By Ben Solis, Michigan Advance
The lower chamber of the Michigan Legislature converted its recent flurry of 2026-27 fiscal year budget work into two master omnibus bills that were then advanced by the House Appropriations Committee on Wednesday morning.
Chaired by state Rep. Ann Bollin (R-Brighton Township), the committee converted the House’s K-12 education budget (House Bill 5628), higher education (House Bill 5618) and community colleges (House Bill 5617) budgets into House Bill 5630, the omnibus vehicle for all school aid funding.
After a brief break, the committee reconvened to convert its various department, agency and judicial branch bills into House Bill 5619.
Bollin said that the House’s budget this year was “responsible and responsive” and “reflects a very simple principle: that we respect the hardworking taxpayers of Michigan.”
“The House budget reduces the overall state budget by $106 million in general fund spending and savings help us not dip into the rainy day fund,” Bollin said. “It does not raise taxes or fees. It is a real budget based on real dollars, real spending. We’re prioritizing what matters most to taxpayers, making sure every dollar is spent wisely.”
Bollin said that includes investments in public safety, education, local government, Medicaid, and veterans’ services.
“By making our budget numbers accurate and eliminating the waste, we’re able to cover every priority without shortchanging people here in Michigan,” Bollin added. “It’s responsible and I look forward to working together to advance this and invest in the people of Michigan and their priorities.”
Following the hearing, Bollin said the pace of the budget process this year was encouraging. By this time last year, the Senate was still formulating its final budget presentation, but was on track to deliver it by May. The House, however, had not yet finalized its budget and would not do so until the summer months.
This year, both chambers of the Legislature appear to be on track to have their budgets delivered to the conference committee for negotiations by the end of April. Much like the House, the Senate plans to have its budget moved to the floor by the end of this week; the Senate’s appropriations counterpart is meeting on Thursday morning to do just that.
Even the tenor of the discussions, while at times adversarial over programming to key programs that Democrats support, was much more upbeat. Lawmakers from opposite sides of the aisle routinely flattered one another through the proceedings, cracking jokes and speaking of each other in good graces.
A Capitol tradition of having school children dress up like legislators for an annual look-a-like contest helped ease the tensions, as several young legislative doppelgangers made appearances during some of the most tense discussions.
Bollin said she was hopeful the process would slow down as it did last year When asked if she was confident that the budget would be wrapped up swiftly this year, she pivoted to say that she was “confident that it doesn’t have to take as long.”
“I think we put forth that we have a very strong will to deliver a responsible budget to the taxpayers across Michigan, and I would say to the jovial attitude in the room, I also felt it,” Bollin said. “And I also think this is a very different year. I think we’ve built relationships based on what the new dynamic is here.”
Bollin added that there appeared to be more common ground and that has pushed Republicans and Democrats to have “actually resolved issues.” She cited the road funding issue that held up a large portion of the negotiations last year, and credited Republican House Speaker Matt Hall (R-Richland Township) for the GOP’s side in that.
State Rep. Jason Morgan (D-Ann Arbor) sits on the House Appropriations Committee. He spoke with the Advance following the hearing. Although he did agree that the budget was moving on a swifter pace, he wasn’t quite ready to say that things were all good between his brethren in the Democratic minority and their colleagues in Republican leadership.
“I think part of the reason is that there’s an acknowledgement this year that this budget is a complete sham, just as it was last year, and knowing going into this that the real negotiation will happen after this budget is passed through the House,” Morgan said. “I think that frees up some of the tension a little bit. If you look at this entire budget, just like the last year’s House Republican budget, it’s all kind of fantasy numbers and ghost employees that aren’t real. You can’t even really take it seriously, because there’s not a lot to even debate when the numbers are all made up.”
To Morgan’s point much of the real fiscal year sausage making comes at the negotiating table, and not within the individual chambers’ appropriations rooms as they gear up to present plans that neither side would accept without some concessions.
The House’s proposal
That said, items that might be a big sticking point at the negotiating table can be gleaned from the proposed plan and the way Democrats in the minority reacted to the presentation on Wednesday morning.
In all, the education omnibus budget would appropriate $24.177 billion, with $20.04 billion from the state’s School Aid Fund and another $1.19 billion from the state’s General Fund.
