Spencer Deery

Deery earned a bachelor's degree from the Brigham Young University in communications and a master's degree in public administration from George Washington University.^[1] A student at Brigham Young University, Deery stated, "Children who attend high school here need opportunities to succeed, even if their status is undocumented. Most are American in their culture and denying them in-state tuition because of something their parents did is not only unjust but promotes despair, poverty and crime."^[2] Deery was a publicist at Deseret Book Company, a The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints publishing company, in 2008.^[3][4] Deery worked as deputy chief of staff at Purdue University for former university president Mitch Daniels.^[5] Before his time at Purdue University, he served as a public policy research aid in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.^[6]

Spencer Deery has been an especially productive legislator on tax reductions and education regulations. His legislative accomplishments on taxes include income tax deductions for parents, federal tax savings for small businesses, increasing the earned income tax credit, and numerous reductions for property taxes, including reductions for: home improvements, limiting the growth of property taxes as home values grow, and further such deductions for senior citizen home owners ^[7]. On the education side, he has been active for both K-12 education and university education. For K-12 education, he supported Secured School Safety Grants and made teaching licensure easier, counting experience from charter schools, removing STEM requirements, removing college degree requirements, and removing vaccine requirements^[8]. His bill with perhaps the heaviest news coverage was SB 202, which replaced university tenure with a review every 5-years for the "intellectual diversity" of faculty speech. This law included a reporting system to name professors who express political biases in classroom and lab environments or who engage in DEI activities.^[9]