Republican leaders in Topeka want to bump the governor’s office from its lead role in proposing state spending. Instead, the plan is to assign a hand-picked committee of lawmakers for the grinding work of drafting the state budget.
This striking change is needed, they say, because lawmakers don’t like waiting until mid-January for a governor’s spending plan. Their own committee would produce a baseline budget for introduction on the first day of the 2025 legislative session, beating a governor’s traditional release by two weeks. The governor’s budget becomes a “supplemental” plan (meaning: irrelevant).
The real problem isn’t a two-week wait. It’s that the legislators are Republicans and the governor is a Democrat.
The Legislature, dominated by nearly70 percent Republicans in the House and Senate, has trouble coming to grips with even the slightest issue. That these lawmakers could create a coherent plan to raise and spend $27 billion is fantasy.
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For decades, governors have presented spending plans by mid-January for legislators to consider and amend during the legislative session that usually ends by early May.
The current process works because people know what they’re doing. Over the summer and into October, scores of state agencies get busy calculating their budgets for the next fiscal year beginning July1. Many agents and bureaucrats are involved, figuring costs and revenues of departments and domains throughout the executive, judicial and legislative branches.
Appraisals and estimates, one division and one office at a time, flow into the governor’s office for review by the budget director and a dozen analysts. The final accounting in late December becomes what is known as “the governor’s budget.”
The budget plan, roughly 900 pages, is published (online only) in two volumes; it is a detailed accounting of income and outgo, a blueprint for the cost of state government. This year it covers fiscal year 2025 ‒ from July 1, 2024 through June 30, 2025.
Is a legislative committee equipped to take over this process?
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Over generations, legislators have had roughly 90 days to examine the governor’s budget plan, make changes, offer alternatives. This involves a lot of arguing among political tribes and two of the three branches of government ‒ the executive (headed by the governor), and legislative (Speaker of the House and Senate president). When the governor is a Democrat and the legislature is dominated by Republicans, fireworks can be expected. The judicial branch (courts) looks on with an arched eye.
Usually by mid-May, the legislature and governor have come to terms and a budget is passed by the House and Senate and signed into law.
The new plan is that a dozen or so citizen legislators, heavy with one party and sprinkled with the other, direct the process. The Department of Legislative Research is staffed with experts assigned to various committees, but if they are diverted to budget assignments, committee work will suffer.
One choice option is for Republicans to ship the Kansas budget to Alexandria, Va., for ghost-writing by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative think tank that routinely cranks out legislation for states dominated by Republicans.
Senate President Ty Masterson, R-Andover, is president of ALEC, which has worked up Kansas legislation covering abortion, school finance, education reforms, and local and state taxation proposals, among others.
Masterson’s hand-picked committee may have its name on a Kansas budget but it could be drafted in a D.C. suburb.
