By Elena Durnbaugh and Zach Gorchow
Gongwer News Service
Michigan politics has a way of producing the unexpected, and 2025 fulfilled that tradition.
The 103rd Legislature opened last January bringing in a new term of divided government.
House Republicans took control of the House and brought an end to Democratic trifecta. At the federal level, Republicans won back control of the U.S. Senate and the White House.
In the subsequent 12 months, lawmakers, advocates and stakeholders had to learn how to navigate a brave new world. There were controversies, unexpected electoral decisions and much more.
Here are the top 10 stories of 2025 as determined by Gongwer News Service:
10. Dana Nessel vs. Everybody
Attorney General Dana Nessel was at the heart of so many stories this year. She filed or joined nearly 40 lawsuits against President Donald Trump with other Democratic attorneys general. She continued to pursue criminal charges involving alleged corruption in Lansing, winning guilty pleas from Anné and Rob Minard, onetime top aides to former House Speaker Lee Chatfield, with pledges from them to cooperate in her department’s case against Chatfield.
Nessel emerged as something of the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party (to borrow a phrase from former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean and former Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone) in response to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s increasingly devout centrism. She had sharp criticism for Whitmer’s approach to Trump.
Nessel also stunned Lansing when her department executed a search warrant, colloquially known as a raid, on the Michigan Economic Development Corporation headquarters as part of a criminal inquiry into a company that received a $20 million earmark. Her department accused the MEDC of “stonewalling.”
She’s perhaps the most prominent elected official to oppose state efforts to ease the way for new hyperscale data centers.
Her department ruled that Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson violated the Michigan Campaign Finance Act when she held a news conference about her gubernatorial campaign in the Richard H. Austin State Office Building in an embarrassing admonishment for a fellow Democrat.
Nessel experienced some setbacks, too. Her department suffered an embarrassing loss on the 2020 electors case, where a judge ruled there wasn’t even enough evidence to bring the Trump electors to trial (her department continues to weigh an appeal). House Republicans on the Oversight Committee also recommended she be held in contempt of the Legislature, after she declined to testify before the panel, which is investigating a couple of topics, including whether she acted in areas with clear conflicts of interest.
—————
9. The Matt Hall Show
Despite limited action in the Legislature this year, there were very few weeks that went by without Lansing knowing what was on the mind of House Speaker Matt Hall.
Hall, R-Richland Township, seized the news cycle at the end of last year, and after being elected by his House Republican colleagues as their caucus leader and therefore speaker, he was loathe to miss an opportunity to continue to dominate. That opportunity was further enhanced by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s absence from the Lansing scene and lack of public events in the state.
Most weeks, Hall held hour-long press conferences in the speaker’s library for Lansing media, which was streamed live by House Republicans.
In addition to taking questions from reporters, the speaker would take time during the press conferences to message on recent House activity, criticize Senate Democrats, discuss his trips to Washington D.C., with Whitmer, tout an award he won or showcase his new portrait in the library (it’s in color while the other speakers’ portraits are in black and white).
Hall often pointed out that he was the only member of the triad – the power dynamic consisting of Senate Majority Leader Winnie Brinks, Whitmer, and himself – that was regularly available to take questions from the press.
For many months, this was true, with Senate Democrats remaining silent and often declining to comment on Hall’s assertions. Even House Democrats found themselves on uneven footing, seemingly unsure of how to combat Hall’s proliferant messaging.
Eventually, legislative Democrats had enough, with the break seeming to come around the time of the Mackinac Policy Conference, which featured an extremely intense quadrant panel.
During the panel, Hall told House Minority Leader Ranjeev Puri, D-Canton Township, he didn’t need him, which House Democrats largely took as a challenge for the remainder of the year. Brinks, through gritted teeth, spoke at that time of the importance of bicameral and bipartisan legislation and begged Hall to “get in the room” to negotiate with the Senate. She would end the year issuing a statement in response to Hall and House Republicans cutting work projects by telling the speaker there was “a special place in hell for someone willing to yank money away from moms and babies 15 days before Christmas.”
