Jim Pillen

3 years as Governor in Nebraska

Downloadable Report Card

Promised to Fix Property Taxes — and Tried to Tax Everything Else Instead
Overrode What Nebraska Voters Chose at the Ballot Box
Said "I Don't Believe in Welfare" and Turned Down Summer Food Aid for 150,000 Nebraska Kids
Is Polluting Our Water with His Hog Empire — and He Smeared the Reporter Who Exposed It
Put the Government Between Nebraskans and Their Doctors
Turned a Nebraska Prison Into an ICE Detention Camp
Won't Face Nebraskans' Questions
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Sep 19, 2026

Jim Pillen Handed a Lobbyist a $2.5 Million No-Bid Contract. Records Show His Office Was Warned About the Technology Her Company Was Selling.

Before Jim Pillen recommended lobbyist Julie Bushell for a $208,333-a-month no-bid contract, she was pushing lawmakers to fund her company's nitrate sensors. The state's top environmental official warned Pillen's chief of staff the technology was unproven. The lawmaker carrying the bill says he never saw the warning.

Sep 17, 2026

Jim Pillen Blamed Nebraska's Budget Forecasters for the Shortfall. Now He's Put the Two Senators Who Sponsored His Tax Cuts on the Board.

Six weeks before the forecast that will shape his next budget, Pillen replaced a third of Nebraska's independent revenue-forecasting board — the first governor to do that in its 40-year history — installing Lou Ann Linehan and Tom Briese, who championed the income tax cuts that have contributed to a third straight budget hole of at least $200 million. Linehan says she doesn't think there is a problem.

Taxes Corruption & Ethics Nebraska

Sep 10, 2026

Jim Pillen Sent Nebraska's State Patrol to Work With ICE. His Own Hog Farms Employed Undocumented Workers for More Than a Decade.

A Flatwater Free Press and New York Times investigation found at least 20 Pillen Family Farms operations employed undocumented workers, and at least 12 Pillen workers were charged with using fake or stolen IDs. The company joined E-Verify the day Pillen launched his campaign for governor.

Immigration Corruption & Ethics Nebraska

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Promised to Fix Property Taxes — and Tried to Tax Everything Else Instead

Property taxes are the No. 1 thing Nebraskans ask their lawmakers to fix, and Jim Pillen made it his signature promise: in January 2024 he called for a 40% reduction.

What we got instead was a plan to shift the burden onto everyday Nebraskans, followed by failure after failure.

Pillen's plan wasn't a tax cut — it was a tax shift: a draft of his proposal would have imposed new sales taxes on more than 120 everyday goods and services. A Republican senator on Pillen's own task force, Merv Riepe, said the plan benefited large net-worth property owners at the expense of middle- and lower-income renters — who, he noted, had not been shown the list of new sales taxes.
His bill, LB 388, went down in flames on the final day of the 2024 session — filibustered by a fellow Republican who called it a tax increase Nebraskans overwhelmingly opposed, and pulled by its own sponsor before it could reach a vote.
He dragged lawmakers back for a special session, vowing to keep them in Lincoln until Christmas if that's what it took. They ditched most of his ideas.
Nebraska property taxes are higher today than when he took office in 2023: they rose another $285 million in 2025 — the third-largest increase in state history — to $5.59 billion statewide. He did get the first statewide decrease in 26 years: $6 million in 2024, about a tenth of a percent.

Jim Pillen promised us property tax relief and delivered a plan to tax everything else. We deserve better.

Overrode What Nebraska Voters Chose at the Ballot Box

When politicians won't act, Nebraska's constitution lets voters make laws directly. In November 2024, 74.6% of Nebraska voters passed Initiative 436, guaranteeing workers the right to earn paid sick leave.

Seven months later — before the law even took effect — Jim Pillen signed a bill gutting it. Then he did it again to a second ballot measure.

On June 4, 2025, Pillen signed LB 415, which entirely exempted employers with 10 or fewer employees from the voter-approved law — along with temporary and seasonal agricultural workers and workers under 16 — four months before it was due to take effect on October 1.
Nebraska Appleseed said the carve-outs stripped the new benefit from 140,000 Nebraskans — before a single one of them had used a single sick day.
He came back for the minimum wage. On February 9, 2026, he signed LB 258, passed 33-16 four days earlier.
LB 258 caps annual minimum wage increases at 1.75% instead of the cost of living, and creates a $13.50 "youth wage" for 14- and 15-year-olds that stays below today's $15 until 2065 — undoing what 59% of Nebraska voters approved in 2022.

Nebraskans voted. Jim Pillen overruled them. Twice. We deserve better.

Said "I Don't Believe in Welfare" and Turned Down Summer Food Aid for 150,000 Nebraska Kids

No child in Nebraska should go hungry over the summer. But when the federal government offered Nebraska $18 million to help feed kids from low-income families while school was out, Jim Pillen said no.

In December 2023, Pillen refused to opt Nebraska into the federal Summer EBT grocery program, turning down $18 million that advocates said would have fed 150,000 low-income Nebraska youths.
Asked to defend the decision at a news conference, his answer was "I don't believe in welfare."
He reversed course in February 2024 — after Nebraska Appleseed delivered a petition with 6,144 signatures from 230 communities, and after, in his own words, "you sit down with kids who are living it".
The program he tried to block was a huge success: it delivered nearly $24 million in grocery benefits to 121,855 Nebraska families in its first summer.

