Michigan House Speaker Matt Hall (R-Richland Township) speaks to members of the news media to discuss the ongoing battle over the state's budget and new notices from schools that they are laying off staff due to funding uncertainty. Aug. 21, 2025 | Photo by Ben Solis/Michigan Advance
Michigan schools facing uncertainty over the state budget are beginning to issue layoff notices to staff, adding another layer of disarray over the Legislature’s strained and stagnant funding plans for the coming fiscal year.
On Thursday, Michigan House Speaker Matt Hall (R-Richland Township) eschewed schools’ claims that new layoffs were related to the current budget fight. Hall also doubled down on his assertion that his chamber’s budget would provide them with more money than in years past.
In a regularly hosted news conference, the speaker told schools to hold the line and wait it out, promising that the House’s full budget would be presented soon, and that negotiations on a consensus plan with the Senate would emerge swiftly.
Those who represent and advocate for Michigan’s K-12 schools, however, said Thursday that districts can’t wait for the Legislature’s fight to continue, and the longer they do, tough decisions would need to be made.
SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
At present, the Legislature is now many weeks past its statutory July 1 deadline to complete and present to the governor an appropriations bill to fund state departments, public schools and higher education. Although the deadline has been missed before, this year’s budget fight is novel in the fact that partisan gridlock has stalled movement on negotiations.
A full budget has been passed by the Michigan Senate, but the chamber lacks a clear roads funding plan, which the Republican-controlled House has blamed for the current impasse.
The House has yet to present its full budget funding state operations, but it has crafted a roads plan and passed K-12 and higher education budgets. The Democrats who control the Senate say it’s the House that’s holding up the process.
Either way, the two competing school funding plans are diametrically different in their approaches to funding. That’s given K-12 districts no insight into how to best plan for the year to come. To give themselves some cushion, some districts are already either talking about laying off staff or have already done so.
In his press conference to address the ongoing stalemate held Thursday, Hall was asked if he had comment on those schools who are directly tying the budget crisis to their decisions on layoffs.
The question from a reporter focused mainly on school safety and mental health staff that were allegedly getting the ax.
To that, Hall said that the previous Democratic trifecta, which held power for the last two years, slashed funding for mental health and school safety, and that his chamber’s schools budget this year was a restoration of those areas.
Some have criticized the House budget because it rolled up all the categorical spending line items for funding areas into the total per-pupil allowance, which gave schools no clear direction on how to spend that money. Critics have also said that schools would remove free meals and other key programs if the House budget was adopted into law because the Legislature no longer mandated that they fund them.
Hall said boilerplate language in the House education budget mandates money to be used for mental health and schools.
“Right before the [2024] election, they tried to fix that and put a little bit in, but it’s still way down,” Hall said. “One of the main things we’re trying to achieve in our budget, we … put a rule in place that you must fund school safety and mental health with this money.”
In response to the talk of layoffs in the face of potentially more school funding from the House this year, Hall said he believed those layoffs were more performance based than anything else.
Another reporter noted that despite whatever the House put in its version of the education budget, the lower chamber and its big brother in the Senate still needed to work out a consensus conference budget. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer would also have considerable influence in those negotiations. That could take time even after the House presents its full plan and the Senate finally moves forward on road funding.
Schools would be left in the lurch despite promises of increased funding because they don’t have that money now.
Again, Hall asked schools to hold the line and not make any rash personnel decisions because the money was coming.
“If I was a school superintendent, and I was watching this and I saw that all parties want to increase my funding, I wouldn’t be making all of these crazy decisions, because I see that all parties are trying to fund me more,” Hall said. “I would assume they’ll work it out. … All three budgets [the House, the Senate and the governor’s recommendations] increase funding for schools, it’s just the House Republicans who are increasing it the most.”
Hall chalked up the disconnect to the new House budgeting process, adding that the chamber was doing it “in a way that is a little different than the establishment is used to.”
Robert McCann, executive director of the K-12 Alliance of Michigan, said schools have a reason to be worried as the budget battle rages on.
“The reason for these layoffs is directly tied to the fact that they haven’t passed a budget,” McCann told Michigan Advance. “The budget is more than the per pupil [amount]. The budget is more than the total amount you’re getting. It’s pieces that create an entire budget for a school year, and those individual pieces fund specific programs and specific personnel.”
McCann said schools typically build their budgets in June, even though, as in years past, a final consensus budget might not be completed.
“But we were pretty far along in the process [in previous years] where they can take some reasonable guesses as to where their final budget is and what it’s going to look like,” McCann said. “They might have had to come back and tweak it a little bit at the end of the summer, but it’s close, and they could make enough informed decisions to keep personnel or to bring on new ones.”
In the current saga, McCann said schools have nothing to go on.
“With all due respect to the speaker, I couldn’t disagree more. Yes, they had two budgets that have been passed, but they were radically different from one another,” he added. “That’s where I say, it’s not just the fact that there were two budgets passed that would give them some amount of money, it’s that there were two budgets that contained very different funding and ways of distributing that funding.”
Hall gives clearer look at ‘waste cutting’ calculus
Aside from the dilemma facing schools, the roads issue continues to take precedence in the budget talks for Hall, as does the new Republican ethos to target funding areas that they consider “waste, fraud and abuse.”
The speaker has said that the full budget hasn’t come out yet, despite an optimistic view from his appropriations chair, state Rep. Ann Bollin (R-Brighton) that it could be delivered as soon as next week, because his team keeps finding wasteful spending areas that it says it can cut safely and responsibly.
Although that concept has been a national GOP talking point, Hall has only given a few examples of where waste was located in previous spending plans and where cuts might come from.
On Thursday, he shared more, targeting the Department of Attorney General, the Department of Technology, Management and Budget, the Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity, the Department of Civil Rights and the Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy.
Hall showed slides comparing the budgets of former Republican Gov. Rick Snyder to the last two budget cycles when Democrats held all levers of power in state government.
By his caucus’ math, the attorney general’s office budget grew by 22%; management and budget by 36%; civil rights by 80%; labor by 92%; and EGLE by 107%.
For Hall, that was evidence enough for Republicans to take the ax to those ballooning departments and label that all as waste.
Budget no closer as talk continues
The numerous press conferences and tough talk in Lansing, on both sides of the aisle, have brought the budget no closer to completion.
Hall previously said it was his estimation that the full budget proposal would land by Sept. 30, the constitutional drop deadline for the fiscal year before the government lands in a shutdown. The last government shutdown in Michigan lasted only a few hours, with a consensus reached soon afterward.
The Advance asked Hall what that might look like if both budgets are delivered and passed by each chamber on Sept. 30 or Oct. 1, and how swiftly he believed the two sides could come to agreement to stave off a potential shut down.
Hall has said his team was putting together “the perfect budget,” and therefore, any shut down might only last a few hours in this round, if it happens at all.
“In that scenario, we would only need a couple of hours at that point,” Hall said. “But I think we’ll try to give them a little more time, a few more days than that, to work through this.”
In the face of sneering political mistrust between Democrats and Republicans, Hall’s assumption appears highly optimistic.
The speaker, however, blamed any infighting on two opposing factions within the Democratic Party, and not on House Republicans.
“If the Democrats can unify and empower their leader, Governor Whitmer, we’ll get a deal done in about two weeks, probably less,” Hall said. “I think when I show this to her, she will see a lot of this waste, fraud and abuse, and will help us eliminate it. And then I think we share a common goal of getting the roads fixed.”
Comments