Idaho Legislature’s budget committee operating under two different sets of voting rules

The door to the JFAC committee room at the Idaho State Capitol building is pictured on Jan. 6, 2023. (Otto Kitsinger for Idaho Capital Sun)

Without formal published rules in place guiding the proceedings, members of the Idaho Legislature’s powerful budget committee clashed again on Wednesday over changes to the committee’s voting procedures.

Two Democrats walked out of the committee meeting in protest Wednesday, saying there is no clear set of rules governing the Idaho Legislature’s Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee.

On Wednesday, it also became clear for the first time that there are now two different standards for how votes are handled in the committee.

The Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee, or JFAC for short, is a powerful committee made up of 10 members each from the Idaho Senate and Idaho House of Representatives. The committee meets almost every day during the legislative session and is responsible for setting the budget for every state agency and department. 

In order for funding to be approved for fighting wildfires, paying for public schools, improving state parks, paying state employees and judges or administering all of the state’s other programs and services, JFAC has to sign off.
For decades, JFAC met and voted jointly – 11 votes out of 20 constituted a majority when everyone was in attendance.

But JFAC has undergone a series of major changes to the committee’s meeting, voting and budgeting procedures over the past two years or so. 

JFACs co-chairs said the changes increase transparency and accountability and ensure there is more widespread support before budgets reach the floor of the Idaho House and Idaho Senate.

Now deep into the 2025 legislative session, it has become clear that no other committee in the Idaho Legislature has this much confusion or uncertainty over voting and what it takes to advance a motion or bill from the committee to the floor.

Senate Minority Leader Melissa Wintrow and Sen. Janie Ward-Engelking, both D-Boise, walked out of Wednesday’s JFAC meeting in protest, briefly denying the committee a quorum and grinding action to a halt.

“When you don’t have predictable rules and we are in a culture of defunding programs and services that we rely on as citizens, now our hand is forced to leave the floor to ensure that some money goes out (to fund budgets),” Wintrow said in an interview Wednesday morning.

Ward-Engelking agreed.

“We waited until somebody else came up that we knew would be supportive of the budget, and then came back,” Ward-Engelking said in an interview.

Wintrow was even more outspoken in a written statement she sent out a short time later on Wednesday.

“We left the floor because we felt the most prudent thing for Idaho voters would be to deny a quorum,” Wintrow wrote. “JFAC is operating outside of all precedent and common sense voting rules, counting the hypothetical votes of absent members as ‘no’ votes. Rules provide predictability, transparency and fairness. To echo the words of Sen. (Kevin) Cook: the body owns the rules, and we have not voted on a set of rules as a body. Instead, a few people in leadership are making up rules as we go at the expense of Idaho voters.”

This isn’t the first time JFAC members clashed over rules in recent days.

On Friday, House Speaker Mike Moyle, who is not a member of JFAC, entered the JFAC room and began publicly arguing with some JFAC members during a break in the committee after Cook, R-Idaho Falls, and Sen. Jim Woodward, R-Sagle, raised objections to JFAC’s voting procedures. JFAC co-chair Wendy Horman, R-Idaho Falls, told the Sun she welcomes robust discussion, but she said it is out of order for committee members to speak without being recognized by the committee chair.

Some JFAC members also publicly complained about JFAC failing to set a revenue projection to base the 2026 budget around until after several budgets and major tax cuts passed.

Heading into the 2025 legislative session, the Idaho House did not adopt joint rules of the Idaho House and Senate, which govern how joint committees like JFAC run. 

On the other hand, the Idaho Senate did adopt the joint rules during the 2025 organizational session held in December.

The rules lay out how bills are introduced, passed and amended, the role of committees and much more.

One of the reasons the House did not adopt joint rules before the session is because Moyle, the speaker of the Idaho House, disagrees with Joint Rule 11. That rule states that when joint committees of both chambers meet, the chairman of the Senate committee will serve as the chairperson. Moyle said the House doesn’t want to give up the authority to set agendas and share the chairmanship.

In addition to the rules, committee chairs in the Idaho Legislature use the Idaho Constitution, state laws and Mason‘s Manual of Legislative Procedure to guide proceedings.

In the absence of formal rules, Horman and fellow co-chair Sen. Scott Grow, R-Eagle, said JFAC is operating under precedent set by the new procedures they put in place over the past two years and a letter they both signed in February 2023.

The letter states: “House and Senate Majority leadership have determined to utilize the joint voting procedure used in the past while also announcing the votes of House and Senate committees separately. If a bill receives majority support from the joint committee and does not receive majority support from the House or Senate committee, the bill will be sent to the house from which the majority of members did not vote in the affirmative.”

After weeks of uncertainty, it became clear on Wednesday there are now two different interpretations of that letter. That means there are now two different standards for how votes are handled in JFAC.

• If at least six of the 10 House members serving on JFAC don’t vote in favor of a motion or budget, that motion fails and is dead. Horman, the Idaho Falls Republican who serves as co-chair of JFAC, said the House clerk has informed her there is no mechanism to bring a failed motion forward to the House floor or assign it a bill number,
• If at least six of the 10 Senate members serving on JFAC don’t vote in favor of a motion or budget, the motion is announced as failing in JFAC and then sent to the Idaho Senate. Grow, the Eagle Republican who serves as the other JFAC co-chair, said it will be up to Senate Republican leadership to decide how to handle the failed motions from JFAC.

