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.
Rating: (-1)
Bill Description: House Bill 465 is an enhancement of $7,487,300 for the Public Schools, Student Support Division for fiscal year 2026. This legislation appropriates a total of $1,676,267,200 to the agency.
Is the continuation or growth in ongoing spending, if any, inappropriate for the changes in circumstances, scope of the agency, or current economic environment? Conversely, is the continuation or growth in ongoing spending appropriate given any change in circumstances or economic pressures?
The student support division was created in the 2025 fiscal year as part of a reorganization of the Public School Support Program. Therefore, no three-year comparison is available. The Student Support Division will receive over $1.67 billion in ongoing spending in FY 2026. There are some concerns. The appropriation is an increase over the maintenance budget, albeit a small one, even though support units are down 1.2%. And Health Insurance per support unit is up 8.7%.
(0)
Does this budget perpetuate or expand state dependence on federal dollars, thereby violating principles of federalism? Conversely, does this budget actively reduce the amount of federal dollars used to balance this budget?
This legislation has total federal support for this division at $249,647,800 — nearly 15% of the total budget. However, this budget requests $9,500,000 in new federal grants to get to this number, meaning that without this additional federal grant money, the federal funds would be $9.5 million less. So this budget increases dependency. This degree of dependency is concerning for Idaho schools as the Biden administration (or a future administration) demonstrated this funding could be leveraged to support bad federal policy.
(-1)
