Valentine’s Day massacre: Uncounted throng of Wyomingites fired by Trump administration
A wave of federal-employee layoffs swept the nation Friday, leaving an undisclosed number of Wyoming workers from multiple agencies suddenly jobless and bereft of explanations in its wake. How many people and agencies have been affected, what roles have been eliminated, which communities have been hardest hit and many other basic questions remain unanswered by the government, despite repeated inquiries to multiple offices.
Amid the confusion and chaos, patterns emerged through interviews with a diverse array of fresh-out-of-work staffers and their advocates: concern for agencies’ ability to execute their missions today, and in the future; fear of public harm from lost services and damaged resources; and expectations that Native Americans will be disproportionately impacted, both by lost jobs and broken commitments.
Wyoming’s top elected officials, meanwhile, have largely celebrated the Trump administration’s actions.
WyoFile agreed to let both newly laid-off and still-employed staffers remain anonymous because we found their fears of potential reprisals to be credible and realistic.
In the absence of agency responsiveness, we’ve not been able to independently corroborate everything they shared.
Stability gone
For nearly seven years, a U.S. Forest Service employee based out of a mid-sized Wyoming town worked mostly as a horse packer. In that role, he helped haul timber for bridge projects, transport alpine lake water samples and pack gear for hydrologists, biologists or trail crews.
He loved the lifestyle and had a knack for working with horses. So he was thrilled last year when his job status changed to “permanent seasonal.”
“When I finally became a permanent employee with the Forest Service, I had committed to this being my career,” he said. “It had a lot of stuff going for it in terms of benefits and stability, or what felt like stability.”
A U.S. Forest Service employee speaks at an interagency wildfire briefing in May 2024. (Madelyn Beck/WyoFile)
He settled in, buying property with his fiancé and planning for the long haul. Now, however, all that supposed stability “is just gone.”
He was just a couple months shy of completing the mandatory one-year probationary phase of his new position. That left him vulnerable to the thousands of jobs cut by the U.S. Department of Agriculture — the Forest Service’s parent agency — this week as part of an aggressive Trump administration campaign to reduce the federal workforce.
His supervisor called him Thursday to break the news, he said, and he received his formal notice via email on Friday, effective immediately.
He thinks this will likely mark the end of his career with the agency, and said he will seek other work in the area. But he worries about the state of a workforce already stretched so thin it’s barely able to adequately manage an invaluable resource.
“Mostly I’m just concerned for the resource at this point,” he said. “Like the trail maintenance that the community has seen over the years, that is going to be gone. There’s just no one to do it anymore. So I think that’s going to be one of the first impacts that people notice.”
Long term, he said, “I just hope our public lands are still here. For me, that means more than working for the Forest Service, like just having a place to go.”
He studied wildlife and fisheries management in college, and worked his way up through internships and trail crews before getting his job in Wyoming. He is also concerned about the many young people who were starting their careers in the agency — because they represented the future of the Forest Service.
“The people who are getting cut right now are the Forest Service’s future employees, the future leaders of the Forest Service,” he said. “It’s just wrong, what they are doing to people.”
‘A new day’
Meanwhile, in Wyoming’s Capitol building Friday, the state’s U.S. Sen. Cynthia Lummis, a Republican, spoke to legislators in both chambers. She described the rapid changes under Trump as having many benefits for Wyoming.
The president, she told the Senate, “is working with lightning speed to make major changes that are going to be so good for Wyoming.”
Members of Wyoming’s House of Representatives greet U.S. Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyoming) in the Capitol Building in March 2021. (Katie Klingsporn/WyoFile)
Changes she referenced involve energy production and women’s sports. She also lauded the efforts of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
“What Elon Musk is doing is incredibly important to America,” she said. “He is ferreting out true waste, fraud and abuse.”
“It’s an absolute new day in Washington,” Lummis, who has held state or federal office for decades, said. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen.”
Deep cuts
That optimism was in stark contrast to the uncertainty expressed by federal employees to WyoFile.
Staffers at western Wyoming’s two largest national forests, the Bridger-Teton and Shoshone, were shaken by the seemingly indiscriminate layoffs that swept across their federal agency late this week.
On the 2.4 million-acre Shoshone — the nation’s oldest national forest — roughly 20% of permanent workers were informed they were out of a job, according to a U.S. Forest Service staffer in Wyoming familiar with the layoffs. The losses hit some reaches of the Shoshone harder than others, with up to 40% of the non-fire staff being cut loose in some ranger districts, they told WyoFile.
A Biden administration decision to convert long-term seasonal employees into permanent seasonal employees likely inflated the number of lost jobs. Those converted federal workers were still considered “probationary” and every one of them who wasn’t a firefighter lost their jobs, according to the staffer.
“None of those people who just got hired permanently last year have a job anymore,” the federal worker said.
Ripple effects from the empty positions will inevitably reach the public, according to the source. Many fields and disciplines will be affected.
“It’s all different fields, from timber to recreation to people who are supposed to be clearing the trails, picking up garbage and replacing toilet paper,” the federal worker said. “Our office is going to have to close our doors to the public, because we won’t have front desk staff.”
This image of a Forest Service staffer illustrates the impacts of big crowds on national forest infrastructure. (Facebook/U.S. Forest Service Bridger-Teton National Forest)
Two federal government employees with connections to the Bridger-Teton National Forest reported that probationary employee layoffs there were also deep. Across the 3.4-million-acre forest, according to the sources, about 30 or more full-time staffers have been informed they’re losing their jobs.
Some ranger districts were hit harder than others, with the Jackson District losing eight staffers and the Pinedale District losing 10 employees, according to the staffer.
Communication about what’s happening from newly minted agency top brass under the Trump administration has been dismal, one of the sources said.
“This is terrible, it’s an absolutely terrible way to treat people,” the source said. “Morale is really low, we’re not getting any information. I find out more from r/fednews on Reddit than I hear from any sort of level of leadership.”
A spokesperson in the U.S. Forest Service’s Washington, D.C. headquarters declined to provide or corroborate layoff figures for Wyoming’s six national forests.
“[U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins] 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,” the spokesperson said in an email. “As part of this effort, USDA has released individuals in their probationary period of employment.”
A harbinger
The federal layoffs, while hard to swallow for those affected, weren’t completely out of left field. Federal workers were already feeling uncertain after the Trump administration emailed the “Fork in the Road” letter.
The resignation offer excused those who accepted it from “all applicable in-person work requirements” while paying them through the end of September. For those who would not resign, the letter stated, “we cannot give you full assurance regarding the certainty of your position or agency.”
WyoFile first spoke with a federal employee about the mounting employment situation in Casper on Feb. 7. They followed up Friday to say they were fired.
The prospect of finding another job in Wyoming felt daunting, where options, in their fields of expertise, are slim. There are far more career opportunities outside the state, they added, which means uprooting families, including spouses who work in Wyoming communities.
“You’re going to have to cast a wider net than just Wyoming,” they said. “There’s just not that many specific job opportunities here for those people that are specialized.”
