ST. PAUL — As the 2025 legislative session wrapped up just before midnight Monday, unresolved budget bills and policy debates render lawmakers’ work far from done.
Lawmakers closed the regular 2025 legislative session at 11:46 p.m. Monday, May 19, the last scheduled day of this year's session.
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At adjournment, legislators had sent seven of approximately 17 budget bills to the governor’s desk, had yet to approve a bonding bill, and needed to complete several policy negotiations. All four legislative leaders and Gov. Tim Walz said Monday that a special session will take place this year, but did not confirm when or for how long.
Walz and Legislative leaders on Friday announced a that carved out a $66 billion to $67 billion budget with up to $2 billion in net cuts over four years, but leaders said Monday that their work is anything but finished.
Lawmakers point fingers
Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy, DFL-St. Paul, said Monday that the House was stalling budget bills in an effort to make last-minute gains.
“I am feeling a deep, deep frustration this morning with my colleagues in the House … My mouth is full of cuss words right now,” she said. “We negotiated with the administration and with the House in a tie to reach joint targets; every person in that room committed to doing the work to get this budget processed as swiftly as possible. And we’ve seen over and over again, particularly the House Republicans, adding new conditions and new ideas when budget bills are about to close.”
House Democrats held a press conference later Monday afternoon and concurred with Murphy about their GOP counterparts.
“Democrats stand ready to complete our important work on balancing the state budget, and we’re calling on our Republican colleagues to stop holding budget bills hostage with partisan demands unrelated to the work of passing a budget,” said Leader Jamie Long, DFL-Minneapolis.
House DFL members declared a no-vote on the Health budget bill that proposed adults from MinnesotaCare, but Long said that issue is “not holding up any budget that needs to come to the floor today.”
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Long and his fellow House Democrats said Republicans were pushing to make gains on several fronts, including amending paid family medical leave.
Rep. Nathan Coulter, DFL-Bloomington, said his House GOP colleagues were holding the Higher Education budget bill in an attempt to ensure their involvement in picking University of Minnesota regents during the upcoming special session.
“We know we’re … heading to overtime,” said Rep. Cedrick Frazier, DFL-New Hope. “We know that, but we’re here to talk about the why we’re heading to overtime.”
Speaker of the House Lisa Demuth, R-Cold Spring, said she had “no intent” on going back on the budget deal she signed, but that the deal left room for conference committees to work out details in their final versions of each bill.
“People are working in their conference committees, and there are different areas that they’re kind of finding sticking points, but they’re working their way through,” she said. “That is how this is intended to go. But nothing is being held up intentionally at this point.”
Senate Minority Leader Mark Johnson, R-East Grand Forks, said Monday that it’s “unfortunate” the “blame game is starting already.”
Johnson, referring to an early-session boycott by House DFL-ers , said that “23 days off at the beginning of session, that would have been very useful at this point.”
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“As I’ve talked about from the very start, I believed that we could have gotten this done on time,” Demuth said. “Our Democrat colleagues didn’t show up for work, and we ended up doing that 23 days in a row.”
What’s passed, what’s pending
By Monday’s adjournment at midnight, seven budget bills had been sent to Walz’s desk: agriculture, broadband and rural development; cannabis; housing and homelessness; judiciary and public safety; legacy; state and local government; and veterans and military affairs
Lawmakers still have several budget bills to hash out in a special session: commerce; E-12 (early through high school education); energy, utilities, environment and climate; health and human services; higher education, human services; jobs, labor and economic development; and taxes and transportation.
The Legislature passed a few last-minute budget deal provisions in its final hours. One of those passed Sunday in the judiciary budget was a bill to close the Stillwater prison — a move that has received . Another passed on Sunday in a standalone bill, , which takes $77 million from funds allocated for the Northern Lights Express Project to fund unemployment insurance for E-12 hourly school workers.
The Minnesota House also made a last-minute push Monday night in an attempt to establish a . The measure passed in the Senate on May 8 but failed to pass the House, as Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman, DFL-Brooklyn Park, said Monday that “Republicans in the House and Democrats in the House agreed we do not have the money for the OIG proposal.”
Hortman said Monday she will be voting “yes” in the House to pass the repeal of MinnesotaCare for undocumented immigrant adults.
“Certainly, Democrats, until the last gavel drops on the last minute of passing a budget for the state of Minnesota, Democrats are going to keep fighting to try to get Republicans to relent on that demand,” Hortman said Monday.
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Murphy said Monday she has a “path” to pass the budget deal through in the Senate.
Bonding has made little movement in the wake of passing a budget deal, but Walz on Monday said a bonding bill should “certainly” be part of the Legislature’s continued work in a special session.
“We gotta be bringing around some of the numbers on bonding,” he said.
The Legislature has until July 1 to enact a budget to avoid a partial government shutdown. Walz did not specify on Monday how long a special session may be or when it would take place.
“Once we get past June 1, we’ll be obligated then to start looking at ‘What does it look like if you shut down,’ ” Walz said. “That means we send out layoff notices and things like that. That is not without a cost … We got plenty of time to finish this … Just continue to work on this, button these things up.”
Hortman and Murphy said shortly after adjournment Monday that leaders are giving lawmakers a 5 p.m. Wednesday deadline to work through their differences in budget bills in working groups, informal conference committees, before Walz would call a special session.
“Hopefully, at that point, leadership doesn’t need to take any bills from people, but hopefully we can give them suggestions that might help them close things up,” Hortman said.
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Hortman said she expects a special session would be announced Friday at the earliest and Tuesday, May 27, at the latest. Apart from a special session in the coming weeks, the Legislature is set to reconvene Feb. 17, 2026.
A divided Legislature
The Minnesota Legislature worked with 101 Democrats and 100 Republicans this session, a dynamic that marked a shift from a DFL Senate, House and governorship over the past two years.
Sen. John Jasinski, R-Faribault, said after walking out of the Senate, which adjourned before the House at roughly 10 p.m., that it’s frustrating that the Legislature will be going into overtime, but that it’s a symptom of divided government.
“I think the other side has been used to having full control for two years, and I think they realize that they need to compromise,” he said. “And I think that’s where a lot of things are sticking.”
Demuth said she thinks the power sharing overall “went very well.”
“You didn’t see as many things getting passed through, but the things that needed to made their way through,” she said.
Murphy, who has served eight terms in the House and Senate combined, said this session has been her most difficult.
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“The very, very closely divided Legislature. The tie in the House, I think it’s just really emphasized our differences in a way that makes this much more difficult," she said.
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