Is Utah passing too many laws? Gov. Cox thinks so

SALT LAKE CITY — Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said he will discuss changes with lawmakers to decrease the number of bills jammed into the state's short legislative session.

The Beehive State has one of the shortest lawmaking periods in the entire country, coming in at a constitutionally mandated 45 days. In 2025, only one other state has a 45-day session, Virginia, most other states range from four months to yearlong.

Despite its abbreviated session, Utah has seen a steady increase in the number of bills introduced and passed by the House and Senate's 104 members over the last decade, and especially in the last three years.

In 2025, the Legislature introduced 959 bills and resolutions — a new record. And it sent 582 bills to the governor's desk — second only to 2024, which saw elected representatives write, debate and approve 591 pieces of legislation.

"I think we passed way too many bills," Cox told reporters on the final night of the legislative session.

Cox touted the work of his administration collaborating with the legislative branch to fit so much into such a short time and complimented legislators' "messy" "sausage-making" as having produced mostly good policy. But there is room to improve, he said.

Cox committed to talk with legislative leadership during the interim between sessions about ways to "ratchet" down the number of bills "so that we can have more process, so that we can get better outcomes."

"The process really matters," Cox said. "How we do things is almost as important as what we do."

While legislators got to say goodbye to the Capitol late on March 7, the end of the session marked the beginning of an intensive 20-day window where Cox's office will review each of the bills.

Cox refused to comment on whether he planned to veto any specific bills. In 2024, Cox used his veto power on seven bills to instruct the Legislature on which bills were unnecessary because they could have been solved with a "phone call."

"There is a cost associated with each new piece of legislation, and I'm increasingly concerned that we're not giving government administration adequate time to implement policy changes — both at the state and local levels," Cox told the Deseret News in a statement on Wednesday. "With this recent trend of record-setting numbers of bills, it's time to rethink our approach."

Will lawmakers limit bills?

Over the last 15 years, the number of bills introduced each session has increased from the low 700s to the high 900s, according to data compiled by Adam Brown, an associate professor of political science at Brigham Young University.

The number of bills passed has similarly increased from around 480 to 580. As the number of bills has gone up, the time spent on the floor debating bills in both chambers has decreased from a median of around 14 minutes to 11 minutes, Brown's analysis found.

"Lawmakers have a built-in incentive to introduce legislation, since passing more bills in their own name gives them something to highlight to voters," Brown said. "But with only 45 days in the legislative session, more bills inevitably mean less time for thoughtful debate."

Senate Majority Leader Kirk Cullimore, R-Sandy, said during the last week of the session that the number of bills being passed at the state level might actually reflect positive differences between Utah and Washington, D.C.

Unlike Congress, where updates to code, small amendments and new provisions can all be added into federal statute in one giant "omnibus" bill, the Utah Legislature must consider each separate issue in state code in separate bills. A large portion of these bills are passed rapidly with a unanimous "consent" vote.

"We have the one subject rule," Cullimore said. "Some of them are just tweaking things that we've done in years past, and it's a line or two. At the federal level, you'd see that just merged into other bills."

Senate President Stuart Adams, R-Layton, pushed back against policy changes to bring down the total number of bills.

While he would prefer there to be fewer bills, Adams said there is already a vigorous vetting process in place that winnows the initial number of around 1,500 bills that start being drafted, to less than 1,000 that are introduced, to less than 600 that are ultimately passed on the floor after committee consideration.

"We're not going to limit the number of bills," Adams said. "We're not going to set a quota on it."

How does Utah compare to other states?

Utah legislators actually introduce far fewer bills than legislators in other states — though this may have something to do with the truncated legislative session.

Over the 2023-24 legislative session, New York lawmakers introduced 24,284 bills, Massachusetts had 16,670 and Texas had 13,092, with many states hovering between 2,000 and 5,000.

Utah sat at the back of the pack, with Alaska introducing the fewest bills, at 812, and Wyoming, Idaho and the Dakotas joining Utah at around 1,000 introduced pieces of legislation.

Some states have placed a limit on the number of bills each lawmaker may introduce. California limits its lawmakers to 35 bills that they can introduce during each two-year session.

Utah could follow California's lead in setting a cap on the number of bills each lawmaker can introduce, Brown said, or the state could also consider extending the length of the session, letting lawmakers hire professional staff to help evaluate bills or setting earlier deadlines for lawmakers to draft, introduce and pass bills.

But, at Utah's levels, an increasing number of new bill files might actually be a good thing, according to James Curry, a professor of political science at the University of Utah.

"One of the measures of a healthy legislature is members actively introducing policy ideas (rather than doing very little and letting unelected bureaucrats make policy)," Curry said. "We should want them trying to do more, not less."

The more interesting question is why Utah legislators introduce so few bills, Curry said. The reasons could include the inertia of doing things as they have been done in the past or a desire from leadership to maintain more control over the process, Curry said.

Which lawmakers introduced the most bills?

The number of bills introduced by individual lawmakers varies dramatically.

Over the past four legislative sessions, a handful of lawmakers have consistently introduced two to four times the number of bills as the median lawmaker.

These lawmakers include: Sens. Wayne Harper, R-Taylorsville; Lincoln Fillmore, R-South Jordan; and Todd Weiler, R-Woods Cross; and House Rules Chair Jordan Teuscher, R-South Jordan.

In 2025, Weiler, Harper and Fillmore again topped the list, with Weiler requesting 33 bill files and Harper and Fillmore each requesting 26. Teuscher requested more than any other representative, with 19 bill requests.

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