October 1, 2025 starts a new fiscal year for the Michigan government but the Legislature has not yet, as I’m writing, agreed upon a final state budget. Both the Senate and House of Representatives have passed school and general government budgets, but there’s a multi-billion-dollar chasm between the two which we need to resolve or the government will shut down. That’s a situation I would like to avoid.

The Senate passed its school and general budgets back in the late spring and early summer – well within the statutory July 1^st deadline. The problem is that the Senate’s proposed budget increases spending by more than $4 billion with no explanation how to pay for it, which makes their work unusable. Michigan’s constitution requires the state to pass a balanced budget.

The Michigan House of Representatives passed a school budget in June and a general operating budget in August. Eighteen House Appropriations subcommittees spent months examining state spending, one line item at a time, and cut billions of dollars of waste. With about a $9 billion difference between the Senate and House budgets, there is a large financial chasm that needs to be negotiated.

It should come as no surprise that politics and political rhetoric abounds in Lansing. I’d like to emphasize the spending priorities built into the House budgets.

The House School Aid Budget includes record-high funding of $12,000 per student, which is a more than 20% increase over the current year. (It’s also substantially higher than the approximately $10,000 per student funding in the Senate and Executive branch proposals.) We achieve this by consolidating $2,000 of currently mandated spending into a kind of flex account that local school districts can apply for their students’ specific needs. Said another way, we’re giving schools the ability to decide how to spend the money, rather than attaching strings from Lansing.

Our total K-12 funding proposal is $21.9 billion, which is $100 million more than the $21.8 billion proposed by the state Senate. So it’s funny to hear critics claim that the House education budget is loaded with “cuts.” Our $21.9 billion plan is greater than their $21.8 billion proposal. Calling record-high funding a cut is not mathematically compatible.

The general (or omnibus) budget passed by the House contains record funding for roads. It creates a new $115 million Public Safety Trust Fund to specifically target high-crime areas. It includes a 20% salary increase for Michigan State Police and funds to hire graduates from the next two State Police academies (without removing a single trooper from duty). It provides Medicaid funding for 60,000 more Michiganders than the Senate budget. All of this is accomplished without raising taxes.

I get it: the House general government budget was late (it should have been done by July 1) and it emphasizes different priorities than found in the unbalanced, constitutionally unusable Senate budget. If we get to Oct. 1 without a deal, I’m sure you will hear a lot about these differences in the form of political talking points along with hyperbolic claims of unimaginable harm to Michiganders.

Gov. Whitmer promised to “fix the damn roads” more than seven years ago. We agree that needs to be done and found $3.4 billion in the budget for roads without raising taxes. That includes $2.5 billion for local roads – you know, the ones you drive on every day. The governor acknowledged in her 2025 State of the State address that more school funding has not resulted in better reading and math results; that’s why our record funding for schools gives more flexibility to local school boards. A new public safety trust fund, which will go directly to county and local law enforcement, will target high crime areas.

We can do all this without raising your taxes.