OKPOLICY.ORG
The state budget for the next fiscal year was announced last week, setting the stage for the legislature to complete its work by the constitutionally mandated deadline: the last Friday in May. The budget process relied on an unprecedented level of “horse trading” or “log rolling.” The budget process necessarily has an element of give and take, but it has never been as reliant on non-budget policy decisions as it has in recent sessions.
In announcing the budget agreement, the governor and legislative leaders also announced that they had reached agreement on certain policy issues, such as “behind the meter” energy production, “business courts,” damage caps on non-economic damages, and preconstruction expense recovery for utilities. The agreement on the budget was seemingly linked to the approval of these policies, some or all of which may be contentious and might not have passed independently.
It would be naïve to think policymaking is solely about sound reasoning, with the better argument always prevailing. Leverage is usually part of the equation. But using the state budget as leverage to push through non-budget measures that might not pass otherwise can lead to serious mistakes. The pros and cons of these policies are lost when linked to the allocation of funds.
It’s interesting that the authors of the Oklahoma Constitution tried to guard against log rolling with a provision that all legislation must have only a single subject. This aimed to prevent combining popular and unpopular measures in a single bill, forcing legislators to accept bad proposals along with good ones.
That type of linkage is not far from what’s happening with the budget process, except instead of a single bill, it’s trading a series of non-budget policy measures for a series of budget decisions tied together. The problem is the wisdom of the policy becomes secondary to getting the deal done.
