For at least the past several years, in the middle of the night on the last day of the legislative session, Illinois lawmakers have been asked to vote on budgets of over 3,000 pages mere hours after first seeing them.
With more than $56 billion in play, you’d think there’d be a better process in place.
Instead, Illinois’ budgeting leaves lawmakers and taxpayers in the dark. Year after year, the state bypasses basic steps to ensure transparency and accountability.
Illinois needs a more responsible process, built on early revenue estimates, independent analysis, and spending decisions that align with them.
Start with a basic question: How much money does the state have to work with?
Budgeting should follow a simple principle: You need to know how much money you have before deciding how to spend it. While the governor’s Office of Management and Budget gives some indication of revenues ahead of the budget proposal, lawmakers often treat its estimates as flexible.
State law requires the General Assembly to pass an estimate of the revenue for the upcoming budget year. The Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability provides these estimates, but lawmakers regularly ignore them and simply spend first, then raise taxes and fees to cover the gaps.
Lawmakers often don’t know the long-term costs of what they pass. Even when estimates exist, they are often released during or after passage and focus on projected revenue gains without fully accounting for risks or long-term costs. A Medicaid-style program for undocumented immigrants ended up costing billions more than expected, and corporate tax changes were adopted without meaningful analysis of their economic effects.
That’s not budgeting. It’s guesswork.
Major proposals should include long-term cost projections and be made publicly available before any vote. They should be subject to public hearings and real debate before reaching the floor.
In 2026, a 3,300-page budget was filed just a day before adjournment, continuing a trend where lawmakers have as little as 26 seconds per page to review it. In practice, lawmakers often vote before fully understanding what they’re approving. Final votes also regularly happen around midnight when nobody is watching.
That’s why Illinois should require budget bills to be publicly available for at least 48-72 hours before any vote. Spending and revenue proposals should also be heard throughout the regular session, not just in the final few days leading up to budget enactment.
The problem doesn’t end there. Basic transparency rules are routinely bypassed.
The Illinois Constitution requires bills to be read three times on separate days. Lawmakers circumvent this by swapping in entirely new language at the last minute. The 2026 budget started as a one-sentence bill about court spending before being transformed into a 3,386-page bill with just one day left before the final vote.
These last-minute substitutions prevent meaningful scrutiny and shut the public out of the process. Without transparency, researchers, advocates, and the public have little opportunity to weigh in on how taxpayers’ dollars are spent.
This is not how responsible budgeting works. Illinois should follow basic standards of transparency, accountability, and deliberation. Without reform, the state will continue making billion-dollar decisions behind closed doors – with taxpayers left to pay the price.
