House Appropriations roll calls show Hinson absent for all five Epstein votes on September 3 and 10, 2025 — and recorded, both days, on the vote to send the bill to the floor.
H.R. 8646 passed 213-210 on June 4. It comes in $380 million below last year and, in the Appropriations Committee's own words, reduces salaries and expenses "to account for staffing reductions" — the nearly 4,300 FDA and roughly 900 meat-inspection jobs already gone. 188 members with a page on this site voted yes. Four voted no.
A NOTUS column collected what Republican candidates have been saying about the cost of living. Twelve of them have report cards on this site. Their answers range from 'earn more' to 'the Democrats invented this term affordability.'
Food, rent, electricity, healthcare - in America we should be able to afford these basic necessities of life without going bankrupt.
Ashley Hinson has supported the current administration's tariffs and other policies which have led to:
Half of all Americans struggling to afford groceries
47% struggling to afford their utility bills
47% struggling to afford healthcare
48% struggling to afford housing
1 in 4 Americans saying they have skipped a medical checkup due to affordability
23% skipping a prescription dose
Gas prices skyrocketing
She has publicly defended Trump's trade war while it hammered Iowa. On a Sept. 29, 2025 call with reporters, she said "I know that President Trump will not abandon our Iowa farmers" and that "restoring our dominance and the global order when it comes to fair trade does not just happen overnight." An Iowa State University economist was blunter about where the tariffs were heading: "We're all going to be poorer."
We are feeling this directly in our wallets. What is Ashley Hinson doing about that? Making things worse. We deserve better.
We all deserve access to quality healthcare so we can live healthy and productive lives.
Ashley Hinson disagrees:
She voted to cut more than $1 trillion in federal health care and food assistance as part of the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act"
She voted to let ACA tax credits expire, increasing health costs for millions of Americans, driving many of them to switch to cheaper plans or abandon health insurance coverage altogether. And the less people there are with coverage, the higher the rest of our premiums will be.
She wants to repeal the ACA, reduce Medicare and Medicaid spending, and add work requirements to Medicaid.
Iowa's Medicaid budget is projected to be cut by more than 15% under Trump's budget bill — one of only three states hit that hard. About 90,000 Iowans are projected to lose Medicaid coverage by 2034, and 69,000 of them will end up with no health insurance at all.
She voted against the Affordable Insulin Now Act, which would have capped insulin at $35 a month — putting pharmaceutical profits ahead of Iowans who depend on insulin to survive.
Wants to Gut Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security
Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security aren't handouts. They're earned benefits that we pay into out of every single paycheck, our entire working lives, so that we can see a doctor, take care of our parents, and retire with dignity instead of going bankrupt when we get old or sick.
For years, Ashley Hinson and her party have been quietly laying the groundwork to gut these programs. Now they've said the quiet part out loud.
They admitted the plan. Speaker Mike Johnson told the "Moon Griffon Show" that "entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid and things like Social Security ... have to be adjusted and fixed," and that "We have a plan to do that next year ... desperate times call for desperate measures."
We know what the plan looks like. The Republican Study Committee — a caucus of more than 170 House Republicans that includes Speaker Johnson and his top three deputies in leadership — released a budget calling for raising the Social Security retirement age for future retirees and converting Medicare into a privatized "premium support" model that would hand seniors over to for-profit insurance companies.
They already started. The "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" that Ashley Hinson supported cut roughly $1 trillion from Medicaid to help pay for tax cuts for the richest 1 percent.
Even Republicans admit what "reform" means. Sen. Josh Hawley, on the push to "address" and "reform" these programs: "That's usually code for 'cut.' I'm not in favor of that."
It's a broken promise. Donald Trump pledged in 2024, "I will never do anything that will jeopardize or hurt Social Security or Medicare." Ashley Hinson and her party are now preparing to do exactly that.
Ashley Hinson has already said she is open to it. In December 2020, weeks before she was sworn in, Ashley Hinson told The Gazette she was "open" to raising the Social Security retirement age. Millions of Americans in physically demanding jobs who can't work into their late 60s would simply lose benefits they paid for out of every paycheck of their working lives.
These programs are a promise: work hard, pay in your whole life, and your country will be there for you when you need it. Ashley Hinson wants to break that promise so she can keep cutting taxes for billionaires. We deserve better.
