Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte on Thursday signed two bills restricting transgender Montanans’ access to public bathrooms and locker rooms and participation on athletic teams, sparking legal action from civil rights advocates against one of the new laws slated to go into effect immediately. 

The news came from the governor’s office via a press release in the early afternoon and an accompanying video posted to the social media platform X. There, Gianforte said the legislation would help “safeguard fairness, privacy, and security” in sports and public places.

“Over the last few years we’ve seen far-left gender ideology sweep the nation,” Gianforte said. “But here in Montana we’ve stood up against this radical agenda and maintained equal opportunity for all Americans while also protecting women and girls.”

House Bill 121, which affects public bathrooms, locker rooms and sleeping areas, in addition to those residing at domestic violence shelters, was written to take effect immediately upon being signed into law. House Bill 300, pertaining to student athletes in K-12 and university settings, is not slated to take effect until Oct. 1. 

An attorney for the ACLU of Montana said the organization filed a lawsuit Thursday afternoon against HB 121 on behalf of transgender and intersex plaintiffs. The same-day lawsuit was prompted by the law’s immediate effective date, the attorney said.

“This is yet another attempt to demonize and marginalize transgender Montanans and we won’t stand by idly,” said Alex Rate, the organization’s legal director.

Both bills saw broad support from legislative Republican lawmakers, reflecting how the issue of strict gender roles has become a cornerstone of the state and national GOP in recent years.

Gianforte’s Thursday announcement was lauded by national groups including the Alliance Defending Freedom and Independent Women’s Voice, which has advocated for similar gender bills in other states. 

Throughout committee hearings and debates, backers of both bills consistently sidestepped opponents’ allegations they intended to restrict the lives and expression of transgender people. Rather, supporters described cisgender women feeling uncomfortable or threatened when in close proximity to transgender people in vulnerable spaces, such as locker rooms and dormitories. 

Supporters also described the hypothetical situation of predatory, cisgender men masquerading as women for the purpose of invading public spaces, an argument that Democratic lawmakers and transgender opponents panned as disingenuous and fearmongering.

“We have trans people in our communities. We have trans people who are employees, who are students. We have trans people who face abuse and come to the shelter,” said Rep. Zooey Zephyr, D-Missoula, the first openly transgender woman to serve in the Montana Legislature, during a January debate over HB 121. “‘This is not an issue’ is what was said again and again by the people impacted on the ground.”

The plaintiffs in the ACLU lawsuit include two state employees, a political intern for the Montana Democratic Party who works at the state Capitol building, and an accessibility coordinator at Helena College, a public university, all of whom are transgender or do not identify as either gender. Another plaintiff is intersex and, because of his biological characteristics, does not know whether HB 121 classifies him as “male” or “female.” 

The law creates a route for legal action against any public facility — including jails, schools and government buildings — or domestic violence shelter that do not take steps to ensure that multi-user bathrooms or locker rooms are sex-segregated based on chromosomes and reproductive biology.

In court filings, attorneys for the ACLU of Montana said the law presents plaintiffs with impossible choices about how to navigate public spaces where they work, as well as public parks and libraries. 

“Discomfort with or dislike of transgender people cloaked as a privacy or safety concern is not a legitimate basis for imposing unequal or stigmatizing treatment,” attorneys wrote in the brief for a temporary restraining order. 

Rate added that the ACLU of Montana did not have an immediate plan to challenge HB 300, the prohibition on athletic participation, though he said the latter bill “suffers from the same constitutional infirmities” as the bathroom ban.

Lawmakers from both parties this session questioned how HB 300 is legally distinct from prior bills that sought to restrict student sports participation. A bill from 2021 was struck down as it applied to colleges and universities after a judge found it infringed on the role of the Montana Board of Regents. Another bill that sought to institute strict definitions of “sex” across Montana law was found unconstitutional in February based on equal protection and privacy violations. 

Supporters pointed out that HB 300 amends a broader, preexisting section of law that prohibits discrimination in education. They also said the policy is in line with the federal government’s stance on interpreting gender discrimination, an analysis that has flipped between the administrations of former Democratic President Joe Biden and current Republican President Donald Trump. The NCAA has also recently changed its protocols for transgender athlete participation, under pressure from the Trump administration, requiring participation to be based on sex assigned at birth.

In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for the Office of the Commissioner of Higher Education told Montana Free Press that it is anticipating minimal issues with complying with both laws.

