When Mikie Sherrill was campaigning for governor last year, she promised to bring change to Trenton.
This week’s state budget news showed there’s only so much one person can do when the same-old-same-old run the Statehouse.
To recap: The state must finalize a new budget by the end of the fiscal year, which is Tuesday. Sherrill produced her budget plan back on March 10, which means the Legislature has had more than three months to return their version of the spending plan to Sherrill for her signature. Yet here we are, four days before the deadline, with nothing for the public to review.
This comes even though Sherrill, Senate President Nicholas Scutari, and Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin, all Democrats, said Tuesday that they came to a deal and offered a few details. But judging by the recently updated legislative calendar — budget committee hearings were just scheduled for Sunday, and they have to approve the plan before the full Legislature does — it looks again like we won’t find out until the last minute how lawmakers plan to spend $61 billion of our tax dollars.
What makes this year’s last-minute scramble to write a spending plan extra galling is the Legislature started 2026 with a fat pay raise they gave themselves. Most of their salaries jumped 67% from $49,000 to $82,000, but they still can’t take their most important task seriously.
Though I have no doubt we’ll see a budget signed by 11:59 p.m. Tuesday, the problem with working right up until the deadline, as we’ve seen particularly in recent years, is legislators end up voting on a document most haven’t seen and surely haven’t read, while the public is left almost entirely out of the loop. That’s how we end up, like we did in 2023, with $1.5 billion in extra spending tossed into the mix with zero vetting.
This is an issue that gives both progressive and Republican wonks agita.
“It really doesn’t have to be this way,” said Peter Chen, senior policy analyst at progressive think tank New Jersey Policy Perspective.
Indeed. In 2009, the Legislature unveiled their budget plan on June 13 and the budget committees waited a whole two days before voting on it (back then, total spending was $28.6 billion). Last year, the budget committees voted to advance it on a Friday night before anyone from the public outside of a few reporters got a chance to see it.
“Maybe it’s good policy to know what you’re going to vote on,” Chen cracked.
This is a topic that raises Sen. Declan O’Scanlon’s dander. The Monmouth County Republican, who sits on his chamber’s budget committee, regularly gripes about how secretive the budget process is in Trenton. This year is worse than ever, he told me.
“It is completely, horrifically dysfunctional, opaque, the opposite of transparent. It’s a mess and not one member of the Legislature will know what’s in this budget when they vote on it,” he said.
O’Scanlon said Sherrill could have issued some sort of threat to make her allies in the Legislature finish their work long before the July 1 deadline. If there’s no budget signed by then, the state government shuts down until there is one.
“The governor could force discipline,” he said. “The governor could say, ‘I’m going to give two weeks between a final budget and when I sign it, and if you don’t have the budget within two weeks of the deadline, you are shutting the government down, because I’m not going to sign it until the public has had a chance to see it. And then, by the way, when I do sign it, I am going to target the pork for legislative leadership and I’m going to red-line it.’”
He added: “And you know what? You would have had a budget first day of June.”
Sherrill’s office declined to respond.