Cut Taxes for the Rich, While the Rest of Us Pay For It
We all need to pay our fair share to the government so it can provide the services that benefit all of us.
But billionaires in the U.S. pay a smaller tax rate than most teachers and nurses. That's not fair.
The wealthiest 400 billionaire families in the U.S. paid an average federal individual tax rate of just 8.2 percent. For comparison, the average American taxpayer in the same year paid 13 percent.
23 of the largest and most profitable companies in the US paid no federal corporate income taxes from 2018-2022. And 109 corporations paid zero federal tax in at least one of those years.
The "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" that Ashley Hinson supported will reduce taxes for the top 1 percent of taxpayers by more than $1 trillion over the next decade, while raising taxes for the poorest Americans.
Ashley Hinson is on the side of the billionaires and big business. We deserve better.
We all deserve clean air, clean water, and a healthy planet to live on.
Ashley Hinson has supported the repealing and rolling back of environmental protections and climate change regulations, all so that billionaires and big business can plunder natural resources and destroy our environment in the name of profit.
She voted for the budget bill that repeals most of the clean energy tax credits Iowa's wind and solar industry was built on — credits the Sierra Club's Iowa chapter says had the potential to add 15,000 new Iowa clean energy jobs by 2030 and $2.5 billion to the state's GDP.
We're all going to pay the price for this with increased rates of asthma, cancer, and premature deaths. We deserve better.
Is Intentionally Wrecking Our Public Schools and Our Kids' Futures
Nine out of ten American children — 49.6 million of them — go to a public school. It's where they learn to read, where they eat breakfast and lunch, where kids with disabilities are guaranteed an education by law, and where a kid from any family, rich or poor, religious or not, gets a fair shot.
Ashley Hinson and her party are taking that apart on purpose: draining public school money into private and religious schools, pushing one religion into everybody else's classrooms, and shutting down the federal department that is supposed to look out for our kids.
She voted to create the first national private school voucher in American history. It is hidden inside the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act." You give up to $1,700 a year to a charity that hands out private school scholarships, and the government gives you back every penny you gave on your taxes. It costs you nothing — no other tax break in the country works that way. Each person is capped at $1,700, but any number of people can do it, so there is no limit on what it drains from the Treasury. It starts January 1, 2027. Congress's own scorekeepers say $26 billion over ten years; one tax research group says as much as $51 billion every year — more than the government spends on Title I ($18.4 billion) for poor schools and IDEA ($14.6 billion) for kids with disabilities combined. And "low-income" means a family earning three times what a normal family in their area earns still qualifies — in some places, $500,000 a year.
They are giving away our tax dollars to families who are already wealthy and were never in public school to begin with. Every state that has tried it gets the same result — the money goes to people already paying private tuition: 95% of Arkansas voucher users never attended a public school. In Florida's first year of universal vouchers, 69% of new recipients were already in private school and only 13% had ever set foot in a public one. In Iowa, two-thirds were already in private school. We aren't rescuing kids from bad schools — we're cutting checks to families who never needed them, with the money coming out of the schools 90% of our kids actually attend.
And the kids who do switch end up doing worse. Four careful studies found the same thing. In Washington, DC, voucher kids fell behind in math. In Louisiana, a student who started in the middle of the class dropped to the bottom third in math after three years. Indiana and Ohio found the same. Kids with disabilities lost the most.
The money goes to religious schools that can turn our kids away. Ohio now spends nearly $1 billion a year on vouchers, the vast majority going to Catholic and evangelical schools — schools that, unlike public schools, can reject your child over their religion, their disability, or who their parents are, or for ANY REASON AT ALL with almost no accountability for the public money they take. Many have simply raised tuition to capture the vouchers instead of enrolling more students.
Iowa's own voucher program cost taxpayers $329.6 million this year — and the state auditor found that $258.7 million of it went to families who were already paying private tuition themselves. Nearly 79% of Education Savings Account users were already projected to attend private school before the program existed. For the 20% who actually switched, the state paid roughly $38,000 per student. Auditor Rob Sand put it plainly: the program "is still paying tuition for the wealthiest families in the state of Iowa, who can barely even feel the check that they write." The income limits came off entirely this year.