“We’ve agreed to disagree,” Horman told the Idaho Capital Sun when asked about the different standards after Wednesday’s JFAC meeting adjourned.

On Wednesday, budget requests to provide $2.25 million in state funding in the current fiscal year 2025 for a rural nursing loan repayment program and multiple motions regarding the oversight of the Emergency Management Services program all failed to receive a majority of support among Senate finance members. The funding for the rural nursing loan repayment program was separate, and in addition to, action JFAC took Wednesday to reject a $500,000 request to expand the Rural Physician Incentive Program.

Horman and Grow announced the two sets of voting standards during Wednesday’s meeting. 

These exact voting scenarios have come up several times over the past two weeks.

On Feb. 28, JFAC failed to reach a majority of support among Senate JFAC members for multiple budget requests, including a grant funding request for body-worn cameras for Idaho Department of Correction officers. JFAC first attempted to send the failed motions to the Senate. However, JFAC ultimately started over on two of the failed motions from Feb. 28 (including the body worn cameras) and passed them on March 5.

When motions failed to achieve a majority of support among House JFAC members on March 7, the motions just died; they weren’t sent anywhere.

During Wednesday’s meeting, Horman said JFAC co-chairs and legislative leaders hope to clarify rules and procedures after the legislative session ends. For the rest of this year, the two different voting procedures will remain in place.

“The Senate is taking a different approach on that (than the House), and we’ve agreed that is how we will move forward for the rest of the session until we can get into the interim and make some clarifications to this letter, or other rules that may need to be adjusted in the joint rules,” Horman said.

One area where Horman and Grow agree is that it takes six votes among House JFAC members and six votes among Senate JFAC members to constitute a majority, no matter how many members are physically there. 

That means if seven Senate members of JFAC are present, a 5-2 vote in favor of a budget or motion would be considered failing to receive a majority because it did not receive six votes.

On Wednesday, Ward-Engelking and Wintrow said it was nearly impossible to reach the six Senate JFAC votes necessary to pass budgets while other senators were away in other committees presenting bills. Cook, R-Idaho Falls, missed most of JFAC’s meeting on Wednesday presenting bills in other committees. Other senators also came and went Wednesday.

Over the course of the past few weeks, three Republican senators – Sens. Phil Hart, R-Kellogg; Glenneda Zuiderveld, R-Twin Falls; and Cindy Carlson, R-Riggins, (as well as the substitute legislator covering for Carlson) have repeatedly voted against multiple budgets and supplemental funding requests. That means if any two of the remaining seven senators on JFAC join them, they have the power to kill any budget or motion. If a couple of Senate members of JFAC are absent, it may only take one other senator to join them and kill any budget.

Meanwhile, legislative leaders have set a nonbinding target to adjourn the legislative session by March 21, the end of next week. 

After major tax cuts, a Medicaid expansion work requirement bill and a bill allowing families to receive a refundable tax credit to reimburse them for education expenses including tuition at private, religious schools all passed, the 2026 budget is one of the final unresolved issues in the 2025 legislative session.

As of Wednesday afternoon, JFAC has not even considered all the budget enhancements that state agencies requested for next year’s budget, and some other budget enhancements failed to pass out of JFAC with a majority of support from both chambers.

Along with changing voting procedures, one of the other major JFAC changes Horman and Grow instituted involved separating budgets into two parts. The first part is a bare-bones maintenance of operations budget that is solely intended to keep the lights on for state agencies. It takes a version of last year’s budget and removes all of the one-time funding and all of the new funding requests.

The new funding requests are called budget enhancements and voted on separately.

As of Wednesday, six of the 10 maintenance budgets had passed both the Idaho House and Idaho Senate and were awaiting action from Gov. Brad Little.

The Idaho House controlled two of the maintenance budgets on its reading calendar, and the Idaho Senate controlled the other two maintenance budgets on its reading calendar.

Meanwhile, dozens of other budget enhancements remain unresolved or have yet to reach the House or Senate floor.

Horman and Moyle told the Sun on Friday that some legislators are applying pressure to only pass the maintenance budgets and walk away from the budget enhancements. 

“I think there’s some important enhancements that we need and want, and I think that we need to look at those,” Moyle said Friday. “But you know, there’s some conflicts or differences in what those ought to be.”

Horman said she is working to build consensus and bring the budget enhancements forward to the floor.

“Some members would like to see no additional spending beyond the maintenance budgets, but that was never the goal of this transition,” Horman said Friday. “Our commitment is to bring those forward to the extent we can get agreement on them.”

But in an interview Wednesday, Wintrow said it is now easier to kill or block budget enhancements.

“What you’re seeing right now is a culture of people who are part of government, who don’t want to fund or run a government,” Wintrow said. “The agencies are suffering, and you’ve heard me say it twice on the floor now that we are taking cuts from all the budgets and especially the governor’s initiatives in order to fund the tax cut.”

JFAC Feb 23 letter