The weeks leading up to the layoff announcement have been uneasy, they said.
The normally interactive, boisterous and friendly daily atmosphere among work colleagues had turned quiet and even suspicious.
“You can feel distrust,” they said. “You can feel low morale and just anxiety in general, because every day, multiple times a day over the past two weeks, there’s been just a barrage of different orders, rulemakings — and they contradict one another. It changes constantly.
“Obviously, people fear for their jobs,” they added.
A line of visitors queues up for boat rides in Grand Teton National Park. (J. Bonney/National Park Service)
There’s also fear about what layoffs mean for Wyoming.
“It’s going to slow down approval processes, permitting — all of that stuff,” they said. “If you lose the people that keep those wheels greased, then stuff is going to grind to a halt, or at least become very slow and tedious.”
Most federal employees in Wyoming are not performing their jobs with partisan politics in mind, they said. Yet those workers are being inundated with a public discourse that paints them as either partisan or lazy — simply on the public dole, they said.
That sentiment is reflected in emails sent from the administration’s higher-ups in recent weeks.
“They have this language that was very clearly not written by a federal employee,” they said. “It has no formality, it has no professionalism and it has these snarky comments like, ‘We’re giving you the opportunity to quit being a lazy employee and you can go be more productive in the private sector,’” they said, summarizing the tone of emails. “The language in those letters is condescending and insulting.”
“I feel like this tactic — by the person who’s instigating it — their concept is that it’s an acceptable way to go about things,” they said. “But in the public- and in the civil-service sector, those are different people.
“For one, you take an oath before you’re hired. Everyone takes a live oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States and to serve the people of the United States, not an administration. And that’s different [than the private sector]. That feeling of dedication is different, I think, when you’re a civil servant. They’re not just doing a job just to make money and go home. There’s another component to it.”
Support for workers
Federal employee support groups, conservationists and advocates for tribes criticized the indiscriminate slashing. The Native Organizers Alliance said the actions could affect a host of agencies from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the Indian Health Service and Bureau of Indian Education and might be illegal.
“Blanket layoffs … without a process in place to ensure that the federal agencies can carry out the duties … means that these actions potentially violate the law,” said Judith LeBlanc, executive director of Native Organizers Alliance.
“The largest single employer of Native people is the federal government, LeBlanc, a member of the Caddo Nation from the lower Mississippi Valley said in a statement. “The federal government is legally responsible for ensuring that our Tribal programs are funded and run smoothly.”
Built in 1884 to serve as a calvary commissary, the Fort Washakie IHS clinic is one of the few original IHS clinics still in operation today. (Matthew Copeland/WyoFile)
National Parks supporters also waved a warning flag.
“Today, approximately 1,000 National Park Service employees lost their jobs,” Phil Francis, former Superintendent of the Blue Ridge Parkway and chairman of the executive council of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, said Friday. He called the action to fire probationary employees — those who have been hired within a year or so — “shortsighted.”
“We are losing the future leaders of the National Park Service,” he said.
Theresa Pierno, president and CEO for the National Parks Conservation Association agreed with the former superintendent, calling the widespread firing “reckless.”
The firings “could have serious public safety and health consequences,” she said in a statement Friday. “This isn’t how we treat the places we cherish or those who protect them.”
That the administration backed off its earlier hiring freeze on seasonal National Park workers brought limited relief. “These jobs should never have been in jeopardy,” Francis said.
Parks can fill some visitor services positions, Pierno said. But, she cautioned, the beginning of the visitor season is “just weeks away.”
Another Forest Service employee spoke of how the layoffs will ripple into Wyoming communities where federal workers buy homes, shop and enroll their children in schools.
“These people live and work in our communities,” the employee said.
Wyoming Workforce Services was not aware of federal employee dismissals, a spokesperson told WyoFile on Friday. The agency encourages “federal employees who may be affected by a layoff to contact their nearest Wyoming Workforce Center for assistance,” the spokesperson said. “These centers offer a range of individualized resources, including job search support and training opportunities. Our unemployment insurance website offers a portal for individuals to file unemployment insurance claims. Additional information can also be found on our website at dws.wyo.gov.”
Constitutional issue impedes elimination of Wyoming’s protected wildlife list
A bill to authorize game wardens to deal with sometimes-pesky otters turned, for a moment, into an effort to altogether eliminate Wyoming’s 72-year-old “protected” wildlife list.
The state designation, two decades older than the Endangered Species Act, was “archaic” and unneeded, Sen. Larry Hicks, a Baggs Republican, argued in the Senate Travel, Recreation, Wildlife and Cultural Resources Committee on Tuesday. Hicks successfully amended House Bill 45, “Removing otters as protected animals,” so that it would also apply to pikas and fishers. (The state’s other “protected” species — black‑footed ferret, lynx and wolverine — would retain federal ESA safeguards.)
Casper Republican Sen. Bill Landen stood alone in opposition to the change before the committee he chairs OK’d it. He reiterated his concerns the next day on the floor of the Wyoming Senate.
“I have to admit, fellow senators, we got out over the tips of our skis a little bit,” Landen said, calling out his committee’s potentially unconstitutional actions. “We made some changes that, I have to say, probably run us afoul of something that we hold quite dear here in this Senate chamber. That is, pursuant to the Wyoming Constitution, no … bill shall be so altered or amended to become a different bill.”
Sen. Bill Landen, R-Casper, sits at his desk during the Wyoming Legislature’s 2025 general session. (Mike Vanata/WyoFile)
He questioned whether a bill with a title focusing on otters could alter policy related to other species.
His colleagues in the upper chamber were evidently listening.
The amendment OK’d in committee — which would have also retitled the bill — was overwhelmingly voted down.
House Bill 45 was back to being just an otter bill, which several senators seemed to enjoy.
“On and for this bill,” Sen. Jim Anderson, R-Casper, said. “I think we ‘otter’ pass it.”
But the otter measure hasn’t been without its own controversy. Brought by Jackson Republican Rep. Andrew Byron, who’s a former flyfishing guide, the idea emanated from an angling experience in Teton County’s beleaguered Fish Creek, which isn’t living up to its name. The sophomore representative saw an otter family and called up the local warden to inquire about relocating them.
Sota the pudelpointer and a river otter share a Pine Creek meadow within the town limits of Pinedale in January 2024. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)
“He goes, ‘Andrew, we can’t touch those,’” Byron testified Tuesday in the Senate committee. He went on to learn about the 72-year-old protected species statute, which precludes relocating or killing conflict-causing otters.
Byron bemoaned how the public has perceived his bill.
“There are fears out there that this is an all-out attack, this is a free-for-all, anyone can do anything with otters,” he told the senators. “It’s really, really not the case.”
House Bill 45 would not greenlight recreational otter hunting or trapping seasons. Instead, otters would default to being a non-game species that could be killed with a permit. The Wyoming Game and Fish Department has supported the potential measure, which would give its biologists and wardens flexibility.
“As we get species recovering in the state and spreading out, we often do see isolated conflict,” Game and Fish Director Angi Bruce said. “I personally believe that when we are able to go in and address conflict situations with landowners, it helps build support for that species.”
