It wasn’t the first time a controversial program or spending item was sneaked through the General Assembly in secret. This tactic is made possible by inserting major policy changes into what is known as a “budget implementation” bill, often shortened to “the BIMP.”
The state budget, the multi-thousand-page document usually only revealed a few hours before passage, sets out how much money the state will spend on its various agencies and programs.
The annual BIMP bill often has just as little public notice as the state budget. BIMP bills enact the state budget for the upcoming fiscal year and often include changes to transfers, deposits, reimbursements, and how state funds can or can’t be used. However, BIMP bills can also include significant changes to state law that are never even discussed during the legislative process.
So, let’s take a peek behind the curtain at how this secretive process works.
In the past few years, the BIMP was used to slip programs into law at the last second, with the goal of enacting them before they received much public scrutiny.
The most notorious of these in recent times was the Health Benefits for Immigrant Seniors (HBIS) program, which suddenly appeared and was enacted through a last-minute addition via the FY21 BIMP bill in 2020.
The original HBIS program included Medicaid-like health benefits for undocumented immigrant seniors over the age of 65. It was expected to cost Illinois taxpayers more than $100 million in its first year. With the HBIS/BIMP sleight of hand being so successful in 2020, Democrats returned to the back room and used the same process to create a new program called Health Benefits for Immigrant Adults (HBIA) in 2021 using the FY22 BIMP. HBIA extended free healthcare benefits to undocumented immigrants between the ages of 55 and 64.
Asking themselves, “why stop there?” Democrats took another swing at it in 2022, this time through a last-minute amendment creating a Medicaid Omnibus bill, and again expanded the HBIA program to include undocumented immigrants over the age of 42 in a program called Health Benefits for Immigrant Adults (HBIA) with an “estimated” cost of $68 million.
They accomplished it all in secret, sliding the wording into the bill at the last minute and ramming it through in the middle of the night.
Of course, we now know the result. The Auditor General recently investigated the HBIS and HBIA programs and found their costs to be wildly out of control: overspending their estimates by 284% and costing Illinois taxpayers more than $1.6 billion (and growing).
Sadly, these shenanigans seem to happen every year.
But how?
House and Senate rules require bills to be read on multiple days before voting. How could a bill with hundreds of pages and hundreds of millions of dollars of fiscal impact possibly just appear out of the blue and get rushed into law?
Let’s examine how it happened last year.
The BIMP bill for the current fiscal year was House Bill 4959 of the 103rd General Assembly. It began its journey on February 7, 2024, as a bill which had nothing at all to do with the budget.
The original HB 4959 set up “the Creative Economy Task Force within the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity to create a strategic plan to improve the creative economy in the State.”
Aside from the usual eye rolls that accompany a bill that creates yet another task force, HB 4959 moved through the House without making waves.
But HB 4959 contained a short phrase that would be the source of much mischief three months later: it’s enacting clause, “An Act concerning State government.”
A common enacting clause found at the top of many House bills, this wording was innocuous enough to not attract attention, but also vague enough to allow the bill to be amended later for almost any purpose without running afoul of the state Constitution’s “single subject” requirement.
In other words: a potential trojan horse for bad legislation.
The Creative Economy Task Force bill quietly wound its way through the process. Passing committee unanimously on March 21, cruising through the House overwhelmingly on April 18. Clearing a Senate committee unanimously on May 9.
And then the trap was sprung.
On May 26, the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, a 403-page amendment jumped onto the bill, “replacing everything after the enacting clause.”
The Creative Economy Task Force was no more. It was struck down at the very doorstep of success by the lightning-quick action of Springfield Democrats who had been negotiating with each other behind the scenes to get enough votes to pass the largest spending bill in Illinois history – and the nearly $1 billion in tax increases which would be needed to pay for it. When the Creative Economy Task Force bill, with its vague enactment clause, caught the eye of spendthrift Democrats, it never stood a chance.
Senate Floor Amendment 2 was filed, debated, adopted, passed and sent over to the House in just a few hours that Sunday. Since the bill had already cleared multiple steps in the legislative process before it was amended, this new amendment was already far along the road to enactment.
With the adoption of the 403-page amendment to what had originally been a five-page bill, Illinoisans outside the Democrats’ insiders-only state Capitol backroom finally got their first look at what had just become “the Fiscal Year 2025 Budget Implementation Act.”
What the people finally saw, if they had time to look, was all too typical of the last-minute mischief that characterizes so much of Illinois’ less-than-transparent budget process.
True to form, the BIMP bill had several surprises, including a shift of $150 million from the Road Fund, which is used for road construction throughout the state, and re-directing that money to offset general revenue spending on mass transit, including Chicago’s mass transit mess. Democrats also used the BIMP to allow for $12 million in Road Fund dollars to be used to support the Electric Vehicle Rebate Program, resulting in gas taxpayers propping up Illinois’ Democrat’s Green New Deal.
The BIMP bill is just one part of the secretive, non-transparent and badly broken Illinois state budget process. It allows a handful of power brokers to go behind closed doors and make deals, while Illinois taxpayers continue to pay the price. This year, Illinoisans (those who have stayed awake into the wee hours of the morning, that is) will have only a brief window of opportunity late in May to find out what surprises this year’s BIMP bill has in store for them.