The Idaho Spending Index serves to provide a fiscally conservative perspective on state budgeting while providing an unbiased measurement of how Idaho lawmakers apply these values to their voting behavior on appropriations bills. Each bill is analyzed within the context of the metrics below. They receive one (+1) point for each metric that is satisfied by freedom-focused policymaking and lose one (-1) point for each instance in which the inverse is true. The sum of these points composes the score for the bill.

Analyst: Niklas Kleinworth

Rating: -1

Bill Description: Senate Bill 1419 appropriates $1,589,000 and 9.00 full-time positions to the Office of Administrative Hearings for fiscal year 2025.

ANALYST NOTE: The Office of Administrative Hearings was recently established through House Bill 629 of 2022. The agency received its first full year of funding in the 2024 fiscal year.

Does the budget grow government through the addition of new permanent FTPs or through funding unlegislated efforts to create new or expanded entitlement programs? Conversely, does this budget reduce the size of government staff and programs except where compelled by new legislation?

This legislation would transfer 5 full time equivalent positions from the Office of the Attorney General to the Office of Administrative Hearings. This request would add $744,400 in spending from the General Fund to the agency. However, there is not a commensurate decrease in FTPs and funding in the budget request for the Office of the Attorney General. This is an expansion of the overall size of government.

(-1)