Michigan Gov. Whitmer talks education, infrastructure at Mackinac Policy Conference. Read her full remarks.

CBS News

a day ago

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer took the stage on Thursday at the Mackinac Policy Conference, touching on various topics, such as education, infrastructure and Medicaid.
The Democratic governor, finishing her second term, called Medicaid a "lifeline for 2.6 million Michiganders." This comes a week after the U.S. House passed President Trump's "big, beautiful bill," which includes significant cuts to the program. The bill aims to find $880 billion in savings over 10 years, with at least $700 billion coming from health provisions.
Under the legislation, new work requirements would apply to childless Medicaid recipients without disabilities between the ages of 19 and 64. Republican lawmakers argue that more frequent eligibility checks on Medicaid recipients will significantly reduce "waste, fraud, and abuse." The bill requires states to check at least every six months whether adults covered under the Medicaid expansion are still eligible.
Whitmer also touched on the workforce and continuing support for higher education. She mentioned actions taken, like raising the minimum wage and the state working to protect abortion and LGBTQ rights.
In Michigan, we know what it means to do hard things that make a real difference in people's lives," Whitmer said in a statement after giving her remarks. "We must work together to make sure every Michigan kid can read and build on the work we've already done to implement proven, science of reading strategies.
"We must work across the aisle to deliver a sustainable, long-term solution for state and local roads so people can get where they need to go safely. And we must secure a chip factory in Michigan, ensuring we can design and make the cutting-edge technology America will need to lead the 21st century, while creating thousands of good-paying jobs for Michiganders. Let's build on our incredible progress over the last six-and-a-half-years, stay focused on the fundamentals, and move Michigan forward."
Read Whitmer's full remarks as provided by her office
Hello everyone! Great to be back at MPC in my seventh year as governor.
This afternoon, I want to talk about our ability to do hard things. Some people call it GRIT. It's our willingness to work together in the short-term to get things done that make a big difference in the long-term. Michigan is a diverse state in every sense of the word, but it's our ability to unite around shared priorities that makes us special. We solve problems that others write off as unsolvable. We prove, time and time again, that we can do hard things.
We all know that citizens across the political spectrum are frustrated. Broken promises, stagnating wages, and increasing polarization leads to people listening to the loudest or angriest voice in the room.
Michiganders deserve better. We cannot give in to the instant gratification that comes from cheap, divisive anger-driven politics. We need leadership that provides certainty and executes a clear, long-term strategy, instead of lurching from self-inflicted wounds to embarrassing controversy, week to week.
Historically, Michigan has been a model for doing hard things. Just look at the Mighty Mac. We have worked across the aisle, between government at all levels, and across industries of all kinds to make meaningful, lasting progress. Let me highlight just a few of the hard things that we've done, together.
First, Selfridge. Back in 2014, the A10 Warthogs at the air base in Macomb County were set to be retired. The clock was ticking, and a lot was at risk without another mission. After a decade of fierce, consistent Michigan advocacy, President Trump announced last month that Selfridge will receive a new fighter mission of F15-EX jets. This move protects 30,000 jobs, 5,000 military families, and $850 million of statewide commerce. For Michigan, this is a B-F-D.
Saving Selfridge was a Team Michigan effort. I advocated for the base in face-to-face meetings at the White House every year since I took office in 2019. I won't lie—it made for some odd moments and even odder photographs—but at the end of the day, we delivered. We saved an economic anchor of one of our state's largest and most prosperous counties. We bolstered our other bases. And we strengthened our growing defense and aerospace industries. We can do hard things.
Moving on to Medicaid. It's a lifeline for 2.6 million Michiganders including:
three in five nursing home residents,
300,000 people with disabilities,
And nearly half the births in Michigan, including 84% of the deliveries at Detroit Children's Hospital.
Last week, Republicans in the U.S. House passed legislation to cut hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid and SNAP. The cuts would terminate health care for millions of our most vulnerable friends, family, and neighbors. It would threaten food that nearly 15% of Michiganders rely on to feed themselves and their kids.
Here in Michigan, we worked together to expand Medicaid. When the Affordable Care Act passed, I was the minority leader in the Michigan senate. I knew we had to seize the chance to expand health care to hundreds of thousands more Michiganders. Governor Snyder supported it too. And our only chance at getting it done was working together.
Not everyone agreed with my approach, including some of my own colleagues, who didn't want to give the governor a "win." But, I saw a generational opportunity to do something transformative, and I knew that we had to put our differences aside. I went desk to desk to get the votes to get it done. We created Healthy Michigan, which still covers hundreds of thousands of people today. We can do hard things.
Moving on to our workforce. For decades we watched the evolution of work and knew Michigan needed to seriously upskill our workforce to compete for good jobs. This was a universal priority, and we had to take it seriously or risk losing businesses who needed a pool of skilled talent to move to or expand in Michigan.
Unfortunately, our policy had been heading in the opposite direction for years. Gutted funding for public colleges and universities made it less and less affordable for all and completely out of reach for too many. When I ran for governor, I prioritized higher education and skills training. Early on, I set our ambitious but achievable Sixty by 30 goal, to have 60% of our adult population earn a degree or certificate by 2030.
Since I took office, we've been inching closer and closer to meeting it. By working across the aisle, we established Michigan Reconnect, the Michigan Achievement Scholarship, and the Michigan Guarantee. If you graduate high school or are older than 25, you can earn an associate's degree, tuition-free right now. If you attend a private or public university, you can save up to $27,500 right now.
