HELENA — Two weeks after the end of the Montana Legislature’s 2025 session, the final outcome for hundreds of bills has yet to be decided, as Gov. Greg Gianforte has the authority to sign or veto them. His decisions are likely to play a big role in the state’s final spending picture.

(Watch the video to see more on how vetoes could affect the state budget.)

As lawmakers debated House Bill 2 – the main state budget bill – and other major bills in the final weeks of the session, some said, no matter what the Legislature did, Gianforte would likely veto bills based on their budget impact.

“Anyone that suggests that they're surprised the Exec is going to weigh in on this – well, I walked those halls and I heard it,” said Rep. Llew Jones, R-Conrad, who chairs the House Appropriations Committee.

All in all, the Legislature passed 816 bills in 2025. As of Tuesday, 574 of them had already become law. Another 208 have officially gone to Gianforte’s desk for consideration, while 28 passed the Legislature but still haven’t been officially transmitted to the governor.

Gianforte had vetoed six bills as of Tuesday. For two of them, he specifically cited the cost:

· House Bill 610, sponsored by Rep. Kerri Seekins-Crowe, R-Billings, would have allowed people on Medicaid to get anti-psychotic medications without requiring prior authorization. It was projected to cost the state around $5 million a year for the next two years.
· Senate Bill 167, sponsored by Sen. Greg Hertz, R-Polson, which would have expanded funding for the state’s Noxious Weed Trust Fund, which provides grants to help local governments and landowners address weeds. It called for a one-time payment of $10 million.

In letters announcing the vetoes, Gianforte said the bills were well intentioned, but the Legislature had passed too much legislation that wasn’t fiscally responsible.

“I will keenly review the budget and spending bills the Legislature passed, making some difficult decisions to protect taxpayers and their hard-earned resources,” he wrote.

Last week, Republican leaders in the Senate put out a statement, agreeing the Legislature hadn’t done enough to control spending and saying Gianforte should use his veto power to get the budget in line.

“I think that people did expect that that was what was going to happen,” said Sen. Carl Glimm, R-Kila, who chairs the Senate Finance and Claims Committee. “But that doesn't that doesn't really give us a free pass, right? We didn't do our job. Our job is to balance the budget; our job is to appropriate the money.”

Glimm pointed to a May 7 analysis from the Legislative Fiscal Division, which said that, if all the bills the Legislature passed became law, the state’s ongoing spending could exceed ongoing revenues by the 2028 fiscal year.

“As appropriators, we're supposed to be looking out for what that balance sheet looks like,” he said. “I don't think we did a good job, because we passed way too much stuff, and we're leaving it up to the governor to finish the job when we leave town. We should have a balanced budget. He shouldn't have to veto things just to balance the budget.”

Glimm said the Legislature also left some agencies – particularly the Office of the State Public Defender and the Montana State Hospital – in a state where they may need to come back and ask for additional appropriations in the 2027 session.

Jones said the Legislature did meet its constitutional requirement to provide a balanced budget, because it remains structurally balanced – meaning more revenues than expenditures – through the two years before the next legislative session. He said the four-year projections are informational only – intended to give a better picture of how large-scale changes like the income tax cut the Legislature passed might affect the budget going forward.

However, Jones said he too wants to see the governor veto bills for budget reasons. He said he would prefer to see another $100 million or so left in the general fund for 2027 – and he said that would go a long way to improving the structural balance in 2028 and 2029 as well.

“As the sheets begin to work, that's becoming balanced as well,” he said. “That being said, we've got to realize that a four-year-out forecast is exactly that. There could be a bunch more people that come to the state, there could be higher income earnings by the people that are in the state.”

Jones said one of the bills he believes could be vetoed is Senate Bill 537, sponsored by Sen. Daniel Zolnikov, R-Billings, which would redirect almost $70 million in marijuana taxes from the general fund over two years, to pay for law enforcement and behavioral health programs. The Legislature also passed House Bill 932, from Rep. Ken Walsh, R-Twin Bridges, which also adjusts marijuana tax distribution but doesn’t pull much out of the general fund.

Glimm said he doesn’t have a full breakdown of places he’d like to see vetoes, but he hopes the governor will look closely at some of the amendments Senate Republicans tried to make to trim HB 2 and at several bills with large price tags passed in the final days of the session.

One of the most notable large bills the Legislature passed at the end was House Bill 924, sponsored by Jones. It would put hundreds of millions of dollars into a new state trust that would invest the money and use interest income to fund a variety of infrastructure and other programs.

Jones acknowledged HB 924 would take a lot out of the general fund, but said he thought investment spending like that should be seen in a different light than some of the Legislature’s other spending.

“We're spending on an investment that's going to be there in the case of an emergency that actually offsets general fund spend in the future,” he said.

The governor has ten days to sign or veto a bill after receiving it – and in the case of appropriations bills like HB 2, he can veto individual line items of spending. If ten days pass without the governor taking action, a bill becomes law without his signature.

HB 2, SB 537 and HB 924 are among the bills that haven’t formally been sent to Gianforte yet, so the ten-day calendar hasn’t started on them.