Iowa has opted in to the new federal voucher on top of its own statewide program.
Our public schools took generations to build, and they are the one institution that has to take every single child who walks in the door. Ashley Hinson is helping tear them down and hand the pieces to private interests. Our kids will pay for it for the rest of their lives. We deserve better.
A good job where we can make a living to support our families, own a home, and have a good life. That's the American Dream.
Ashley Hinson supports policies and an administration that are turning the American Dream into a nightmare.
There were 20.8 million layoffs in the U.S. in 2025
55% of employed Americans say they're concerned about losing their jobs
The unemployment rate is 4.2%
In 2025 the U.S. economy averaged just 15,000 jobs added per month, a dramatic decrease from the monthly average of 125,000 the year before Trump took office.
Overall employment for workers without college degrees fell by 361,000 jobs from January to September 2025.
58,000 net manufacturing jobs have been lost from April, when the administration announced "Liberation Day" tariffs, to September 2025.
Works for Billionaires, Big Business & Special Interests and Not for Us
Our elected officials should work for us, the people.
As a member of the House Appropriations Committee, Ashley Hinson is a top target for industry money. She has raised $52.6 million across her career — and 79% of it came from PACs, super PACs and large donors. Super PACs alone have spent more than $3 million on her behalf across her House and Senate campaigns. Look at who some of her biggest backers are:
The Opportunity Matters Fund spent $546,677 supporting her — a super PAC funded with $35,000,000 from Oracle founder Larry Ellison
Americans for Prosperity Action, the Koch network's super PAC, spent $822,642, and the Senate Leadership Fund another $643,424
The Congressional Leadership Fund spent $399,434
NextEra Energy — $53,500
Pro-Israel PACs, led by AIPAC — $204,110
Marquis Energy, the ethanol producer — $50,000
KKR & Co. ($37,050) and Jane Street Group ($34,000) — Wall Street private equity and trading
The Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America, the National Automobile Dealers Association and Value in Electing Women PAC — $45,000 each
Arnold Ventures ($34,000), plus Coinbase and dialysis company DaVita
The National Republican Congressional Committee ($211,800) and the National Republican Senatorial Committee ($62,000)
Ashley Hinson is funded by billionaires, big business and special interests. No wonder she's not doing anything to improve OUR lives. We deserve better.
Let Elon Musk and DOGE Cut More Than $297 MILLION from Iowa
We all want a government that works for us as efficiently and effectively as possible. Unfortunately our government doesn't always work that way, so reform is badly needed. Given how big and complicated the government is, it's a tough problem that needs well-thought out solutions, so that we don't make things worse.
That's not what we got.
Ashley Hinson stood idly by while billionaire and ketamine-addled chaos monkey Elon Musk and his DOGE goons chainsawed their way through the U.S. government, promising to save the government at least $2 trillion annually in waste, fraud and abuse. Because they had no idea what they were doing and no one to stop them, in the end our government suffered, people suffered, Iowa suffered, government spending actually went UP and Elon Musk became even richer.
Elon Musk and DOGE:
Had access to and exfiltrated (stole) all our sensitive personal information.
Kneecapped the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which had returned over $26 billion to the American people since 2011.
Attempted to cut $4 billion in funding for medical research.
Will cost the federal government an estimated $500 billion in lost tax revenue (that could pay for programs for us), due to cuts at the IRS.
Laid waste to the employees at several government departments, removing their top experts and most skilled practitioners, and making their services less effective for all of us. This badly affected veterans, who make up 30% of the federal workforce.
Told Iowa reporters in March 2025 that she had "a chance to hear directly from Elon (Musk) this week" and that DOGE was being "very, very transparent."
At a closed-door Republican gathering in Lake View, an audience member said DOGE had disbanded and Ashley Hinson corrected him: "It's not." Musk, she conceded, "was a little bit of a firebrand" — but "the work continued at these agencies."
We'd like to thank you, Ashley Hinson, for doing absolutely nothing while an unelected South African big tech billionaire took a chainsaw to vital U.S. government functions and completely failed to make the government more efficient. We deserve better.
As a member of Congress, part of Ashley Hinson's job is to act as a check and balance to the executive branch. She and her fellow members of Congress from Iowa have completely abdicated their responsibility. These spineless cowards are rubber stamping everything Donald Trump wants to do, no matter how crazy, dangerous or harmful. And we've seen the results. We deserve better.