Sen. Tara Nethercott, R-Cheyenne, stands during the Wyoming Legislature’s 2025 general session. (Mike Vanata/WyoFile)
On the Senate floor, Cheyenne Republican Tara Nethercott encouraged her counterparts to steer clear of the euphemisms.
“I would appreciate it if we stopped talking about relocating them, nobody’s going to relocate an otter,” Nethercott said. “They will be killed, and they’ll be trapped for their pelts. And so let’s just have an honest conversation.”
A leading otter expert, University of Wyoming professor Merav Ben-David, has opposed HB 45.
“I think this bill is premature,” she testified Tuesday to senators. “Removing otters, at this point, from the protected list, puts at risk [their] expansion to other places in the state.”
Wyoming’s otter population, according to Ben-David, is slowly crawling its way back from being effectively wiped out during the fur trade era. Lontra canadensis only hung on in Yellowstone National Park, though they’ve since reclaimed old haunts in the Snake, Green, Wind and Shoshone river basins and are beginning to show up in the North Platte River watershed.
Opposition notwithstanding, the otter-specific version of HB 45 is on a glide path through the Legislature. It passed its committee votes easily, and the Wyoming House by a 52-8 margin. After 30 minutes of debate on Wednesday, senators in a voice vote gave the proposal the initial OK. It also passed its second reading in the Senate on Thursday. Now only one vote by the Senate stands between the measure and the governor’s desk.
Although Hicks’ proposal to do away with the state-protected species list fell flat, it’s potentially not dead for good. Landen, co-chair of the Joint Travel, Recreation, Wildlife and Cultural Resources Committee, expressed a willingness to explore the idea during interim meetings between the Legislature’s 2025 and 2026 sessions.
Senate cuts $70M from Legislature’s sue-the-feds war chest
The Wyoming Senate voted 22-9 on Monday to cut $70 million from a legislative war chest set aside to sue the federal government for environmental policies seen as detrimental to the state.
The vote on an amendment proposed by Sen. Mike Gierau, a Democrat from Teton County, came after days of debate over whether the lawmaking body should have litigation funds separate from Gov. Mark Gordon’s executive branch. Perhaps paramount in the vote, which left $5 million in Senate File 41, “Federal acts-legal actions authorized,” was the new administration in Washington, D.C.
“What’s changed for me, frankly, is the President of the United States,” Sen. John Kolb, a Republican from Rock Springs, said as he outlined his support for the reduction. He represents an area heavily reliant on federal property managed by the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service.
“All of a sudden we’ve got … two pots of money working against each other.”
Sen. Mike Gierau
Some 48% of Wyoming’s land is federal land, owned by all Americans. Federal initiatives to preserve wildlife habitat, scenic and historic sites and other natural resources on that land have rubbed some fur the wrong way. In Kolb’s Sweetwater County, for example, a BLM conservation-balanced management plan for 3.6 million acres, an expanse larger than Connecticut, sparked growls and howls.
“I think we have a very less adversarial condition between our state and the presidency,” Kolb said of the consequences of President Donald Trump’s election.
Armed and dangerous
Gordon vetoed a similar bill the Legislature passed in 2024, Sen. Bob Ide, R-Casper, told members of the Joint Agriculture, State and Public Lands & Water Resources Interim Committee earlier this year. That body voted to sponsor the measure.
Senate File 41 is “a shot across the bow to protect our state, our lands, against federal acts — [National Environmental Policy Act] and [Federal Land Policy Management Act] — that affect our state,” Ide told the committee.
A workers’ tricycle at the Jim Bridger Plant in 2019. (Angus M. Thuermer Jr./WyoFile)
“We need to be armed and dangerous to fight back against this and act like we’re a real sovereign state,” he later said on the Senate floor. The bill says: “We don’t want you [the feds] pushing us around like you have been for a long time.”
Many lawmakers balked at the prospect of the Legislature firing off its own lawsuits. For various reasons, the Senate Appropriations Committee did not support the measure, which went to the whole Senate nevertheless.
The bill would allow a majority of the Legislature’s Management Council — only six lawmakers — to initiate a suit.
“We had a situation where we can’t export our coal to places that would like it through our ports in America because we didn’t sue in a timely manner,” Sen. Darin Smith, R-Cheyenne, said in support of the bill and its quick-trigger Management Council authority.
“This is timely,” he said. “We’re going to be sorry if we don’t gear up and fund this and if we do, then we might just intimidate the feds out of the Rock Springs land grab that they would like to try to do.”
Two’s a crowd
Republican Sen. Charlie Scott of Casper, Wyoming’s longest serving lawmaker, called the bill “a mistake,” because suing on behalf of the state is a function of the executive branch. “Lawsuits require people who are experienced in litigation to supervise whatever lawyers we’re actually using,” he said.
Having Wyoming represented in court by two different entities could be counterproductive, Gierau said. “All of a sudden we’ve got … two pots of money working against each other,” he said.
In a recent failed petition by Utah to get the U.S. Supreme Court to hear a case demanding the federal government divest itself of 18.5 million acres in the Beehive State, Wyoming had three positions.
In amicus briefs, the state officially backed Utah only by outlining its economic reliance on federal lands. U.S. Rep Harriet Hageman was more strident, claiming federal ownership of land in the West was equivalent to a wartime occupation. And 26 Wyoming lawmakers filed a brief saying their support for Utah didn’t mean they would stop at taking back just BLM-managed lands. Wyoming’s subsequent claims might extend to National Forests and National Parks, they said.
Gordon’s executive branch has been doing fine, and the Legislature should stick to passing laws and setting policy “but not try to litigate,” Casper Republican Sen. Jim Anderson said.
“We are not good litigators,” he told fellow senators. “This bill could employ more attorneys than we have in the state.”
For Sen. and attorney Tara Nethercott, lawmakers too often have “a knee-jerk reaction to litigate every time and without, maybe, justification.” Such immediate response comes without deep thought about consequences, costs and other things, the Cheyenne Republican said.
The bill’s funding expires on June 30, 2028. The measure must pass a third reading in the Senate before it goes to the House.
Electricity sales tax cut advances, to delight of industry and chagrin of Wyoming towns and counties
A legislative committee narrowly advanced a measure on Friday to repeal sales tax on electricity in the midst of rising electrical rates — a $43.4 million annual savings for ratepayers, according to the bill’s fiscal note.
By far, Wyoming’s largest electrical consumers are industrial users: mines, oil and natural gas producers and refiners, and especially a booming data center industry in Laramie County. Many towns and counties rely on sales taxes from those industries — including from electricity — to support public services, including services those very industries necessitate.
For example, Evansville Police Chief Mike Thompson described the revenue base of his 2,700 person community as more industrial than residential. The Casper-adjacent town, home to an oil refinery and a multitude of other large industrial operations, is almost completely reliant on various sales taxes to support public services.
“It’s going to cripple our community,” Thompson said.
