# Guaranteed Income Preemption **The coordinated state-legislative campaign to prohibit cities and counties from running guaranteed-income pilot programs.** Between 2023 and 2026 it moved from nonexistent to law in five states, driven by model legislation from the [[Foundation for Government Accountability]] and its lobbying arm, the Opportunity Solutions Project. It is the cleanest current example of the **abusive preemption** pattern in this knowledge base: a nationally-funded organization drafts a bill, red-state legislators pass it, and the target is not a federal program but the discretion of a blue city. > [!important] The structural tell > These bans are not responses to guaranteed income failing. They are responses to it being **piloted at all**. Preemption arrived while the evidence was still being generated — which is the point. A prohibited experiment produces no data to argue with. ## What happened Guaranteed-income pilots proliferated after 2020, mostly city-run and mostly funded by pandemic relief dollars or philanthropy: Stockton, Los Angeles, Chicago, Cook County, Harris County, Denver, and dozens more. Mayors for a Guaranteed Income counted upward of a hundred programs at peak. The backlash was immediate and organized. **Enacted bans (5 states):** Arkansas moved first in 2023, followed by South Dakota, Idaho, Iowa, and Kansas (HB 2101, 2025 session). The statutes vary in detail but share the core move — barring political subdivisions from establishing or administering programs that provide recurring unconditional cash to individuals. **2026 session, pending:** Illinois HB0060, North Carolina H859, Wisconsin SB202. **Blocked by veto:** Arizona's ban passed the legislature and was vetoed by Governor [[Katie Hobbs]]. Wisconsin's was vetoed by Governor Tony Evers. **Defeated in the legislature:** Texas SB 2010 (2025) would have gone furthest of any proposal — barring *nonprofits and private philanthropy*, not merely governments, from making direct cash payments to residents in hardship. It failed after a sustained campaign in which pilot recipients testified at the Capitol. **Blocked by litigation instead:** Texas has no ban statute, so Attorney General [[Ken Paxton]] used the courts. He obtained a Texas Supreme Court stay in April 2024 halting Harris County's *Uplift Harris* program — $500/month to 1,900 households — on state constitutional grounds barring gifts of public funds, then secured a second stay against the county's redesigned successor program. The litigation route matters: it shows the campaign does not require a legislature when a friendly attorney general and a friendly court are available. ## The machinery **[[Foundation for Government Accountability]]** is a Naples, Florida think tank whose entire operating model is state-level safety-net restriction — work requirements, eligibility verification, SNAP and Medicaid restrictions, and now guaranteed-income bans. It writes model bills, supplies testimony, and runs the lobbying through the **Opportunity Solutions Project**, its affiliated 501(c)(4). **Funding.** FGA's annual revenue exceeded $14 million by 2022. Reporting has traced roughly $18 million since 2014 from the Ed Uihlein Family Foundation (see [[Dick Uihlein]] and the [[Uihlein Family]]) and roughly $17 million from [[DonorsTrust]], the donor-advised fund that anonymizes contributions across the movement. See [[Dark Money Timeline]]. **The messaging.** FGA's framing is consistent across states: guaranteed income is a "socialist experiment" that "traps Americans into dependency" and "disincentivizes work." This is [[Charles Murray]]'s *[[Losing Ground]]* thesis — that transfer programs cause the pathologies they address — deployed forty years later as legislative boilerplate. **The pattern is [[ALEC]]'s.** One organization drafts, dozens of legislators file near-identical text, and the bills travel faster than local opposition can organize. What is distinctive here is speed: from zero states to five in roughly three legislative cycles. ## The local-control contradiction The preemption is difficult to reconcile with the stated federalism principles of the coalition passing it. The same legislators who argue that Washington should devolve authority to states are removing authority from counties — and in the Texas SB 2010 version, from private charities. Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis put the point compactly: *"Republicans like local control only when they have the control."* This is not unique to guaranteed income. It is the same structure as state preemption of local minimum wages, paid sick leave, and tenant protections — the [[Corporate Capture]] playbook applied to municipal policymaking. The Local Solutions Support Center tracked **nearly 850 abusive preemption bills** across states in the 2026 sessions, already matching the full-year 2025 total and up roughly a third from mid-2025. ## The contradiction worth holding onto The organizations funding these bans sit inside a coalition whose most cited economist ([[Milton Friedman]]) designed the [[Negative Income Tax]], whose most influential welfare-reform intellectual ([[Charles Murray]]) proposed a $10,000 basic income in *[[In Our Hands]]*, and whose technology wing ([[Sam Altman]], [[Elon Musk]], [[Dario Amodei]]) publicly floats basic income as the answer to AI displacement. The reconciliation is not "the right is confused." It is that **the operative commitment was never about cash efficiency.** Friedman's and Murray's versions abolish the welfare bureaucracy and its supervisory apparatus. Municipal pilots do the opposite — they add unconditional cash *on top* of existing programs, and they generate evidence that unsupervised poor people spend money sensibly. The first threatens the bureaucracy; the second threatens the premise. The asymmetry is sharpest against [[Alaska Permanent Fund]]: an unconditional universal cash payment running since 1982 in a deep-red state, which nobody proposes to ban. Same instrument, opposite treatment — because Alaskans are imagined as owners collecting a royalty and municipal pilot recipients are imagined through [[Welfare Queen]]. Read that way, the bans are not inconsistent with the movement's basic-income tradition. They are consistent with the part of it that always mattered: **conditionality as a disciplinary instrument, not a fiscal one.** See [[Medicaid Work Requirements]] for the same logic in health policy. ## What to watch - Whether Illinois HB0060, North Carolina H859, or Wisconsin SB202 advance in the remainder of the 2026 sessions. - Whether the Texas SB 2010 model — extending bans to **private philanthropy** — is refiled anywhere. That would be a significant escalation beyond preemption into restriction of private charitable activity. - Whether the AI-displacement argument splits the coalition. If tech-right donors begin funding basic income seriously while FGA-aligned legislators keep banning pilots, the contradiction becomes a funding fight rather than a rhetorical one. - 2026 midterm framing: cash assistance and affordability intersect at [[Big Beautiful Bill (2026 Issue)]]. ## See also [[Universal Basic Income]] · [[Alaska Permanent Fund]] · [[Negative Income Tax]] · [[Means Testing]] · [[Welfare Queen]] · [[In Our Hands]] · [[Foundation for Government Accountability]] · [[Medicaid Work Requirements]] · [[Welfare Reform Act]] · [[ALEC]] · [[Dark Money Timeline]]