Recent Articles

by Cami Koons, Iowa Capital Dispatch
March 6, 2026

The Harkin Institute for Public Policy & Citizen Engagement determined regulations on fertilizers, animal feeding operations and agricultural drainage, among other things are policies that would improve water quality and public health in Iowa.

The Harkin Institute released a policy report Friday as a follow-up to the comprehensive Polk County water quality report released this summer. 

Adam Shriver, the institute’s director of wellness and nutrition policy, wrote in the report’s forward that it contains “a set of policies that, if followed, would dramatically improve Iowa’s waterways to protect the health of current and future generations.”

Iowa Capital Dispatch
March 2, 2026

A western Iowa teacher who was fired after publicly commenting that she wouldn’t miss activist Charlie Kirk after his death last year has been awarded jobless benefits.

Jana Aldrich of Council Bluffs was a special education teacher who last year worked for the Omaha-based Child Saving Institute, a nonprofit with a mission of helping children with behavioral, mental and social needs.

According to state records, on Sept. 10, 2025, shortly after conservative activist Kirk was shot and killed in Utah, Aldrich posted a comment to Facebook. The post included a widely circulating meme that included Kirk’s April 3, 2023, statement in response to a question about gun deaths: “I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”

Iowa Capital Dispatch
February 20, 2026

Muscatine County, which has a contract to hold immigration detainees for the federal government, is refusing to publicly disclose its copy of that contract.

In recent months, Muscatine County’s jail administrator has been named in five lawsuits related to the county’s agreement to jail some of the immigrants who are picked up in Iowa by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

Like other Iowa counties, Muscatine County has a contract with ICE to house those individuals in return for payments from the federal government. That contract, and the county’s detention of the immigrants, have been the subject of five civil lawsuits and an alleged ethics complaint concerning former Muscatine County Attorney James Barry, who resigned last year.