State lawmakers are advancing a grab-bag of bills to preempt local government authority again in 2026, including measures that affect employment law and imitate the Trump administration’s views of DEI and gender identity.
Florida and Iowa legislators have won statehouse approval of preemption bills restricting local governments’ diversity policies and enforcement of anti-discrimination ordinances, respectively. Tennessee, meanwhile, enacted a sweeping law (SB 674) last month that declares all regulation of private-sector employment off limits for counties and municipalities.
Such measures, nearly all sponsored by Republicans, continue a perennial tradition of state lawmakers exploring new ways to limit the authority of local governments. The bills often aim to rein in what their supporters see as overly burdensome regulation by more left-leaning city councils. They’ve often covered single issues such as minimum wage or paid sick leave, but at times target broader policy categories, as in Tennessee’s law.
Some states this year are considering ways to use preemption bills to advance President Donald Trump’s agenda. The president has demanded cutting of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at the federal government level and among contractors, while simultaneously calling for federal civil rights enforcers to target corporations’ diversity work as discriminatory.
The Florida bill (SB 1134) awaiting Gov. Ron DeSantis’ (R) signature would empower the governor to remove local officials if they violate the measure’s curbs on DEI. Among its provisions, the bill bans local governments from allowing taxpayer funds to be spent on DEI efforts, including by their contractors and vendors.
This year’s bills show “a very specific connection to what we’re seeing at the federal level,” said Katie Belanger, lead consultant for the Local Solutions Support Center, which opposes preemption efforts. “A good number of the bills we are tracking are focused on DEI preemption,” many of them specific to public-sector diversity programs.
Iowa lawmakers also followed Trump’s lead with a preemption measure, targeting anti-bias protections for transgender and non-binary workers for a second consecutive year.
This year’s legislation (SF 579), which Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) signed into law last month, bans cities and counties from enforcing civil rights laws that deal with protected traits not covered by state law. It’s a follow-up to last year’s removal of gender identity as a protected trait from the statewide anti-bias law—the first time a state repealed a category from civil rights protections.
Idaho also is considering a bill (H557) restricting anti-bias ordinances that would eliminate local protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
‘Whack-a-Mole’
Preempting local regulation of employment practices benefits businesses, as they can avoid having to follow a patchwork of city and county laws throughout the state, said RJ Gibson, government affairs director for the Tennessee Chamber of Commerce & Industry.
“The more certainty we have, the more uniformity we have, the easier it is to make investments and hire people,” he said.
Tennessee law already preempted local governments on specific workplace-related issues, including minimum wage and anti-discrimination law. But lawmakers have tended to propose preemptions in reaction to ordinances a city or county was considering or recently passed.
This year’s legislation “was mostly just an attempt to stop playing whack-a-mole and make it clear the state occupies this space. We’re not going to have to keep doing this every year,” Gibson said.
Some legal scholars and worker advocates have criticized the trend toward preempting local laws, whether employment-related or covering a range of other topics including gun control, elections, and cooperation with immigration enforcement.
Preemption efforts “are gutting the capacity of municipalities to enact ordinances that are consistent with the value structure of the people who elected them,” said Lisa Amsler, an Indiana University law professor emerita. “It’s undermining democracy at the local government level.”
Broad Swipes
Texas took arguably the broadest swipe at preempting local authority in 2023, with what critics called the “death star” law. Its practical effects are still unclear, as a first-of-its-kind lawsuit seeking to void more than 100 local laws in Dallas based on that preemption law remains pending in state court.
Among the ordinances it could preempt is a local law banning discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, which Texas’ statewide civil rights law doesn’t explicitly do.
Indiana considered a similar bill (HB 1416) this year, essentially blocking all local regulation that isn’t explicitly authorized by the state. The bill didn’t get a vote before the legislature adjourned for the year in early March.
A bill pending in Pennsylvania (HB 241) would mirror the Tennessee law in broadly preempting all local regulation of employment. The GOP-sponsored measure hasn’t advanced out of committee in the Democratic-majority state House.
“We’ve started seeing preemption switch from specific issues to gutting the ability of local governments to function,” Belanger said.
Preemption as a concept is at least as old as the US Constitution, which provides that federal law supersedes any conflicting state or local laws, said Christopher Koliba, a professor in the public affairs school at the University of Kansas. He’s researching the health effects of preempting policies that target poverty like minimum wage increases and rent control, particularly in cities with large Black populations.
It’s a tool that both progressive and conservative policymakers have wielded, such as when the federal government enforced desegregation of schools during the Civil Rights movement, he said.
“It’s a neutral idea in some ways,” Koliba said. But it’s relatively new to see it “used more to advance political agendas that are emanating from statehouses to try to impose their will on local jurisdictions.”
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