It took hungry kids confronting him face-to-face for Jim Pillen to accept money to feed them. We deserve better.

Is Polluting Our Water with His Hog Empire — and He Smeared the Reporter Who Exposed It

Clean drinking water isn't a luxury. Nearly one-fifth of Nebraska now has an estimated groundwater nitrate level above 5 parts per million — the third-highest share in the United States — and high nitrate is linked to colorectal cancer, thyroid disease and neural tube birth defects. Nebraska has the seventh-highest pediatric cancer rate in the country.

So who's contributing to the problem? Our Governor.

An investigation by the Flatwater Free Press found that monitoring wells at 16 hog operations tied to Pillen's family business tested far above the legal drinking-water limit for nitrate — one reading hit 445 parts per million, nearly 45 times the EPA standard for safe drinking water.
A few of those facilities violated the state's livestock waste control rules: they housed more hogs than permitted, the state alleged, failed to report wastewater discharge into a marsh, and submitted groundwater test results late.
Since 1993, Pillen and his family have owned or operated at least 108 livestock facilities across Nebraska — and as Governor, he has not sold his business holdings.
When the reporting came out, Pillen didn't answer the findings. He attacked the journalist: "Number one, I didn't read it. And I won't. Number two, all you got to do is look at the author. The author is from communist China. What more do you need to know?"

Jim Pillen's response to his farms polluting our water was a racist smear against the reporter who exposed it. We deserve better.

Put the Government Between Nebraskans and Their Doctors

Decisions about pregnancy and family medical care should be made by Nebraskans and their doctors — not by politicians.

Jim Pillen disagrees. In May 2023 he signed LB 574, a single bill that reached into two different exam rooms at once.

It banned abortion at 12 weeks — a ban his own office announced "takes effect immediately" the day he signed it.
The same bill banned gender-confirming surgery for anyone under 19 and restricted hormone treatments and puberty blockers for minors — handing the rules for those therapies to a political appointee, the state's chief medical officer, who is an ear, nose and throat doctor.
The combined law was upheld by the Nebraska Supreme Court in July 2024.

Jim Pillen put politicians in charge of our most personal medical decisions. We deserve better.

Turned a Nebraska Prison Into an ICE Detention Camp

Whether white, black, or brown, we should all be able to live in Nebraska and exercise our constitutional rights without fear that law enforcement will turn on us.

But the current administration has created a masked immigration force which, in the view of the current and former national security officials ProPublica interviewed, "has become an unfettered and unaccountable national police force" — one that has detained more than 170 U.S. citizens, kicking, dragging, and holding them for days. And Jim Pillen didn't just stand by — he volunteered Nebraska to help.

In August 2025, Pillen handed the state's minimum-security Work Ethic Camp in McCook over to DHS to become an ICE detention center — one that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem herself nicknamed the "Cornhusker Clink".
His own office later published the contract: the federal government pays Nebraska's prison agency a base of $2.4 million a month to hold detainees.
He ordered the Nebraska National Guard to support immigration agents, and had the State Patrol sign an agreement letting troopers help ICE make arrests. He told Fox News he was "really, really proud" to put Nebraska's Guard, State Patrol and prison system into Trump's deportation mission.
The camp took its first detainees in early November 2025. Pillen said its 200 beds should be full "by Thanksgiving", with a second phase to add 100 more.
Nebraskans protested in the hallway outside his office the day it was announced, holding signs reading "ICE = Gestapo," and the ACLU of Nebraska called it "our own heartland horror".

Jim Pillen turned a Nebraska state facility — and Nebraska's own troops — over to an out-of-control federal police force. We deserve better.

Won't Face Nebraskans' Questions

Democracy works when leaders have to answer for themselves in public — unscripted, side by side with their opponents, in front of the people they want to serve.

Jim Pillen refuses.

In March 2022, Pillen refused to debate his Republican primary rivals. His campaign told one central Nebraska station that "debates are often just political theater, a chance for the mainstream media to pit Republican candidates against each other."
Then he refused to debate Democrat Carol Blood in the general election — making him, the Nebraska Examiner found, Nebraska's first governor since at least the 1970s elected without facing his opponents on a debate stage. His campaign manager's explanation: "Jim is a livestock producer, not a politician, and he doesn't do political theater."
His senior adviser told Nebraska Public Media the no-debate strategy was decided "day one" — and that "the people who care about debates are political insiders and members of the media."
Running for reelection in January 2026, he held a "town hall" by telephone — one where the questions were submitted to his team. He answered seven of them from the public, plus more put to him by a former Nebraska Republican Party chairman.
On that call he repeatedly used a slur for the Nebraskans who criticize him: "if you sit and listen to the keyboard warriors that are libtards — you would think the sky is falling down" and, of demonstrators outside one of his events, "the 'libtards' that lost their brains."
Three days later a reporter told him she had spoken with parents of children with special needs who were hurt by the comments — and a member of his team cut in: "So, we're gonna keep the questions on topic." His staff gave reporters the same answer when they asked about a no-bid contract approved at his request.

If Jim Pillen won't answer questions to win the job, why would he answer to us once he has it? Now in his fourth year in office, we have our answer. We deserve better.

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