The general government omnibus budget would appropriate $51.63 billion for fiscal year 2026-27, with $12.33 billion from the General Fund.
As reported yesterday in Michigan Advance, the House’s new K-12 plan would fund public education throughout the state at $21.52 billion with $67.3 million from the state’s general fund. That amounts to a nearly $236 million increase in funding over the current fiscal year, up 1.1%. That would not change in the version approved by the committee on Wednesday morning.
Among its largest changes compared to what Gov. Gretchen Whitmer proposed earlier this year, the House K-12 plan increases the amount of money proposed to literacy support. Whitmer put forward an increase of $35.6 million in school aid fund dollars and $100 million in one-time school aid. The House, however, aims to increase literacy support by $85.6 million and revises that $100 million to $150 million, but as ongoing funding.
Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling, or LETRS, training is a big part of Whitmer’s proposal. She proposed an increase of $40 million in one-time funding to help boost dollars for educators’ LETRS training. The House planned to appropriate $65 million.
The House also makes investments in infrastructure grants for schools with Whitmer’s recommendation eliminated as one-time funding.
High-impact tutoring was proposed to receive $100 million in Whitmer’s proposal, but the House proposal reduces that to $50 million.
The House puts less money toward at-risk funding compared to what the governor proposed, but not by much. Whitmer proposed an increase of $78.8 million toward at-risk student programs while the House proposed $65 million but arrives at the same total as Whitmer with the state funding $1.4 billion toward at-risk programs.
Changes in the general government omnibus budget over the previous fiscal year ranged, as one would expect, from miniscule to voluminous.
Among the biggest changes that irked the panel’s Democrats include the elimination of arts and culture funding in the Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity budget, a large reduction in funding for the tri-share child care program in the Department of Lifelong Education, Advancement and Potential budget, and the removal of the Michigan Commission on Law Enforcement Standards from the Department of State Police.
The House Republicans, as Morgan added, continue to focus on so-called ghost employees, or rather, employee positions that are funded in the budget and go unfilled, resulting in a pot of money sitting there awaiting staff hires. Bollin and Hall have argued vigorously that the money should be used elsewhere if it wasn’t going toward hiring new employees, and that the money should not be shoved away for departmental work projects as a result.
Morgan said that some of the positions House Republicans eliminated in their most recent proposal continues down that track, and that the slashed hiring funding would affect positions that were unreasonable to cut.
“Particularly in the Department of Transportation, for example, you have more state trunk line miles, and you have more work that the state is going to be doing in partnership with our locals to build and repair more roadways,” Morgan said. “You can’t cut the engineering department by $50 million and expect that these projects are going to be designed with care. It’s just not realistic. It might seem nice on paper, but practically, it doesn’t work.”
Morgan said that was also true of the House’s plans for higher education, which make significant cuts to the University of Michigan and Michigan State University. The same was true of the House’s proposal in the 2025-26 cycle, but their plan moved some of that slashed funding to other university and college operating budgets. This year, the money is not being shifted to other higher education institutions in the same way.
“If the House Republicans were truly successful and slashed Michigan State University and the University of Michigan by 62.5%, you would see a devastating impact across our state,” Morgan said. “You’d see massive job losses, a retraction of life changing research happening at some of these universities, a huge impact on farmers and our agriculture community, and a huge impact on student tuition and support services.”
Morgan said that it was his belief that state Republicans “love attacking Michigan State and the University of Michigan because they are large and impactful in their state, but if you were to realistically succeed in doing that, it would devastate not just Ann Arbor and East Lansing, but the entire state economy.”
Several amendments floated by the committee’s House Democrats were defeated before the committee reported HB 5630 and HB 5619 to the chamber’s floor along party lines.
Many of those amendments saw the committee’s Democratic members attempting to put money back into slashed funding items, add funding to key priorities that House Republicans did not include, or to restore some items in the departments where they are currently housed if they were being shuffled to another home in the House Republicans’ overall budget.
For example, state Rep. Jasper Martus (D-Flushing) attempted to amend HB 5619 to keep the Michigan Commission on Law Enforcement Standards within the Department of State Police, as opposed to what the budget proposes — moving the commission to the Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs.
- 4:54 pmThis story was updated with additional comment and details.
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