GOP threatens Beshear's power as governor pushes back against new laws
The 2025 legislative session just ended, but questions over funding for several bills passed by lawmakers in recent weeks is setting the table for the first conflict of the 2026 Kentucky General Assembly.
On one side is Gov. Andy Beshear, a term-limited Democrat in office through 2027 who says his office will be unable to enforce 11 bills approved by the legislature because they did not have budget appropriations attached.
On the other side is the Republican-dominated legislature, whose majority leaders say they plan to use the next legislative session — which will be centered around building the state's next two-year budget — to hit back at the governor if he won't carry out the new laws.
"We're going to take all doubt out of what he doesn't have the ability to spend money on going forward," House Speaker David Osborne, R-Prospect, said Friday on the last day of the 2025 session. "It will be a different-looking budget next time."
In a letter sent to state legislators Thursday, Beshear said some of the bills in question "represent good public policy and programs" and cited only financial implications as the barrier for implementation.
But the 11 pieces of legislation in his letter include several of the more controversial bills passed this year, including some his office spoke out against.
House Bill 495, which reverses Beshear's 2024 executive order banning conversion therapy while also banning Medicaid from covering some medical treatments for transgender residents, is among them. So is Senate Bill 89, which loosens pollution restrictions for many Kentucky waterways and had drawn "grave concerns" from the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, as well as House Bill 695, which adds work requirements for able-bodied adults who receive Medicaid coverage in the state.
Beshear has estimated implementation costs of each bill would rise into the millions.
"These holdings are simple: if the legislature creates a policy or program but does not provide funding, it does not intend for the executive branch to perform those services over the biennium," his letter stated. "... Thesebills are lacking the appropriations necessary to implement these legislative acts."
The governor announced earlier this year his office would publish projected fiscal impacts of bills in the legislature through a state website, also prompting pushback from some GOP legislators.
In a statement Monday evening, Beshear spokesperson Crystal Staley said the governor asked the General Assembly, "which claims it's fiscally conservative, to be fiscally responsible."
"The General Assembly's response was anger over the publication of the fiscal notes and it now threatens to punish the Governor if he cannot run the new, expensive programs without any funding," Staley said. "Our families have to budget, and so should the General Assembly."
Republican legislators who took issue with Beshear's claims argued the governor has at times implemented policies that support his own priorities without concern over their impact on state spending.
House Speaker Pro Tempore David Meade, R-Stanford, said last year the governor "used $50 million to expand Medicaid, to increase Medicaid reimbursement rates in certain areas," evidence Beshear "doesn't even follow his own guidance."
Meade, who's been in office for a dozen years, ended his comments on the House floor Thursday with a warning for Beshear about the next legislative session, when lawmakers will spend 60 days hammering out the next two-year state budget.
"Don't worry, governor — because next year when we do the budget, we are going to make it abundantly clear what you can and cannot spend money on," Meade said, to applause from other GOP legislators.
In comments to Louisville Public Media, Senate President Robert Stivers, R-Manchester, was more pointed.
Beshear, the only official in a statewide elected office who is not a Republican, has been a popular speaker on the national circuit in recent months as a Democrat who won reelection in a solidly red state. He spoke last year during the election cycle at Democratic events in Iowa and Georgia, as he was vetted as a potential running mate for Kamala Harris, and touted Kentucky in a January speech at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland.
Discretionary money used by the governor to fund trips, though, could be at risk if the legislature's bills aren't put in place, Stivers said.
'He won't hire anybody, he won't travel. He won't do anything unless he gets authority from the legislature,' he told LPM. 'Because everybody knows, by the Constitution the power of the purse is ours.'
Other bills cited in Beshear's letter include:
Senate Bill 4, which creates state standards for use of artificial intelligence.
Senate Bill 27, which establishes committees and additional research concerning Parkinson's disease.
Senate Bill 43, which changes regulations around drivers with physical or mental disabilities.
Senate Bill 63, which allows "special purpose vehicles" on highways in some instances.
House Bill 346, which alters payments on emissions fees from generators.
House Bill 390, which changes state laws surrounding vehicle insurance and online insurance verification.
House Bill 398, which loosens state workplace health and safety regulations.
House Bill 775, which was expanded late in the session to alter taxes on several products and projects in Kentucky.
When Osborne adjourned Friday's House session, he said the chamber would gavel back in to begin next year's 60-day General Assembly on Jan. 6, 2025 — "in the parking lot," he joked, a reference to temporary chambers currently under construction while the state Capitol begins a years-long renovation.
If Beshear's office does not implement new laws passed this year, he said, that won't be forgotten when lawmakers return to Frankfort.
"He continues to cite feeble legal salutations on why he doesn't have to follow the law. Even as governor, he still has to follow the law," Osborne said. "By and large, I think that you're going to see us move to remedy a lot of that."
Reach Lucas Aulbach at laulbach@courier-journal.com.
This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Beshear, Kentucky Republicans clash over funding for new 2025 laws
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