Opinion | Michigan’s budget process demands transparency

Pork or progress? That is the dichotomy that has ground Lansing’s budget deliberations to a halt. Increasingly in recent years, the budget has been a secret document, not just when legislators vote on it, but for years afterward.

The lubricant that makes the budget go — in secret meetings between legislators, special interests and the governor — is a massive amount of pork given to enough legislators to get them to pass the budget without any clue what’s in it.

Heck, it has taken The Detroit News and others a couple of years after the budget was passed in 2022 to figure out just part of the puzzle of Fay Beydoun getting a $20 million payout to her (then) non-existent group. And that’s just one piece of pork. Most of the state budgets are greased with hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars in pork projects. All this is put into the budget during backroom meetings at the last minute — and shoved past legislators who have never read the budget and may only know one important thing: what piece of pork is in it for them.

That’s the way some — but not all — of the leadership in Lansing wants to proceed this year as well. Same ol’, same ol’. 

Contrary to that process, House Speaker Matt Hall has made clear that he wants an open, transparent budgetary process. The House budget committee, where I serve, has embraced that challenge. Right at the start of this legislative session, I voted for Speaker Hall’s new rule in the House that any legislatively requested pork item had to be disclosed by May 1, in writing and posted on state websites.

I can tell you first-hand that this has thrown an enormous wrench into the usual secret, last-minute deals that have characterized prior budgets and still seems to be the preferred budget mechanism for Senate Democratic Leader Winnie Brinks. Although both Speaker Hall and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer have declared that they want an open, transparent process, Brinks has refused to go along with that. Her actions indicate she wants the same secret deals in back rooms for the budget.

So, that makes for quite the conflict in budget negotiations. And stalemate is, unfortunately, a likely result. We saw last month that negotiations on the K-12 budget between Speaker Hall, the governor and Leader Brinks, did not result in an agreed budget after Leader Brinks walked away and canceled votes. How could it? If one party is insisting on secret backroom deals with massive amounts of pork thrown around, and the others are not agreeing to that process — what’s the likelihood of agreement?

Until the public and media insist on transparency in budget processes, the evidence suggests Brinks will continue to hold out, and that it is likely to extend budget negotiations deep into September, if not October.

We have a choice this year to break from the longtime practice of secrecy and pork payouts. It’s a dramatic choice. Pork or progress. Let’s hope that the great strides made in pressing for real reform, real progress, and an open, transparent budget process aren’t lost because one party doesn’t want to work by those rules.