Idaho governor asks agencies to cut budgets

Idaho Gov. Brad Little has asked most state agencies to trim their current budgets by 1% and prepare for more cuts in the coming year.

The Idaho Press reports Little didn’t make the request of K-12 public schools. He sent a memo to other state agencies late last month last month asking them to identify another 2% base reduction in their budgets for the coming year.

Little’s chief of staff Zach Hauge wrote in the memo that the governor’s top priority is education. He called the request a “spending reset.”

State tax revenues are running substantially lower than anticipated, but the state budget still has a big cushion, in part because this year’s spending was budgeted to total about $174 million less than the predicted tax revenues.