Behind Indiana’s facade of family values, the 2025 legislative session revealed a chilling indifference to the well-being of Hoosier families, women and children.
The final budget provides hefty tax cuts for businesses and modest property tax cuts ($300 maximum) for homeowners that will force local governments to raise income taxes or lose millions of dollars in revenue. What good is a $300 in savings for families paying an additional $1,000 in local income taxes?
Meanwhile, renter deductions, first-time homebuyer credits and “stacked credits” for veterans with disabilities were eliminated. Non-homeowners will pay all the additional local income taxes with even fewer offsetting credits and deductions.
Indiana will continue taxing medical devices (period products) for women, seriously underfund police, fire departments and public schools, and completely defund public broadcasting and the Indiana Commission for Women created in 1996 to remove legal and social barriers for women.
One of the biggest barriers for women in Indiana has been and will continue to be child care. This session brought some small, piecemeal relief, but no investment toward universal, affordable child care.
Those who care about the health and safety of women and children can at least be grateful that the most extreme bills did not pass. Sadly, nearly all of the bills that could have improved the overall quality of life for Hoosiers also did not pass.
Lawmakers slashed public health care by 60%. This disproportionately strips health care access from women and children who constitute 70% of Medicaid beneficiaries.
Over the past two years, Health First Indiana directed $225 million to local public health departments. Lawmakers reduced that funding to $80 million for the next two years.
After health care, education is the most critical investment we can make in our children’s future. Lowering property taxes in Indiana means less money for public schools.
Local school districts may seek additional operating expenses through a referendum every two years, but those amounts are limited by annual tax caps and increasingly difficult to pass in uncertain economic times.
Lawmakers cut tax dollars from pre-kindergarten programs and subsidized child care while removing all restrictions from private school vouchers, literally taking money from the poor and giving it to the rich.
A $7,000 education voucher does nothing for families who don’t have thousands of matching dollars to pay twice that in private school tuition. With vouchers, “choice” means private schools choose whom they will admit, and they are never required to provide special education, transportation or free lunches.
In 2024, the K-12 public schools that serve 93% of Hoosier students received only 64% of our K-12 dollars while 36% went to private schools serving only 7% of students. The new budget redirects even more money from public schools to private schools.
In the words of Republican State Sen. Vaneta Becker, “We don’t have enough money for health care and for Medicaid, but we can give a millionaire a voucher to send their kids to private school. It’s unconscionable.”
It’s also unconstitutional. Universal vouchers violate the Indiana Constitution’s Article 1, Section 6 by intentionally funneling Hoosier tax dollars into religious schools.
Indiana legislators have ignored their oath to uphold the Indiana Constitution and violated their duty under Article 8, Section 1 “to provide, by law, for a general and uniform system of Common Schools, wherein tuition shall be without charge, and equally open to all.”
Indiana currently funds three education systems: traditional public schools, charter schools and private schools (99% of which are religious), but our lawmakers are intentionally starving the first to feed the latter.
Public K-12 education was further undermined by making public school board races partisan and allowing the governor to appoint an Indiana secretary of education without any relevant experience, formal education or ties to Indiana.
Our legislative and executive branches are sabotaging the free public education that is supposed to be equally open to all children in Indiana.
The new laws anticipate the elimination of the federal Department of Education and a decision from the U.S. Supreme Court making religious education a states’ rights issue.
In sum, Indiana’s legislative session was government of the party, by the party and for the party.
We need to elect legislators who care about all Hoosiers enough to put people over party.
Laurie Gray is the owner of Socratic Parenting LLC.
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