MacIver’s Top Five Budget Recommendations

Throughout the MacIver Institute’s coverage and analysis of the 2025-27 state budget process, we have made various recommendations that promote conservative, free market fiscal principles. Now that the Joint Committee on Finance (JFC) has begun executive hearings on the budget, it’s a good opportunity to revisit those recommendations and explain why they’re important.

1. Start over

When JFC began its executive hearings on May 8^th, it introduced a substitute amendment that is identical to the current budget. That set the starting point for the next state budget at $98.9 billion. The only question the committee will consider now will be how much more the state should spend. By doing this, JFC decided that it will not debate anything that the state currently spends money on. If there’s any waste, fraud, and abuse currently occurring in state government, JFC locked it into the next state budget.

The process of using the current budget as a starting point for the next budget is called “incremental budgeting.” It’s easy, it’s lazy, and it’s entirely inappropriate for party that is promoting government accountability initiatives like DOGE and GOAT. Instead, JFC needs to start over by introducing a new substitute amendment that sets the starting point at $0. This is called “zero-based budgeting.” It forces every agency to justify every penny it spends on every program (and subprogram.) It is the only way to root out all waste, fraud, and abuse and to ensure maximum government efficiency and effectiveness.

2. Broad funding reductions

Most government programs are not monitored nor assessed. It’s just money in and money out. Oftentimes, agencies don’t even keep track of how much they’re spending on individual items. The scale of this problem is revealed through the agency budget requests, which were submitted to the governor this past fall. Those requests include a breakdown of each agency’s programs and which programs it actively assesses. MacIver reviewed the requests from the top 14 state agencies and discovered that out of 58 total programs, only 42 had assigned performance measures. The remaining 16 programs received almost $20 billion of funding in the current state budget. Without performance measures, there is no telling whether those programs are fulfilling their purpose or having any impact on anything.

JFC should either eliminate all unassessed programs or implement across-the-board standard reductions. For example, JFC could choose to reduce the funding to all unassessed programs by 5%. That would reduce spending by $1 billion (a mere 1% reduction). That might not be much in the grand scheme of things, but it would send a clear message that the state expects to see results for everything it funds.

3. Eliminate administrative rules and statutes tied to unaccountable programs

JFC cannot simply allocate no money to programs that are authorized by state law, because the requirement for those programs still exists (whether or not the program is actually fulfilling that requirement). Therefore, when JFC eliminates funding for a program, it must also delete the provision in the administrative rules or state statutes that authorized it. Gov. Evers, naturally, will seek to veto out that deletion, but such a veto would be unconstitutional. That’s because he can’t veto out anything that would leave the bill unworkable. Because the program would have no funding, leaving the requirement in code or statute would be unworkable.

4. Eliminate all appropriations that require ongoing oversight

Last year, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that once the legislature sets funds aside for a specific purpose, it loses all control over those funds. Previous budgets would transfer certain funds into segregated accounts held by the legislature. Agencies would have to submit requests for those funds on a case-by-case basis. This included the stewardship program, the DPI reading program, UW development funding, tech college workforce grants, and DPI recovery high schools. These total at least $138 million in the current budget. As a consequence of that ruling, the legislature only has one logical response. Zero out those programs.

5. Require state agencies to write and submit operational budgets

The MacIver Institute made the shocking discovery last year that state agencies do not have their own budgets. The state budget provides them with top line funding for their major programs and operations, but apparently that’s as far as the state’s managerial accounting practices go. Without a budget, it is impossible for any organization to manage its resources, identify challenges, or assess progress. It’s really incomprehensible that a $100 billion bureaucracy doesn’t have individual agency budgets. That needs to stop, and the state budget is the ideal place to make it happen.

You can find links to all of MacIver’s in-depth analysis of the state budget in this post: MacIver’s Guide to the 2025-27 State Budget