“A preliminary review of campus bathroom facilities shows that minimal effort will bring our campuses into compliance,” said Galen Hollenbaugh, deputy commissioner for government relations and communications. 

Regarding HB 300, Hollenbaugh said, the Montana Board of Regents policy requires the Montana University System to “comply with NCAA regulations.” 

“Following a presidential Executive Order, the NCAA has revised the relevant regulations regarding trans athletes, neutralizing any MUS compliance issues with HB 300,” Hollenbaugh said.

The post Gianforte signs bathroom, trans athlete restrictions into law appeared first on Montana Free Press.

The billions of dollars approved by Congress to clean up abandoned oil and gas wells have been frozen as part of President Donald Trump’s sweeping cuts to government spending, creating concerns that the cleanup will be halted just as it’s getting started.

President Trump’s barrage of executive orders included a January directive called “Unleashing American Energy,” which, among other provisions, ordered that federal agencies stop distributing money appropriated by President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA).

The Trump administration titled this section of the order “Terminating the Green New Deal.” But in freezing this congressionally approved spending, the administration halted a program that paid for plugging and reclaiming so-called “orphaned” or abandoned oil and gas wells. The order stated that agencies should “immediately pause the disbursement of funds” from those two Biden laws. It set a 90-day deadline, upcoming in April, for agencies to review their spending programs and make sure that they align with the Trump administration’s goal of increasing U.S. energy production.

The orphaned well program, which was modeled on a North Dakota initiative, had been widely used by oil states, including several in the West.

The program — which set aside $4.7 billion, a historically large sum, for plugging wells — was distributed to states via grants from the Department of the Interior. In January, days before Trump took office, New Mexico announced that it would be receiving $5.5 million to clean up abandoned wells in the state. California also received a $9 million grant.

California, Colorado, Montana and New Mexico had each plugged over 100 orphaned wells using the Biden funds, according to an Interior Department report in 2024. Wyoming alone plugged 1,021 wells in just one year using federal grants.

As of last fall, the U.S. government had released over half a billion dollars in grants. Wells have been plugged in the people’s front yards, in national park areas and deep in the remote Alaskan wilderness. More than $3 billion are still left to be distributed, but previously available information about the grants appears to have been removed from the Interior Department’s website.

In response to questions from High Country News, an Interior Department spokesperson said that the grant program is “under review.”

“President Trump’s decisive actions are necessary steps to eliminate bureaucratic waste and refocus our agency on its core mission: serving the American people and managing our nation’s natural resources with integrity and efficiency,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “Orphaned wells negatively impact current and future oil and gas development activities and pose significant risk to national energy security and public safety.”

In addition to supporting jobs that address oil patch pollution, these federal dollars are used on wells that lack any owner to pay for reclamation. Left unplugged, such orphaned oil and gas wells leak huge amounts of methane into the atmosphere and can contaminate local water sources with salty water and benzene.

Now the future of that work is uncertain, in legal limbo alongside many of the Trump administration’s cost-cutting policies. The funding in question had already been appropriated by Congress, making it unclear that the Trump administration can indefinitely cancel it.

On March 20, more than 30 House Democrats sent a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, asking him to clear up the lingering confusion surrounding orphaned well funding and restart the grant program.

The funding “protects our communities, cleans up our environment, and builds our economy.”

“We have already begun to hear from IIJA funding recipients impacted by this pause who now face an uncertain future after DOI issued a stop work order on their orphaned well remediation projects,” the letter states.

The letter goes on to say that the Interior Department has issued no guidance on the funds’ status.

“We urge you to resume distribution of this Congressionally directed funding immediately,” the letter stated. “It protects our communities, cleans up our environment, and builds our economy.”

ORPHANED WELLS represent the final stage in what ProPublica recently described as the oil industry’s “ playbook”: When oil wells are no longer productive, large companies sell them off to smaller companies and thereby shed their obligation to plug those wells.

Oil industry profits don’t pay for cleanup

The increasingly marginal wells change hands, eventually landing with operators who lack the financial means to plug them. And when these companies go bankrupt, the wells become orphaned, meaning that the plugging costs then fall on American taxpayers.

The Biden administration’s infrastructure law was the first significant federal attempt to address the growing problem of orphaned wells across the United States, although the funding it provided paled in comparison to the scale of the problem.

The Interior Department estimates that there are about 157,000 documented orphaned oil and gas wells nationwide. This figure is likely a dramatic undercount: The Environmental Protection Agency stated in an April 2021 report that there could be as many as 3.4 million abandoned wells nationally.

