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 1190 appropriates $19,000,000 to the Military Division for fiscal year 2023.

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?

Senate Bill 1190 provides a supplemental appropriation of $19 million in federal funding to cover a portion of the construction costs for the Jerome readiness center. The total cost of the project is $25 million. The agency noted that they were not aware of this federal grant opportunity earlier in the budgeting process and asked for this appropriation as a supplemental to avoid asking for a second appropriation for the 2024 fiscal year.

From the information publicly available, there is no apparent reason why this supplemental could not have been an additional appropriation for the 2024 fiscal year instead. Being that this project was not planned before the budget-making process, and there is no emergency that completion of this project would resolve, this request is not an appropriate use of a supplemental appropriation.

(-1)