—————
8. An especially long wait for a special election
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer came under withering criticism from Republicans, eventually joined by Democrats, for refusing to call a special election to fill the vacancy left after former Sen. Kristen McDonald Rivet, D-Bay City, resigned upon taking her seat in the U.S. House.
Finally on Aug. 29, Whitmer called for a special primary election in the 35th Senate District on Feb. 3, 2026, and a special general election on May 5, 2026. There is no other known Michigan legislative vacancy where a governor has taken so long to announce the special election schedule. By the time a new senator is sworn in sometime in mid-May 2026, the seat will have been vacant for more than 16 months, also an apparent record.
Whitmer, in keeping with her communications strategy for 2025, said next to nothing about her reasons for not quickly setting a special election schedule.
Republicans fumed at the obvious reason for the delay. The district is a competitive one, and with the Senate Democratic majority at a precarious 19-18 over Republicans, a potential Republican victory would put the Senate into a tie and end functional Democratic control.
The schedule Whitmer eventually announced was a boon for Democrats. Republicans had hoped to get either Rep. Timmy Beson of Bay City or Rep. Bill Schuette of Midland as their nominee. However, with the general election May 5 – about two weeks after the deadline to file for the full term running from 2027-30 – they would have to forgo reelection to their House seat without knowing if they had won the Senate race.
As a result, neither representative filed for the special election, depriving Republicans of what they anticipated to be a strong candidate-to-candidate advantage.
To what extent the criticism Whitmer took for leaving 270,000 people in the Tri-Cities region without a senator will damage the eventual Democratic nominee, only time will tell.
7. MEDC controversies/earmarks under fire
A series of drip-drip-drip controversies over the $20 million legislative earmark to Fay Beydoun’s Global Link exploded in 2025. There’s an ongoing criminal investigation that included the Department of Attorney General uncorking a surprising raid on the Michigan Economic Development Corporation offices after attorney general investigators deemed MEDC staff uncooperative.
Two signature projects on which Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and MEDC President and CEO Quentin Messer Jr. pinned so much hope – the Gotion plant near Big Rapids and the Sandisk chips plant near Flint – died.
Messer himself was the target of vociferous criticism, attorney general investigation and calls for his resignation.
The MEDC’s signature program, the Strategic Outreach and Attraction Reserve Fund, succumbed to bipartisan loathing, leaving the state without a major economic attraction tool for the first time since the early 1990s.
The agency’s very existence post-Whitmer seems in doubt.
The Global Link controversy was one of several earmarks to earn enmity and prompt Whitmer and the Democratic-led Senate to agree to House Speaker Matt Hall’s proposal to require advance disclosure of earmarks well before the Legislature passes them.
6. The Trump-Whitmer rapprochement
It was one of the two biggest surprise stories of the year (keep reading to find the other). Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and President Donald Trump, arch-foes in the final year of the first Trump administration, suddenly working together and saying positive things about the other.
Recall that in 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic began, that Whitmer searingly criticized the president’s response, prompting Trump to say he had told then-Vice President Mike Pence not to call “the woman from Michigan.” The two did battle all through 2020 and in 2024, with Trump running to return to the White House, Whitmer quipped in a speech to the Democratic convention that Trump’s first word was probably “chauffeur.”
But once Trump returned to the White House on Jan. 20, Whitmer set course on a new strategy to make nice with the president. Trump appointed her to the Council of Governors, and Whitmer was seated at the president’s table for a February dinner with a group of governors. Whitmer had a handful of asks: a new fighter mission at Selfridge Air National Guard Base, releasing CHIPS fund monies for a chips plant near Flint and later in the year, federal disaster assistance after Northern Michigan was hammered by an ice storm.
Days after the first White House meeting, Whitmer name checked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth – now perhaps the most loathed member of the Trump cabinet among Democrats – in her State of the State speech. Whitmer met again with Trump at the White House in March.
Through these first two months, while other Democrats sharply criticized Trump’s actions – unilateral funding cuts, mass firings of federal workers, immigration raids, tariffs and more – Whitmer was largely quiet. She had tepid criticism of the president’s new tariffs but not much else. While other states with Democratic governors shouted from the mountaintops about federal funding problems, Whitmer’s administration said little.
