Idaho’s zombie gold bill rises from the grave every year | Opinion
It seems nearly every single year around this time, I have to write the same column.
No matter how many times it gets voted down or vetoed, a zombie rises from the grave yet again at the Idaho Legislature: the idea of letting the Idaho treasurer invest state idle funds in physical chunks of gold or silver held in a secure vault.
The case that this is a bad idea is clear. Idle funds are meant to be used soon, and gold and silver are too volatile for that purpose.
For example, Yahoo Finance estimated that a market crash in gold and silver wiped out $1.28 trillion in wealth just last month. And the day after Sen. Phil Hart presented this year’s version of the bill to the Senate State Affairs Committee, silver lost nearly 10% of its value in a sudden crash attributed to the Iran bombing, according to Forbes.
With long-term savings, you might argue that you can just wait long enough and the asset will recover. But idle funds aren’t long-term savings accounts like state rainy day funds. They’re funds waiting to be used in short order.
Think about your own finances: You don’t want to park the money you’ve set aside to pay your next utility bill — quite analogous to state idle funds — in assets subject to wild price fluctuations. If you can make a little interest while you’re waiting, that’s nice, but what you want most is to be certain that money will still all be there when the bill comes due.
Gold and sliver bullion are not those kinds of assets and never have been.
I had a high school teacher who told the story of her brother, who bought silver bullion during the 1980 bubble when the billionaire Hunt brothers cornered the market on silver. When the bubble burst, he lost essentially his entire investment. She said her brother decided to take physical possession of the little brick, which he used as a door stop so that at least he would gain something useful from the transaction.
You don’t want that to happen to the funds Idaho was holding to pay for bridge repairs next month.
So why do certain lawmakers keep raising the same bad idea again and again? Only they know what’s in their hearts, but I have a hunch.
Year after year, prolific political donations flow from Money Metals Exchange President and CEO Stefan Gleason to the Idaho Legislature, particularly its far-right component. And year after year, recipients of his donations support a bill that would likely put Idaho taxpayer funds in his company’s vault, located in Eagle.
According to campaign finance records, Gleason donated $2,000 to Hart directly in 2024, along with big contributions to folks like Speaker Mike Moyle, R-Star; Rep. Dale Hawkins, R-Fernwood; and Sen. Glenneda Zuiderveld, R-Twin Falls. In 2024, the Statesman’s Kevin Fixler tallied a total of $360,000 in donations from Gleason and closely linked business entities between 2020 and 2024.
Maybe that’s a coincidence. Maybe pigs fly.
And this is hardly the only instance of something like this happening recently. Donald Trump Jr. likewise wined and dined lawmakers at a private event earlier this year trying to get support for a bill that would allow Idaho to issue payments to vendors using stablecoins like the one his company issues.
The Idaho Legislature should be working on behalf of the people, not the donors who fund certain lawmakers’ political campaigns. But the state of Idaho has long refused to take political corruption seriously.
Rules of the Legislature allow lawmakers to vote on and even sponsor bills that they have a personal financial stake in. They merely have to announce that they have a conflict of interest, then do whatever they want.
This may become an issue of particular relevance if this bill makes it to the House, since Rep. Rob Beiswenger, R-Horseshoe Bend, has listed himself as a sales specialist with Money Metals Exchange since 2021, according to his LinkedIn profile and candidate questionnaires. No matter, the rules of ethics are made of soggy tissue paper.
So are the campaign finance laws. Want to ignore the $1,000 contribution limit and give a candidate $5,000? Make a personal maximum $1,000 contribution; hand your spouse another $1,000 to make a second; open up three LLCs to each make another. This is common practice, and it’s entirely legal. It allows effectively infinite contributions.
Get caught actually breaking campaign finance laws? No worries, just brush it off. The penalties are negligible — fines so small that most major donors wouldn’t bend over to pick up that amount of money if it fell out of their pocket. There’s no real incentive to change bad behavior, and I’ve watched prosecutors drop cut-and-dry cases because the penalty is so small they determine it isn’t worth the effort of prosecuting them.
Anyone want to try draining this swamp?
Bryan Clark is an opinion writer with the Idaho Statesman.
This story was originally published March 5, 2026 at 4:00 AM.
CORRECTION: This story has been updated to correct the year in which Kevin Fixler tallied campaign contributions.