We deserve to feel safe in our neighborhoods, schools, and places of worship.
In order to do that, we need to take real steps to prevent gun violence. And despite what we've been told, it is possible to support the 2nd Amendment and support common-sense gun safety laws at the same time. But Ashley Hinson has opposed bipartisan gun safety laws, while offering meaningless thoughts and prayers every time there's a new mass shooting.
A child or adolescent is killed with a gun every 2 hours and 48 minutes in the U.S.
Age-adjusted firearm homicide rates in the U.S. are 33 times greater than in Australia and 77 times greater than in Germany
Every day, 125 Americans are killed with guns, and more than 200 are shot and wounded
Women in the U.S. are 28 times more likely to be killed with a gun than women in other high-income countries.
On April 1, 2025, she introduced the RIFLE Act (H.R. 2552) with Sen. Tom Cotton, to repeal the $200 federal transfer tax on National Firearms Act items like suppressors and short-barreled rifles — making them cheaper and easier to buy. The NRA's lobbying arm promoted the bill by name.
Ashley Hinson is OK with our kids dying, as long as she has her guns. We deserve better.
America is the land of FREEDOM. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to start a business, freedom to choose your own career path, freedom to make your own medical decisions, freedom to raise your children according to your values, and freedom to pursue happiness. Freedom is what makes America great.
Unless you're a woman and you're making the deeply personal decision about whether to have a baby or not. A decision that will dramatically affect the rest of your life. In that case Ashley Hinson thinks that your freedom doesn't matter and that the government should get to control your body. That's not freedom, that's tyranny.
Voted against the Right to Contraception Act, which would have protected the right to use birth control nationwide
Arkansas House of Representatives candidate (and pastor) Robb Ryerse stated it well: "Abortion should remain safe and legal. These are personal decisions best made by patients, their doctors, and their faith — not politicians. You don't have to agree with every decision someone makes to believe they should be free to make it. That's what personal liberty means." Almost 2/3 of Americans agree and believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. But Ashley Hinson thinks she knows better, and doesn't believe that we should have the freedom to make our own decisions. We deserve better.
In America our vote represents our will. It gives us the power to make the change that we want to see in the world.
Unfortunately that's not a sentiment that Ashley Hinson's billionaire and big business donors can stomach. Because when we have voting power, we use it to make our lives better, and they lose power. Read about all the ways they're trying to take away our voting power on our about page, then come back here.
Ashley Hinson has opposed legislation to make voting easier while supporting the SAVE Act, which would force every single American citizen to prove their citizenship status in person when registering to vote or updating their voter registration information. For the vast majority of Americans, this would mean presenting a passport or birth certificate at their local election office. This would disenfranchise millions of U.S. citizens: 146 million Americans do not have a passport, and 69 million women who have married do not have a birth certificate that matches their new legal name. Working-class and low-income Americans would also be disproportionately disenfranchised if the bill became law, as the vast majority of these groups do not possess a passport.
YOU HAVE POWER. Why else do you think Ashley Hinson and her bosses are working so hard to take it away? Don't let them. We deserve better.
Whether white, black, or brown, we should all be able to live in America and exercise our constitutional rights without fear that law enforcement will turn on us.
But the current administration has created a secret police force that is abusing their power against anyone who stands in their way, U.S. citizen or not. They claim to be going after "the worst of the worst", but are taking daycare workers, day laborers, grandmas and kids who are valued members of our communities. And Ashley Hinson, staunch defender of the Second Amendment to fight back against government tyranny, is doing nothing while the government tyrannizes us.
ProPublica:They describe the legions of masked immigration officers operating in near-total anonymity on the orders of the president as the crossing of a line that had long set the United States apart from the world's most repressive regimes. ICE, in their view, has become an unfettered and unaccountable national police force.
ProPublica:Accosting people outside of their immigration court hearings where they're showing up and trying to do the right thing and then hauling them off to an immigration jail in the middle of the country where they can't access loved ones or speak to counsel. Bands of masked men apprehending people in broad daylight in the streets and hauling them off. Disappearing people to a third country, to a prison where there's a documented record of serious torture and human rights abuse.