Then in April, Whitmer delivered a speech in Washington about the economy and went to the White House to meet with Trump again, but this turned into the viral moment when Whitmer unexpectedly was walked into a live news conference in the Oval Office. She held a folder in front of her face to shield herself from the cameras, but the move backfired when a New York Times photo of her holding the folders rocketed around the globe. Politico reported that later in the year, Whitmer gave a signed copy of a newspaper with the photo to the White House.
Trump came to Michigan to announce a new fighter mission later in April with the first new F-15 EX arriving in 2028. But he did not act on the CHIPS plant request, and Sandisk dropped the project. Whitmer initially boasted that Trump had approved a major disaster declaration for Northern Michigan, but the Trump administration later declined to approve public assistance funding to assist with damaged utility repairs and individual assistance.
Whitmer’s approach has drawn considerable national interest, considering how it departs from other prominent national Democrats.
5. Budgetary burdens
Many observers of the 2025-26 budget process would feel comfortable calling it a fiasco.
During a November policy roundtable, Public Policy Associates CEO Rob Fowler succinctly summed up the process, which began in May and stretched until October.
“It wasn’t pretty,” he said.
The Democratic-controlled Senate passed its proposal in mid-May while the Republican-led House did not do so until late August.
From there, negotiations were slow to develop as education and local government groups urged action given their July 1 start to their respective fiscal years. Schools started their fiscal year and their academic year with next to no clarity on what the K-12 budget would look like, as the budget House Republicans introduced and passed all but eliminated categoricals.
Ultimately, the Legislature passed its budget in early October after passing a short-term spending measure in the days prior to the beginning of the 2025-26 fiscal year.
With that said, as part of budget negotiations, the Legislature was able to enact policy that seemed to be impossible divorced from the appropriations process.
The Legislature was able to deliver a nearly $2 billion roads plan and new laws that increase transparency for earmark projects in the budget.
Still, late in December, budget surprises still weren’t done when the Republican-led House Appropriations Committee unilaterally disapproved approximately $645 million in work project funding from the 2024-25 fiscal year budget. The cuts included a wide variety of projects, such as infrastructure and construction works, funding for Meals on Wheels programs and support for Rx Kids, which provides money to new mothers.
As the Legislature adjourned for the year, it was still unclear exactly how much was cut from which projects and how much of the money disapproved was already spent. Senate Democrats, unable to do anything to restore the funding, attempted to pass a supplemental, which was ignored by House Republicans. The Senate also asked Attorney General Dana Nessel for an opinion on whether the House’s actions were constitutional.
Despite the ongoing chaos, the 2026 Consensus Revenue Estimating Conference, which will springboard the process for the 2026-27 fiscal year, is set for Jan. 16.
4. Tipped Wage and ESTA
For a brief and shining moment in late February, it seemed like the Legislature was going to figure out how to work together.
After a month of negotiations back and forth between the Senate and the House, the Legislature passed a bipartisan compromise to preserve a lower tipped minimum wage than the regular minimum wage, but with an increase, and to amend the state's paid sick time law just under the wire of the February 21 deadline.
The deadline was imposed by a Supreme Court decision last year about actions taken by the Legislature to adopt and amend ballot proposals on minimum wage and paid sick leave in 2018. The court ruled that the Republican-led Legislature circumvented the will of voters by adopting the proposals and changing them in the same term and ordered that the laws go into effect as written.
The business community raised concerns, saying that, as written, the laws would devastate small businesses, and some tipped wage workers said that doing away with a tipped minimum wage altogether would cut the size of their paychecks with customers reducing or ending tipping.
The unwillingness of Democrats to discuss legislation to address tipped minimum wage and earned sick time at the end of 2024 was the main reason House Republicans gave for walking out of the chamber during lame duck.
The ability to pull together and write better legislation was heralded at the time, with Rep. Bill Schuette, R-Midland, calling it the “first trial balloon of divided government” remarking that, although neither side got exactly what it wanted, the bills brought both sides together for “policy solutions that improve the bottom line.”
With the primary goals of the walk off achieved, the Legislature would not pass another bill to be signed into law until May, and no substantially new policies would clear both chambers until the budget passed in October.
