This story is part of a series about how the 2025 Minnesota Legislative Session is affecting Jewish institutions and communal priorities. Stories will include views from Jewish lawmakers and coverage of how budget cuts might affect social services, elder care, and education.
In 2023, the Minnesota Legislature was full of positive energy.
Democrats had a rare trifecta — controlling the House, Senate, and governor’s office — and passed a series of popular bills.
Free school lunches, paid family leave, and a high-profile change to reading education came through, along with other policies. It was also a boom year for Jewish priorities, with Holocaust education, drivers licenses for all, hate crimes legislation, and other wins.
“We had an unprecedented surplus of $17 billion and had the opportunity to really be visionary…about how we invest in the future of Minnesota,” said State Rep. Sandra Feist (DFL-New Brighton), a Jewish lawmaker.
By contrast, the 2025 legislative session has been “an unwelcome change,” she said.
Minnesota has a $6 billion projected deficit, and lawmakers are negotiating over difficult cuts to balance the state budget.
“A lot of people will be unhappy, but we don’t have a choice,” said State Sen. Ron Latz (DFL-St. Louis Park), another Jewish lawmaker. “We have to balance the budget, and that’s what we’re going to do.”
To understand what navigating this year’s session is like, TC Jewfolk spoke with Feist, Latz, and Ethan Roberts, a Jewish community lobbyist and the deputy executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas.
Among the challenges they pointed to: This time, there’s no trifecta to ease legislative work.
Instead, Republicans and Democrats are evenly split in the House, while Democrats have a one-vote majority in the Senate, making for a contentious session where 2023 wins could fall by the wayside.
Democrats are looking “clear-eyed at the decisions that we need to make around the budget,” Feist said, while negotiating “intensely with our [Republican] colleagues in the House to avoid giving up on our policy gains.”
But even under fire, key policies will remain, Latz said.
“Things like the [free] school lunch and…paid family medical leave, those kinds of things are not going to go away,” he said. “We’re just not going to accept removing those things from the budget.”
The legislature has until May 19 to pass budget bills. If they don’t succeed, lawmakers will likely reconvene for a special session in June. Without a budget, the state government will shut down after June 30.
The federal dimension
Looming over state budget negotiations is the fact that Minnesota depends on funding from the federal government.
That’s usually been a good thing.
For example, thanks to federal programs like Medicaid, the national insurance for people with low income, Minnesota is a leading state in providing health insurance.
And during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the state received an infusion of cash from Congress as part of national aid efforts.
That one-time funding led to Minnesota’s record $17.6 billion budget surplus in 2023. Only about $5 billion of that surplus was money made by the state through ongoing revenue, Latz said.
“We could put [federal pandemic aid money] into one-time needs…but we couldn’t put that into long-term ongoing expenditures,” he said.
Republicans now blame Democrats’ massive spending in the 2023 legislature for the current budget crisis. Latz rejects that accusation.
“Did we overspend last time? We didn’t,” he said. “We used [the surplus] very carefully and I think, meaningfully…but the economy goes up and it goes down, and when it goes down, it means state revenues go down, and [that] means we have to right-size our expenditures.”
Minnesota is not unique in its budget struggles — many states are dealing with deficits.
But what is novel about this budget cycle is that the federal government won’t step up to help.
Instead, the feds are “potentially going to make things infinitely worse,” said the JCRC’s Ethan Roberts.
President Donald Trump’s tariff policies are creating economic uncertainty, which contributes to steeper budget deficits. Trump’s trade wars are also raising expectations of a recession, which puts more pressure on state budgets.
Meanwhile, Trump and Congressional Republicans are pushing steep cuts to federal spending, which will cause state expenses to increase.
“There’s a tremendous contrast,” Roberts said. “We were in a tough spot in the midst of the Great Recession in terms of the state budget, but looking to Washington, there was substantial relief coming to the states.”
Roberts pointed out that the federal government, unlike most states, has no obligation to balance its budget. That means in times of need, the feds can provide aid without worrying about deficits — a lifeline for states that now seems cut off.
(Not worrying about deficits is something President Franklin D. Roosevelt learned the hard way. He caused a recession in the late 1930s when trying to balance the federal budget during the Great Depression.)
At the Capitol
Budget pressures mean a bleak atmosphere at the legislative session this year.
“There’s a real sense, with both parties, that we are looking at some really tough years in the future, and we’ve got to start getting the ship in order now and not wait,” Roberts said. “Otherwise, it’s going to be even worse.”
In the midst of negotiations and cuts, Jewish priorities are also at risk, ranging from funding that Jewish schools like Heilicher and Torah Academy rely on, to a Medicaid system that supports social services and long-term care for vulnerable people.
Other priorities are just scraping by, like funding for the Nonprofit Security Grant Program.
The NSGP is a federal program that Jewish organizations helped create. It helps all manner of nonprofits secure themselves against violence. The Trump administration paused the program for two months, and only recently started it back up again.
States can also set aside money to help NSGP recipients. As chair of the Senate Judiciary and Public Safety committee, that funding is under Latz’s purview — $125,000 per year for Minnesota organizations.
“It’s been a high priority for me over the years, and it’s within my budgetary authority, so we were able to find the money to keep it going,” Latz said.
The next few days will be key to the session, with the Minnesota Legislature aiming for the May 19 deadline to pass budget bills.
“The toughest decisions get made when you’re up against deadlines, when the pressure is the highest to finish the job,” Latz said.
Still, “we know that the real deadline is June 30, when the budget cycle ends…so that’s the practical deadline,” he said. “But I feel, at least for a good portion of what we’re doing here, that we’re going to get stuff done.”
Other lawmakers are gearing up for a budget fight that stretches into a June special session.
“It depends on when you consider the deadline for going to the mat…to really fight as hard as we can to protect the progress that we made last term,” Feist said.
“Is going to the mat finishing on time at the last minute on [May 19]?” she said. “Or is going to the mat seeking it out through June and making sure that we avoid a government shutdown, but don’t give in?”
Deciding that strategy is above Feist’s pay grade, she said. But she feels that Democrats should defend their 2023 policy victories, even if it means missing the May deadline.
In the meantime, the Minnesota Jewish community is hunkering down for hard times.
“I am sure that we will do everything that we can to ensure that the most vulnerable among us don’t fall through the cracks,” Roberts said.
“We got through the Great Recession, and the community got through [Bernie Madoff’s financial fraud], and we will get through this.”
