Attorney General outlines budget requests, litigation posture and public‑safety priorities

Attorney General Marty Jackley presented the Office of the Attorney General's FY26 budget to the Joint Appropriations Committee and detailed staffing, litigation and program priorities, including two requested FTEs and ongoing high‑priority prosecutions.

Jackley told the committee the AG's total FY26 request is $41,167,000 and asked for two additional FTEs: a consumer protection investigator to handle a rise in consumer contacts (about 68,000 contacts last year, up from 64,000) and an attorney to handle prosecutions arising in Department of Corrections facilities. "I'm asking you for a 6th [consumer investigator]," he said, and described 117 prosecutions linked to the penitentiary that he said now fall to the attorney general under statute.

On litigation, Jackley described multi‑state actions against large tech companies and his office's posture on discovery: "We were letting the Meta lawyers control discovery, and we should not do that. We are the plaintiff; we should be controlling the discovery," he told the committee and said he replaced a prior special assistant handling the case and has the civil chief overseeing it. He said 41 state attorneys general are involved in the Meta matter and that the office is monitoring the federal TikTok issue as well.

Jackley reviewed public‑corruption and violent‑crime prosecutions the office is managing, including a still‑pending trial involving allegations of approximately $1.8 million taken from Department of Social Services programs and a death‑penalty notice filed in a homicide case he expected to try this spring or summer.

He reported growing controlled‑substance workload: methamphetamine and fentanyl remain major enforcement priorities, with the office reporting thousands of meth arrests and hundreds of fentanyl arrests in 2024. The AG highlighted a high‑profile Rapid City sentence in a fentanyl distribution case and said the state continues to see large seizures.

The office described victim services, forensic lab workload and concerns about reduced federal VOCA victim‑service funding. Jackley noted the DOJ and FBI coordinate on some lab work with the state's forensic lab and asked the committee to consider federal or other funding sources for a proposed bomb‑tech expansion should federal authorities assign higher protective responsibilities for visits by the U.S. secretary of homeland security.

Jackley also addressed tobacco and opioid settlements and said the state has received securitized tobacco revenues historically and that the state is in arbitration for several years; he said the state's pharmaceutical litigation yielded a potential $78.6 million settlement figure on paper and reiterated his view that settlement proceeds should be used for treatment and prevention rather than stockpiled.

He closed by asking the committee to consider the specific FY26 items — the two FTEs and other spending‑authority requests — and offered to provide further documentation on litigation, settlement accounting and forensic lab capacity.