Not all were happy about the compromise. Organized labor and the groups that pursued the petitions considered the moves by Senate Democrats and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer a betrayal.
3. Nine bills in limbo
The House and the Senate started on unfriendly terms this year, with House Speaker Matt Hall, R-Richland Township, declining to present nine bills to the governor that were not presented prior to January 1.
The Senate responded shortly after by filing a lawsuit against the House.
Among the nine bills in question is one (House Bill 6058 of 2024) that would require governments to pay a greater share of their employees' health insurance premiums.
The remaining legislation still held in the House includes three bills allowing Detroit history museums to seek a property tax millage from Wayne County voters (House Bill 4177 of 2023, House Bill 5817 of 2024 and House Bill 5818 of 2024); bills that would put corrections officers into the State Police pension system (House Bill 4665 of 2023, House Bill 4666 of 2023 and House Bill 4667 of 2023) and exempting public assistance, disability and worker's compensation from garnishment to repay debts (House Bill 4900 of 2024 and House Bill 4901 of 2024).
All year, the case has played out in various courts through decisions and appeals.
Most recently, House Republicans filed an appeal to the Supreme Court earlier this month regarding the Court of Appeals decision that Hall must present the nine remaining bills from last term to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
2. Gary Peters decides to hang it up
No one thought U.S. Sen. Gary Peters, D-Bloomfield Township, would opt against seeking a third term in 2026. There was less than zero energy on the Republican side about a candidate stepping forward. Peters would have unlimited resources as the former chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. And with a Republican in the White House, trying to unseat Peters would be even more difficult.
But Peters, a mainstay of Michigan politics for more than 30 years, decided he was ready to retire from the political scene. The move set off a big scramble in Michigan Democratic politics. 2018 gubernatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed jumped into the race. U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Birmingham, jumped in too, opening up her solidly Democratic seat and triggering an avalanche of candidates for that district. State Sen. Mallory McMorrow, D-Royal Oak, who was considering a run for governor, instead decided to run for Senate.
Meanwhile, it offered Republican former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, who narrowly lost the 2024 U.S. Senate race, a chance at redemption. He declared his candidacy, swept the key endorsements, most importantly President Donald Trump,
and virtually cleared the field.
Peters’ decision sets up the first time in Michigan history that the state will have open seat races for governor and U.S. Senate in the same year, something very rare nationally as well, and makes Michigan ground zero for the midterms.
1. Legislative Inertia
In physics, the principle of inertia is understood, in part, as the natural tendency of things at rest to stay at rest.
Applying natural laws to the workings of government is dicey, but, to some extent, legislative inertia shaped the year.
The tone for the term was set during lame duck of 2024, when House Republicans walked out, depriving the chamber of a quorum, and House Democrats imploded, leaving dozens of bills dead on the floor. The new term, as noted earlier, started with nine bills from the previous Legislature never making it to the governor’s desk and a lawsuit that threw the new Legislature into gridlock.
Things were never really able to pick up from there.
For much of the year, only legislation with an imminent deadline cleared both chambers, as was the case with tipped wage and earned sick time legislation. Other bills passed simply to give lawmakers more time, as was the case with the legislation extending the deadline for filing financial disclosures. In the case of the budget, the Legislature blew through deadline after deadline, dragging the process out for months over the summer, delivering the plan for the new fiscal year three days after it started.
The year will end with only 74 public acts signed by the governor, a historic low. Depending on who is asked, this can be read as a good thing – Hall touted quality over quantity and proof that House Republicans were able to serve as a stumbling block for the cavalier Senate Democrats – or a disappointment. Brinks told Gongwer News Service the year was marked by disappointment and missed opportunity.
Hall said he was focused on the “big things” not the “small things.” But there are hundreds of bills each chamber has passed overwhelmingly collecting dust in the other chamber prompting most of the professional class in Lansing to tear out its collective hair.
Whatever the spin, it’s clear that the Legislature could not get things in motion and figure out how to effectively work together during divided government.
As anyone who has listened to the “Bill Nye the Science Guy” theme song is likely aware, inertia is a property of matter. In terms of having mass and taking up space, the Legislature met the definition. In terms of legislative action, the year was marked more by political theater than meaningful policy.
