Cutting the Waste and Getting Our Budget Back on Track
by Senator Steve Green
Cases of waste, fraud, and abuse have been out of control in Minnesota. We have become a national embarrassment because of it. And our Governor isn’t helping. Democrats also seem uninterested in making budgetary cuts. Their only suggestions so far have been to cut spending on things like non-public school transportation and nursing home funding. Considering our government grew by about 40% in 2023 thanks to Democrat spending, that’s unacceptable. Agencies can do with smaller budgets, and cuts can easily be made. Senate Republicans have created a plan that would eliminate $600 million in wasteful spending. We’ve also put forward ideas to make sure this runaway spending never occurs again.
As a reminder, we have a $6 billion deficit to contend with. We need to remember that as we move forward.
The easiest cut to find was the earmark for $21 million to fund a public option health care plan. That plan was already a waste of time and money. We can’t afford it, plain and simple. The public option hasn’t even passed, but the money is earmarked. It makes no sense. Let’s free up that funding to deal with our deficit.
There’s also an immense amount of waste in transportation projects. To name a few cuts that make sense: $194.5 million in state dollars for The Northern Lights Passenger Rail, the $500,000 left over from the original $6.2 million appropriation for Reconnect Rondo, $30 million for the Blue Line light rail extension project, and $22 million per biennium for the NorthStar Rail cancellation. All of these projects have been plagued with high price tags, constant delays, and cost overruns. If we made these spending reductions, we could easily save taxpayers around $250 million.
Another thing we can cut is funding going to undocumented non-citizens. Anyone here illegally should not be reaping the same benefits legal citizens qualify for. Yet Democrats have passed numerous spending measures that benefit them anyways. While Governor Walz is proposing a cut of over $200 million to our nursing homes, Democrats expanded MNCare for Undocumented non-Citizens, which costs about $220 million in taxpayer dollars. The North Star Promise was also a great program intended to help Minnesota families get their kids into college. Yet Democrats extended it to illegal non-citizens, which costs $86,000 per undocumented student. Democrats also opted to provide tax credits to non-citizens via ITINs – that runs about $158 million. Every dollar spent on an illegal person is a dollar not going to Minnesota families. Again, cutting all these expensive and excessive benefits would save around $378 million.
The cuts we need to make are only part of the story. We also have to put mechanisms in place to make sure our budget never gets mismanaged like this again. We’ve put forward commonsense proposals like financial disclosure by legislators, restrictions on grants to nonprofits with highly compensated officers, reports on vacant state offices, and sunsets for commissions and working groups. These are easy changes that would add transparency and honesty to our budgeting process. Most importantly, we want zero-based budgeting, which would be a process every 10 years that ensures state spending is evaluated for necessity and justified for its effectiveness. These are simple steps we can take to ensure our budgets are more responsible and less wasteful.
The bottom line is we have a $6 billion deficit – cuts are necessary. But we want to cut the frivolous spending, like what we’ve seen in grants and transportation projects. The Governor’s proposals hurt the most vulnerable. Republicans were able to pull this plan together in just a few weeks – imagine how much more waste we could find if Democrats joined us in taking our deficit seriously. We are more than halfway through the session, and we need to get this figured out sooner rather than later.