Wyoming Department of Health officials were in the hot seat during state lawmakers’ Sept. 30 meeting on the agency's budget.
For over six hours, department officials went line by line through their budget for the benefit of electeds on the Subcommittee on the Wyoming Department of Health Budget, like Rep. Ken Pendergraft (R-Sheridan), a member of the further-right Wyoming Freedom Caucus.
“We are the keepers of the purse strings,” said Pendergraft, the chair of the subcommittee and the lawmaker who made a motion for its creation at an August meeting of the interim Joint Appropriations Committee. “We constantly have to ask ourselves, ‘Is this the proper role of government?’ Because it sure is easy, when you've got loads of money at your disposal, to say, ‘Yeah, we could do that.’ The question that needs to come up at times: ‘Yes, but should we?’”
At the beginning of the meeting, Pendergraft told the audience that the subcommittee was not there “to slash and burn” or to “disrupt anything.”
But he made clear they were there to look at which elements of one of the state’s largest agencies are the “proper role of government.”
When the subcommittee was formed, Rep. John Bear (R-Gillette) told Wyoming Public Radio he saw a connection between the panel’s goals and the goals of the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Another lawmaker said he’d heard his colleagues refer to it as a “DOGE committee.”
During public comment, Samuel Burkett, who works at a business that provides case management for people who use the Health Department’s developmental disability waivers, said the DD waiver program needs to be funded.
The program acts as a social safety net for Medicaid-qualifying state residents who have intellectual disabilities or brain injuries.
“I hear from client after client, from patient after patient, and from parent after parent about how this would be devastating,” said Burkett.
Pendergraft interrupted to say the original reason for their meeting was to find money in the budget to keep funding programs like Burkett’s.
“I would remind you that the reason we're here is because the people sitting on this committee were committed to trying to find a way to adequately fund those waivers,” he said.
The context Pendergraft said he and others were operating under is a revenue forecast from the Legislative Service Office’s (LSO) April report that said the state’s School Foundation Program Account (SFPA) is projected to hit a $686 million shortfall by the 2029-2030 biennium.
“Wyoming is headed toward an impending fiscal cliff that is caused by what I believe is unsustainable spending,” said Pendergraft, a freshman to the Appropriations Committee. “We just bit off more than we really can chew. And I think that we need to take a good, hard look at that.”
But in an August phone interview with WPR, Sen. Mike Gierau (D-Jackson) said that depressing budget projections are not necessarily a reason for big cuts. Gierau has been on the Appropriations Committee for seven years.
“ We have to budget based on how much revenue we have,” explained Gierau. “The farther we look out, the less we know about how much money we're going to have. We can't deficit-spend. Every year that I've been on Appropriations, if you look two or three bienniums out in the budget projection, it always looks very bleak. Because it's supposed to. We're supposed to make sure that we're always staying pretty conservative about … adding programs.”
At the end of the hearing, Pendergraft laid out a budgetary philosophy that he said was shared by others on the larger Appropriations Committee.
“[Agencies could] go back to a zero base,” he said. “We start over each time and say, ‘These are the most important things. This is what it's going to cost us.’ It's a little bit more work, in a way, to build it from there. But it may well be that there are just things – ‘We do this, we ask for this,’ because we always have.”
Then Gierau chimed in.
“I just want to push back lightly on something you just said, Mr. Chairman,” he said. “I want to make sure we don't leave anyone thinking that that's how we do it in the state of Wyoming, because it's not.”
“Thank you for your comments, Senator,” Pendergraft replied. “Well taken.”
The subcommittee will study big state budget reductions that happened in 2017 and 2021 for guidance on what to do now at their next virtual meeting on Oct. 14.
This reporting was made possible by a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, supporting state government coverage in the state. Wyoming Public Media and Jackson Hole Community Radio are partnering to cover state issues both on air and online.
