Hunt became the first person elected to two consecutive four-year terms as governor, serving from 1943 to 1949. He faced hostile majorities in both houses of the legislature throughout his years as governor. The principal legislative accomplishment of his first term was the enactment of a retirement system for teachers. He repeatedly proposed a retirement system for state workers in his second term without success. During his first term, Republican U.S. Senator Edward V. Robertson charged that the Japanese citizens interned at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, were leading pampered lives and hoarding supplies. The "Denver Post" wrote an exposé backing his complaints. Hunt dismissed that as a "political story" and said that "food stuffs cannot be brought into a city to feed 13,500 people in a wheel barrow and it would not be good business to bring it in every day." He toured the camp and said the internees' "living standard was, to my way of thinking, rather disgraceful." At the end of the war he wrote to the War Relocation Authority that "We do not want a single one of these evacuees to remain in Wyoming."