Gongwer News Service
Michigan politics has a way of producing the unexpected, and 2025 fulfilled that tradition.
The 103rd Legislature opened last January bringing in a new term of divided government.
House Republicans took control of the House and brought an end to Democratic trifecta. At the federal level, Republicans won back control of the U.S. Senate and the White House.
In the subsequent 12 months, lawmakers, advocates and stakeholders had to learn how to navigate a brave new world. There were controversies, unexpected electoral decisions and much more.
Here are the top 10 stories of 2025 as determined by Gongwer News Service:
10. Dana Nessel vs. Everybody
Attorney General Dana Nessel was at the heart of so many stories this year. She filed or joined nearly 40 lawsuits against President Donald Trump with other Democratic attorneys general. She continued to pursue criminal charges involving alleged corruption in Lansing, winning guilty pleas from Anné and Rob Minard, onetime top aides to former House Speaker Lee Chatfield, with pledges from them to cooperate in her department’s case against Chatfield.
Nessel emerged as something of the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party (to borrow a phrase from former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean and former Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone) in response to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s increasingly devout centrism. She had sharp criticism for Whitmer’s approach to Trump.
Nessel also stunned Lansing when her department executed a search warrant, colloquially known as a raid, on the Michigan Economic Development Corporation headquarters as part of a criminal inquiry into a company that received a $20 million earmark. Her department accused the MEDC of “stonewalling.”
She’s perhaps the most prominent elected official to oppose state efforts to ease the way for new hyperscale data centers.
Her department ruled that Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson violated the Michigan Campaign Finance Act when she held a news conference about her gubernatorial campaign in the Richard H. Austin State Office Building in an embarrassing admonishment for a fellow Democrat.
Nessel experienced some setbacks, too. Her department suffered an embarrassing loss on the 2020 electors case, where a judge ruled there wasn’t even enough evidence to bring the Trump electors to trial (her department continues to weigh an appeal). House Republicans on the Oversight Committee also recommended she be held in contempt of the Legislature, after she declined to testify before the panel, which is investigating a couple of topics, including whether she acted in areas with clear conflicts of interest.
—————
9. The Matt Hall Show
Despite limited action in the Legislature this year, there were very few weeks that went by without Lansing knowing what was on the mind of House Speaker Matt Hall.
Hall, R-Richland Township, seized the news cycle at the end of last year, and after being elected by his House Republican colleagues as their caucus leader and therefore speaker, he was loathe to miss an opportunity to continue to dominate. That opportunity was further enhanced by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s absence from the Lansing scene and lack of public events in the state.
Most weeks, Hall held hour-long press conferences in the speaker’s library for Lansing media, which was streamed live by House Republicans.
In addition to taking questions from reporters, the speaker would take time during the press conferences to message on recent House activity, criticize Senate Democrats, discuss his trips to Washington D.C., with Whitmer, tout an award he won or showcase his new portrait in the library (it’s in color while the other speakers’ portraits are in black and white).
Hall often pointed out that he was the only member of the triad – the power dynamic consisting of Senate Majority Leader Winnie Brinks, Whitmer, and himself – that was regularly available to take questions from the press.
For many months, this was true, with Senate Democrats remaining silent and often declining to comment on Hall’s assertions. Even House Democrats found themselves on uneven footing, seemingly unsure of how to combat Hall’s proliferant messaging.
Eventually, legislative Democrats had enough, with the break seeming to come around the time of the Mackinac Policy Conference, which featured an extremely intense quadrant panel.
During the panel, Hall told House Minority Leader Ranjeev Puri, D-Canton Township, he didn’t need him, which House Democrats largely took as a challenge for the remainder of the year. Brinks, through gritted teeth, spoke at that time of the importance of bicameral and bipartisan legislation and begged Hall to “get in the room” to negotiate with the Senate. She would end the year issuing a statement in response to Hall and House Republicans cutting work projects by telling the speaker there was “a special place in hell for someone willing to yank money away from moms and babies 15 days before Christmas.”
—————
8. An especially long wait for a special election
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer came under withering criticism from Republicans, eventually joined by Democrats, for refusing to call a special election to fill the vacancy left after former Sen. Kristen McDonald Rivet, D-Bay City, resigned upon taking her seat in the U.S. House.
