In the run up to the 68th Wyoming Legislature’s general session, a record 555 bills were filed for consideration by House and Senate lawmakers.
Wyoming Public Radio went through past news releases from the Legislative Service Office (LSO), a nonpartisan staff office for Wyoming lawmakers, and found it’s the most bills numbered for introduction in any Wyoming legislature in at least the last 24 years. The office only keeps online records going back to 2001.
If you printed all 555 out, the stack would formally qualify as a “ream” of paper, according to the definition of the word found in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.
Jam-packed marketplace of ideas
Into that flood of policymaking enters Jessie Rubino, the state director for the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, which is one of 12 organized Freedom Caucuses in legislatures across the U.S. The groups are part of the State Freedom Caucus Network in Washington, D.C.
When lawmakers meet in Cheyenne, it’s Rubino’s job to analyze many of the bills that get filed from a “liberty and constitutional perspective,” sharing suggestions on how members of the further-right faction should vote via email.
“There's been more bills filed this session than any in recent memory,” Rubino told WPR in an interview at the Capitol Extension. She’s a University of Wyoming (UW) graduate, former American history teacher and the spouse of Joe Rubino, the Wyoming secretary of state’s chief policy officer.
“A lot of people have been portraying the greater number of bills as a bad thing, and I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing,” she said. “In the last election cycle, we saw more of what I would call regular folks elected to the Legislature. These people brought ideas from their communities to the body.”
After the Freedom Caucus became the first of its kind in the nation to take control of a legislative chamber last year, planning for the ongoing general session ramped up. Like any newly empowered political group, it had to consider which bills to prioritize and which strategies would work best to get them passed.
“I think that conservatives and members of the [caucus] would agree that in the marketplace of ideas, the more ideas are better because in the end, the best ideas will win out,” Rubino said. “So the more bills there are, the more there is to work with, including if there are multiple vehicles to achieve the same policy goal.”
Legislative torrential downpour
And there are multiple vehicles: Swaths of the 555 measures can be grouped by the hot-button issues they’re addressing, like abortion restrictions, gun control rollbacks and an overhaul of state election processes, to name a few policy areas.
Many of the 555 bills aren’t the sole work of the caucus, since interim committees draft a large number of their own during the Legislature’s off season. But when compared to the last general session in 2023, WPR estimates that 2025 has seen an increase not only in the amount of legislation filed in total but in the number of bills having to do with social wedge issues.
Nine bills having to do with the trans community were, at the very least, received for introduction to the Legislature this session, compared to two in 2023. Bills centered on abortion went from five in 2023 to eight 2025. And at least 23 bills that would significantly reshape the way Wyoming runs its elections were received for introduction this session, compared to five in 2023.
One particularly controversial bill this year sponsored by a Freedom Caucus member would’ve required abortion providers to dispose of patients’ fetal tissue after prescribing them medication to end their pregnancies. After taking the medication, Wyomingites would’ve had to “catch” the tissue and return it to physicians in special containers marked “biohazard,” as opposed to flushing it down a toilet.
“That would be an example of taking an extreme approach that is based upon a national interest group wish list, but which certainly doesn't apply very well in Wyoming,” said former Speaker Pro Tempore Rep. Clark Stith (R-Rock Springs), a moderate Republican. “It just doesn't make any sense.”
He was ousted this past election cycle by a caucus endorsee. The legislation in question is similar to a model bill put forward by the national conservative group Students for Life.
Another policy out of the Senate would’ve required police and local officials in Wyoming to question the citizenship of residents, forcing sheriffs to enter into agreements with federal agencies concerning the deportation of immigrants. Its supporters said it was necessary to keep local governments from preventing law enforcement from asking about immigration status.
“It’s unworkable, and it’s reminiscent of an East German police state under communism,” said Stith. “I just don't think people in Wyoming want that. But by … having several of these relatively extreme bills, it perhaps dilutes the focus on any one of them.”
Both of those measures later died as they moved through the Legislature.
Some of the 555 bear striking resemblance to the more than 60 executive orders Pres. Donald Trump has signed since taking office on Jan. 20, like ramping up deportations for immigrants and banning trans people from sports teams. As of Feb. 14, the executive orders represent the most in a president's first 100 days in more than 40 years.