“Undocumented orphaned wells may emit nearly 63 million grams of methane per hour into the atmosphere,” according to a November 2024 report, “the equivalent of over 3.6 million gasoline-powered passenger cars driven per year.”

Many state regulators are aware that their financial requirements for oil and gas operators are are aware of this pattern and struggle to prevent it.

Several state oil regulators stated this explicitly in a 2024 survey conducted by the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission (IOGCC), a quasi-governmental body that represents dozens of oil states. The documents were obtained via a records request by Fieldnotes, an industry watchdog, and shared with High Country News.

“Yes, this is the common life of a well,” regulators from Louisiana said, referring to the pattern of marginal wells being passed along to smaller companies.

Utah regulators agreed: “It is definitely a problem when wells are transferred to ‘poor’ operators.”

The plugging program was supposed to address these dysfunctional state programs, primarily by providing money. The Interior Department released its first round of grants in 2023, offering up $658 million to 26 states, including most of the oil states in the West.

The subsequent grants were intended to actually push states to fix their well-plugging programs and require that operators submit more money up front — enough to ensure that the industry and not the public ends up paying for the cost of plugging.

Known as regulatory improvement grants, these pools of funding required that states demonstrate higher financial assurance standards, increase scrutiny on well transfers, improve their plugging standards or show other reforms to their orphaned well regulatory regimes.

These grants essentially became the sole tool for the federal government to incentivize tougher state regulations. But the attempt immediately ran into headwinds: Oil states pushed back on these conditions. Some of this occurred via the IOGCC, which collaborated with the federal government on the rollout of the infrastructure law. This included initiatives to reduce orphaned well numbers, program implementation and data collection. Public documents show the inter-state commission lobbied to keep the federal guidelines as weak as possible. 

“Undocumented orphaned wells may emit nearly 63 million grams of methane per hour into the atmosphere.”

In a meeting of the Texas Railroad Commission in May 2022, Commissioner Wayne Christian – also an appointee to the IOGCC – said that he was working to remove the requirements from the federal grants.

“I’m part of the negotiation with IOGCC on the dollars coming down,” Christian said. “The Interior Department kind of have slowed things down, because all of a sudden, surprise, surprise, they decided they wanted to tell us how to do our work. And so we’re kind of fighting back on that.”

Interior devotes billions to plugging old oil wells. Is it enough?

Regulatory improvement grants would have made available an additional $40 million per state. Now the future of those grants and the improvement incentives are in jeopardy, though some groups are challenging the legality of Trump’s decision to freeze funds that had already been appropriated by Congress and passed into law.

Several environmental groups and many Democratic states have filed lawsuits against the Trump administration, seeking to release the unspent funds from the Infrastructure and Inflation Reduction acts, the Biden administration’s landmark spending bills.

“The Trump Administration has continued to block funds needed for our domestic energy security, transportation, and infrastructure provided under the IRA and IIJA,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta in a statement in February, after filing an injunction alongside 23 Democratic attorney generals, attempting to halt the administration’s funding cuts.

Bonta’s statement noted that the administration was blocking funding that “creates well-paying jobs while simultaneously reducing harmful pollution.”

The post Trump halts historic orphaned well-plugging program appeared first on High Country News.

The approximately 360 Montana-based federal Forest Service workers laid off in a blanket federal workforce reduction initiative may soon return to their positions.

The federal Merit Systems Protection Board on Wednesday directed the U.S. Department of Agriculture to temporarily reinstate the thousands of workers across the country who lost their USDA jobs last month after receiving generic emails stating that “based on [their] performance,” their continued employment “would not be in the public interest.” The board considers employment-related claims brought by federal workers to assess the legality of the government’s actions. 

The USDA is the largest federal employer in Montana and oversees the U.S. Forest Service, which manages more land in Montana than any other federal agency. Hundreds of Montanans lost their positions with the USFS in a sweeping round of layoffs implemented at the behest of a Department of Government Efficiency federal workforce reduction effort led by tech billionaire Elon Musk.

While many of the Forest Service workers laid off have multiple years of experience with the agency, they were considered “probationary employees” because they were just a year or two into their current position. Among other duties, the laid-off employees were charged with clearing trails, servicing campgrounds and rental cabins, responding to wildfires, controlling noxious weeds, supporting timber sales, restoring fisheries and studying archaeological sites.

