Sometime within the last decade or so, setting the Mississippi state budget became a top-secret affair, closely guarded even against many of the lawmakers who are, ostensibly, tasked with setting it.
Why, rank-and-file legislators even have difficulty getting a spreadsheet that clearly shows what’s being proposed until just before they are expected to vote on the more than 100 bills — thousands of pages — that make up the multi-billion budget.
Budget info is on a need-to-know basis in the Mississippi Legislature, and unless you are one of a small handful of negotiators, you don’t need to know. And the public or press? Forget about it.
Shockingly, we’ve seen in recent years that mistakes get made in this hurried, harried and secret process. Big, multi-million dollar mistakes. Things get sneaked into budgets that clear headedness, deliberation and transparency would have prevented. Ditto for things that get left out.
Earlier this year, the Mississippi Legislature overhauled the entire state tax code by accident, because of typos not caught in the secretive, hurried process. Instead of deliberating and fixing the mistakes, the governor and legislative leaders rolled with it, because the typos were inadvertently close to what they wanted.
That’s a helluva footnote in the history of Mississippi governance and fiscal policy, one big, beautiful clerical error.
Mississippi budget secrecy hit another crescendo last week that had rank-and-file lawmakers on both side of the aisle angered. In a chaotic two-day special session scrum, lawmakers passed a $7.1 billion budget with nearly no deliberation and little adherence to proper parliamentary procedure.
Most lawmakers don’t know exactly what they passed in the budget last week.
The process already produced one major snafu: Lawmakers passed a $1.9 million line item in the Department of Health budget that, if signed into law would threaten the loss of more than a billion dollars of the state’s draw down of federal Medicaid dollars.
READ MORE: House passes bill that threatens Mississippi’s Medicaid funding, then skedaddles, leaves Senate holding bag
But because of the hurried, secretive budget process, the Senate was practically forced to pass the measure anyway, because the House had hurriedly passed all its budget bills in the wee hours of the morning then left the Capitol. Lawmakers said they secured a promise from the governor that he will line-item veto the mistake. They abdicated their purse string responsibility and passed the measure on to him.
It wasn’t always like this.
Not that many years ago, the Legislature’s budget process was a more transparent, egalitarian affair. While final haggling and passage of the actual budget bills has always been a late-night, last minute hectic affair, the budget process was more considered and open.
The Joint Legislative Budget Committee would hold weeks of public hearings on agencies budget requests and provide some scrutiny — again, in public hearings — on said agencies’ spending for the past year.
Lawmakers, even rank-and-file, spent much more of their time on budget deliberations and generally, budget proposals were not a state secret.
But what started as months of hearings and deliberations over time shrank to weeks, then, most recently, just a couple of days. Now, just a few agencies — the process of their selection is unclear — show up and give very and often superficial presentations to the JLBC.
The process has become more and more closed, secretive, or as one lawmaker put it recently, the “mushroom treatment” for most legislators — and certainly for the public.
Legislative leaders have vowed to open the budget process up, or at least slow it down. But so far, that appears to have been lip service. Rank-and-file members from both legislative chambers, and both sides of the aisle, are growing more frustrated with the process.
Politics are politics, and they can’t be removed from the legislative process. But a state budget shouldn’t be full of secrets and mushrooms and political strat-e-gery.
And huge mistakes.
Freshman Sen. Rod Hickman has penned an op-ed in which he summed things up nicely.
“On the day we returned to the Capitol, legislators were handed nearly 100 appropriations bills totaling over $7.8 billion in public spending — and were expected to vote on them immediately,” Hickman wrote. “No time for review. No chance for public input. No opportunity to amend. That is not governing — it’s rubber-stamping. And it disrespects both the legislative process and the people we serve.”
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