Finally on Aug. 29, Whitmer called for a special primary election in the 35th Senate District on Feb. 3, 2026, and a special general election on May 5, 2026. There is no other known Michigan legislative vacancy where a governor has taken so long to announce the special election schedule. By the time a new senator is sworn in sometime in mid-May 2026, the seat will have been vacant for more than 16 months, also an apparent record.
Whitmer, in keeping with her communications strategy for 2025, said next to nothing about her reasons for not quickly setting a special election schedule.
Republicans fumed at the obvious reason for the delay. The district is a competitive one, and with the Senate Democratic majority at a precarious 19-18 over Republicans, a potential Republican victory would put the Senate into a tie and end functional Democratic control.
The schedule Whitmer eventually announced was a boon for Democrats. Republicans had hoped to get either Rep. Timmy Beson of Bay City or Rep. Bill Schuette of Midland as their nominee. However, with the general election May 5 – about two weeks after the deadline to file for the full term running from 2027-30 – they would have to forgo reelection to their House seat without knowing if they had won the Senate race.
As a result, neither representative filed for the special election, depriving Republicans of what they anticipated to be a strong candidate-to-candidate advantage.
To what extent the criticism Whitmer took for leaving 270,000 people in the Tri-Cities region without a senator will damage the eventual Democratic nominee, only time will tell.
7. MEDC controversies/earmarks under fire
A series of drip-drip-drip controversies over the $20 million legislative earmark to Fay Beydoun’s Global Link exploded in 2025. There’s an ongoing criminal investigation that included the Department of Attorney General uncorking a surprising raid on the Michigan Economic Development Corporation offices after attorney general investigators deemed MEDC staff uncooperative.
Two signature projects on which Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and MEDC President and CEO Quentin Messer Jr. pinned so much hope – the Gotion plant near Big Rapids and the Sandisk chips plant near Flint – died.
Messer himself was the target of vociferous criticism, attorney general investigation and calls for his resignation.
The MEDC’s signature program, the Strategic Outreach and Attraction Reserve Fund, succumbed to bipartisan loathing, leaving the state without a major economic attraction tool for the first time since the early 1990s.
The agency’s very existence post-Whitmer seems in doubt.
The Global Link controversy was one of several earmarks to earn enmity and prompt Whitmer and the Democratic-led Senate to agree to House Speaker Matt Hall’s proposal to require advance disclosure of earmarks well before the Legislature passes them.
6. The Trump-Whitmer rapprochement
It was one of the two biggest surprise stories of the year (keep reading to find the other). Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and President Donald Trump, arch-foes in the final year of the first Trump administration, suddenly working together and saying positive things about the other.
Recall that in 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic began, that Whitmer searingly criticized the president’s response, prompting Trump to say he had told then-Vice President Mike Pence not to call “the woman from Michigan.” The two did battle all through 2020 and in 2024, with Trump running to return to the White House, Whitmer quipped in a speech to the Democratic convention that Trump’s first word was probably “chauffeur.”
But once Trump returned to the White House on Jan. 20, Whitmer set course on a new strategy to make nice with the president. Trump appointed her to the Council of Governors, and Whitmer was seated at the president’s table for a February dinner with a group of governors. Whitmer had a handful of asks: a new fighter mission at Selfridge Air National Guard Base, releasing CHIPS fund monies for a chips plant near Flint and later in the year, federal disaster assistance after Northern Michigan was hammered by an ice storm.
Days after the first White House meeting, Whitmer name checked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth – now perhaps the most loathed member of the Trump cabinet among Democrats – in her State of the State speech. Whitmer met again with Trump at the White House in March.
Through these first two months, while other Democrats sharply criticized Trump’s actions – unilateral funding cuts, mass firings of federal workers, immigration raids, tariffs and more – Whitmer was largely quiet. She had tepid criticism of the president’s new tariffs but not much else. While other states with Democratic governors shouted from the mountaintops about federal funding problems, Whitmer’s administration said little.
