Nate Willems said the Iowa Attorney General’s Office should spend “less time filing political lawsuits” and more time on helping Iowa workers and consumers.
Attorney General Brenna Bird, a Republican, has held the office since January 2023. She’s running for reelection against Willems, a lawyer and former state representative, on Nov. 3. Bird’s platform focuses on criminal prosecution and on dozens of lawsuits dealing with federal policy, while Willems pledges to stand up to corporations and protect workers and wages.
Bird
Bird grew up on a farm near Dexter and earned her law degree from the University of Chicago in 2001. She worked for US Rep. Steve King from 2003 to 2010, eventually becoming his chief of staff, and then served as counsel to former Gov. Terry Branstad.
Bird was county attorney in Fremont and Audubon counties, and became Guthrie County attorney in 2018.
She ran for attorney general in 2010 and lost to incumbent Tom Miller, a Democrat, by 11 points. She ran again in 2022 and won by just under two points. That win made her the first Republican to hold the office in Iowa since 1979.
Three months into her term, Bird made waves by pausing state payments to healthcare providers for emergency contraception and abortion for sexual assault victims, to “review the program.” The office had covered emergency contraception for roughly 40 years under Miller through the Crime Victim Compensation Program, which is funded through fines paid by convicted offenders.
Bird said she intended to make the pause permanent.
As sexual assaults continued to happen, providers kept dispensing the medication and absorbed the cost. More than 160 claims worth about $7,500 went unpaid. Polk County’s supervisors voted to foot the bill locally, having served 270 victims the previous year. Johnson County allocated $10,000 after its sexual assault response team said it didn’t have the money to take on the expense.
Bird claimed that no victims were denied services due to the audit. State Auditor and gubernatorial candidate Rob Sand disagreed, saying Bird was inflicting more trauma on rape victims just for politics.
Bird’s review ran over a year, and in May 2024 she announced that her office would reimburse all 362 pending contraception claims—but permanently ruled out paying for abortions for rape victims.
That review produced the outcomes Bird now campaigns on. Bird additionally claimed her office doubled the state payment to nurses for sexual assault examinations, and started reimbursing examiners for mileage.
In consumer cases, Bird joined 46 other states in a lawsuit against Meta over teen social media addiction and a separate claim over Facebook sharing user data. That lawsuit brought $135 million to Iowa.
She sued OpenAI in October under the state’s consumer fraud act, claiming that the company that created ChatGPT had misled Iowans about the chatbot’s safety.
Bird filed or joined more than a dozen multistate suits against the Joe Biden administration over student loan cancellation, federal vaccine mandates, the American Rescue Plan’s limit on state tax cuts, EPA power plant rules, Title IX protections for transgender students, and a rule letting asset managers weigh climate risk.
Iowa was one of six states whose challenge to allow student loan cancellations to continue reached the US Supreme Court and won. Student loan forgiveness would have helped 264,000 Iowans.
After that, Bird joined 10 other states to sue the Biden administration to block a student loan repayment plan that resulted in lower monthly payments. Over 50,000 Iowans were enrolled in the SAVE repayment plan before it was blocked by a federal court in March 2026.
You can find a full list of actions Bird took against the federal government when Biden was president here.
When Donald Trump became president, Bird’s actions against the federal government changed dramatically. In June 2025, she led 16 states in a brief supporting the Trump administration’s decision to cut Harvard University’s federal funding, following the administration’s demands that Harvard end its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
Bird also negotiated a data-sharing trade with the Trump administration. The state of Iowa gained access to a federal database to check people’s citizenship or immigration status, in return for helping Homeland Security access state driver’s license records and opening Iowa residents’ licensing information to the Trump administration.
Her office has charged eight people in connection with alleged illegal voting. Juries acquitted three and one received a deferred judgement. One person was found guilty in August 2025, but a judge granted a retrial in December and that ruling is on appeal. One person was awaiting trial as of June and two others do not have a reported outcome as of October 2026. No conviction currently stands.
A separate case against a Montgomery County absentee ballot board member, charged over his handling of 2024 mail ballots, ended in acquittal on Oct. 8.
READ MORE: Brenna Bird attacks rare noncitizen voting while defending dark money donations
Willems
Willems grew up in Anamosa, earned a degree from Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service in 2001 and a law degree from the University of Iowa in 2007.
He practices labor and employment law in Cedar Rapids, is the first vice president of the Iowa Federation of Teachers, and clerked for state Rep. Ro Foege before winning Foege’s seat in 2008.
He represented then-House District 29 from 2009 to 2013. Willems was a member of the education, judiciary, labor, state government, and ways and means committees.
In private practice he was part of a class action that won $15 million in back wages for 11,000 employees of University of Iowa Health Care.
Willems told The Gazette he isn’t interested in political lawsuits, and instead wants to rebuild the state’s Consumer Protection Division to create a unit that goes after wage theft.
On the election fraud cases, Willems said during a debate that Bird has been able to get only one conviction in her relentless pursuit of noncitizen voters. That conviction is not active due to retrial and appeal.
Willems has said he wants to work for Iowa’s people to recover unpaid wages, citing his own estimate that Iowa workers lose about $900 million a year to wage theft through unpaid overtime, stolen tips, and misclassification of employees.
Willems said those are all crimes that ought to be prosecuted.
