Illinois budget process needs reform
Revamping how the state decides on spending would improve responsibility and transparency.
Restructuring Illinois’ opaque budget process would help ensure taxpayer money is spent more responsibly and efficiently.
The 2026 budget alone contained more than $4.5 billion in wasteful spending. That included $40 million for a sports complex at the alma mater of Illinois House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch along with funding for projects such as the Floating Museum art collective, relocating pigs and a center to “rethink” capitalism.
Illinois lawmakers rely on secrecy and shortcuts in the budget process. In 2015, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities ranked Illinois’ process among the nation’s worst, citing lack of long-run cost or revenue forecasts.
Over a decade later, it’s only deteriorated further.
The state’s process suffers from a lack of transparency, unreliable revenue estimates and missed opportunities for accountability and long-term planning.
The nearly 3,400-page enacted budget for fiscal 2026 was available for review for just a single day. Since 2022, lawmakers have had an average of 26 seconds to review each page.
The Illinois Constitution requires bills to be read three times on three separate days. But lawmakers routinely bypass that by replacing the language of a previously read bill with the substance of the budget bill. That limits scrutiny of high-cost, potentially economically damaging proposals.
Appropriations committees can be a gatekeeper on spending and are a place where lawmakers can propose amendments to the budget. However, that gut-and-replace tactic is used, which creates minimal time to review the budget. That leads to a lack of rigorous evaluation of long-term costs and tradeoffs. It also contributes to pork projects and policies with potential hidden costs, such as a social media tax that could trigger costly lawsuits.
Other states provide stronger models.
In California, all bills with significant fiscal impact go through appropriations subcommittees that assess fiscal sustainability and often halt costly proposals before enactment. Texas requires fiscal notes for all bills or joint resolutions with budgetary impact, ensuring that lawmakers understand costs, savings and revenue gains or losses before voting.
Illinois should adopt similar practices to strengthen legislative oversight and prevent unsustainable spending commitments that fall onto taxpayers.
The state also needs to enforce a more standardized and transparent budgeting framework. It can do this by:
- Ensuring lawmakers and the public have enough time to review and debate budget proposals before a vote.
- Implementing multi-year budgeting and adopting a formal revenue estimating procedure.
- Including long-term revenue and policy options to address projected budget shortfalls.
- Expanding and taking full advantage of the state’s underused Budgeting for Results Commission would be a good first step.
Those reforms are a starting point. For a more comprehensive roadmap to fix Illinois’ finances, see our report Illinois Forward 2027.