Then in April, Whitmer delivered a speech in Washington about the economy and went to the White House to meet with Trump again, but this turned into the viral moment when Whitmer unexpectedly was walked into a live news conference in the Oval Office. She held a folder in front of her face to shield herself from the cameras, but the move backfired when a New York Times photo of her holding the folders rocketed around the globe. Politico reported that later in the year, Whitmer gave a signed copy of a newspaper with the photo to the White House.
Trump came to Michigan to announce a new fighter mission later in April with the first new F-15 EX arriving in 2028. But he did not act on the CHIPS plant request, and Sandisk dropped the project. Whitmer initially boasted that Trump had approved a major disaster declaration for Northern Michigan, but the Trump administration later declined to approve public assistance funding to assist with damaged utility repairs and individual assistance.
Whitmer’s approach has drawn considerable national interest, considering how it departs from other prominent national Democrats.
5. Budgetary burdens
Many observers of the 2025-26 budget process would feel comfortable calling it a fiasco.
During a November policy roundtable, Public Policy Associates CEO Rob Fowler succinctly summed up the process, which began in May and stretched until October.
“It wasn’t pretty,” he said.
The Democratic-controlled Senate passed its proposal in mid-May while the Republican-led House did not do so until late August.
From there, negotiations were slow to develop as education and local government groups urged action given their July 1 start to their respective fiscal years. Schools started their fiscal year and their academic year with next to no clarity on what the K-12 budget would look like, as the budget House Republicans introduced and passed all but eliminated categoricals.
Ultimately, the Legislature passed its budget in early October after passing a short-term spending measure in the days prior to the beginning of the 2025-26 fiscal year.
With that said, as part of budget negotiations, the Legislature was able to enact policy that seemed to be impossible divorced from the appropriations process.
The Legislature was able to deliver a nearly $2 billion roads plan and new laws that increase transparency for earmark projects in the budget.
Still, late in December, budget surprises still weren’t done when the Republican-led House Appropriations Committee unilaterally disapproved approximately $645 million in work project funding from the 2024-25 fiscal year budget. The cuts included a wide variety of projects, such as infrastructure and construction works, funding for Meals on Wheels programs and support for Rx Kids, which provides money to new mothers.
As the Legislature adjourned for the year, it was still unclear exactly how much was cut from which projects and how much of the money disapproved was already spent. Senate Democrats, unable to do anything to restore the funding, attempted to pass a supplemental, which was ignored by House Republicans. The Senate also asked Attorney General Dana Nessel for an opinion on whether the House’s actions were constitutional.
Despite the ongoing chaos, the 2026 Consensus Revenue Estimating Conference, which will springboard the process for the 2026-27 fiscal year, is set for Jan. 16.
4. Tipped Wage and ESTA
For a brief and shining moment in late February, it seemed like the Legislature was going to figure out how to work together.
After a month of negotiations back and forth between the Senate and the House, the Legislature passed a bipartisan compromise to preserve a lower tipped minimum wage than the regular minimum wage, but with an increase, and to amend the state's paid sick time law just under the wire of the February 21 deadline.
The deadline was imposed by a Supreme Court decision last year about actions taken by the Legislature to adopt and amend ballot proposals on minimum wage and paid sick leave in 2018. The court ruled that the Republican-led Legislature circumvented the will of voters by adopting the proposals and changing them in the same term and ordered that the laws go into effect as written.
The business community raised concerns, saying that, as written, the laws would devastate small businesses, and some tipped wage workers said that doing away with a tipped minimum wage altogether would cut the size of their paychecks with customers reducing or ending tipping.
The unwillingness of Democrats to discuss legislation to address tipped minimum wage and earned sick time at the end of 2024 was the main reason House Republicans gave for walking out of the chamber during lame duck.
The ability to pull together and write better legislation was heralded at the time, with Rep. Bill Schuette, R-Midland, calling it the “first trial balloon of divided government” remarking that, although neither side got exactly what it wanted, the bills brought both sides together for “policy solutions that improve the bottom line.”
With the primary goals of the walk off achieved, the Legislature would not pass another bill to be signed into law until May, and no substantially new policies would clear both chambers until the budget passed in October.