An electric power meter stands outside a residential home in Casper. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile)
Likewise, Cheyenne has seen wild success in courting manufacturing and data facilities — enterprises whose primary net contribution to the city and county are taxes, Cheyenne Mayor Patrick Collins testified before the Senate Revenue Committee.
“I see data centers as our Jonah field,” Collins said, referencing Sublette County’s famed oil and gas development. “I see them as our Campbell County coal mines. We don’t have great mineral wealth here in Laramie County to fuel our economy, as many parts of our state do.”
Demand for electricity in and around Cheyenne is projected to increase from about 350 megawatts today to 1,200 megawatts by 2030, based on anticipated growth in manufacturing and data centers, according to Collins. “So in today’s dollars, that would cost Cheyenne about $4.4 million if we take the sales tax off electricity,” he said.
Those concerns were echoed by the Wyoming Association of Municipalities and Wyoming County Commissioners Association. They noted that proposed tax reductions for homeowners, as well as a wide range of pending tax reductions for extractive industries, will likely starve small governments of the revenue they need.
All of those anxieties might be assuaged, however, according to the bill’s proponents, including lead sponsor Republican Sen. Troy McKeown from Gillette. Lawmakers are working to partially negate the revenue loss from property tax relief for towns and counties McKeown said. Plus, according to Sen. Cale Case, R-Lander, there are plans in the works to offset local governments’ losses from SF 128 with a new tax that taps electric utilities and their customers outside Wyoming.
“It’s going to cripple our community.”
Mike Thompson, Evansville Police Chief
“We would export a very large amount of tax burden and we would collect more than the sales tax we’re giving up,” Case said.
Lawmakers discussed such a strategy in April, noting Wyoming is particularly suited to shift the tax burden because it exports more electricity than it uses — although the volume of that export of electrons has been declining in recent years, according to Power Company of Wyoming Director of Communications and Government Relations Kara Choquette, who testified before the committee and participated in interim deliberations on the topic.
Nonetheless, a bill to implement a new tax to offset the revenue loss of SF 128 had yet to materialize by Friday afternoon.
“There’s a bill to be filed in the House that accomplishes — kind of looks at these things so they have to all fit together,” Case said. “It’s complicated.”
Sen. Cale Case, R-Lander, pictured during the 2025 legislative session. (Mike Vanata/WyoFile)
Underpinning that potential bill is a report by a legislative “electric tax subcommittee,” which was appropriated $50,000 to hire a law firm to analyse the legality of imposing taxes that extend beyond Wyoming’s borders. The Senate Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions Committee, chaired by Case, met behind closed doors with the hired lawyers at the Capitol on Thursday to hear their analysis.
“The purpose of the briefing yesterday was to hear from our lawyers that we hired,” Case told the Revenue Committee on Friday. “So it was privileged lawyer communications.”
Based on that briefing, “It’s clear that we can do that,” Case added. “We absolutely can do that.”
Whether or not such a bill materializes in time to offset revenue losses from SF 128, a bevy of lobbyists, who regularly comment on legislation, said they emphatically support the bill, including those representing Wyoming rural electric co-ops, Wyoming agricultural industries, the Petroleum Association of Wyoming and Wyoming Mining Association. Monthly electricity bills are one of the top expenses for doing business, they testified.
“We have a far larger industrial load in Wyoming than you do residential — that’s not true for most states,” Jody Levin told lawmakers on behalf of the trona industry and the Wyoming Mining Association. “So the increases that we have seen in electricity have been borne largely by your industrial consumers.”
McKeown tested Evansville Police Chief Thompson’s claims regarding the potential impact to his community, and bristled at his pleas for more careful scrutiny of the measure. “It’s actually pretty simple. It just takes the sales [tax] off electricity,” McKeown murmured to a fellow committee member before asking for a vote.
Wyoming county clerks push back against Gray’s ballot drop box stance
CHEYENNE—A disagreement between Wyoming’s state and local election officials over ballot drop boxes came to a boil Wednesday at the Capitol as lawmakers debated prohibiting their use in state statute.
Wyoming’s county clerks have utilized drop boxes for decades, long before they took on controversy in the 2020 election, thanks in large part to the film “2,000 Mules.”
The film largely rested on the premise that ballot drop boxes were used in widespread voter fraud. Since then, the film’s distributor apologized and pulled it from its platform, and Dinesh D’Souza, the film’s director, also apologized and admitted that part of the film’s analysis was “on the basis of inaccurate information.”
Nevertheless, Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray continues to push for an end to drop box use in Wyoming.
“This should come as no surprise to anyone in the room, but I am a huge supporter of this bill,” Gray told the House Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions Committee on Wednesday as it considered House Bill 131, “Ballot drop boxes-prohibition.”
Indeed, Gray ran for office in 2022 on a promise to ban ballot drop boxes. Wednesday he reminded the committee of that, harkening back to a “very, very vigorous primary,” wherein drop boxes were “the defining issue.”
Gray also reiterated his opinion Wednesday that state law does not allow for ballot drop boxes.
According to state law, “Upon receipt, a qualified elector shall mark the ballot and sign the affidavit. The ballot shall then be sealed in the inner ballot envelope and mailed or delivered to the clerk.”
Rep. Mike Yin, D-Jackson, responded to Gray’s comments with a question.
“It sounded like you accused every county clerk who had drop boxes of breaking the law,” Yin said. “If that is the case, and you think that they diluted your power, because if that’s the case, why didn’t you file suit against them?”
Gray blamed Wyoming’s attorney general for declining “to take any action on it,” before Yin pressed him once more.
“Just to make it very clear, your position is that the country clerks broke the law?” Yin asked.
“I do not believe ballot drop boxes are authorized,” Gray responded.
A voter casts her ballot in the Sweetwater County primary election on Aug. 20, 2024. (Angus M. Thuermer Jr./WyoFile)
Sixteen county clerks attended the meeting, including Platte County Clerk Malcolm Ervin, who serves as president for the County Clerks’ Association of Wyoming.
“It’s unfortunate that the secretary would allude or insinuate that somehow these counties have violated the law or their oath,” Ervin told the committee. “That’s a serious insinuation.”
Ervin also pushed back on Gray’s repeated claims that the clerks’ interpretation of state law as being permissive to drop boxes was “strained” and only came about during the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It’s ironic that the word gaslighting was used by the secretary, because that’s exactly what he’s trying to do to you here,” Ervin said.
“He says the use of ballot drop boxes and this interpretation of the county clerks came about because of a strained interpretation in 2020,” Ervin said. “Despite [the clerks] having told the secretary that’s not true a number of times, he continues to propagate that untruth.”
The clerks association does not have a stance on the bill, Ervin added.
“What we want to do is offer facts when you make that decision,” he said.
Part of Gray’s argument against the drop boxes has been that it violates the section of the election code that requires uniformity.
“If you have a different system for each county in these races, then you don’t have a uniform system,” Gray said. “And that is problematic in terms of running a uniform statewide election.”
The committee voted 11-1 to pass the bill with two amendments, one of which came at the request of the clerks. Yin was the lone opposing vote.
