When the Mississippi House and Senate ended their 2025 session without approving a budget, there were a lot of factors in play.
The House took the position it was not going to cooperate in the usual practice of waiting until the final weekend of the session to approve major budget bills, a rushed-up process that leaves many lawmakers clueless as to what precisely they are voting on.
The Senate, meanwhile, was miffed that the House took advantage of some careless work by senators to enact a bill that will phase out the state’s income tax more quickly than the Senate leadership believes is prudent.
Also in the mix is a major disagreement between the House and Senate over the so-called “Christmas tree” spending bill, in which lawmakers annually appropriate hundreds of millions of dollars for special projects across the state that have more to do with the pull of individual lawmakers than the projects’ merits.
The House wants that spending to go forward as usual, but the Senate has balked. Last week, House Speaker Jason White lashed out at his Senate counterpart, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, about the impasse, as lawmakers await the calling of a special session to deal with the unfinished budget.
If the Senate refuses to cooperate on the earmarks, it has good reason besides the hard feelings about how the income-tax bill went down.
President Donald Trump has made clear his intent to slash federal spending, at least if the courts don’t stop him, including in how much money Washington sends to the states. Republican majorities in Congress are also talking about spending cutbacks to pay for the extension of income-tax breaks that are due to expire at the end of this year. Medicaid cuts are reportedly near the top of the targets for cuts. If that were to happen, Mississippi would have to shoulder a greater share of the cost of the federal-state program that provides health-care coverage to the poor and disabled.
Besides the potential reduction in federal funding, Mississippi’s treasury could be pinched by the expanded series of state tax cuts scheduled to occur over the next decade or so.
Since lawmakers, even if partly in error, were not cautious about tax cuts during the 2025 session, they need to be cautious about spending.
Besides, the earmarks that load up these local infrastructure bills are often of dubious value to anyone other than the recipients and the legislators who represent them. The distribution of the taxpayers’ money can be illogical and inequitable.
Mississippi Today offered a glaring example last year in an investigative report that examined in part the volume of earmarks benefiting the home county of one member of White’s inner circle, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Trey Lamar.
Over the most recent three-year period, according to the news outlet’s reporting, the Senatobia Republican has been able to steer almost $39 million in late-session earmarks to Tate County. By comparison, the city of Jackson, with five times the population, received less than $6 million during the same time.
Such inequities often go unchecked because if any lawmakers complain publicly, they know that the projects in their districts could end up getting nothing. The fear of retribution buys their complicity.
It might be naïve to hope that lawmakers would appropriate all state funds based on merit, not on political connections. It would be good, however, for the Legislature to move more in that direction.
If that is what the Senate is trying to accomplish, it should stand its ground.