Cathy Harris, chair of the Merit Systems Protection Board, issued the order in response to a claim filed on behalf of “John Doe,” a forestry technician who argued that he was terminated despite receiving a “fully successful” performance evaluation as recently as Jan. 15 and being given “only positive feedback” about his job performance.

The Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal investigative and prosecutorial agency that is itself in the Trump administration’s crosshairs, argued that the generic email Doe received was “identical to the mass termination letters” received by thousands of other probationary employees working for the USDA and other agencies. Between 5,700 and 6,000 employees received these emails, according to the OSC.

The USDA should contact laid-off federal workers within five days about a resumption of their employment, according to the Alden Law Group, a Washington, D.C.-based law firm representing the federal workers. The reinstatement restores the workers’ positions through April 18. During that period, Harris will consider whether the agency acted illegally by conducting the terminations without properly considering employees’ performance or going through “reductions in force” protocols for shrinking the federal government’s payroll.

Robert Arnold, a business representative with the National Federation of Federal Employees, a union representing Forest Service workers and other federal employees, cheered the order.

“All those people were fired unjustly, and it’s good that that’s apparent to some in positions of power,” he said. “We hope it sticks.”

Arnold added that he expected additional detail about the Forest Service’s plan to comply with the order in the coming days.

Harris’ order is nonprecedential, meaning MSPB and administrative judges are not required to consider it when weighing future claims.

In a statement about the order, OSC Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger thanked the board for issuing a stay on the firings. 

“Agencies are best positioned to determine the employees impacted by these mass terminations,” Dellinger said in the statement. “Voluntarily rescinding these hasty and apparently unlawful personnel actions is the right thing to do and avoids the unnecessary wasting of taxpayer dollars.”

USDA could not be immediately reached for comment on the order.

Nationwide, the workforce reduction is estimated to have resulted in approximately 10% of Forest Service employees losing their jobs, but some national forests were hit harder than others. Mary Erickson, who recently retired from her longtime post as supervisor of the Custer Gallatin National Forest, said approximately one-quarter of the forest’s non-wildfire staff lost their jobs in the “Valentine’s Day massacre.” Erickson criticized the focus on some of the agency’s most vulnerable employees, describing it as an attempt to “demonize and demoralize public servants.” 

“It makes me so frustrated when people act as if the Forest Service has never gone through budget cuts or changes. I think, ‘What do people think the Custer Gallatin combination was all about?’ That’s a 3 million acre national forest spread from West Yellowstone to Camp Crook, South Dakota,” Erickson said at a Feb. 25 event in Bozeman she organized to elevate workers’ stories and connect them with community support. “But this time is beyond anything I have ever seen or experienced.”

While wildland firefighters and other public safety personnel were officially exempted from the firing, an untold number of laid-off employees whose primary responsibilities lay in other arenas also served as “fire militia” to support local wildfire operations.

Allison Borges, a noxious weed specialist who was nine months into a permanent position on the Custer Gallatin National Forest when she was laid off, told MTFP Thursday afternoon that she has not yet received any outreach about being reinstated to her position. Borges said she’s reached out to her supervisor and was told that she, too, is awaiting guidance about complying with the order.

Borges said she’s uncertain if she should return to a job she loves and excels at or seek out employment that will offer more of the professional stability she’s long sought. Borges said she appreciates the outpouring of support from sympathetic community members but remains unsure how far that will take her and her colleagues.

“I know people are going to make their voices heard, they’re going to be present. But I’m also watching my agency crumble a little bit,” she said. “Things are happening so fast that by the time our collective voices are elevated to the sort of [administrators] that will help us make change, I don’t know if the agency will still be standing.”

The Montana Department of Labor and Industry on Feb. 28 announced that it has scheduled a “rapid response event” slated for March 12 to help terminated federal employees find new jobs and access workforce development resources. DLI Commissioner Sarah Swanson is encouraging those employees to apply for unemployment benefits and told MTFP that the department would evaluate claimants’ eligibility on a “case-by-case basis.”

The post Labor board temporarily reinstates laid-off Forest Service workers’ employment appeared first on Montana Free Press.

” width=”224″ height=”168″ align=”right” hspace=”10″ alt=”A packed Capitol rotunda in Helena, Montana, for the February 19 Rally for Public Lands” title=”A packed Capitol rotunda in Helena, Montana, for the February 19 Rally for Public Lands” />The U.S. Constitution gives citizens the right to “petition the government for a redress of grievances.” As a blizzard of public lands change sweeps out of Washington, D.C., activists around Greater Yellowstone ponder tactics to help them keep what they hold dear.

