What lived and died in the 2026 Mississippi legislative session

By Michael Goldberg | Originally published by Mississippi Today

The Mississippi Legislature essentially concluded its 2026 regular legislative session on Thursday, after approving a $7.36-billion budget but failing to agree on a wide range of policy priorities despite Republicans holding majorities in both chambers.

Lawmakers have adjourned at least “on paper” until April 15 and could end up declining to return until next year. But House Speaker Jason White and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann said lawmakers could return sometime over the next two weeks to override potential vetoes from Gov. Tate Reeves or take up other priorities that didn’t make it across the finish line. 

Looking back at the session, the third of the current Legislature’s four-year term, legislators filed thousands of bills and spent hours debating proposals dealing with education, health care, voting rights, criminal justice, tax policy and more. They agreed on very little, and most bills died.

No issues garnered as much attention as “school choice” or “education freedom,” policies mostly championed by the House leadership that aimed to reshape the state’s K-12 education system. 

White made clear school choice would be the House’s top priority, and it became the session’s hallmark issue. His efforts around school choice were foiled in the Senate, which stood firm against policies a majority of its members didn’t support.  

READ MORE: Education was the signature issue of the ’26 legislative session. What happened?

PHOTO GALLERY: Mississippi Legislature wraps up its 2026 session

Outside of policy bills, lawmakers also agreed this session to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on projects across the state, including a $253-million “Christmas tree” bill of lawmakers’ pet projects for their districts. 

On Thursday, White said negotiations are continuing behind the scenes to reach an agreement on policy to increase the regulation and transparency of pharmacy benefit managers. He said if an agreement can be reached, lawmakers might ask Reeves to call a special legislative session in the near future to address the issue, which advocates argue is critical to protecting patients and independent pharmacists in Mississippi from rising drug costs. 

Some of the hallmark issues the Legislature tacked this session: 

School choice push dies. Modest teacher pay raise survives

The push for school choice led by White began almost immediately upon the conclusion of last year’s session, with the speaker creating a select committee that met over the summer and fall to study school choice and lay the groundwork for an omnibus, nearly 500-page education reform package. 

The bill would have directed some taxpayer funds to private schools, reduced public school transfer restrictions, made it easier to open charter schools statewide and would have expanded the literacy act that helped lead Mississippi to nationally noted success in reading. 

In the end, the only school choice legislation headed to the governor’s desk is an increase in the amount of tax credits available to Mississippians who donate to private schools. The Senate opposed the vast majority of the House’s school choice platform and killed the omnibus bill at a committee meeting that lasted less than two minutes. 

The Senate did support a school choice policy known as “portability” or “open enrollment,” which would allow students to enroll in public schools outside of their home districts. But that provision also fell victim to political combat between the chambers.

Proponents of school choice say the polices would give parents more say over their children’s education, while opponents warn of siphoning money away from an already underfunded public system and sending taxpayer money to private schools.

After the haggling over school choice subsided, lawmakers in both chambers shifted their focus to reaching an agreement on a proposal to give teachers a pay raise.  The House pushed a $5,000 raise while the Senate raised its plan from an initial $2,000 to $6,000, spread out over three years.  

The chambers ended up landing on a $2,000 pay raise for teachers and a number of other school employees. 

Medicaid costs spike, creating budget issues

Both chambers voted to spend $1.17 billion to fund the Mississippi Division of Medicaid, the second-largest expense for a state that struggles with abject poverty and poor health. 

Lawmakers were stunned earlier this year by the division’s initial request for a $390-million increase in state funding, despite state Medicaid enrollment dropping to its lowest level in over a decade. 

Lawmakers were also baffled, in part, because of a $160-million discrepancy between the agency’s request and a November budget proposal from Reeves, whose office oversees the Division of Medicaid.

But House and Senate leaders ultimately settled on funding the agency at a $165 million increase from the current year, and also provided an extra $35 million to cover a shortfall in this year’s budget.

A big reason why the state is having to spend more state dollars on funding the agency is that federal pandemic relief dollars that for years bolstered it are now depleted. 

Senate Appropriations Chairman Briggs Hopson said providing more state funds to Medicaid left very little room in the budget for other spending increases. 

Senate blocks efforts to reform prison health care 

House Corrections Chairwoman Becky Currie, a Republican from Brookhaven, introduced legislation based on findings gleaned from numerous tours of Mississippi’s prisons as well as instances of alleged denial of medical care documented by Mississippi Today in its “Behind Bars, Beyond Care” series.

She ushered passage of a range of bills on the House floor, from a proposal to create a mandatory hepatitis C testing program for prisoners to a measure that would have ensured the current prison health contractor, VitalCore Health Strategies, would need to compete for renewing its contract in 2027.

The bills passed the House in unanimous, bipartisan votes. But almost all of the bills died in the Senate after Corrections Committee Vice Chairwoman Lydia Chassaniol, a Republican from Winona, refused to bring them forward. 

Chassaniol ran the committee while Corrections Chairman Juan Barnett, a Democrat from Heidelberg, was out with an illness. She said she acted based on Barnett’s wishes. 

Currie said she plans to try again next year.

