Appropriations subcommittee reviews proposed FY26 changes to general government boilerplate

The House Appropriations Subcommittee on General Government heard a detailed briefing on proposed changes to budget “boilerplate” language across fiscal years during a committee meeting. Michael Knasson of the House Fiscal Agency presented a line-by-line comparison of enacted fiscal 2023 language, the current fiscal 2025 budget language and the executive recommendation for fiscal 2026, and committee members asked about deletions of reporting requirements and changes to contingency authorizations.

Knasson told the committee the packet compares three sets of boilerplate and highlights only sections where wording differs across years; where a column is blank, “it doesn’t mean that the section has been eliminated or deleted,” he said. The presentation ran through dozens of sections covering the Attorney General, Department of Civil Rights, Legislature, Department of State and the Department of Technology, Management and Budget (DTMB).

The presentation identified several substantive changes. For the Attorney General, a provision authorizing reimbursement of Third Circuit Court costs for SNAP/food-stamp fraud cases (up to $400,000) was removed because the court-ordered diversion practice ended years ago. The budget increases the cap on litigation expense reimbursements from $500,000 to $1,000,000 and adds a new section that earmarks $500,000 to the Center for Civil Justice to provide legal assistance to low-income and marginalized populations; an additional $500,000 in Part 1 was noted as the source. Language that had specifically directed $2.7 million in litigation-settlement proceeds to the Flint water investigation was removed in the executive recommendation and repurposed to permit those restricted proceeds to pay court judgments, attorney fees and similar litigation-related expenses.

Knasson summarized changes to the Department of Civil Rights boilerplate including an increase in the authorized receipt of private revenues for training and events from $85,000 in fiscal 2023 to $600,000 in the current-year language; he said the department had asked for as much as $1,000,000 in an earlier request but was not then drawing those amounts.

On elections and the Department of State, the briefing noted several deletions and technical codifications: the sale of lookup records and the bulk records provisions had been codified in statute (and thus removed from boilerplate), a prior $11 lookup fee was raised to $15 and the department reported that lookup fees generate roughly $70 million a year; Knasson said that change brings in about $20 million more to the transportation collection fund. Multiple reporting requirements tied to HAVA reimbursements, election mail notifications and some county reimbursement reports were removed in the executive recommendation; committee members asked whether removing those backstops would reduce oversight.

Representative Kelly pressed the point about branch offices and in-person services after Knasson noted the executive deemed a “maintain adequate in-person services” provision unenforceable. Kelly asked, “How is that unenforceable?” Knasson and other members said the budget office had cited separation-of-powers concerns when the executive removed certain operational directives from boilerplate.

DTMB’s contingency-authority and IT-related boilerplate drew significant attention. Knasson described a large, earlier increase in contingency authorization tied to the Make It in Michigan competitiveness fund (which had raised federal and restricted-authority figures in an earlier draft to very large amounts); the executive recommendation reduced that authorization relative to the earlier draft (Knasson said the executive package lowers the contingency to $50,000,000 to reflect a drawn-down fund balance). The presentation also lists multiple reporting requirements and project-level transparency provisions that the executive budget recommends deleting, including an annual statewide IT spending report and several IT project lifecycle reports; Knasson said some of those reporting duties were costly for departments to produce.

Committee members and staff noted other specific numeric clarifications included in the briefing packet: the litigation-proceeds language that refers to roughly $200 million a year in tobacco-settlement revenues; the Department of State’s organ-donor program receipts (about $90,000 annually, spending roughly $50,000); and a $1,000,000 one-time DTMB passthrough to the City of Lansing for infrastructure included in the current-year boilerplate.

The subcommittee approved the minutes of its February 2025 meeting by unanimous consent after Representative Maddock moved approval and there were no objections. Members agreed to submit notes and suggested boilerplate edits to the chair for compilation. The committee also heard that revenue-sharing and related topics will be discussed at a later meeting and that Ben Gersick (Treasury) was scheduled to present next week on revenue-sharing issues.

The meeting adjourned after the presentation and committee discussion.