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” width=”224″ height=”168″ align=”right” hspace=”10″ alt=”The federal government employs as many as 10,000 wildland firefighters each year. With hiring freezes in place nationwide, fire season is in limbo” title=”The federal government employs as many as 10,000 wildland firefighters each year. With hiring freezes in place nationwide, fire season is in limbo” />Executive orders coming from the White House could transform a range of core issues affecting Greater Yellowstone. From Forest Service and BLM priorities to national park staffing cuts, public lands advocates must brace for a long season of conflict.

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” width=”224″ height=”168″ align=”right” hspace=”10″ alt=”Axolotl Lakes southwest of Ennis, Montana, in the foothills of the Gravelly Range” title=”Axolotl Lakes southwest of Ennis, Montana, in the foothills of the Gravelly Range” />As organizers prepare for the biennial Rally for Public Lands, the conservation world faces down a changing climate, an administration determined to dismantle environmental protections, and its own internal contradictions.

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In response to news this week that Montana’s largest land manager is laying off 360 Montana-based federal employees, a spokesperson for the U.S. Forest Service said Friday the agency is “confident that talented individuals” impacted by the staffing reduction will have “many opportunities to contribute to our economy and society in countless ways outside of government.”

The spokesperson, who asked to not be identified, went on to say that Brooke Rollins, who heads up the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service, “fully supports President Trump’s directive to optimize government operations, eliminate inefficiencies, and strengthen USDA’s ability to better serve American farmers, ranchers, loggers and the agriculture community.”

“We have a solemn responsibility to be good stewards of Americans’ hard-earned taxpayer dollars and to ensure that every dollar is being spent as effectively as possible to serve the people, not the bureaucracy,” the statement continued.

Montana Conservation Voters Executive Director Whitney Tawney wrote in an email Friday to Montana Free Press that the cuts threaten Montana’s economy, recreational opportunities and communities. 

“Indiscriminately cutting jobs for hardworking Montanans who manage our public lands is the opposite of common sense. These cuts will make our public lands less healthy, more likely to burn and less accessible,” she wrote. “Montana’s Congressional delegation must call President Trump now and tell him this is unacceptable. These decisions should be made locally, not by D.C. political hacks who know nothing of Montana’s public lands.”

The Forest Service spokesperson did not respond to Montana Free Press’ follow-up questions regarding severance pay for the affected employees or changes national forest users can anticipate in response to the workforce reduction.

According to a Thursday evening story by POLITICO, the Forest Service anticipated firing about 3,400 federal employees across “every level of the agency” as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the federal workforce. Wildland firefighters, law enforcement officers and other employees with a public safety nexus were exempted from the firing initiative. 

The workers that have been impacted are still within their probationary period, meaning they’ve been employed by the agency for less than two years, and perform a variety of roles ranging from road and trail maintenance to timber production and watershed restoration.

Hilary Eisen, a Bozeman-based policy director with the Winter Wildlands Alliance, said the layoffs will be felt by “everybody who visits or works on these public lands.”

The Forest Service administers tens of millions of acres of land across Montana. In addition to reviewing and authorizing timber sales and livestock grazing leases, the Forest Service plays an important role in the state’s multi-billion dollar outdoor recreation economy and conducts research on a variety of subjects ranging from how wildfires spread to the impact of “hot drought” on forests and promising forestry-oriented approaches to increase water yields.

“The people who lost their jobs maintain trails, discover and extinguish abandoned campfires before they become wildfires, clean outhouses, control weeds, process permits, and much, much more,” Eisen wrote in an email to MTFP. “Arbitrary cuts to the federal workforce is not a path towards efficiency or meaningful budget reductions, but it will harm communities all across Montana and the nation.”

The National Federation of Federal Employees, a union that represents Forest Service workers, has joined a coalition of unions in a lawsuit to halt the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the federal workforce. In the lawsuit, the unions argue Trump’s efforts are undermining the role of Congress to establish funding for federal agencies. This, they say, is a violation of the separation of powers. 

In response to what it described as the “illegal gutting of the federal workforce,” the union on Thursday issued a press release urging the judicial branch’s intervention. 

