The North Carolina General Assembly’s Skewed and Out-of-Touch Priorities
As of now, the 2025-2027 state budget is almost four months overdue. One of the primary tasks of state legislators is to craft and pass a state budget that ensures adequate revenue to support robust services and protections for the people of North Carolina. State budgets cover a variety of expenses, including:
- Paying state employees to provide services for the residents of North Carolina, including teachers, healthcare, and public safety employees
- Funding for public schools, childcare, and early education programs
- Evidence-based programs designed to improve the lives of North Carolinians
- Healthcare coverage for patients and reimbursements for providers and hospitals
- Environmental protections and disaster recovery programs
- Social safety net programs, such as unemployment benefits
- Infrastructure for state agencies, including ensuring sufficient staffing
- Election oversight and administration
While the North Carolina General Assembly has come to Raleigh multiple times since the missed budget deadline of July 1, Republican leadership has made passing a budget the furthest thing from their minds. Instead, we’ve seen inflammatory, partisan, and unnecessary bills designed to mirror the ideological priorities of the federal administration, including:
- Proposed bills to cut taxes for the most wealthy
- Intensified attacks on immigrant communities
- Cuts to programs promoting racial equity
- Attacks on trans communities, particularly on trans children
- Reducing Medicaid patients’ access to reproductive health care providers
- Gerrymandering Congressional maps (which NCGA Republicans passed on 10/22)
- Attacks on election infrastructure and voting rights
These priorities of Republicans in the NC General Assembly are all partisan, cruel, and designed to divide communities and entrench political power for those benefiting from corruption and chaos; they are not a serious attempt to govern for the benefit of all. Combined with the lack of a full budget, this entire legislative session has been a dereliction of duty by Republican leadership of our General Assembly. Our state motto is “To be rather than to seem,” yet all session, the only thing we’ve seen has been lip service and hollow rhetoric about the “issues” facing our state, rather than the bold action our elected leaders need to take.
Adding in the manufactured federal government shutdown that is leaving North Carolina with even more critical funding gaps and impacting the livelihoods of nearly 85,000 federal employees in our state, North Carolinians deserve better than what legislative leaders have offered us this session.
The North Carolina General Assembly is supposedly scheduled to come to Raleigh once a month between now and the late-April start of their “short” session. Contact your lawmakers and let them know you expect a budget and real solutions to issues impacting North Carolinians, not more politics!
