The Governor’s deadline to sign, amend or veto bills was 11:59 p.m. on March 24, 2025. At the end of the day, the Governor vetoed 157 bills and offered amendments to 160. With respect to the budget, he vetoed eight provisions and offered 205 amendments. The General Assembly reconvenes next Wednesday, April 2, to consider all of his recommendations. The legislature is also expected to meet in special session to fill judicial vacancies.
Frankly, the recommendations are so wide-ranging, it is impossible to discuss all of them. The Governor’s recommendations include cuts for rental assistance and first-time homebuyer programs, paid family leave and minimum wage increases, and funding for CSB support coordinators and Marcus Alert programs. He also offered amendments to gut the Virginia Right to Contraception Act. It will be a busy day!
My Legislation
Over the past few days, I have been reading through all of the Governor’s recommendations. His amendments and vetoes are a mixed bag but tend to attempt to relitigate issues we have already resolved during the General Assembly session. He vetoed many hot button items, including a bill I introduced to prohibit the sale of assault weapons. That was not surprising.
I was a little surprised that he again vetoed legislation that flowed from the tragedy at UVA in 2022. Three students were killed and two were wounded by another student, who has since pled guilty to the offense and is awaiting sentencing. UVA requested legislation to make illegal the possession of firearms on college campuses. In 2023 I introduced the bill, which died in the Republican-controlled House of Delegates. Last year, the legislation passed both chambers only to be vetoed by the Governor. In his veto statement, he advised that the bill failed to acknowledge the cultural differences that exist in different parts of Virginia. This year, the legislation tied the restriction to actions by the Boards of Visitors. In that way, the bill did reflect any differences across public colleges. The Governor vetoed it anyway. Perhaps he knew what we knew: that every public college and university has a policy restricting firearms on campuses. In his veto statement this year, he advised that law enforcement already has the tools necessary to respond to threats. The bill was requested and supported by the University of Virginia Police Department.
The Governor also vetoed a third bill of mine that would have allowed the Sentencing Commission to release pretrial data it collects on adults charged with criminal offenses punishable by incarceration to the Virginia Longitudinal Data System (VLDS) in an anonymized format. The VLDS, which is managed by the State Council for Higher Education in Virginia, is a powerful tool used for research. The inclusion of these data sets would allow for a better understanding of our pretrial system and the interplay of any variety of factors for those individuals in the system.
The Governor has amended bills to essentially relitigate an issue that has been resolved multiple times over the past three years. The Virginia Clean Economy Act passed in 2020 and requires our transition to clean energy by 2050. It sets certain parameters and goals for us to meet along the way. Every year, Republican legislators introduce bills to undo the VCEA. Never one to give up a chance to continue to play politics, the Governor amended multiple bills, including one of mine, to try to do this again.
Budget Amendments
The Governor’s amendments to the budget rehash some old ground. He resurrects the creation of a Gaming Commission in the budget (there used to be some honest discussion about legislating in the budget, but both sides use it now). Never mind that we already have a state lottery with a large bureaucracy to support it. This small government governor wants to create more bureaucracy to oversee gaming. The General Assembly has already rejected that plan, in large part because we already have a governmental entity with expertise in gaming. If they need more oversight tools or staffing, then we should have that conversation.
The Governor makes substantial cuts to health care, including reductions for free clinics and federally qualified health centers. He cuts K-12 education with a dramatic reduction in the new funding we provided to eliminate the cap on support personnel that has been in place since the recession in 2008. We made it a goal to restore that funding, and we did just that in the budget we passed in February. Now the Governor wants to undo it. While at the same time, he is trying to use general fund dollars to create school vouchers.
He is relitigating the VA 529 surplus. We have over $1 billion of surplus funds that were generated by 529 prepaid plans. We have still not reached agreement on how that money should be used. The Governor has his own plans, which we have already rejected. The Governor also reinserted language threatening to withhold funding from law enforcement agencies that do not cooperate with ICE.
All of these issues have been addressed during the legislative process, yet we will be debating them all over again when we return to Richmond to vote on these amendments.
There is at least one amendment that I like. The Governor makes permanent a 20% refundable earned income tax credit, which will benefit working families. As passed in our budget, the extension only goes through 2027. While the Governor’s amendment is good, and I agree with it, I also understand why we limited it for two years: we must budget after this Governor leaves office. We put a cap on the tax credit because we simply do not know what our revenue situation will be in two years. Our revenue forecast includes the possibility of some challenging fiscal times. For that reason, we chose to take it slow with tax relief. This is consistent with what else we have done to reduce taxes the past few years. We have made tax cuts temporary or one-time. This helps keep our budget in balance.
Federal Impacts
We continue to be concerned about Medicaid. I have written in this space often about potential federal cuts. We saw Congress pass legislation a few weeks ago directing the House Energy and Commerce Committee to cut $880 billion over a ten-year period. If you exclude Medicare, Medicaid accounts for 93 percent of the spending over which this Committee has oversight. The President has said he wouldn’t touch Medicaid, except to reduce “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Nobody supports fraud, waste, and abuse, but you are simply not going to make those cuts without cutting health care for people. Slogans are great, but we are dealing with real people and programs that keep them alive. The reality is that cuts to Medicaid of any kind will unravel budgets for nearly every state, and certainly those that expanded Medicaid.
We also do not know what the federal workforce cuts will mean for Virginia. We benefit from federal spending more than most states. We have more than 145,000 civilian federal employees and a large military presence, including thousands of people who work for military contractors. It is difficult to know how all the funding changes and layoffs will affect us in the long haul and where we will be from a budgetary standpoint going forward. We have to exercise caution.
While in Richmond next Tuesday and Wednesday, the Senate Rules Committee will meet to make Senate appointments to a variety of commissions and the Joint Courts Committee will interview judicial candidates. I will also attend the first meeting of the Senate Special Subcommittee on Federal Impacts to Resouces. If you have questions or input, please reach out to me at (434) 296-5491 or senatordeeds@senate.virginia.gov.
Best,
