The Iowa Legislature's 2025 session opens Monday, Jan. 13. Iowa State has requested nearly $11.8 million in additional appropriations from the state for the fiscal year that begins July 1.
University leaders didn't ask for an increase to the general university operating support, but instead grouped seven funding requests in two focus areas:
- Enhancing Iowa's rural economy
- Supporting Iowa businesses
The seven requests are:
Enhancing Iowa's rural economy
1. Incremental operations funding for the Ag Experiment Station ($3.75 million) and Cooperative Extension ($1 million) to help maintain the state's agricultural competitiveness and explore opportunities for growth. Three proposed focus areas are: agricultural workforce and entrepreneurship, digital and precision livestock and crops, ag economics policy and training.
2. New support ($4 million) to open four manufacturing hubs in partnership with regional educational institutions and create new avenues for students and manufacturing employees to complete four-year and advanced degrees. Funding would upgrade existing training centers with advanced technologies and update and align curricula. The name for the concept is MakeIowa.
3. New support ($1 million) for scholarships that assure in-state tuition at the College of Veterinary Medicine for up to 10 students/year accepted into the ISU Production Animal-Veterinary Early Acceptance Program established in 2023. Upon graduation, the scholarship would be forgiven if a veterinarian worked for five years as a food animal veterinarian in rural Iowa.
4. Incremental support ($250,000) for livestock disease research, to leverage even more external research funding and combat threats to the state's livestock industry.
Supporting Iowa businesses
5. Incremental operations support ($1.5 million) for the Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory (VDL), particularly its new Biosafety Level 2 facility. Current appropriations and the lab's fee income can't cover this expense. About 16% of the VDL's operating budget comes from state appropriations, compared to an average 48% at other VDLs.
6. New support ($250,000) for staff and operations in entrepreneurship, for example, competition prizes, travel to national conferences and competitions for students and professional mentoring for faculty.
7. Additional support ($36,000) to reach a total of $3 million annually ($1 million each) for the three state bioscience platforms based at Iowa State (biobased products, vaccines and immunotherapeutics, and digital and precision agriculture), getting to the funding goal established in 2017 when the initiative launched.
Iowa State is not requesting state support for specific building projects in FY26, but is part of a $30 million capital request from the Iowa Board of Regents for deferred maintenance projects on all three university campuses. One Iowa State priority, if funds are appropriated, is a renovation of Atanasoff Hall for the computer science department.
Other session notes
In November, House majority leader Pat Grassley announced a new standing committee in the House of Representatives, the Higher Education Committee, which will deal with bills "containing significant reforms to Iowa's higher education system." To lead the committee, he appointed Rep. Taylor Collins (chair) and Rep. Jeff Shipley (vice chair). Grassley said Iowa's public universities need to concentrate on graduating students to fill the state's high-need jobs.
Special dates for the university this session:
- ISU Day at the state capitol is Tuesday, March 4.
- Undergraduate Research in the Capitol (20 students from each of the three regent universities) is Monday, March 31.