How we got here
In June, Gray sent a letter to all 23 county clerks, urging them to ditch ballot drop boxes ahead of the absentee voting period, arguing Wyoming law does not permit them. Gray also announced in the letter he would rescind several directives issued by former Secretary of State Ed Buchanan related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Most of the rescinded directives did not involve ballot drop boxes.
“We hold that the use of ballot drop boxes as a method of ballot delivery is safe, secure and statutorily authorized,” the clerks’ association wrote in its response to Gray.
Ultimately, the seven counties — Albany, Carbon, Converse, Fremont, Laramie, Sweetwater and Teton — that provided ballot drop boxes in 2022 did so again in 2024.
Gray announced his intent to ask lawmakers to ban ballot drop boxes in state law at a December press conference.
Rep. Chris Knapp (R-Gillette) stands on the House floor during the 2024 budget session. (Ashton J. Hacke/WyoFile)
Committee colloquy
Rep. Chris Knapp, a Freedom Caucus Republican from Gillette, is the main sponsor of HB 131.
“In our statute, there is no such thing as a drop box. It’s not defined in our statute, and so this bill basically makes it clear that returning a ballot gets hand delivered to the clerk,” Knapp told the committee.
As lawmakers discussed the bill, Rep. Gary Brown, R-Cheyenne, asked the clerks what section of state statute “grants you the right to use the drop boxes?”
Ervin pointed to the election code that specifies ballots shall be “delivered to the clerk.”
“That’s been the interpretation of the county clerks for at least 30 years, if not longer, and that’s been shared by a number of secretaries, one of whom is now a district court judge,” Ervin said, referring to Buchanan.
Several other clerks testified, including Lisa Smith of Carbon County, who described the security measures involved with her office’s drop box.
Since 2016, Smith said the drop box has provided a way for residents to drop off ballots as well as other items like treasurer payments. But her office is the only one that has a key or access to the inside of the drop box.
“It’s adjacent to the building. We have four cameras with two separate security systems, and all recorded footage is reviewed daily,” Smith said. “So anything that is captured, it’s not a 24-hour running tape, it’s motion censored. So it’s recording when there’s motion, even if it’s a deer. So that footage is actually reviewed by the county clerk daily, and a log is kept.”
That footage is also backed up by the county’s IT department and the Carbon County Sheriff’s Office, Smith said.
“We don’t even really advertise that a ballot drop box is available, but people are used to it because it’s been happening for quite some time,” Smith said.
Converse County Clerk Karen Rimmer said her office’s decision to use a ballot drop box “was strictly for the benefit of the voters who live there, the people that elected me to be their county clerk and conduct the election on their behalf.”
Rimmer said she also sought the advice of her county attorney, who did not share Gray’s interpretation of state law.
Fremont County Clerk Julie Freese told the committee she previously emailed Gray, inviting him to Lander to see the county’s drop box for himself.
Freese said she suggested they look at the security footage together and “collaborate on how to better do this if you think it isn’t adequate.
“I did not receive a response at all — at all. Not even ‘I don’t have time, I don’t want to see it.’ Nothing. Not one thing,” Freese said.
Later in the meeting, Gray said he didn’t respond to Freese because he’s long maintained that he does not see the drop boxes as statutorily authorized.
Rep. Steve Johnson, R-Cheyenne, asked Freese if she ever considered having the clerk’s office open 24/7 during the election in order to avoid having a drop box.
“Clerks spent a lot of time at the courthouse. I will tell you that. That’s not very far off that we’re not almost there 24/7” Freese said.
Laramie County Clerk Debra Lee provided some numbers for the committee to consider.
Thirty-six percent of Laramie County voters in the 2024 general election, for example, cast their ballot by returning it to the clerk via drop box, Lee said.
“To bring this a little closer to home, nearly a third of the 2024 general election ballots that were delivered in the drop box were from constituents of Representative Brown, Johnson and Lucas,” Lee added.
The three Cheyenne lawmakers are members of the committee.
When Rep. Ann Lucas asked how many ballots were delivered late by the United States Postal Service, Lee said “they’re still coming in.”
Amendments
While the clerks’ association did not take a position on the bill, Ervin said there were six areas in the bill where the clerks could use clarification.
If a ballot is hand delivered to another county office, for example, could the clerk’s office accept the ballot? Would a drop box within the clerk’s office be permissible? If a ballot is dropped into a clerk’s general business box, would there be a remedy available to the clerks to contact that voter? Can a private courier, such as FedEx, be used to mail an absentee ballot? Would the prohibition apply to mail ballot elections for special districts?
And can a ballot be hand delivered to a sworn election judge?
The committee addressed just one of those concerns by specifying that only USPS could be used to mail absentee ballots.
Lawmakers also amended the bill to allow voters to hand deliver ballots to municipal clerks, as suggested to the committee by Joey Correnti, a podcaster and executive director of Rural Wyoming Matters.
Wyoming locks up kids at the highest rates in the nation. Bill to help understand why died without debate.
Wyoming has for decades incarcerated juvenile offenders at the highest rates in the nation.
The state’s multi-year efforts to reduce those numbers have been hampered, in part, by an unclear picture of why kids enter the justice system and whether incarceration seems to help. A bill to strengthen data and information sharing about state-supervised youth, including those in the juvenile justice system, died without debate in the House Judiciary Committee last week.
The five no votes came from freshman lawmakers aligned with the Wyoming Freedom Caucus. Rep. Lloyd Larsen, R-Lander, a 12-year veteran of the House, led the effort to craft the measure. He took the bill’s failure as evidence more could have been done to communicate the backstory behind the need for more data.
“We didn’t just come up with this on a Saturday night while we were eating popcorn,” Larsen said of the Joint Judiciary Interim Committee-sponsored legislation. “We’ve gone through two interims of looking at this.”
Why it matters
While many of Wyoming’s neighboring states have decreased their use of juvenile incarceration, the Equality State once again posted the highest rate in the nation, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Justice. In 2021, Wyoming courts removed adjudicated delinquents — juvenile justice-specific terminology for young people convicted of crimes — from their homes and placed them in public and private facilities at over three times the national average. The majority of the offenses were non-violent, and 13% were technical violations — in other words, kids failing to comply with the terms of their probation, be it missing a drug test or poor academic performance.
Research has found juvenile incarceration does not significantly deter delinquent behavior or improve public safety while leading to poor outcomes for young people — from lower academic performance to higher suicide rates. Instead, studies show that community-based programs, which address the root causes of delinquent behavior while keeping kids close to home, lead to better outcomes and do so with a smaller price tag for the state.
Five years after South Dakota implemented juvenile justice reform — investing $6.1 million in expanded community-based programs in 2015 — the state cut the number of incarcerated youth in half and reduced its juvenile corrections budget.
Data collected by the U.S. Department of Justice shows Wyoming had the highest juvenile incarceration rate in 2021. (Source: Easy Access to the Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.)
House Bill 48, “Department of family services-confidentiality amendments,” which died in the House Judiciary Committee last week, was seen as an important step in a multi-year effort to understand what’s driving Wyoming’s heavy, and expensive, reliance on juvenile incarceration.
