By the middle of the 2026 legislative session, Local Solutions Support Center (LSSC) tracked nearly 850 abusive preemption bills across states currently in legislative session.

State lawmakers pushed more than 800 abusive preemption bills across 48 states in 2025. Many of the preemption hotspots the LSSC team tracked - from immigration to anti-DEI efforts - align with the Trump administration’s rhetoric. In fact, it’s impossible to tell the story of preemption in 2025 without considering the impact of the new administration on policy making and people.

As many 2025 state legislative sessions come to a close, abusive preemption once again threatens local control of a number of issues. Across the country, states continue to advance legislation that interferes with the ability of local governments to tailor local solutions for local needs.

Local Solutions Support Center (LSSC) is tracking nearly 600 abusive preemption bills so far this year - a significantly higher number of bills than our team identified in all of 2024. The new federal landscape is emboldening state lawmakers to advance harmful preemption bills - with a particular focus on anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ+, and anti-DEI legislation.

Our new report, Preemption’s Role in Undermining American Democracy: 2024 Legislative Session Overview, tracks the 411 abusive preemption bills LSSC identified nationwide this year across 16 different issue spaces. This report explores the major areas of everyday life where lawmakers and corporations are advancing preemption in an effort to undermine democracy.

LSSC’s latest report, Protecting Local Democracy: 2023 Legislative Session Overview, explores all the preemption trends that played out in states across the country this past year. The report also highlights what issues advocates are most concerned about as we head into 2024.

The scope of abusive preemption bills is widening – from Death Star preemption; to efforts to undermine the power of reform-oriented prosecutors; to discriminating against transgender youth; to making it harder for local officials to successfully conduct elections. LSSC’s mid-session report explores the top trends we’re tracking so far this session, as well as a few promising victories that advocates are securing.

Despite the growing threat of abusive preemption, LSSC and our partners across the country secured important wins in 2022 – in state houses, in the courts, and in organizing spaces. We learned lessons and developed best practices that are already strengthening our work as the national hub countering abusive preemption and strengthening democracy as we head into 2023. This new report highlights some of the Local Solutions Support Center’s key activities to support the field and push back against abusive preemption in 2022.

In this report, LSSC tracks how abusive preemption was used during the 2022 legislative session by state lawmakers at the behest of corporations to undermine local authority, particularly on public health authority, LGBTQ rights, and democracy & voting rights.

SSC’s new 2022 Mid-Session report looks at how state elected officials are continuing to undermine local authority on topics ranging from educational curriculum to voting rights to labor laws to LGBTQ equality.

2021 was an unprecedented year for abusive preemption. As local elected officials and advocates sought to protect their communities from the ongoing public health and economic effects of the pandemic, they encountered preemption efforts from state lawmakers on a scale never before seen.

The Local Solutions Support Center’s (LSSC) report explores 2021 legislative activity in more detail. Overall in the session, LSSC tracked over 400 preemption bills – more than two times the number of bills tracked during the 2019 session.

This report reveals how the growing abuse of preemption over the last decade forced many municipalities to start from behind when responding to the pandemic, and highlights the issue areas advocates are preparing to defend from state interference in the months ahead.

Between January and June 2019, state legislatures across the nation continued a troubling trend of passing more laws forbidding or “preempting” local control over a large and growing set of public health, economic, environmental, and social justice policy solutions.