these centers. Lawmakers did not fund more of these but did allow counties some flexibility to use existing funding to hire specialists to help students with behavior issues.
In 2022, voters rejected a constitutional amendment that would’ve given elected officials more control over the day-to-day operations of the schools. Now, lawmakers have passed a bill designed to give the state Supreme Court a chance to overturn decades of precedent.
Little action on barriers to employment
While Gov. Morrisey preached making West Virginia “more competitive” for businesses with his “Backyard Brawl” initiative, lawmakers did little to help West Virginians find high-paying jobs or address the barriers that keep people from working.
Two of the state’s biggest workforce challenges weren’t addressed this session: child care and transportation.
Both labor and child care advocates came together to push for solutions to the state’s ongoing child care crisis. But the Legislature put the issue on the back burner as multiple bills were parked in committees, leaving families without child care options and providers without help.
The state also still lacks a fully funded public transit system.
West Virginia’s rural communities reported a lack of access to buses or shuttles to take them to work and doctor’s appointments, putting another strain on the state’s workforce.
Members of the state’s public transit association made a pitch to lawmakers for more funding to expand services to new counties, but nothing came of that either.
No housing solutions, but new law targets the unhoused
Housing advocates raised alarms about the state’s affordable housing crisis. A representative from the state’s affordable housing agency said nearly 150,000 West Virginians pay more than a third of their income on housing costs.
Lawmakers briefly considered a fund for developers to build workforce housing.
Instead, they targeted the state’s homeless population
by banning squatting, the act of living in a home without an owner’s permission, and tried unsuccessfully to ban public camping.
Dismantling DEI
Lawmakers focused on removing diversity, equity and inclusion programs from state agencies and schools. Before the session, the governor vowed to eradicate these programs.
Business leaders at the state’s Chamber of Commerce warned against it, saying it harmed the state’s ability to attract new, diverse talent and businesses.
First, lawmakers eliminated a state office that protects public employees from discrimination — only to find it had been quietly gutted by the Morrisey administration.
Then, they took up a bill from Morrisey to ban diversity programs in state government and public schools. On the final night, the House had not yet voted on it.
As the midnight deadline approached, Democrats stacked more than 20 amendments onto the bill and read long-winded explanations.
Pulling every trick in the book to keep the bill moving, the Republican supermajority limited debate to an hour, ran out the clock with long legal soliloquies, and shot down amendment after amendment with a deafening “NO!”
In opposition, Del. Anitra Hamilton, a Democrat from Monongalia County and the only Black woman in the statehouse, said banning diversity programs sends the message: “You’re welcome to work here, but your voice doesn’t matter.”
The House passed the bill. A young page ran it to the Senate.
In a flurry of maneuvers that left staff attorneys scratching their heads, Senate Republicans steamrolled objections from Democrats and passed it.
