Good morning from Iowa Capital Dispatch.
“I’m really hoping people become a little bit more patriotic and realize this country is worth saving.” — Patti Gordon of Atlanta, a vice chair of the Fulton County, Georgia, Republican Party, attending President Donald Trump’s rally at the kickoff of the Freedom 250 celebration in Washington, D.C.
The Iowa Department of Inspections, Appeals and Licensing oversees restaurant inspections in Iowa. (Photo via Getty Images; DIAL logo courtesy of Iowa Department of Inspections, Appeals and Licensing)
Inspectors have cited Iowa restaurants and stores for hundreds of food-safety violations during the past several weeks, including unsanitary kitchens, insects inside bottled beverages and ice cream mix stored on the same cooler shelf as fishing bait.
An inspector ordered the immediate, temporary shutdown of one eastern Iowa restaurant due to issues with dishwashing and refrigeration.
Iowa Auditor Rob Sand held a news conference Feb. 17, 2026. (Photo by Robin Opsahl/Iowa Capital Dispatch)
The Iowa Department of Management is asking the state auditor’s office to amend a report that found Gov. Kim Reynolds had improperly used federal COVID-19 relief funds to pay for staff in 2020 after the U.S. Treasury Department determined this finding was unsustained.
Kraig Paulsen, the director of the Department of Management, sent a letter Wednesday asking Auditor Rob Sand to amend the Iowa’s Fiscal Year 2020 Statewide Single Audit Report to reflect the new U.S. Treasury management decision.
Iowa, with a SNAP payment error rate of 5.34% in 2025, is just one of nine states with an error rate below 6% and that won’t have to match a portion of the federal food aid program benefits it pays out, starting in October 2027.
About half of farmers and ranchers regularly use artificial intelligence tools, like Chat GPT or Gemini, to support their operations, according to a report from the agricultural marketing firm MorganMyers and Ag Access, an agricultural market researcher.
Parties, protests, displays of historic documents, odes to the Founding Fathers — and a massive political rally by the president — will mark a deeply polarized nation’s 250th anniversary on this Fourth of July.
President Donald Trump’s celebrations for America’s 250th birthday began Wednesday with an evening speech from the president with some of his biggest fans in attendance.
The Trump administration sent Congress a request Wednesday for $87.6 billion in emergency funding to cover the cost of the war in Iran and other expenses.
President Donald Trump derailed a housing overhaul that he was set to sign into law Wednesday, canceling a signing ceremony for the broadly popular bipartisan bill until Congress passes an election security measure.
The U.S. Postal Service won’t deliver mail ballots in states that refuse to turn over lists of voters under a proposed rule, the agency’s chief executive said Wednesday, angering Democrats who warn the decision will disenfranchise voters.
A federal appeals court on Wednesday ruled the Department of Justice isn’t entitled to access the sensitive personal data of Michigan voters, a setback in President Donald Trump’s push to assert power over state-run elections.
U.S. Senate Republicans walked into a lunch with the president on Wednesday looking for ways to unify, but they left the closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill as fractured as ever about policy goals.
Patients and providers have argued in lawsuits challenging state abortion bans that exceptions for the life and health of the mother are too ill defined to give doctors and hospitals enough confidence to provide timely care for miscarriages.
In the four years since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, some clinics have expanded later abortion offerings, and advocates are pushing for many of the 21 states that have bans after 18 weeks to drop them.
Placards featuring 268 names, each with a photo and the age of a child or young adult who lost their life due to what their families call social media-related causes, lined the lawn of the U.S. Capitol’s Upper Senate Park Tuesday evening.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Thanks for reading Daily Dispatch. Did you know our weekend digest is also free? Sign up here. And if you enjoyed today’s edition, please forward to a friend. Increasing our readership helps us cover more news.