Lawmakers plan to vote on budget cuts Friday. Are they ready?

Carolyn Komatsoulis and Sarah Cutler, Idaho Statesman on Feb 5, 2026

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In a meeting with reporters on Tuesday, the governor’s budget director, Lori Wolff, discussed state agencies’ plans to slash their budgets.

Those cuts could include cutting funding to the 988 crisis hotline and limiting popular career technical education programs. Wolff said members of the Legislature’s powerful budget committee — set to vote on the cuts three days later — had been reaching out to ask questions on more than 50 budget submissions.

The submissions came from the agencies after the budget committee’s co-chairs, Sen. C. Scott Grow and Rep. Josh Tanner, both Eagle Republicans, asked them to suggest possible cuts of 1% to 2% more than the governor’s ongoing 3% cuts. Grow previously told the Statesman he wanted to leave the budget with extra room in case revenues come in low.

On Friday, the committee is set to make a big decision: Whether to approve Gov. Brad Little’s recommendation, or even to expand upon it with deeper cuts — both for the current and next fiscal year. Wolff previously told the Statesman that the governor did not want legislators to make additional cuts.

However, the extra cuts will exclude Medicaid, K-12 schools, Idaho State Police and the Idaho Department of Correction, Grow said. The budget co-chairs previously asked those departments to look at ways to slash their budgets. The Department of Correction and Idaho State Police shared those ways in agency memos, including eliminating the state police’s only SWAT team. Grow did not directly answer what has changed since then but said the committee was following Little’s lead.

Grow told the Statesman on Wednesday that some members were “in a fog” and on Thursday, clarified that some people still had questions about Friday’s vote. He said he planned to provide more “guidance” to members. Still, Grow was optimistic when asked if legislators understand what they’re going to do.

“I hope they will,” he said, sitting in his office at the Capitol. “I mean, we presented it on Tuesday. They always have a chance to come to talk to me.”

But others aren’t so sure.

Rep. Rod Furniss, a Rigby Republican and a member of the budget committee, told the Statesman that he didn’t think other committee members understood what they were cutting. Furniss said he was probably leaning against the cuts, because it wasn’t worth it to cut essential services just to have more money on the bottom line.

“We’re cutting into the bone,” Furniss said in an interview. “We went through a list of cuts today that would be affected by the 1 and 2% cuts, and on that list were things that we didn’t know about until we went through them today. So I’m pretty sure … that (the committee) didn’t realize some of the things that are going to be cut.”

In a meeting Tuesday of the budget committee, Sen. Codi Galloway, a Boise Republican, said the cuts were “a lot of money, and fast, and very broad brush.” But she was reassured that the committee’s working groups could take another look at the budgets.

“I recognize that I’ll have additional time in the upcoming weeks to look more closely at individual agencies and make sure that we make good decisions,” Galloway said. “That gives me the confidence to be able to vote on this fairly soon and move forward.”

The budget committee is voting on the dollar amount to cut, and the working groups will decide how to get to that number, Grow said.

But Sen. Melissa Wintrow, a Boise Democrat, challenged the logic of adding back after cutting.

“Why would I vote for a mass 1 to 2% cut and then double down on my work and go back into working group and add things back in?” Wintrow said.

Grow, the co-chair, said that once the cuts are finalized, lawmakers will have to slash the voted-upon amount of money from the budget. Grow said he wants to give each working group a target dollar amount to cut, since if one group refuses to cut from an agency, that burdens all the other agencies, Grow said.

Tanner, the other co-chair, said the vote “sets a baseline” for the working groups.

“The working groups will continue to work through things,” Tanner said. “If they see a program that they’re like, we want to bring this program up, they just gotta go find additional cuts in another area to balance this thing out.”

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