New York Times:Masked and heavily armed, ICE agents are sent to cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles and Minneapolis to terrorize immigrant communities and brutalize people who challenge their efforts to stop and detain anyone deemed suspicious. To expand its reach, ICE greatly lowered its recruitment standards, effectively enlisting anyone who cares to sign up. To attract new officers, ICE advertises the chance to do violence to people deemed "enemies" of the United States, likening civil immigration enforcement to a war on a dangerous, alien force. The result is an agency whose agents' first recourse appears to be violence or the threat of violence.
They are executing American citizens. On January 7, 2026 an ICE agent in Minneapolis murdered an American citizen, a mother of 3, by shooting her in the face as she tried to drive away. Then the killer walked away, and our government lied and tried to gaslight us about what happened. Decent politicians condemned the murder. What did Ashley Hinson have to say? Nothing.
They are executing American citizens: Part 2. On January 24, 2026 ICE agents in Minneapolis murdered an American citizen, a 37 year old ICU nurse, who was filming their activity and trying to help others. Then our government lied and tried to gaslight us about what happened.
And the list of the dead keeps growing. ICE agents — on duty and off — keep killing members of our communities, while Ashley Hinson says nothing:
On December 31, 2025, an off-duty ICE officer in Northridge, Los Angeles shot and killed Keith Porter Jr., a 43-year-old U.S. citizen and father of two who was born and raised in Compton. Federal officials called it self-defense against an "active shooter," but Porter's family says he was peacefully returning home and never posed a threat — and witnesses reported only three shots, matching his autopsy and contradicting claims of an exchange of gunfire.
On July 7, 2026, an ICE officer in Houston shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old father of three and small-business owner who had lived in the U.S. for 35 years. Agents had been hunting a different white van. Harris County's medical examiner ruled his death a homicide, and his co-workers disputed ICE's claim that he used his vehicle as a weapon.
On July 13, 2026, an ICE agent in Biddeford, Maine shot and killed Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a 26-year-old Colombian father who was legally authorized to work in the U.S. and supported his wife and 3-year-old daughter by delivering food and cleaning a veterinary clinic. He was not the target of ICE's warrant — agents were looking for someone else — and were not wearing body cameras. Even Maine's Republican Senator Susan Collins urged DHS to halt non-urgent vehicle stops in the state.
If ICE can murder innocent U.S. citizens without repercussions, what could they do to you? ICE is out of control and a danger to us all - no one is safe. What's Ashley Hinson going to do about it? Absolutely nothing. We deserve better.
Voted for the Unnecessary and Unpopular War in Iran
War destroys human lives, families and innocent people, causes economic ruin, and triggers immense suffering. War should always be the option of last resort.
In order to distract from the Epstein Files, Donald Trump started an illegal war of choice with Iran, and now:
The American people don't want this war with Iran. But Ashley Hinson supports this madness and voted against the War Powers Resolution that would have stopped it. Does Ashley Hinson work for Israel or the people of Iowa? We deserve better.
An Iowa State University report estimated the tariffs could cost the Iowa soybean industry between $191 million and $1.49 billion, with corn, ethanol, and hog producers losing hundreds of millions more. The head of the Iowa Soybean Association called Trump's trade policies a "bitter pill" for farmers.
In 2025, Ashley Hinson held town halls across Iowa. It didn't go well.
In April 2025, constituents in Mason City pushed back hard on tariffs, DOGE cuts, and deportations. In May 2025, at a town hall in Decorah, she told the room she was "proud" to have voted for Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill. The crowd responded with boos, jeers and laughs.
After that, she launched her Senate campaign — and stopped holding town halls. Her office scheduled a telephone town hall for March 26, then canceled it for unknown reasons; her public calendar still listed it as "postponed," and by June 2026 she had not held a single town hall all year. Her first of 2026 finally came by telephone, on August 10.
In August 2025, she promised: "I keep doing those town halls because I think they're important." That was before Iowans made clear what they thought of her record.
Only once Trump relented did Ashley Hinson vote for the Epstein Files Transparency Act on November 18, 2025 — a bill that passed 427 to 1. When releasing the files cost her nothing, she was happy to go along. When it counted, she protected the powerful.
We're all going to pay the price for this with increased rates of asthma, cancer, and premature deaths. We deserve better.
