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State worker groups oppose suggested IPERS cuts, new teacher pay model • Iowa Capital Dispatch [1]

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Date: 2025-08-07

As Iowa’s DOGE task force considers recommending cuts to public employee compensation and tying school staff pay to student achievement, public workers organizations are rallying for Iowans to speak out against these proposals.

The DOGE task force members met Wednesday to discuss some of the recommendations they plan to include in the report submitted to Gov. Kim Reynolds and the Legislature by their Sept. 29 deadline.

The governor launched the task force through an executive order in February as a means to find areas where state and local governments can become more efficient. The state task force is modeled off of the federal DOGE, or Department of Government Efficiency, service in Washington, D.C., formerly headed by billionaire Elon Musk.

Reynolds said when she created the task force she had three main goals for Iowa DOGE: “maximizing return on taxpayer investment, further refining our workforce and job training programs and leverage leveraging technology such as artificial intelligence.”

The task force, made up of business and industry leaders from across the state, has met multiple times in the past few months to craft a recommendations for Reynolds and state lawmakers to consider enacting as they head into the 2026 legislative session. Though the report is not yet finalized, leaders of work groups within the DOGE task force presented 45 recommendations at the Wednesday meeting for consideration.

Task force proposal calls for slashing public employee benefits

Among those suggestions were steps to cut government costs through reduced employee compensation. Terry Lutz, chairman of McClure Engineering Co. and former mayor of Fort Dodge, said as chair of Iowa DOGE’s “return-on-investment” work group, his group discovered Iowa’s retirement and health care compensation programs are “way out of whack with the private sector.”

Public employees in Iowa contribute roughly 30% to the Iowa Public Employees’ Retirement System (IPERS), while the state contributes 70% — whereas in the private sector, contribution rates are “almost be the opposite of that,” Lutz said. Similarly, he said yearly health care deductibles for state government employees are significantly lower than private sector employees.

“We discovered that some public roles have developed compensation packages that far exceed the private sector, including health and retirement benefits, time off and others,” Lutz said. “We are recommending doing away with the current defined benefits program and going to a defined contribution program, like so many other states have done.”

The recommendation would call for Iowa’s current public benefits program to remain as-is for current employees, but for changes to systems like IPERS to take effect for new employees.

In response to this proposal, groups representing public employees including the Iowa chapters of the AFL-CIO and AFSCME, as well as the Iowa State Education Association (ISEA), have launched “hands off IPERS” efforts, asking Iowans to contact Reynolds and lawmakers to share their opposition to the proposal.

“This proposal would strip away the retirement security public employees have earned through decades of service,” staff with AFSCME Local 61 wrote in a social media post.

Melissa Peterson with the Iowa State Education Association said moving to a defined contribution system for incoming employees would make the current IPERS system unsustainable, even for employees who would be grandfathered in under the proposal. She also said the change would cause major problems for recruiting employees for public sector jobs — like teaching and law enforcement — where Iowa is already seeing workforce shortages.

“If you think it’s difficult now to find a teacher or a corrections officer, go after their retirement, take off the table a defined benefit system, and you’re going to exacerbate the existing shortages we have,” Peterson said. “And, sadly, I think that that might be the intention of some of some of the people sitting around that table. They would like to eliminate our very good, stable, defined benefit system. Because they, as private entrepreneurs, don’t feel like they can compete with (IPERS).”

Teacher ‘pay for performance’ proposed

The subgroup also recommended tying teacher and administrators’ pay to student achievements through a “pay-for-performance system.” Lutz said Iowa’s education spending is higher than the national median at $18,000 per student, but that the state is lagging in national rankings for student achievement in math, reading and science.

Linking K-12 school staff pay to achievement, which would be tracked through dashboards showing metrics comparing certain student achievement assessments to dollars spent, would be a more effective means to improve students’ outcomes than the current system which “rewards teachers and administrators for their length of service or the duties they take on with no ties to student achievements,” Lutz said.

“It’s important to note, we are not suggesting cutting costs,” Lutz said. “We are focused on spending that rewards what matters: higher student achievements.”

Peterson said linking pay for school staff to standardized test scores would not necessarily improve students’ outcomes. Instead, she said, Iowa should provide funding to schools that can lessen student-teacher ratios and find ways to address problems with absenteeism.

A similar “pay-for-performance” model for teacher compensation was discussed during former Gov. Terry Branstad’s administration in 2011, but did not move forward. Peterson said this compensation model was not a good idea at that time, and “if anything, we only now have more challenges in a public education setting than we even did 15 years ago.”

Peterson said to her knowledge, the DOGE task force did not consult with education experts, groups like ISEA or other public education stakeholders while crafting their recommendations.

When the DOGE task force was created, she said she was “cautiously optimistic,” as she did believe there were areas where Iowa government can be more efficient and transparent with taxpayer funds. However, she said the recommendations presented Wednesday feel like “yet another partisan attack” on public education.

“Listen, we’re all for it: Let’s go ahead, let’s have a conversation about what we can do to maximize efficiency,” Peterson said. “I had hoped they would focus on vouchers. I had hoped there would be a conversation about what our K-12 system could do with community partnerships, for example, to help enhance some of our career and technical education programs at the K-12 level. I thought there might be a discussion about the value of our concurrent enrollment programs that are partnerships between K-12 and community colleges. … Instead, it sounds like they decided to focus on what I would consider to be some partisan low-hanging fruit.”

Other recommendations include efforts like establishing a “red tape hotline” for Iowans to report and find solutions when they face bureaucratic hurdles, creating new ways for counties to share resources and services, and speeding up the permit process for new construction projects through the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.

Emily Schmitt of Sukup Manufacturing Co., the task force’s chair, said all 45 recommendations discussed Wednesday would be up for discussions moving forward.

“We have declining assets of time and money,” Schmitt said.”… This is something that’s very impactful to discuss and really get some solutions out there. And that’s what I heard today, and that’s what everybody around this table is here for and committed to.”

The state DOGE task force is scheduled to meet for a final time Sept. 24 before submitting the final report.

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