‘We can do better’: Republicans slam $130 million cuts as ‘not responsible’

State Sen. Codi Galloway said lawmakers’ fast-paced, across-the-board approach to cutting this year’s state budget was not the approach she would take for her own business.

“I’m certainly not going to make a broad-based cut or rescission to any budget that I see in front of me,” the Boise Republican told her Senate colleagues Monday. “I’m going to do it carefully.”

But with so many agencies’ budgets to consider, this precise approach simply isn’t possible for the Joint Finance and Appropriations Committee on which she serves, she said. As the committee weighed whether to adopt Gov. Brad Little’s recommended 3% cuts for fiscal year 2026 — and another 1% cut across the board for the same period — “there is no way that you can take a scalpel effectively,” Galloway said.

“There is no other way to make these kinds of decisions, except for by taking a very dramatic approach” to cuts and later restoring funding for things the committee deems important, she added.

In recent weeks, the finance committee has bubbled with disagreement over this approach. On Monday, those sentiments boiled over on the Senate floor, with several Republican lawmakers slamming the approach — though, ultimately, a bill to cut about $130 million from the state’s general fund this year squeaked through on an 18-17 vote.

“In Congress, when they say, ‘We’ll read the bill after we pass it’ — that’s kind of how I feel with this one,” said Sen. Camille Blaylock, R-Caldwell. She cited confusion among committee members about whether they had cut the budget of the Attorney General’s Office, even though Little had not called for budget cuts to that office.

“I’ve asked a few different (committee) members about what happened with our attorney general’s budget, and I can’t quite get a straight answer,” Blaylock said. “There’s some clarity needed here. And even as I talk with some of the members on that committee, it seems that clarity is pretty hard to come by.”

Blaylock and other lawmakers — many of whom serve on the finance committee — argued that cutting across the board was “not responsible” because it targeted lean and bloated agencies equally. Doing so would incentivize departments to “carry extra weight,” rather than running efficiently, in case of future cuts, she argued.

Sen. Scott Grow, the co-chair of the finance committee and the sponsor of Monday’s bill, told senators he disagreed with much of the criticism of the proposed 2026 cuts. He highlighted department heads’ memos weeks ago to the committee about what the cuts would mean for their agencies. All committee members had access to those letters, he said.

“To say that we haven’t had information, that we haven’t looked at it, is not exactly accurate,” Grow said. He noted that the committee this week is voting to add money back in to 2026 budgets. And amid the uncertainty surrounding state revenues in the coming year, “we’re trying to err on the side of conservatism,” he said.

Many of the Republicans who spoke Monday emphasized that they were not opposed to budget cuts in principle, but rather to what they viewed as a slapdash approach to making them.

“I know that we have to cut budgets, and I hope everybody in this room realizes that,” said Sen. Kevin Cook, R-Idaho Falls. “But this rescission bill isn’t the answer.”

Lumping all of the 2026 cuts into one bill is “not transparent,” he added. “… If you took that bill home, and somebody at your town hall said, ‘Why did you cut that?’ and you open that bill and try to find it, you’re not going to find it.”

Sen. Jim Guthrie acknowledged the need to shrink the budget but called the approach of first cutting across the board, and adding back later, “harmful.”

“Senators, we can do better,” the McCammon Republican said.

Sen. Jim Woodward, R-Sagle, questioned the premise of the debate over budget cuts. He said accusations that state spending had grown out of control were based on “cherry-picking” budget data.

Between 2005 and 2025, he said, the state has increased its per-person spending from about $2,500 to about $2,700, adjusting for inflation. Across-the-board cuts could decrease residents’ quality of life, he said.

“The reality is, we have been very, very Idaho-like in our spending over the last two decades,” he said. “Living here in Idaho, I would like to leave this at a place that my kids can enjoy, and hopefully grandkids.”

Take a ‘chainsaw’ to the budget? Tension rises before an Idaho legislative vote