How we got here
Back in 2021, when the Joint Judiciary Committee set out to study juvenile justice, the panel’s members quickly realized the first problem they would need to tackle was a lack of consistent data.
That’s in part because Wyoming doesn’t have a statewide juvenile justice system. Instead of sending all juvenile cases to juvenile court, county attorneys have discretion — a policy known as single point of entry — and each county takes a different approach. Some will funnel juvenile cases to municipal and circuit courts, some rely on juvenile courts and others routinely use all three. There are also counties with diversion programs designed to keep juvenile offenders out of court altogether and others that rely heavily on juvenile probation programs.
But no matter what a county decides to do, once a court orders a young person into custody, the state pays the bill. And for decades the state had no way of assessing what was happening at the county level to drive up, or drive down, juvenile incarceration rates, or whether money spent to confine kids was having the desired effect.
Wyoming didn’t know high school graduation rates or recidivism rates for juvenile offenders, or how often they reoffend as adults.
Acknowledging it’s hard to manage what you can’t measure, the Wyoming Legislature passed a Joint Judiciary Committee-sponsored bill in 2022 mandating the Department of Family Services set up the Juvenile Justice Information System.
While DFS oversees out-of-home placements and juvenile incarceration, the agency quickly realized that pre-existing privacy laws would make it hard to fulfill the Legislature’s mandate for a comprehensive system tracking how kids enter the system or what happens after. That’s because DFS, the Wyoming Department of Health, the Wyoming Department of Education, the Wyoming Department of Corrections and the court system, which all hold pieces of the puzzle, are limited in what information they can exchange.
Solving that problem was a top priority of the Legislature’s Mental Health and Vulnerable Adult Task Force, which convened over the last two years. House Bill 48 was the fruit of that labor.
Larsen, the Lander representative who co-chaired the task force, said enhanced data sharing is about helping state agencies better serve constituents and operate more effectively and cost-efficiently.
Rep. Lloyd Larsen, R-Lander, on the House floor during the Wyoming Legislature’s 2024 budget session. (Ashton Hacke/WyoFile)
“I think data really helps us identify what programs are needed and what programs aren’t,” Larsen told WyoFile.
Balancing the state’s desire to evaluate programs with privacy and confidentiality was a focus of the task force, Larsen said, given the vulnerability of the families DFS serves.
“We should always be nervous about privacy,” Larsen said, which is why so much time went into “House Bill 48 which really addresses a very delicate, sensitive issue.”
Those concerns were also on DFS Director Korin Schmidt’s mind when she testified to the House Judiciary Committee about the need for HB 48.
“We take seriously the confidentiality of the information that we gather,” Schmidt said. “However, the confidentiality statutes, in large part … were created in the ‘70s, and they didn’t contemplate a time where maybe we could help these families a little bit earlier, a little bit more effectively, while also being good stewards of the dollar, while also ensuring efficiencies across our systems, both internally and externally.”
State agencies are simply unable to answer many fundamental questions about juvenile justice, Schmidt told the committee.
“We have frequently been asked the question: How many kids that you serve in your juvenile justice system go into the Department of Corrections system? We can’t answer that question,” Schmidt said. “And one of the reasons we can’t answer that question is because of our confidentiality statutes.”
House Bill 48 would give the DFS director authority to initiate changes in how data is shared between state agencies through a rules-changing process requiring public and legislative input.
That ensures “the general public also knows what it is that we are doing in a very transparent way,” Schmidt said.
Those guardrails did not persuade the majority of the House Judiciary Committee — the bill died on a 5-4 vote. Reps. Laurie Bratten from Sheridan and Marlene Brady from Rock Springs, briefly mentioned privacy concerns before casting no votes, along with Republican Reps. Tom Kelly from Sheridan, Jayme Lien from Casper and Joe Webb from Lyman.
What now?
Juvenile justice data sharing was just one piece of HB 48. The bill would also have enhanced DFS’ ability to evaluate its other programs — helping abuse and neglect victims, for example — and opened up opportunities for cross-agency referrals between DFS case workers, public health nurses and mental health providers.
While HB 48 died in committee, Larsen said, that doesn’t mean solutions are off the table this session. He suggested individual lawmakers may bring their own versions of the bill.
Lawmakers have until Jan. 29 to introduce bills in the Senate and Feb. 3 in the House.
“I don’t think that it’s in the best interest of Wyoming that we let them gain more access to our ground,” Banks told fellow lawmakers Thursday. “I also think it’s in the best interest of Wyoming that we don’t allow just outright sales of state ground.”
The slate of all-Republican co-sponsors includes Reps. Ocean Andrew of Laramie, Jeremy Haroldson of Wheatland, Reuben Tarver of Gillette, John Winter of Thermopolis and Sens. Bob Ide of Casper, John Kolb of Rock Springs and Cheri Steinmetz of Torrington. Banks and most of his cosponsors are counted among the hard-line cohort that includes the Wyoming Freedom Caucus and its Wyoming Senate allies.
If enacted unchanged, the bill would add a new legal directive for Wyoming land managers, who often pursue land sales and swaps with the federal government. Some of those deals are compelled by the Wyoming Constitution, which requires officials to maximize revenues from school trust lands to fund public education.
“We have rules and regulations, and we also have statutes that have been provided to us, and they’re a little bit contrary to what the intent of the bill is,” Wyoming Office of State Lands and Investments Acting Director Jason Crowder told the House Agriculture, State and Public Lands & Water Resources Committee Thursday as the panel took public comment and expert testimony on the measure.
The Office of State Lands and Investments, he explained, is charged with protecting and increasing the value of “the whole corpus” of the state’s lands and associated trust accounts.
“Land transactions are the best way for us to do that,” Crowder said.
Looking down at the Jackson Hole valley from the elevated northeast corner of the Kelly Parcel in November 2024. The state of Wyoming sold the parcel to the National Park Service for $100 million the following month. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)
In the case of the Kelly Parcel, the $100 million Wyoming received for 640 acres was $38 million more than the property’s appraised value. When the State Board of Land Commissioners OK’d the sale in a 3-2 vote, Treasurer Curt Meier said that, through investments, his office could turn the proceeds into $1.6 billion.
“That could be a perpetual, actually generational fund that would benefit the students and the education system of the state of Wyoming,” the treasurer said at the time.
Not all of his board colleagues agreed. Superintendent of Public Instruction Megan Degenfelder contested the sale, pushing instead for a land swap that would return fossil-fuel-rich federal land in the Powder River Basin.
Degenfelder, the daughter of an oilman, spoke in support of Banks’ bill.
“I fundamentally agree with the concept that we cannot continue to increase federal ownership of the state of Wyoming,” the superintendent told the House Ag committee. “48% of the surface is owned by the federal government, 65% of mineral acreage is owned by the federal government. We cannot afford to increase that number.”
Lawmakers echoed displeasure with federal land management inside Wyoming’s borders. Banks cited both the Bureau of Land Management’s recent revisions of resource management plans for the Red Desert region and the Powder River Basin.
