Pritzker Slams Trump for State Budget Problems
Governor JB Pritzker greets attendees at an event at the Governor’s Mansion in April. (Photo: Chicago Tribune)
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Governor JB Pritzker on Tuesday directed state agencies to hold back 4% of spending in the FY26 budget and didn’t place the blame on a record-setting budget or the state’s economy, but on the economic policies of President Trump.
Pritzker signed an executive order Tuesday directing the executive branch to conduct budget reviews to identify efficiencies and reductions, limit non-essential spending, purchases, and travel, review hiring decisions and prioritizing essential roles, and proposing program changes and fund transfers if shortfalls emerge, in addition to the 4% holdback.
“Illinois has built a strong economy and proven its fiscal responsibility, but Trump’s disastrous policies threaten to undo that progress,” said Pritzker in a statement Tuesday. “Trump and Congressional Republicans sealed one of the largest wealth transfers in American history, stripping health care, food assistance, and other essential supports for working families to fund permanent tax breaks for the wealthy. At the same time, tariffs are hurting our farmers and businesses, slowing job growth, and driving up costs for Illinois families. I’m taking executive action to mitigate the impact of Trump’s economic policies on our state finances, maintain critical services, and preserve our economic stability.”
But the state’s revenue questions dated back to last November, before the 2024 presidential election, when the Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability laid out the potential of a $3 billion shortfall in the current fiscal year.
In May, Democrats passed a record $55.2 billion budget, $2 billion more than the year prior, that included some $800 million in tax increases.
Republicans say Pritzker and Democrats should be taking the blame for the state’s fiscal challenges, not Washington.
“When President Biden was in the White House, the Governor’s own five-year budget projections showed average annual budget deficits of $4.6 billion over the next five years,” said Senate GOP Leader John Curran (R-Downers Grove) in a statement. “Yet, he continued to increase state spending by 40-percent since taking office, despite Illinois’ GDP significantly lagging behind national growth.”
Former Rep. Tom Demmer, a former House GOP budget negotiator who now serves as an advisor to the Illinois Policy Institute, told me on the radio yesterday Democrats have had the opportunity to rein in spending.
“It’s always struck me as a real kind of cognitive dissonance from the Governor’s office,” Demmer said. “On one hand, they’ve warned of this dire financial situation that we’re going to find ourselves in. Yet, on the other hand, they’ve raised revenue estimates, and they’ve spent every bit of that in this current year without really preparing anything for the future. So the left hand, the right hand are obviously not talking to each other in the Governor’s office.”
Pritzker has broad spending authority over the executive branch and was questioned by reporters Tuesday why he needed to issue the guidance in a formal executive order and if that was just another step in his ongoing war of words with the White House.
“[An] executive order is something that we do all the time when we want to make an emphatic effort to accomplish something and make sure that it’s understood through the entire executive branch that this is everybody’s responsibility,” Pritzker said after an unrelated event in Joliet Tuesday. “[It’s] very important to us that we deal with what Donald Trump has done to almost every state that has had their budgets significantly impacted by the policies of the [Trump tax cut and spending] bill and the policies of his administration.”
Demmer said it may be politically expedient for Pritzker to blame Trump, but the accusations don’t add up.
“You kind of see the evidence of that by when revenue estimates go up, [Pritzker] takes the credit for that in Illinois, and it’s because of our good policies. When revenue estimates go down, it’s all Washington’s fault and it’s nothing that we’ve done on our own,” Demmer said. The reality is, the federal and state policy are intertwined on both sides of that ledger. If you’re really serious about being fiscally responsible, [you address] both sides of the ledger, taking the kind of responsible budget management steps, you need to do. So as a good government leader, you don’t do so as a political firebrand who’s taking pot shots and just saying, ‘oh, this is all somebody else’s fault.”
Pritzker says there are “hundreds of millions of dollars that will have to be made up for” after cuts in federal spending and tariffs he says are impacting Illinois businesses and his moves are responsible budget reactions to what’s happening in DC.
“We think this is a prudent endeavor,” he said. “We also think that we’re gonna have to look at every nook and cranny of state government to make sure that we are balancing the budget as promised in the FY26 budget. Of course, going into FY27, there are going to be severe effects on the state budget and that’s going to be yet another conversation.”
