As higher education and health care suffer continued cuts in state funding much more severe than other parts of the budget, state officials have claimed their hands are tied.
A maze of constitutional and statutory dedications protect huge swaths of the state’s budget. Higher education and health care are the only major programs that don’t enjoy such protections, so they get cut significantly worse than the rest.
But a provision nestled deep in the state’s constitution may mean that conventional wisdom isn’t entirely true.
Article VII, Section 10, Subsection F, Subsubsection 2a says that “adjustments to any constitutionally protected or mandated allocations or appropriations … are authorized when state general fund allocations or appropriations have been reduced in an aggregate amount equal to at least seven-tenths of one percent of the total of such allocations and appropriations for a fiscal year.”
Simply put, this means the state has the authority to cut 5 percent from even those programs that are constitutionally protected once the state’s general fund is cut by at least 0.7 percent.
The state’s general fund is the section of the state’s budget with the least restrictions and dedications, making it the most vulnerable to cuts. Higher education and health care fall under the “discretionary” portion of the general fund, which means those programs are completely vulnerable to cuts.
The provision makes an exception for the state’s Minimum Foundation Program, which funds elementary through high school education and can’t be cut even under this proviso. It also protects several other miscellaneous programs that don’t make up a significant part of the budget.
This proviso could allow the state to make cuts from a larger span of the budget, relieving some cuts to higher education and health care.
The most recent midyear cut, for example, could have triggered these across-the-board cuts, but the Governor’s Office chose not to use the provision.
Because the state’s revenues were less than expected for this budget year, the state needed to trim $106.8 million, according to governor’s executive order, to make the cut. Because the general fund totals $7.7 billion, the midyear cut more than surpassed the 0.7 percent threshold, which is $53.9 million — half the amount cut.
When the Jindal administration distributed the cuts, it decided to take the entire $106.8 million out of the general fund — meaning the administration could have made the cuts from a larger portion of the budget but chose not to.
That translates into the $2.2 million cut University administrators began preparing for last month. That cut grew to $5.1 million after officials took additional money from teaching campuses to prevent cuts to Pennington Biomedical Research Center and the LSU AgCenter.
State Rep. John Bel Edwards, D-Amite, said some legislators protested the decision not to use the proviso and spread out the cuts.
According to Edwards, Jindal’s Commissioner of Administration Paul Rainwater told legislators the administration wanted to wait to use the provision during the next legislative session, when the entire budget — and thus a larger stake in higher education funding — will be up for debate.
“I just didn’t understand it as a rationale,” Edwards said. “If you could use it now, I don’t see why you would wait for later.”
Kyle Plotkin, Jindal’s press secretary, pointed to bills the governor supported in the 2009 legislative session as evidence the administration supports removing budget protections to ease pressures on higher education and health care. Most notable among those bills were Senate Bills 1 and 2, which would have evened out the way the state cuts its budget.
Both those bills failed in committee.
Senate Bills and 1 and 2 in the 2010 session closely resembled their 2009 counterparts. Those bills also failed in committee.
 
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Contact Matthew Albright at [email protected]