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.
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Bill Description: House Bill 246 makes several corrections and object transfers within the departments of Commerce, Environmental Quality, and Health and Welfare for fiscal year 2025.
Does this budget incur any wasteful spending among discretionary funds, including new line items? Conversely, does this budget contain any provisions that serve to reduce spending where possible (i.e. base reductions, debt reconciliation, etc.)?
House Bill 246 makes several corrections to the budget for the current fiscal year — FY 2025. These corrections work to reflect the Legislature’s intentions when appropriating monies in the 2024 legislative session.
There are two such corrections to note. First, money for broadband funding projects is supposed to be spent by the Broadband Office in the Department of Commerce. This is due to legislative action from the 2024 legislative session to keep better accounting of spending on these projects. Secondly, $2 million was mistakenly appropriated to the “General Fund” within the Department of Environmental Quality, not the “DEQ General Fund,” which is a different account. H246 makes a transfer between these accounts to correct this issue.
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Does this budget contain hidden fund transfers or supplemental expenditures that work to enact new policy or are not valid emergency expenditures? Conversely, are fund transfers only made to stabilization funds or are supplemental requests only made in the interest of resolving valid fiscal emergencies?
House Bill 246 also includes two net-zero transfers within the Department of Health and Welfare. These transfers move money within the Physical Health Services program and the Substance Abuse Treatment and Prevention program (SATP). These are called object class transfers, meaning that an agency can take unspent money from things like salaries, and apply it to other things like contract work. Such is the case in the Physical Health Services budget. The SATP program will move money from trustee and benefits payments (grants) to operating expenses.
Being these are transfers between spending categories, rather than between funding sources — like from the General Fund to dedicated funds — these moves do not work to hide the true growth in spending.
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