News Analysis — As the time bombs built into the current fiscal year’s budget begin to go off, Gov. Bruce Rauner wants lawmakers to give him broad powers to move money around.
Staffers from Rauner’s administration appeared before a Senate budgeting committee on Thursday and made the case that the need to give Rauner control over the budget is urgent. “The sooner we can get that flexibility, the sooner this crisis can be revolved. The longer we wait, the worse the crisis will get,” Richard Goldberg, Rauner’s deputy chief of staff for legislative affairs, told the committee. Rauner wants the ability to patch up the current budget without having to come back to the legislature for spending authority every time something is close to running out of money. Goldberg and Rauner’s budget chief Tim Nuding declined to give specifics about the powers the governor is looking for or what actions he would take with them, saying that those details are being negotiated with the legislative leaders.
Democrats on the committee said they support coming to some kind of agreement, but they continued to push the issue of approving funding for subsidized child care for low-income parents. The program needs $300 million to be fully funded through the current fiscal year.
Neither of these issues is entirely new. In the past few years, lawmakers approved and former Gov. Pat Quinn signed into law additional funding mid-fiscal year (also known as supplemental appropriations) for that child care program, the Department of Children and Family Services, mental health care and in-home health care services for the elderly. The recent call and response of the threat of services being cut off and additional funding swooping in to save them at the eleventh hour is indicative of the instability of the state’s budget. But supplemental appropriations are a budgeting tool that was used consistently long before the current crisis. Sometimes cost estimates are off. Sometimes more revenue comes in than expected and can by used to shore up programs later in the year.
For the first two budgets after Quinn took office, lawmakers passed lump sums for agencies and gave Quinn special budgeting powers. That state’s fiscal house was in even worse shape than anyone had imagined, and the General Assembly left much of the tough choices to Quinn. At that time, Republican lawmakers decried giving the governor so much power and said that it was a shirking of legislative responsibilities. For his part, Quinn made the budget limp along by cutting, moving some spending into special funds and allowing the backlog of unpaid bills to stack up.
Still, it’s s no surprise that Democrats are not excited about giving Rauner the power to move money around and possibly cut reimbursement rates for service providers. They may get the funding for child care, but what will they have to give up? The money has to come from somewhere. Once he has that power, there may be little they can do about how he wields it.
Rauner’s people told the committee that keeping the child care program afloat is his top priority, but they warned that it is not the only thing in trouble. “This will not be the last crisis that comes before this committee in FY 15,” Nuding said. He said that the Department of Corrections could be unable to make payroll at some prisons in March or April.
Goldberg and Nuding would not commit to supporting standalone funding for the day care program if a deal cannot be struck on getting their boss control over the budget. And why would they? If they agree to fund programs near and dear to Democrats even if Rauner doesn’t get what he wants, then what leverage will he have in negotiations? That may seem callous, but it is how budgeting often works.
Rauner stands the chance to gain control over the current budget before he even presents his ideas for next fiscal year. From a purely operational perspective, he would be able to move money around and possibly tap special funds to patch the current deeply flawed budget and keep state government going. He would also be able to begin shaping the budget, albeit in limited ways, to his agenda almost immediately. On this issue and the budgeting process at large, one has to wonder if Rauner may be thinking of a quote from his friend Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (which is a riff on a quote from Winston Churchill): “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that — it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”
