The lurking danger of NC budgeting as ‘performance’

The North Carolina General Assembly’s primary task in an odd-numbered year involves drafting and approving a new two-year budget plan. All other policy proposals take a back seat.

Yet state lawmakers left Raleigh this summer without a new budget. They return to action this week, but it’s not clear that they will enact a comprehensive budget plan any time soon.

This is far from unique. The General Assembly often fails to finalize a budget before the new fiscal year starts on July 1. Fall budget compromises have arrived under both Democratic and Republican legislative leadership.

Yet lawmakers have expressed little urgency in recent years to treat July 1 as a real deadline. They appear to have grown comfortable with wrapping up most substantive work for the year without a new budget.

There’s at least some danger that the budget process could become more performative than substantive in the years ahead.

Before exploring that theory, it’s important to highlight one major development that has influenced state budgeting since 2016.

That year, with Republicans controlling the legislature and the governor’s office, the budget arrived on July 14 — two weeks into the new budget year. Two pages within the 209-page document documented a change that has had an increasingly important impact over the past decade.

Under the headline “Budget Stability and Continuity,” lawmakers essentially guaranteed that North Carolina would never face the threat of a government shutdown. If lawmakers reach no agreement on budget provisions by July 1, the old budget remains in effect.

The change has obvious benefits. Lawmakers do not spend time in late June and July squabbling over continuing resolutions. State agencies and others dependent on taxpayer funding don’t have to worry that political brinkmanship could close government offices and stop checks from flowing out of the treasury.

Yet increased stability carries a price. The absence of a true deadline increases the likelihood that no new budget will be in place by July 1 — or even July 14.

As legislators become increasingly comfortable with reaching no deal, it’s not much of a leap to predict that competing House and Senate budget plans will become less and less serious.

It’s already true that the governor’s proposed budget represents a wish list unconstrained by fiscal reality rather than a proposal state lawmakers actively consider. This observation is not limited to current Gov. Josh Stein. In eight years in office, Stein’s predecessor and fellow Democrat Roy Cooper never attempted to present a budget that could win support from a Republican-led General Assembly.

One need not question Cooper or Stein about the sincerity of their support for their budget plans. They can face legitimate questions about proposing spending levels and priorities that stray far from limits the legislature has been willing to accept.

House and Senate budget writers face their own challenges going forward. After 15 years of uninterrupted Republican legislative control, it should be clear that some budget ideas won’t fly in one chamber or the other. It makes little sense to stack a budget proposal with provisions that clearly cannot secure majority support on both sides of the Legislative Building.

The less likely lawmakers are to compromise, the more temptation they will face to tout budget ideas that do little more than mollify or appease competing bases of electoral support.

In a 2018 speech for the John Locke Foundation, Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute warned of the growing problem of elected leaders practicing politics as performance. Levin saw evidence that American institutions faced a transformation. More and more officials were “seeing institutions as platforms that allow people to perform for a wider audience.”

Politics as performance helped explain in 2018 how Donald Trump approached the presidency, Levin argued. But Trump was not alone. “Many members of Congress have come to view the institution as a kind of platform for themselves,” Levin said. “What’s lost in the process is the capacity to legislate.”

“I think what is required is some recovery of institutional ambition,” he said. “Frankly, the only way for that to happen is for the people who occupy these positions to want it to happen.”

This observer is not yet convinced that the state House and Senate are treating the state budget process as performance. Budget writers appear serious about ironing out details of state government’s most pressing business.

Yet the danger of performative budgeting exists. All North Carolinians should root for lawmakers to display the “institutional ambition” to carry out their primary duty.

Mitch Kokai is senior political analyst for the John Locke Foundation.