John Braun commentary: Blame one-party rule for unsustainable new budget, not the feds
Friday, February 27, 2026
Based on what we’ve seen from the Senate’s majority Democrats, the final version of the new operating budget that emerges from Olympia this year will top out at over $80 billion.
If so, that’s an increase of $2.3 billion from the budget adopted less than a year ago, at a time when we should be flattening the state-government cost curve instead. It will do nothing to make living in Washington more affordable.
We should also expect the new budget to be unsustainable, in that it will likely overspend the available revenue by around $5 billion. To balance all that spending, look for Democrats to raid billions of dollars from various sections of the state treasury, on top of another round of tax increases.
Funding ongoing commitments with one-time dollars taken from the rainy-day fund or other accounts is never a smart idea. It makes for a budget that is structurally unsound — like building a house of cards on a substandard foundation, as our Senate Republican budget leader puts it.
The four-year outlook connected to the Democrat budget also counts on money from the proposed state income tax, and projects an absurdly low amount of spending growth going forward.
Knowing how all of this will make the affordability crisis worse, Republican legislators are understandably critical of where the new budget is headed. What’s amazing, for lack of a better word, is that prominent Democrats also are complaining.
Apparently, we’re supposed to believe their budget reflects hard choices, forced by the reforms in the federal H.R. 1 legislation.
I’ll take some exception to that claim. How hard was it for the majority to propose spending another $2.3 billion of the taxpayers’ money, when H.R. 1’s effect on Washington’s finances is expected to be only around 10% of that?
The truth is, the overspending Democrats are proposing now looks like a continuation of the spending spree they’ve been on since one-party rule returned to Olympia.
Let’s go back to 2016, when Democrats controlled the House, Republicans led the state Senate, and I was part of the Senate operating-budget team. That year the final version of the 2015-17 state budget totaled $38.2 billion — the sixth consecutive biennial budget to stay in the $30 billion range.
After Democrats retook the Senate for 2018, fiscal discipline went out the window. The spending shot up in each successive budget until the plan they approved less than a year ago, in April 2025, came in at $77.9 billion.
That means spending more than doubled in less than a decade. It can’t be blamed on the federal government, however, because H.R. 1 wasn’t passed until July 2025.
Spending also has soared within the budget, on everything other than K-12 and higher education. In fact, the new Senate operating budget does something we haven’t seen – it drops the share of spending on K-12 education to 42.4% and higher education to 7.6%, meaning less than half the budget goes to education generally.
That’s notable for two reasons: providing for K-12 is the Legislature’s top priority, under Washington’s constitution, and in 2017, when Republicans last had an equal amount of control over the budget, the share for K-12 alone hit a record 50.7%.
To be clear, however, K-12 is not being shortchanged. It’s receiving nearly 55% more funding since that 2017 budget, roughly in line with the growth of household income in our state.
The point here is that non-education spending has shot up during the same period by nearly 125%, which is a staggering increase.
Just think — if overall spending, not just education spending, had tracked with the growth in household income all these years, government would be smaller and the state budget would be much easier for taxpayers to afford.
It’s easy to find examples of how and why Democrat spending outside of education has gone out of control.
Start with the “JR-to-25” policy, which is associated with safety and security problems at Green Hill School in Chehalis but also is very expensive. Custody in a juvenile facility costs four times as much as in a Department of Corrections facility.
Then there’s what lawmakers call “tort liability” — paying off settlements and judgments against the state. It has become the fastest-growing part of the budget, because Democrats haven’t gotten serious about dealing with the agency mismanagement that leads to people being harmed.
Also, Washington continues to waste money paying Medicaid premiums for people who live elsewhere, and the executive branch of government won’t close a costly loophole that lets its employees tap into Paid Family and Medical Leave benefits improperly.
I and other Republicans have proposed bills to address all of these things, and more. Some of the savings achieved could go toward something else we’ve tried to achieve through Senate Bill 6163, which I introduced: shrinking the waitlist for people with developmental and intellectual disabilities who deserve but aren’t receiving services.
These don’t seem like difficult choices, yet Democrats won’t give them serious consideration. The same thing has happened all eight years since one-party rule returned to the Capitol, and it’s why taxpayers are about to find themselves burdened by an unsustainable $80 billion budget.
Budgets ultimately reflect the priorities of their authors, and the current proposals suggest those priorities remain out of step with Washington’s needs. This situation was not caused by the feds, no matter how many times our Democrats colleagues declare it to be so. They must do better.
•••
Sen. John Braun of Centralia serves the 20th Legislative District, which spans parts of four counties from Yelm to Vancouver. He became Senate Republican leader in 2020.