Rep. Reuben Tarver (R-Gillette) testifies to the House Agriculture Committee during the Wyoming Legislature’s 2025 general session in Cheyenne. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)
Tarver, a co-sponsor representing Gillette, wasn’t on the committee and couldn’t move to amend it, but suggested sweetening the pot for Wyoming and requiring a 10-to-1 or 100-to-1 acre requirement for any land deals.
“I don’t see where the federal government manages absolutely anything very well,” Tarver said. “Everything they touch turns into a problem for the state of Wyoming.”
Rep. Karlee Provenza, D-Laramie, asked her fellow representative if he’d be OK with the bill if it infringed on private property owners’ rights to sell their land to the federal government.
The valley in which the West Fork dam and reservoir would be constructed. (Angus M. Thuermer, Jr./WyoFile)
The Medicine Bow deal’s benefit to an agricultural community didn’t sway Kelly Carpenter, a lobbyist for the Wyoming Farm Bureau Federation, who testified in support of the legislation.
House Bill 118 passed through the House Agriculture Committee in an 8-1 vote after minimal debate, with Provenza opposed. It heads next to the Wyoming House of Representatives, where it’ll need to be read, and voted on, three times on the lower chamber’s floor.
After decades of political maneuvering, Grand Teton buys Wyoming’s Kelly Parcel today
The federal government bought Wyoming’s 640-acre Kelly Parcel school section for $100 million today, a transaction that will see the wildlife-rich property that lawmakers had proposed for commercial development, instead preserved as part of Grand Teton National Park.
The U.S. Department of the Interior and the Grand Teton National Park Foundation announced the completion of this morning’s sale after the foundation spearheaded a $37.6 million drive for private funds to augment $62.4 million in federal conservation money.
Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland called the transaction “an incredible milestone, decades in the making.” In a statement, she said the purchase “will benefit our public lands and Wyoming’s public school students for generations to come.”
Grand Teton Superintendent Chip Jenkins, who had traveled the state to lobby residents for the preservation initiative, thanked the foundation. “We simply would not be here today without them and the thousands of people who raised their voice in support of conserving this important part of the park,” he said in a statement.
“We are in awe.”
Leslie Mattson
Three unnamed families made key “lead” gifts, the Grand Teton National Park Foundation said while the National Park Foundation, National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (through Walmart’s Acres for America Program) and the Jackson Hole Land Trust boosted the drive. Almost 400 donors, from 46 states, gave anywhere from $10 to $15 million, the foundation said in a statement.
“We are in awe,” Grand Teton National Park Foundation President Leslie Mattson said of the many contributions. “We are so proud to have helped enable this incredible achievement for the American people, Grand Teton National Park, and the state of Wyoming.”
The parcel lies at the mouth of the Gros Ventre River Valley and is used by migrating pronghorn, mule deer, elk and other species. In considering how to maximize the financial benefit to Wyoming from state-owned property, some officials mulled state commercial development or advocated for a public auction that could have led to private ownership and construction of an exclusive subdivision.
Some Wyoming politicians, wary of federal land management policies and holdings in Wyoming that amount to about 48% of the state, sought unsuccessfully to bargain the parcel for federal coal lands.
To close the sale, The Conservation Fund provided a bridge loan. The loan enabled the Grand Teton National Park Foundation to accept multi-year pledges, the group said.
The U.S. Department of the Interior provided the federal money through the Land and Water Conservation Fund.
The square-mile section was the largest piece of unprotected land inside Grand Teton, the foundation said, and had been the target of conservation efforts since the 1990s. The late U.S. Sen. Craig Thomas passed federal legislation in 2003 enabling the transaction and the Wyoming Legislature this year conditionally authorized the sale.
The parcel became school trust land upon Wyoming’s statehood on July 10, 1890, and as mandated by the state constitution, was earmarked to generate funds for school children and several institutions.
The foundation thanked supporting stakeholders from across the state, including conservation and sports organizations, state legislators and leaders, Gov. Mark Gordon and Sen. Mike Gierau (D-Jackson).
Complaint asks governor to remove Weston County Clerk from office
Gov. Mark Gordon will consider whether to begin the process for removing Weston County Clerk Becky Hadlock from office after receiving a complaint from eight local qualified electors who allege “acts of misconduct and malfeasance,” according to a Friday press release from the governor’s office.
The release did not detail the allegations or name the complainants, but this is not the first time Weston County’s elections practices have been scrutinized. Following November’s general election, an initial miscount caused by an error of Hadlock’s drew fierce criticism from Weston County voters.
“Given the very serious nature of the potential consequences involved, removal of an official duly elected by the voters of Weston County, preserving the objectivity and integrity of this process is crucial,” Gordon’s press release said.
State law lays out a process for the governor to “commence action” in removing a county officer who is “guilty of misconduct or malfeasance in office” by filing a petition in district court. In other words, if Gordon finds in his review of the complaint against Hadlock that she appears to be guilty, the governor can request the clerk be tried in district court for misconduct or malfeasance in office.
“Consequently, the Governor will have no comment on this investigation while it is ongoing, focusing instead on reviewing and determining relevant facts,” the press release said.
In November, Secretary of State Chuck Gray said his office was planning a “more full analysis evaluating [the clerk’s] conduct” to present to the Attorney General’s office. Gray did not have an update on the matter at a press conference last week, but told WyoFile Friday that his office will be releasing the results of its investigation in early 2025.
How we got here
For the general election, Hadlock printed three versions of the ballot due to errors on the first two, Gray told the Wyoming State Canvassing Board in November.
It’s not unusual for clerks to reprint ballots, but it became a problem when some voters were given the erroneous first and second versions. As a result, tabulators miscounted votes in a county commission race as well as the competition for House District 1, where House Speaker-elect Rep. Chip Neiman (R-Hulett) was running unopposed for reelection.
The initial, unofficial results for Weston County showed Neiman received 166 votes while 1,289 left that part of the ballot blank, also known as an undervote. That count caught Secretary of State Chuck Gray’s attention on election night, he said, and when Hadlock didn’t answer his calls, he sent the sheriff’s office to her home.
Hadlock initially denied there was an issue, Gray said, but ultimately agreed to the secretary of state’s request that her office complete a hand tabulation of the ballots, which confirmed her mistake.
The recount showed that Neiman received 1,269 votes, and the results were certified by the county canvassing board.
The state canvassing board also certified Weston County’s results, but at the objection of local voters who asked at the meeting that they delay doing so. Newcastle Mayor Pam Gualtieri was among the objectors.
“As the mayor, it’s my job to take care of [local citizens], and we would like to see Weston County hand-counted by another county, not ours,” Gualtieri told the board.
Gualtieri reiterated those concerns to WyoFile Friday. Though she was not one of the eight residents who filed the verified complaint, she wants to see some accountability.
“A lot of residents just don’t feel like it was taken seriously [by the clerk,] and it’s affecting their thoughts on the next election,” Gualtieri said.
