RALEIGH (October 15, 2025) – State legislators are due back in Raleigh Monday. And more than three months into the state’s budget year, they have yet to fulfill one of the fundamental duties we elect them to do: Adopt a state budget.
Adoption of a budget is one of their primary jobs. Yet Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger seems in no hurry to do that job.
Berger has the upper hand in negotiations with the state House because what he wants – more tax cuts – is already inscribed in state law due to an agreement the two chambers made in 2023.
So he’s playing a Four Corners stall game with the House.
Rather than prompt a federal-style government shutdown, a law the legislature adopted in 2016 allows the previous year’s state budget allocations to continue if North Carolina legislators fail – as they almost always do, under both parties – to have a budget in place by the July 1 start of the state’s fiscal year.1
Meanwhile, every one of our neighboring states has a budget in place. The dysfunctional North Carolina General Assembly has no sense of self-discipline – and it won’t unless voters hold legislators accountable.
THE STATE HOUSE, in contrast, wants to adjust and slow the scheduled tax cuts due to the many uncertainties in our state and national economies.
What’s wrong with adjusting to the times, unless you prefer to live locked in the early 1950s, say, pre-Brown v. Board of Education?
The House is reading the economic tea leaves – projections that state revenues will be at least $1 billion short in 2026-272 – and suggesting the state ease up. Not raise taxes, mind you, but slow the tax cuts.
The House also recognizes the toll that years of paltry raises pitted against persistent inflation have taken on the state’s public-school teachers and state employees. North Carolina now ranks 43rd in average teacher pay.3
So the House proposes much more generous raises than the Senate for public-school teachers – an average raise of 8.7% over two years, plus a proposal to raise starting teacher pay to at least $50,000 by 2026-27.
In a growing state that faces a severe teacher shortage, the absence of a new budget – already more than three months overdue – makes recruitment and retention of teachers that much more of a challenge, especially in the face of inflation.
North Carolina is hemorrhaging teachers: It saw 11.5% of its teachers – more than 10,000, the most in two decades – leave the profession in 2022-23, and 9.9%, or 9,000, in 2023-24.4
In many districts – particularly those in Northeastern North Carolina – those vacancies are filled by teachers who aren’t fully licensed.5
MEANWHILE, legislative “leaders” announced this week that they will spend next week redrawing congressional district lines to give Republicans at least one more seat in the US House.6 They are reportedly targeting the district of Democratic Rep. Don Davis in Northeastern North Carolina.
It would mark the second time this decade NC legislators have redrawn congressional districts in the middle of the decade, rather than the usual practice of the start of the decade, after the US census is conducted.
State legislators need to stop playing partisan national political games and tend to business at home – namely, adopting a budget that’s three months behind schedule and that gives generous raises to the teachers and other state employees that this legislature seems to take for granted.
“The General Assembly works for North Carolina, not Donald Trump,” said Democratic Gov. Josh Stein.
“The Republican leadership in the General Assembly has failed to pass a budget, failed to pay our teachers and law enforcement what they deserve, and failed to fully fund Medicaid. Now they are failing you, the voters.”7
The governor, though, does not have constitutional authority to veto legislative districts.
VOTERS, PLEASE understand that how you vote is why your children or grandchildren or teacher might find themselves nine months later in a class with 33 students.
Even with legislators’ irresponsible expansion of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to provide private-school vouchers for those who can already afford it,8 the vast majority of this state’s children – its future workforce – will still attend public schools.
Stop ignoring those children, legislators. It’s a disservice to this state, its employers and its most important resource of all – its children.
It’s an abdication of the oath you took the day you were sworn into office.
Do what you took an oath – swearing on The Bible – to do.
Do your job.
1 https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article312355474.html?tbref=hp.
2 https://www.osbm.nc.gov/revised-consensus-revenue-forecast-may-2025/open; https://publicedworks.org/2025/06/house-budget-takes-more-cautious-approach-on-taxes/.
3 https://publicedworks.org/2025/05/nc-teacher-pay-now-ranks-43rd/; https://www.wunc.org/education/2025-04-29/teacher-pay-ranking-drops.
4 https://www.wral.com/news/education/nc-teacher-turnover-down-but-profession-has-changed-new-data-shows-april-2025/.
5 https://www.wunc.org/education/2025-04-03/teacher-turnover-improves-vacancies-high.
6 https://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/article312489376.html
7 https://www.wral.com/story/north-carolina-lawmakers-will-attempt-to-redraw-congressional-districts/22197690/
8 https://publicschoolsfirstnc.org/resources/fact-sheets/facts-on-nc-school-vouchers/.
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