“Federal workers are your friends and neighbors who have dedicated their careers to serving our country. We cannot let the President disrupt their lives and dismantle critical services relied upon by the American people,” NFFE National President Randy Erwin wrote. “If this Administration and Elon Musk truly wanted to make our government more efficient, they would have taken the time to understand that these actions will only lead to chaos and poor service for the American people.”

The layoff notices arrived via email the day after the deadline for the “Fork in the Road” offer for federal employees to resign and continue receiving paychecks through September, according to POLITICO.

MTFP requests for comment from the NFFE were not returned by press time Friday. On its website, the Forest Service-specific arm of the union is advising employees who received termination letters to contact a union representative and consider an appeal of the termination. 

The post USFS: ‘Talented individuals’ laid off from agency will find ‘countless’ opportunities’ outside of government appeared first on Montana Free Press.

” width=”224″ height=”168″ align=”right” hspace=”10″ alt=”Montana-made whiskey isn’t the only commodity affected by trade with Canada” title=”Montana-made whiskey isn’t the only commodity affected by trade with Canada” />Fast-moving announcements of U.S. trade wars against Canada, Mexico and China leave state stakeholders bracing for market turmoil.

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By the time the 2025 session of the Montana Legislature concludes in late April or early May, the state’s 150 lawmakers will have cast thousands of votes on proposals affecting everything from property taxes to pet insurance to human health care, ultimately forwarding hundreds of bills to the desk of Gov. Greg Gianforte.

The often-turbulent legislative firehose is a lot to keep track of even if you’re a seasoned journalist or lobbyist working in the Capitol — much less if you’re an everyday Montanan trying to follow what your representatives are doing from elsewhere in the state. The sheer volume of bills, votes and debate that flows through the Capitol halls can quite easily sweep a casual observer off their feet.

Launching for the 2025 session today, our digital Capitol Tracker guide is intended to offer a lifeline in that storm, helping Montanans ranging from Capitol insiders to bewildered citizens make sense of the quantifiable aspects of legislative proceedings. (For insight on the unquantifiable ones, subscribe to Tom Lutey’s Capitolized newsletter.)

The digital guide mirrors information presented on the Legislature’s newly revamped official website, but is intended to load faster and be easier to use, especially on mobile phones. We’re also able to supplement the sometimes-terse official data with additional information such as links to stories MTFP reporters have written about particular bills or analyses of specific lawmakers’ voting records.

You can find the guide here:

This year’s version of the tracker will be largely familiar to readers who used the 2023 edition. However, we’ve had to rework much of the logic that moves information around behind the scenes (sometimes repeatedly) to accommodate the new legislative website’s various birthing pains. As part of that work, we’ve also removed a few features we had on the prior edition while we think through how we can reconceptualize them.

As of today, the 2025 tracker includes the following functionality:

A page with information for each introduced bill (all 664 of them as of this writing), including the sponsor and the bill’s progression through the various legislative hurdles that stand between a bill and its enactment as law. Bill pages also include links to the full bill text and proposed amendments, as well as fiscal and legal notes for bills that have them.

A page for each of the Legislature’s 100 representatives and 50 senators, including their public contact information, their committee assignments, a list of bills they’ve sponsored and the results of their most recent election. Those pages also include an analysis of how often lawmakers are voting with their Republican and Democratic colleagues.

Lookup tools that let you search bills by title and number and lawmakers by name. You can also look up your district’s lawmakers by entering your address.

A couple of other notes: Due to the sheer volume of information included in the Capitol Tracker and our ongoing efforts to work with the new legislative website, we expect we’ll have a few bugs to sort out in the coming weeks. We’d greatly appreciate your help (and patience) on that front.

Additionally, while we already have some plans for features we’re hoping to add in the coming weeks, we’d love to hear suggestions about ways we could make this tool more useful to you.

You can reach our data team, Data Reporter Jacob Olness and Deputy Editor Eric Dietrich, at jolness@montanafreepress.org and edietrich@montanafreepress.org.

TAKE A LOOK: MTFP’s 2025 Capitol Tracker.

The post Our digital guide to help you track the Montana Capitol is back appeared first on Montana Free Press.

” width=”224″ height=”168″ align=”right” hspace=”10″ alt=”Buckle up. As airlines add direct flights to and from Bozeman and elsewhere in Montana, the GYE expects a busy season of visitors” title=”Buckle up. As airlines add direct flights to and from Bozeman and elsewhere in Montana, the GYE expects a busy season of visitors” />Surging direct-flight jet service portends another busy tourist summer in Greater Yellowstone and beyond.

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