The 2025 Legislature is a general session, not a budget session The budget won't be considered. Only conventional legislation will be.
The bills that make it to the committees after November 4 are those, to a fairly significant degree, that are being advanced now. That means that a full bore populist agenda won't be considered in 2025. A partial one will be, but the populist party that claims to be conservative, but which isn't, and which claims to be Republican, but which isn't really, by traditional standards, won't be calling all the tunes.
That leaves it ample room to be disruptive and to complain, which it excels at. The problem is, for it, is that people will conceive of it as being "in power". It won't pass all of its agenda, maybe any of iit, and will have to explain why it couldn't.
The Senate and the Governor will be who it blames.
The 2026 legislature will be a budget session, and that's where the rubber will really meet the road. At least in the past, WFC members have backed wiping out property taxes (a moronic idea) and cutting the state's budget by 30% (another moronic idea).
That would wipe out much of the funding for education and decimate the primary schools, the University of Wyoming and the community colleges, some of which I'd guess will not survive. When UW starts to teeter, which it'll start too soon, second glances will really commence.
"What do you mean that we're going to Division l700 F in football?"
What'll also start to be impaired is all the emergency funding and the highway funding. We'll rely, ironically, very heavily on the Federal Government for that which, if it takes notice, may very well require the state to get its tax act together.
Frankly, it'll be a disaster for the state.
I'd like to be more optimistic about 2026, but I really can't. The Freedom Caucus won't get everything it wants, but it'll damage things enormously. Maybe enough that the intellectual poverty of much of its positions will become exposed and we can hope for a better 2026 set of results.