Not all were happy about the compromise. Organized labor and the groups that pursued the petitions considered the moves by Senate Democrats and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer a betrayal.
3. Nine bills in limbo
The House and the Senate started on unfriendly terms this year, with House Speaker Matt Hall, R-Richland Township, declining to present nine bills to the governor that were not presented prior to January 1.
The Senate responded shortly after by filing a lawsuit against the House.
Among the nine bills in question is one (House Bill 6058 of 2024) that would require governments to pay a greater share of their employees' health insurance premiums.
The remaining legislation still held in the House includes three bills allowing Detroit history museums to seek a property tax millage from Wayne County voters (House Bill 4177 of 2023, House Bill 5817 of 2024 and House Bill 5818 of 2024); bills that would put corrections officers into the State Police pension system (House Bill 4665 of 2023, House Bill 4666 of 2023 and House Bill 4667 of 2023) and exempting public assistance, disability and worker's compensation from garnishment to repay debts (House Bill 4900 of 2024 and House Bill 4901 of 2024).
All year, the case has played out in various courts through decisions and appeals.
Most recently, House Republicans filed an appeal to the Supreme Court earlier this month regarding the Court of Appeals decision that Hall must present the nine remaining bills from last term to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
2. Gary Peters decides to hang it up
No one thought U.S. Sen. Gary Peters, D-Bloomfield Township, would opt against seeking a third term in 2026. There was less than zero energy on the Republican side about a candidate stepping forward. Peters would have unlimited resources as the former chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. And with a Republican in the White House, trying to unseat Peters would be even more difficult.
But Peters, a mainstay of Michigan politics for more than 30 years, decided he was ready to retire from the political scene. The move set off a big scramble in Michigan Democratic politics. 2018 gubernatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed jumped into the race. U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Birmingham, jumped in too, opening up her solidly Democratic seat and triggering an avalanche of candidates for that district. State Sen. Mallory McMorrow, D-Royal Oak, who was considering a run for governor, instead decided to run for Senate.
Meanwhile, it offered Republican former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, who narrowly lost the 2024 U.S. Senate race, a chance at redemption. He declared his candidacy, swept the key endorsements, most importantly President Donald Trump,
and virtually cleared the field.
Peters’ decision sets up the first time in Michigan history that the state will have open seat races for governor and U.S. Senate in the same year, something very rare nationally as well, and makes Michigan ground zero for the midterms.
1. Legislative Inertia
In physics, the principle of inertia is understood, in part, as the natural tendency of things at rest to stay at rest.
Applying natural laws to the workings of government is dicey, but, to some extent, legislative inertia shaped the year.
The tone for the term was set during lame duck of 2024, when House Republicans walked out, depriving the chamber of a quorum, and House Democrats imploded, leaving dozens of bills dead on the floor. The new term, as noted earlier, started with nine bills from the previous Legislature never making it to the governor’s desk and a lawsuit that threw the new Legislature into gridlock.
Things were never really able to pick up from there.
For much of the year, only legislation with an imminent deadline cleared both chambers, as was the case with tipped wage and earned sick time legislation. Other bills passed simply to give lawmakers more time, as was the case with the legislation extending the deadline for filing financial disclosures. In the case of the budget, the Legislature blew through deadline after deadline, dragging the process out for months over the summer, delivering the plan for the new fiscal year three days after it started.
The year will end with only 74 public acts signed by the governor, a historic low. Depending on who is asked, this can be read as a good thing – Hall touted quality over quantity and proof that House Republicans were able to serve as a stumbling block for the cavalier Senate Democrats – or a disappointment. Brinks told Gongwer News Service the year was marked by disappointment and missed opportunity.
Hall said he was focused on the “big things” not the “small things.” But there are hundreds of bills each chamber has passed overwhelmingly collecting dust in the other chamber prompting most of the professional class in Lansing to tear out its collective hair.
Whatever the spin, it’s clear that the Legislature could not get things in motion and figure out how to effectively work together during divided government.
As anyone who has listened to the “Bill Nye the Science Guy” theme song is likely aware, inertia is a property of matter. In terms of having mass and taking up space, the Legislature met the definition. In terms of legislative action, the year was marked more by political theater than meaningful policy.
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