08/26/2025
Illinois is betting your money on genocide (and they’re losing). The Illinois state pension system manages retirement money for all the public employees in the state. This system has a notorious funding crisis, meaning that many workers are unsure if they’ll receive the promised pensions. Despite reaching a record $111 billion debt in 2015, former Republican Governor Rauner, as well as the Democratic-majority IL General Assembly, made it even harder to resolve this crisis by limiting investments to protect the interests of the Israeli government and Israeli corporations.
Rauner’s 2015 bill bans state agencies from doing business with companies that boycott Israel and also mandates that any business that boycotts Israel be put on a restricted list. This prevents any state pension program from investing in these companies.
We need your support for IL HB 2723, a narrow repeal of Rauner’s law that would remove the Pension Code provisions requiring the Illinois Investment Policy Board to include companies that boycott Israel in its list of restricted companies. The positive impacts of HB 2723 would include improving our pension fund's fiscal health, restoring proper fiduciary standards, and recommitting Illinois to its long tradition of defending civil liberties.
The current law, modified by Rauner’s 2015 bill, is troubling for multiple reasons. First, the term “boycott”, as defined in the bill, is so broad that it takes very little to end up on the banned list. This law also means that the businesses Illinois invests our state’s pension in are handcuffed to Israel, regardless of the standards of their business practices. Instead of protecting Israeli interests by policing corporate politics, our investment board should focus on closing the funding gap. According to the IL Coalition for Human Rights, publicly available data estimates that the loss to our pension funds from Rauner’s anti-BDS law is around $149 million.
There’s a free speech toll, too. Anti-boycott laws set a harmful precedent for state-sanctioned crackdowns on constitutionally protected speech. Under the second Trump administration, we are already seeing how this creates a slippery slope to revoking green cards, expelling student protestors, and heightened surveillance of vulnerable communities. This Illinois state law is a chain connecting our state to the dangerous and undemocratic agenda of the Trump administration. Repealing it would be a meaningful step not just to distance ourselves from his actions but to fight them as well.
Further, the state’s inability to do business with companies that boycott Israel has an outsized effect on small businesses in our community. Larger corporations may be more willing to forego principle for profit, but local businesses can be denied state contracts for refusing to support famine, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. This is particularly true in Illinois because, according to ABC 7 Chicago, Cook County is home to the largest Palestinian community in the country. Which means that Palestinian business owners, decrying the harm Israel has done to their families, or business owners who want to support their neighbors during this genocide, are penalized for doing so by the state of IL. As the death toll in Gaza rises, more and more members of our community are losing more and more family members to Israel’s brutal assault. We are asking for the freedom to support our neighbors in our community, as well as the protection of the retirement security of Illinois’ public servants.
As Israel continues to escalate their attacks not just in Gaza and the West Bank but also in the surrounding region, the combination of this bill and the over $100 million the state of Illinois has invested in Israel is a huge liability. Since the beginning of this war, Israel’s credit rating has already dropped two notches, and as Netanyahu’s far-right coalition ramps up for a full on invasion, things will only get worse. Norway has seen the writing on the wall and is beginning to divest its sovereign wealth fund from Israel. This is likely the beginning of a domino effect to further divestment from a larger number of organizations. Under the current law, as a greater number of organizations take a stance against Israel’s war crimes, Illinois’ opportunities for profitable investment in the pension will keep shrinking until our state employees are left holding an empty bag.
We must act now by supporting HB 2723 / SB2462 to repeal Rauner’s bill for the sake of Illinois and for the sake of Palestinians. Illinois business owners deserve to be able to let their communities know that they reject genocide, famine, and ethnic cleansing, and our public employees deserve responsible stewardship to ensure they will receive the pensions they earned.
Take Action
Click this link to contact your local State Senator and State Representative to push them to support HB 2723 / SB 2462 in Springfield, IL! We are trying to get 3000 messages sent. Every email counts.
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