Only two races were recounted in Weston County, but Gualtieri said that’s needed in every race.
“Even the people who ran in the election are concerned if their numbers are correct, if they’re supposed to have those positions or not,” she said.
Whatever the outcome of the complaint, Gualtieri said Weston County has a long road ahead of itself.
“It’s easier to lose trust than it is to gain the trust,” Gualtieri said.
Hadlock did not respond to WyoFile’s request for comment.
Wyoming lawmakers pursue transgender bathroom, sports restrictions in 2025 session
Republican legislators are planning to bring at least four bills to Wyoming’s 2025 general session aimed at restricting transgender people’s participation in certain sports and access to public bathrooms and other spaces.
Lawmakers’ increasing focus on transgender issues comes on the heels of controversy at the University of Wyoming involving its women’s volleyball team and an alleged transgender player on an opposing team. It also follows an expensive and hard-fought campaign season that saw the Wyoming Freedom Caucus win control of the House and move the body further to the right.
The exact details of the legislation remain to be seen — none of the bills had been published by press time — but they vary in scope, according to several lawmakers who spoke with WyoFile. They are being drafted less than a year after Wyoming banned gender-affirming care for minors including puberty blockers and hormone therapy.
Rep. Martha Lawley (R-Worland), who announced in an op-ed plans to bring both a sports bill and a private spaces bill, said she sees the legislation as an opportunity for lawmakers to unify around a single issue.
“I would like this to become something that’s more about the cooperation that we can engage in when we really want to,” Lawley told WyoFile. “And if there’s one place that we could showcase that it would be on an issue like this.”
One of Lawley’s bills would expand Wyoming’s transgender athlete ban beyond its current limitation on middle and high school girls sports to include elementary school and intercollegiate competition. The second measure would prohibit transgender girls and women from using women’s public bathrooms, locker rooms, showers and correctional facilities.
Lawley defeated a Freedom Caucus-backed opponent in the primary election. Whether the group brings its own legislation on the two related matters is not yet clear. Freedom Caucus Chair Rep. Rachel Rodriguez-Williams (R-Cody) told WyoFile, “We haven’t seen [Lawley’s bills] yet, but we are pleased to see her being more responsive to the will of the people of Wyoming.”
Rep. Martha Lawley (R-Worland) sits at her desk during the 2024 budget session. (Ashton J. Hacke/Wyofile)
Meanwhile, Sen. Wendy Schuler (R-Evanston) — the lead sponsor of the 2023 sports bill that became law without Gov. Mark Gordon’s signature — told WyoFile she’ll also bring legislation to extend sports ban to the collegiate level. Plus, Park County lawmakers are expected to bring a bathroom bill in support of a resolution passed by Powell’s school board last month.
Rep. Karlee Provenza (D-Laramie) told WyoFile she’s saddened by the forthcoming slate of legislation.
“I know that my colleagues are good people. I know that we all want to solve issues and problems, and so when I see this divergence from what I believe are our shared values, it’s just disappointing,” she said, adding that she’d prefer to see lawmakers coalesce around other issues like wildfires, affordable housing and recent trona mine layoffs in southwest Wyoming.
“We have real problems here,” Provenza said. “I thought I was coming [to the Legislature] to solve problems and not attack people in my district, because that’s who this impacts — it’s my district.”
Sports bans
The University of Wyoming women’s volleyball team forfeited an Oct. 5 match against San José State University because the rival team is alleged to have a transgender player.
Wyoming’s players were split 9-9, with one abstention in their team vote on whether to play the Spartans. Records indicate the decision to forfeit was ultimately made for them by higher-ups after pressure mounted from the public and elected officials.The circumstances in part inspired Lawley’s legislation.
“What happened with the volleyball was very eye-opening, I think, for a lot of people in Wyoming,” Lawley said. “I had a lot of response from constituents about that when it was happening. They were very appreciative of the decision made by the University of Wyoming. They felt it was the right decision. Honestly, their only criticism was, ‘Why did it take so long? Why was that so hard to do or figure out?’”
Lawley said her bill would provide clarity in future situations by requiring eligibility standards for intercollegiate sports at UW and Wyoming’s community colleges to be based on biological sex. It would also prohibit teams from competing against out-of-state transgender players.
“This isn’t about shutting anyone out—it’s about giving every young woman the chance to compete on a level playing field,” Lawley wrote in her op-ed. “The amendment provides legal remedies to hold institutions accountable if those rights are violated.”
The legislation also extends the ban already on the books to include all grade levels in the K-12 system. As written, the law only applies to middle and high school girls sports.
While Schuler said she’ll likely support Lawley’s bill, she’s also planning to bring a version that would only include intercollegiate sports.
“Mine is just a little bit more simple,” Schuler said.
Sen. Wendy Schuler (R-Evanston) during the 2023 general session. (Megan Lee Johnson/WyoFile)
When Schuler first brought legislation in 2023 to impose the ban, she originally included collegiate sports. She eased off that, however, when UW asked her to allow the National Collegiate Athletic Association to sort things out instead.
But the NCAA, “they just haven’t done that,” Schuler said. This time, Schuler hasn’t gotten approval from UW, she said, but “they didn’t try to discourage me. Let’s just put it that way.”
Private spaces
In November, the Park County School District #1 Board of Trustees voted unanimously for a resolution that calls on lawmakers to pass legislation related to restroom use, the Powell-Tribune reported.
“Due to conflicting case law and legal authority, the current legal and legislative landscape of the United States and Wyoming does not provide a clear foundation for individual school districts to set policy surrounding the issue of sex-based restroom use,” the resolution reads.
“The district will advocate in the 2025 legislative session and support the passage of legislation similar to Oklahoma Statute 70-1-125 ‘Restrooms in Public Schools’ which will clarify the issue of restroom use for all Wyoming school districts,” the resolution states.
The 2022 Oklahoma law requires restrooms or locker rooms in public schools to be designated exclusively based on biological sex.
Lawley said she’s heard Park County lawmakers are planning to bring their own legislation to account for the resolution. Meanwhile, her legislation would cast a wider net than Oklahoma’s, applying the law to not just public schools but other public buildings such as correctional facilities.
“We have all heard stories of discomfort and fear when policies aren’t clear, leaving institutions scrambling to balance privacy concerns with the risk of lawsuits,” Lawley wrote in her op-ed. “It’s time for the Legislature to act.”
As for enforcement, Lawley said her private spaces bill would give anyone legal standing in court should they sue a school district or other public entity for not complying with the law — also known as a private right of action. Similarly in Texas, a private right of action allows private individuals to sue abortion providers or anyone who “aids and abets” an abortion in a Texas court.
“Other states have used funding as a motivation, and that could be something we look at again,” Lawley said. That could prove to be complicated, however, since the state is constitutionally obligated to fully fund public education.
The Wyoming Legislature’s general session starts Jan. 14.
BEFORE YOU GO… If you learned something from this article, pay it forward and contribute to WyoFile. Our work is funded by readers like you who are committed to unbiased journalism that works for you, not for the algorithms.