But Trump can’t achieve his political goals all by himself: GOP-controlled legislatures like Wyoming’s will have to step in to help make some of his policy projects happen, since local governments are mostly subordinate to states on certain issues, not the federal government.
“We'll definitely be … mirroring what's happening nationally, but you'll see us try to take advantage of that too, to put Wyoming in a better place for the future,” said Rep. Christopher Knapp (R-Gillette), vice chair of the Freedom Caucus, at one of the faction’s press conferences in the Capitol Rotunda. “It feels good because we’re fighting the same battle. Even during the campaign, Trump's ability to make things transparent and to reveal things to the people is the same thing we were doing in the state of Wyoming.”
He said he expects Wyoming to adopt Trump’s policies, and for the state to prod the new administration into giving Wyoming more leeway in areas like energy development.
However, the deluge of bills in Wyoming has hit at least one snag that Trump doesn’t have to deal with: legislative deadlines that mean bills are dying in droves. This week marked deadlines for first, second and third reading in bills’ chamber of origin, for instance.
“Political science has … well documented the fact that oftentimes it's the position on an issue that is a more valuable commodity than the actual policy outcome,” said Ryan Williamson, an assistant professor of political science at UW.
Even if lots of them meet their demise, Williamson said, the high volume gives their sponsors talking points for future campaigns, and it makes it more likely at least some will cross the finish line.
Plus, they can overwhelm the opposition.
“There’s just so much information,” Williamson said. “This information saturation means some stuff doesn’t get the coverage or the attention that it might under other circumstances.”
Former Rep. Dan Zwonitzer (R-Cheyenne), a Republican previously aligned with the more-moderate Wyoming Caucus, agreed with that conclusion. Zwonitzer lost to a Freedom Caucus-endorsed candidate in the August primary after serving in the House for 20 years, but he said he’s still in the loop.
“Every day there's something new for the press to try to cover, [and] by the time you can get caught up on one thing, there's four more that have come up,” said Zwonitzer. “You eventually just throw up your hands and say, ‘I guess you can't fight it all,’ and you just quit fighting. That's really, I think, the strategy at both the national level and the Freedom Caucus and the Wyoming Legislature.”
That said, there are some key differences between what conservative commentator Steve Bannon called “flood[ing] the zone” at the national level and what the Freedom Caucus is doing in Wyoming, Zwonitzer added. For one, Zwonitzer isn’t sure the caucus is deliberately targeting the press in quite the same way that Trump and Bannon’s strategy does.
“Is it as purposeful for the Freedom Caucus? No,” he said. “I think what they tried with the Five and Dime plan was solid [in terms of] ‘Here's what we want to push. Here's our agenda. Let's get behind it.’ But they still rushed it through without really needing to, [so they could generate] good press.”
As for the caucus’s state director Jessie Rubino, she said she thinks the more ideas submitted the better, but that it isn’t necessarily an intentional strategy for the faction or their freshman allies.
“They're just normal everyday people, and they were elected because they didn't see a lot of the policies having the success that they wished that they had had in previous years,” she said.
According to Rubino, the caucus sourced ideas for bills from their constituents through door knocking and internal polling. Members of the caucus also draw inspiration from the Bible.
“I would say that the shared faith in Jesus … doesn't just drive the legislative priorities that the members have,” she said. “It drives everything that they do.”
Some Wyoming legislation mirrored by Trump’s actions, like one bill that would establish legal definitions for both sexes, have been amended by state lawmakers to match his executive orders.
Beyond the 555 bills officially numbered by LSO, 800 bill drafts were sent to the office from legislators for, at the very least, an initial legal review. That figure tends to be larger than the number of bills that end up being officially numbered. In the 2024 legislative budget session, LSO received 610 bill draft requests, for example. In the 2023 general session, LSO received 719.
This reporting was made possible by a grant from the Corporation For Public Broadcasting, supporting state government coverage in the state. Wyoming Public Media and Jackson Hole Community Radio are partnering to cover state issues both on air and online.
