Indiana House Republicans roll out 2026 agenda focused on housing, energy, deregulation

Indiana House Republicans on Thursday announced a four-bill legislative agenda for the 2026 session focusing on housing affordability, utility costs and deregulation.

House Speaker Todd Huston, R-Fishers, framed the tightly focused priorities as a continued effort to address cost-of-living issues.

“We are in the midst of our short session, and we’ve hit the ground running this year to deliver for Hoosiers,” Huston said at a Statehouse news conference. “This year, we’re focused on lowering costs for Hoosier families and reducing government to unleash opportunity.”

The supermajority caucus’s four priority bills hone in on housing supply, electric utility regulation, consolidation of boards and commissions, and continued deregulation of K-12 education. 

The proposals collectively seek to loosen local zoning rules to spur housing construction; change how utilities are regulated and compensated; streamline state government oversight bodies; and repeal thousands of words of education statute lawmakers say are outdated or unused.

Huston made clear, however, that House Republicans do not intend to reopen the state budget.

“This year’s priorities build on efforts advanced in recent years to reduce costs, get government out of the way and grow our economy,” he said.

The session is expected to end by late February — even earlier than usual short sessions  — after lawmakers returned to the Statehouse for two weeks in December to debate a contentious redistricting proposal that ultimately failed to pass.

House Minority Leader Phil GiaQuinta, D-Fort Wayne, said that while some of the proposed housing provisions could help reduce rents, Democrats saw limited progress in the GOP agenda.

“It seemed to me, at first glance, it’s pretty lackluster when it comes to trying to save Hoosiers money on their utility bills,” GiaQuinta said. “It doesn’t mention anything with regards to health care or child care. These are issues that we’ve been talking about for a long time now — and it’s not just us, it’s what Hoosiers are looking for.”

Housing supply and local zoning rules

House Bill 1001, authored by Rep. Doug Miller, R-Elkhart, targets housing affordability by limiting local zoning regulations and streamlining approvals for new residential development.

Miller, a home builder himself, said Indiana has “constrained supply far too long” through “unnecessary and problematic regulations and restrictions,” contributing to high homeownership costs.

“House Republicans have made it a priority to increase housing stock in the state of Indiana,” Miller said, noting nearly $75 million in housing investments in recent budget cycles. “Yet the costs to own a home — they remain high.”

The bill would allow certain housing uses to be approved without public hearings, cap parking requirements, limit local design standards and require mixed-use or multifamily housing to be permitted in some commercially zoned areas. It also expands allowances for accessory dwelling units, such as backyard or in-law apartments.

Miller said the goal is not to strip authority from local governments, but to work within their existing frameworks.

“We’re not taking decision-making away from local authorities,” he said. “What we’re actually doing is working within the guidelines that they already operate.”

The legislation also requires local governments to begin reporting housing approval data to the state, which Miller said will help identify “bottlenecks.”

“We don’t know what we don’t know,” he said.

GiaQuinta said Democrats are open to parts of the proposal, particularly provisions that could reduce construction costs and lower rents. 

He pointed to requirements tied to building materials and design standards as potential contributors to higher housing prices, but he cautioned lawmakers to closely examine the actual savings and impacts on local control.

“If that can lower costs — and lower (monthly payments) for folks that are living in an apartment — there are probably some things in there that are a good first step,” GiaQuinta said. “But if our goal is to reduce costs, we’re going to have to really take a deep dive and see what the exact savings are going to be.”

Utility accountability and energy affordability

Next up, House Bill 1002, authored by Rep. Alaina Shonkwiler, R-Noblesville, would overhaul how Indiana regulates electric utilities by moving forward with performance-based rate making and multi-year rate plans.

“Indiana’s regulatory structure has served us well for generations,” Shonkwiler said. “But that framework was built for a very different energy era.”

She said that although Indiana’s residential electric rates remain among the lowest in the Great Lakes region, families are still struggling to afford utility bills.

“Hoosiers are still feeling the financial burden of heating, cooling and lighting their homes,” she said. “We are updating our regulatory tools so utilities are held accountable for delivering the outcomes we want: strong reliability, improved resilience and better affordability.”

The bill would tie utility profits to performance metrics such as affordability, service restoration and reliability.

Utilities would additionally be required to place customers on budget billing plans by default — allowing ratepayers to opt out — and would be prohibited from disconnecting service to certain low-income customers during periods of extreme summer heat.

Shonkwiler described the approach as “incremental” but significant for Indiana, which has not previously adopted performance-based regulation at this scale.

“This is about modernizing regulation in a way that still protects consumers,” she said.

Still, GiaQuinta said Democrats remain skeptical that the bill would deliver meaningful or timely savings.

“One thing that we can do right off the bat is suspend the sales tax on utilities,” GiaQuinta suggested. “On electricity alone, that’s about $350 a year. And if you do that on all utilities, that really starts to add up.”

Consolidating boards and commissions

Another measure, House Bill 1003, authored by Rep. Steve Bartels, R-Eckerty, proposes repealing, merging or “restructuring” dozens of state boards, commissions and councils.

In its current form, the massive 346-page bill would eliminate 56 state commissions, committees, boards, task forces and councils, according to a legislative fiscal analysis.

“This is a product over three years of work,” Bartels said. A legislative task force debated possible cuts to Indiana’s roster of more than 250 state boards and commissions in November.

“The intent here,” Bartels continued, “is to increase government efficiency and effectiveness.”

While the bill includes “modest cost savings,” he emphasized that money is not the primary goal.

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“The intent is not necessarily to specifically save money,” Bartels said. “It’s efficiency.”

Huston echoed that view, saying overlapping boards can create confusion and duplicate work.

“You’re creating multiple work streams out of that, and oftentimes those work streams are not even congruent with one another,” Huston said.

The bill also makes sweeping changes to administrative rulemaking, professional licensing and the state building code, transferring some responsibilities to the Indiana Department of Homeland Security, for example.

Some suggestions — including elimination of the Fire Prevention and Building Safety Commission — have already been criticized, however.

A representative from the Indiana Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, for example, previously told lawmakers he was concerned about building code decisions and changes being made by state agency staffers or lawmakers without the involvement of the commission, whose members include architects, professional engineers and others with construction experience.

More K-12 education deregulation

Rep. Bob Behning, R-Indianapolis, said his House Bill 1004 continues a multi-year effort to strip unused or outdated language from Indiana’s education code.

“This legislation improves Indiana’s education framework by removing restrictive, redundant and unnecessary statutory requirements,” Behning said.

He added that the bill, as currently drafted, would eliminate more than 19,000 words from state law — following last year’s removal of nearly 35,000 words in a separate deregulation measure — and cleans up conflicting definitions, unused programs and obsolete mandates.

“The goal is really to let education get out of the way, let educators do what they do best,” he said.

Behning noted that the bill would further repeal outdated reporting requirements, remove defunct grant programs and eliminate mandates that “no longer” align with how schools operate, including provisions tied to obsolete technology and programs no longer funded by the state.

Huston called education deregulation one of the House GOP’s most persistent — and challenging — priorities.

“It’s oftentimes asked for, but oftentimes hard to accomplish,” he said. “We want to create a flexible system to do it.”

GiaQuinta told reporters he still needed to review the 168-page bill but questioned the effort.

“Rep. Behning now has been in charge of the education committee since 2011, and he keeps wanting to deregulate the things that he was responsible — and the House Republicans have been responsible — for putting in (state code),” GiaQuinta said. “Maybe they’re correcting the errors of their ways. I don’t really know what the plan is there, so we’ll continue to monitor that.”