Conservatives in the Idaho Legislature have a rare opportunity to flex their muscles and cut years of bloat out of government budgets. Many Idahoans love how the Trump administration employs a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and want to see the overspending stopped and reversed here at home, too.
After a tense standoff last session, the Idaho Legislature established a new budget process. Budgets were split into maintenance budgets, which keep agencies at their current spending levels, and enhancements, which add new spending.
The maintenance budgets include pay raises, benefits cost changes, agency cost-sharing allocation changes, and required contractual inflationary increases. So, they are not bare bones because, in many businesses, pay raises are viewed as enhancements.
The enhancements include replacement items, new line items, and changes driven by programmatic growth. The enhancement budgets can actually show line item reductions to the maintenance budget if that is the will of the Joint Finance Appropriation Committee (JFAC) that sets the budgets.
Before we get ahead of ourselves, it is important to note that 20 agencies and sub-agencies submitted no enhancement budgets, meaning they operate within their maintenance budget appropriations. Some on the following list are very small agencies or agencies of questionable value. But how is it possible that the Attorney General, a very busy agency that is a Constitutional Office, operates with just a maintenance budget? This agency, with a staff of 227 full-time positions and a budget of over $35 million, apparently can do it. The list of agencies with only a maintenance budget is as follows:
Two enhancement budgets have been rejected — one in the House and one in the Senate. Senate Bill 1138, the enhancement budget for the Department of Finance, asked for five new staff positions. It died on the House floor. Similarly, Senate Bill 1155 for the state liquor division died. Many believe that because the state has a monopoly on the selling of hard liquor, it should not need as much in enhancements as were requested.
Rather than express consternation that these bills died, JFAC should take the failures as a rejection from the bodies. Enhancement budgets that fail should not be “revised” slightly but rather taken as the direct message, “Don’t send them back at all.”
When unified budgets were killed in the past, the agency for which the budget was presented was effectively defunded until a replacement unified budget was approved. So, in the case of the liquor division, this would have been a unified request for $32,678,200.
With the new budget process, this budget was split into a $31,156,500 maintenance request covered by SB 1110 and a $1,521,700 enhancement piece covered by SB 1155, the bill that failed. Those two bills total to $32,678,200. The Legislature now has the option to pass the maintenance piece (keeping the department functioning) and reject the enhancements (stopping the growth) — which is what the new process was supposed to allow.
The pushback that we are witnessing on the floors when the enhancement budgets come up for a vote is both understandable and appropriate. So, why are some legislators being criticized for voting down enhancements? In the liquor division example, the maintenance budget was 95% of the total. How can that be considered a draconian reduction? The answer is simple: agencies expect to get what they want, and too many legislators are happy to give it to them. But legislators who vote no on enhancements are actually using the budget process as designed. Let’s encourage them to keep at it.
Good job! Please keep up the good work!
(Please pass this along)
Thank you for the explanation on how this works. I guess it's pretty straightforward, after all.
Just for us dummies, will you please tell me what the heck is a liquor budget of 32 million dollars pay for?