Dear Neighbor, The 2025 session continues to fly by as we work to bring priority bills through the legislative process. Our biggest responsibility for this session is to establish a new two-year state budget and in early March we will receive an updated economic forecast with firm figures to use as framework. Look for more on that soon. For now, here are my latest notes from the House: Tax increase coming News on Friday, February 21st, broke that the payroll tax rate for the new Paid Family Medical Leave program is 25 percent higher than the Democrats’ 2023 enacting legislation included. This translates to a $300-$350 million tax increase on employers and employees, for a grand total of $1.55 billion next year alone. Main Street, family-owned businesses already are operating on razor-thin margins and cannot afford this tax increase. This program clearly is not ready to launch Jan. 1 of 2026 as scheduled. We need to press pause, delay PFML implementation, and find common-sense solutions. Watch for House Republicans to bring forward a lower-cost option in the coming weeks. Higher Education  I enjoyed recently meeting with college/university leaders from around Minnesota, including Bryan Herrmann, Vice Chancellor for Finance and Facilities at Morris; Charles Nies, Chancellor at UMD; Janet Ericksen, Chancellor at Morris; Lori Carrell, Chancellor at Rochester; Rosemary Johnson, Vice Chancellor Academic Affairs at Crookston. The House Higher Education Finance and Policy Committee has been working to understand in great detail the University of Minnesota’s $5 billion annual budget. We have provided them with a historic three days of meetings to lay out their budget and to explain to committee members and the public how they spent the $1.5 billion dollars that the legislature appropriated last biennium. We have already learned a great deal. For instance, the U of M has 51 unique and siloed budgeting units. It is a slow process to track where those taxpayer dollars are going. I've also made a data request seeking the most granular information of how they spent that money across five randomly selected budgeting units out of their 51. I have also done a data request asking for their top 100 salaried people, their names, salary, job titles and a short job description. I currently have a team of data analysts looking at it to understand their budget at a level that has not been previously explored. For example, there are both "Riders" and State Special Appropriations" which are special line items totaling $194.428 million of U of M spending categories. We rarely hear what millions of our tax dollars are spent on. We have just begun to explore these spending items. I will keep you updated as we learn more like the money that trains people how to be social justice warriors, or hosts events that are political in nature. Just think about all the different hate speech that's happened on the campus; our tax sellers paid for that, too. My committee will continue unraveling the U of M’s rather complicated budget. Stay tuned for more as this process plays out. Government transparency H.F. 20 was the first bill to reach the floor this 2025 session. It is a good-government bill, providing greater transparency in the Attorney General’s office. For background, this bill is necessary because special interests are influencing the AG to file motivated litigation. For example, nonprofits currently are funding anti-gun and anti-energy litigation. But the AG is misusing a provision in the Data Practices Act to shield these dealings with dark-money groups from public view. This bill makes more of the attorney general’s data public and correct state law to more closely align with the legislature’s original intent, rather than abiding by the Supreme Court’s questionable interpretation. Unfortunately, all House Democrats voted against the bill before it was set aside for possible discussion another day. Fraud update The House Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight Policy Committee on which I serve had another very interesting and extremely revealing meeting this week. The interim commissioner of the Department of Human Services appeared to testify about childcare fraud. I asked why Minnesota can't stop federally illegal kickbacks that we know are happening in our state. The underwhelming answer I received from the interim DHS Commissioner is further evidence we need to demand better from our government instead of allowing the lax oversight that has become all to commonplace to continue (click image for video).  There has good coverage of this meeting, including (click image for video):  |