LANSING — House Republicans made rare use of a legislative tool Wednesday, Dec. 10 to axe about $645 million in program spending that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s administration wanted to carry over from the 2025 fiscal year.
The cuts impact dozens of programs across nearly all state departments, plus agencies of the Legislature. According to a memo from the House Fiscal Agency, they include:
Full details of the cuts were not immediately clear, since each spending line item the committee cut could contain many individual spending allocations, and those were not detailed in the House Fiscal Agency memo released Dec. 10.
In each case, the money was appropriated as boilerplate in the 2025 budget approved in 2024, when Democrats held a trifecta, controlling the governor’s office and both chambers of the Legislature. With the money partly unspent at the end of the 2025 fiscal year, the State Budget Office had requested that the programs be converted to work projects, so the programs could continue without seeking new legislative approval. Instead, the money will be returned to state coffers so it can be appropriated for other purposes.
The Detroit Free Press reported in September that use of work projects to carry over funding from one year to the next had grown by billions since the COVID-19 pandemic and that House Republicans were considering invoking a provision of state law that allows the appropriations committee in either chamber to deny work project requests without requiring a vote of the full Legislature.
“I don’t think these departments realized we were serious until today,” House Speaker Matt Hall, R-Richland Township, said at a Dec. 10 news conference.
Democrats blasted the move.
“Matt Hall is moving Michigan backward, putting his extreme agenda ahead of the needs of Michiganders,” House Minority Leader Ranjeev Puri, D-Canton, said in a news release.
“Blocking hundreds of millions in job-creating investments and critical programs to help Michigan families thrive is irresponsible and a direct hit on workers and communities across our state,” said House Democratic Leader Ranjeev Puri.
Though Hall said the cuts included some worthy programs that he expects Republicans will vote to restore in a supplemental spending bill early next year, he said the work project denials made by the House Appropriations Committee, in a mostly party line vote, were part of ongoing efforts by his caucus to cut “waste, fraud and abuse,” in state government. Hall said money carried over in the form of work projects, instead of lapsing to the general fund or other state funds, as it normally would at the end of the year, amounted to creation of “slush funds” inside state government.
The administration takes a $2 million line item, spends $1.82 million, and “they try to pocket the rest,” Hall said at the news conference, where he was joined by Rep. Ann Bollin, R-Brighton, chair of the House Appropriations Committee.
In rejecting $645 million in new, non-statutory work projects, the House Appropriations Committee on Dec. 10 OK’d other work projects totaling about $2 billion, which were also requested by the State Budget Office in a letter sent to lawmakers Nov. 14 of this year. Hall and Bollin said that the chairs of appropriations subcommittees had been studying the work project requests since then. In some cases, good spending had to be cut, along with the bad because a line item such as “infrastructure grants” contains numerous projects but the Appropriations Committee can only keep or cut the entire line item, not pick and choose among the projects it contains.
The West Michigan Policy Forum, a conservative business group based in Grand Rapids, praised the cuts in a news release.
“We applaud the House for standing up for taxpayers and seeking to reign in the spending of hardworking Michigan taxpayers’ money,” said forum President and CEO Jase Bolger, who is a former GOP state House speaker. “Rejecting these rollover schemes is a rare and commendable move that disrupts a long cycle of unchecked spending.”
The ombudsman program for Michigan veteran facilities is actually a position funded in the legislative branch of government, under the Legislative Services Bureau, not on the executive side controlled by Whitmer. Jeff Wiggins, a spokesman for Hall, said Dec. 11 there has been no veteran ombudsman since the end of the 2021 fiscal year, so the ongoing funding should halt and the work project denial does not interrupt an existing service.
The Make it in Michigan program, administered by the Michigan Department of Technology, Management and Budget, is a pool of money intended to be used to increase the state’s competitiveness by providing matching funds to obtain federal funding in the areas of infrastructure, mobility and electrification, climate and the environment, economic development, health and public safety, according to a state website.
This story has been updated to add new information.
Contact Paul Egan: 517-372-8660 or pegan@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: House GOP axes $645M from funds aiding infrastructure, children, vets
Reporting by Paul Egan, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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