“Next year is the last year of the term, and I’m looking forward not backward,” Currie said. “I’ve tried hard, it is very frustrating, but all we can do is look forward. We have to fix this.”

Legalizing mobile sports betting dies again

The push to legalize mobile sports betting in Mississippi met the same fate it has for past three session. 

The House voted to legalize online sports betting while the Senate opposed the measure, and leaders refused to bring it up for a vote. In an ultimately fruitless strategic change this year, the House tied legalization to a cash infusion aimed at shoring up the state’s pension system. The House proposal would have required Mississippi to eventually make a one-time $600 million transfer from its Capital Expense Fund to the Public Employees’ Retirement System, which has unfunded liabilities of about $26 billion.

Proponents of legalized betting say it could generate tens of millions of dollars a year in new tax revenue, while critics warn it would fuel gambling addiction and hurt brick-and-mortar casinos. The rise of prediction markets could be another complicating factor for the legalization push going forward, with critics pointing out that the lagrely unregulated markets have effectively legalized online gambling and would eat into the state’s tax revenue. 

Mobile sports betting aside, addressing the financial woes of the pension system has bedeviled legislators for years. 

PERS tweaks made, major spending proposal dies

In an effort to shore up the retirement system’s $26 billion in unfunded liabilities, lawmakers last year made the plan more austere, a hybrid defined contribution plan instead of a defined benefit plan, for people hired after March of this year. Opponents said this will make hiring and retaining state employees, such as teachers and first responders, more difficult.

Lawmakers scuttled a proposal from the Senate to pump $1 billion into PERS over the next decade, and several proposals to vastly overhaul last year’s PERS changes died.

A final agreement approved nearly unanimously by the House and Senate would:

• Reduce the service requirement for full retirement for new hires from 35 years to 30.
• Allow retirees to return to state work after 30 days instead of 90, and make other changes to allow retirees to more easily fill vacant state jobs without jeopardizing their retirement benefits.
• Base retirement payments on an employees’ highest four years of salary instead of their highest eight years.
• Allow state employees to pay into “catch-up” plans such as Roth IRAs. 

Legislature increases Mississippi’s role in immigration enforcement 

Both chambers approved bills that would increase Mississippi’s role in enforcing federal immigration law and force local law enforcement agencies to assist U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 

Republicans said the bills would enhance public safety and hold people accountable for violating immigration laws, while Democrats raised concerns that the federal government is responsible for enforcement and that the proposals would leave counties on the hook for paying to incarcerate undocumented immigrants. 

Reeves has already signed another bill, the Safeguard Honesty Integrity in Elections for Lasting Democracy Act, into law. The measure requires local election officials to verify voters’ citizenship using a federal immigration database and to audit voter rolls for potential noncitizens. Supporters of the SHIELD Act say the measure will boost confidence in election results. Critics say it will suppress some U.S. citizens’ vote.

Legislators again fail to restore ballot initiative 

For the fifth year in a row, lawmakers failed to approve legislation to restore the ballot initiative, a way for citizens to circumvent the Legislature and place issues directly on a statewide ballot.

The Mississippi Supreme Court ruled in 2021 that the prior initiative process was invalid due to some legal technicalities.

Over the last four years, the House and Senate failed to reach an agreement over how the process could be replaced.

Citing fears of dark money and special interests usurping the state’s constitutional republic, the Senate tabled a bill that had been moving through the upper chamber this session.

Had the measure passed, voters would have had to ratify it to amend the state Constitution in a statewide election. As it was presented, the measure also contained a safety clause that would have required more debate and another vote before it could have passed the Legislature.

The House does not have a similar ballot initiative measure pending.

Mississippi could pay extra $120 million a year for food aid after Senate bill dies

Mississippi is on track to pay an additional $120 million a year to run a food assistance program. That’s because of a 2017 state law that generated more paperwork for social safety net programs. 

Under the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill passed by Congress and signed into law by President Donald Trump over the summer, the cost of food assistance benefits will shift from the federal government to states. How much a state will pay is based on its error rate for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. 

An error rate measures how accurately each state determines whether a person is eligible for SNAP benefits. States with error rates over 10%, such as Mississippi, will have to pay a penalty tied to the amount of benefits they receive. 

Republican Sen. Daniel Sparks of Belmont proposed legislation that would simplify SNAP paperwork, which experts say would bring the state’s error rate down. But House leaders said they were not sure whether they supported going back to simplified reporting requirements and needed more time to study the issue. Negotiations around Sparks’ bill fizzled, and the bill died.

A view from the opposition

Throughout the session, Republicans holding a majority in the Legislature and all statewide offices, have promoted gains in K-12 education metrics and private investment that has flowed to Mississippi in recent years.

At a Thursday press conference at the Capitol, recapping the 2026 legislative session, Democrats accused Republicans of failing to strengthen Mississippi’s social safety net by not expanding Medicaid or appropriating additional funds for child care assistance.

“We close out this session with a very simple message,” said Democratic Rep. Zakiya Summers of Jackson. “Republicans are making life harder for working families. Democrats are fighting for you.”

This article was originally published by Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Source: Original Article