The natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuits of happiness and owning property are eternal. As eternal as man’s natural rights may be, we have reached a rare point where our Idaho Freedom Index and Idaho Spending Index require small but important updates to reflect the unfortunate challenges to Western culture we are facing and fully reflect how the Legislature does its budgeting. 

Accordingly, the Idaho Freedom Foundation announces changes to its Idaho Freedom Index and Idaho Spending Index for the 2025 legislative session and beyond. 

In its 12 years of existence, the Idaho Freedom Index has provided the most comprehensive and powerful indicator of how Idaho legislators vote and how those votes reflect the principles of restoring liberty, protecting rights, limiting government, reducing taxes, and honoring the Constitution. It is the “true north” for assessing the performance of the Legislature and, more specifically, seeing how legislators either promote freedom principles or undermine them. 

Who would have thought just a decade ago that we would need legislation in Idaho to ban mutilation surgery on minors, to protect kids from pornography being pushed in schools and library materials, to keep the groomers at bay from targeting children? Who would have thought cell phones we hand to kids could be as dangerous as boxes of snakes? 

Sadly, we have seen how legislation necessarily evolved to address the evils and challenges to our traditional family norms and Western values. The time has come for the Idaho Freedom Index to include in its metrics positive scoring for legislation protecting traditional family values and the virtues of Western culture. We are adding a metric to add positive rating points for bills adding such protections and to negatively affect ratings for bills attacking those values. 

In addition, the number of bills and changes to education policy have been few in number as to make it near impossible for our Education Freedom Index to accurately depict legislators’ comprehensive and sometimes-nuanced views. Therefore, we are ending that index measure and incorporating the education freedom tracking into the Idaho Freedom Index. 

The Freedom Index will now consist of the ever-present 12 index measures used since its inception as well as two new metrics on traditional family values and education freedom.    

Our Freedom Index gives the most accurate assessment of how legislators themselves support or oppose freedom based on their votes. It will do even better now, given the additional measures, capturing the totality of values and freedoms important to Idaho.  We look forward to providing Idahoans the most accurate perspective of how their legislators’ votes square with the principles of freedom, constitutionality, family values, and education choices. 

Further, our Idaho Spending Index will also reflect a small but important perspective adjustment. Because “ongoing budgets” are voted separately from “enhanced spending budgets,” the ratings for the two require separate consideration. 

One metric used in the Spending Index has been rewritten to capture the importance of viewing “enhancement budgets” as platforms to reduce government spending and not only for increasing spending. The Spending Index is, and will remain, the most accurate measure of fiscal responsibility, or lack thereof, by legislators. 

With these important and necessary changes, the Idaho Freedom Index and the Idaho Spending Index will remain the gold standard for tracking state legislators. No other state policy center does this to this level — only the Idaho Freedom Foundation. Take a look at both Index metrics here. 

I invite you to carefully review the Indexes and scores during the legislative sessions and ongoing as you evaluate office holders. I also request you kindly consider supporting the Idaho Freedom Foundation in its efforts. 

In liberty, with firm reliance on our Creator, 

Ronald Nate, Ph.D.
President
Idaho Freedom Foundation

PS: The Idaho Freedom Index has been called “the gold standard” of state-based legislative scorecards. This powerful tool only happens thanks to the support of people like you. Please consider a donation of $100 today to help us prepare the Freedom Index for the 2025 legislative session. Together, we can continue to hold lawmakers to the conservative standard and expose those who fall short. Thank you.