Since we established these paths, more than 100,000 Michiganders have used them to save money, graduate, and find a good-paying job. Over 100,000! And when it comes to our Sixty by 30 goal, we've gone from 45% of our working age population with a degree or certificate to 52%, despite a pandemic. See? We can do hard things.
Finally, a story from this year on minimum wage and paid sick time, a difficult issue that had been kicked down the road for a long time. I'm pleased that Democrats, Republicans, businesses, and workers finally came together earlier this year to pass a reasonable, bipartisan deal.
We raised the minimum wage to $15 an hour one year ahead of schedule, which puts more money in the pockets of 700,000 workers. We increased the tipped minimum wage by the highest amount ever. And we delivered paid sick leave. We did all of this while maintaining flexibility for small businesses, ensuring they could continue operating in Michigan without raising prices or laying people off. We can do hard things.
There's so much we've done together worth celebrating…
We protected abortion rights… expanded LGBTQ+ rights… and passed commonsense gun violence prevention laws.
We raised our credit rating, paid down $20 billion of debt, and brought our rainy day fund to an all-time high.
We're rolling back the retirement tax on our seniors and quintupled the state match of the EITC.
We slashed burdensome regulations on redeveloping brownfields and lowered the cost of R&D.
We will soon open the Gordie Howe International Bridge on the busiest land border crossing in North America. And Michigan loves Gordie Howe and Canadians for the record!
We can do hard things.
To succeed, you must be willing to work with people you disagree with about most things to find what you can do together. It's a harder path to take in the moment, but it's always the right one. Success requires thinking about ways to help the whole team win instead of just padding your own stats. That's why I don't care much about headlines. I care about making headway.
I have 19 months left in this office. I'm not counting down—it really is the best job in the world. I go to work every day to make the place I love most a little better. As I think about how best to use the time I have left here, I want to lay out a few more hard things we must do.
Let's start with our kids. I believe that every child deserves access to a high-quality public education from preK through postsecondary. When I took office, we had been underinvesting in education for decades and had wide funding gaps between our public schools as high as $400 per-student.
For years, we had been trying to fix it, and in 2021, we finally closed the funding gap in our public schools. Since then, we've raised teacher pay and cut retiree taxes. We expanded on-campus mental health resources and started feeding all 1.4 million public school students free breakfast and lunch. Our graduation rate, AP class numbers, and career and technical education completion rates are all at all-time highs. We can do hard things.
But let's be frank… we face a literacy crisis, not just in Michigan, but across the country. Just a quarter of our 4th graders can read proficiently. That's unacceptable. Falling behind in reading follows you for the rest of your life. Literacy is statistically correlated to academic, financial, and physical health. And while this crisis impacts all our kids, I want to call attention to the fact that our boys are falling behind more than our girls. As a result, girls read at a higher level than boys, earn better grades, and are more likely to graduate, go to college, and earn more money.
This is a hard problem to solve and we're all juggling a lot. Parents are trying hard to make ends meet while raising their kids. Our kids have lived through a once-in-a-century pandemic and are being shaped by ever-changing technology. And Michigan's incredible public educators show up, work hard, and care deeply about their students' well-being and academic achievement. We all need to work together to tackle the literacy crisis.
The next hard thing we must do is make sure that every kid in Michigan can read.
We must focus every education policy to meet this high-level goal until we hit it. As the State Board of Education hires their new superintendent, I urge them to pick a candidate with a proven record on literacy.
We have the momentum here. Late last year, I signed commonsense legislation to use proven, science of reading strategies—like phonics. It's how a lot of us learned how to read and we should get back to it… because it works. These new laws also require schools to test for dyslexia so they can identify students who need extra help early.
Knowing how to read is an ordinary superpower that we all deserve to have. Let's do what it takes to get our kids back on track for the bright futures they all deserve. I know we can. Because we can do hard things.
Next, let's talk about roads. We need to deliver a sustainable, long-term solution for local and state roads so folks can get to work, drop their kids off at school, and run errands without blowing a tire or cracking an axle. I'm proud of my Rebuilding Michigan Plan, which has fixed our most economically-critical highways and bridges. I know it's caused a lot of traffic in Southeast Michigan… Yes, I've heard about 696… I'm sorry and you're welcome.
But as I said in my State of the State, Rebuilding Michigan was a temporary fix for a long-term challenge. We need to fix our local roads, which have been underinvested in for decades. I'm grateful for the engagement on this issue all year long by members of the legislature in both parties. We're inching closer to a deal, and we'll have to compromise to do this right. That means new revenue and responsible cuts, too. Let's get it done while balancing our budget, without burdening the middle class. This year, we will. Because we can do hard things.
Finally, let's talk about our ongoing efforts to bring more advanced manufacturing to Michigan. In just the last few years, we've secured projects across the state in several key industries, but I want to focus on semiconductor chips.
We've seen the devastating consequence of what a global shortage of chips can do. It forced our automakers to buy up parking lots and fill them with almost-done cars awaiting chips, and it jacked up prices on phones, computers, and appliances. In the decades ahead, being able to make chips top-to-bottom in America will allow us to stay on the cutting-edge of AI. Whoever dominates this technology, from design to production, will win the 21st century. We cannot afford to lose this race to China. We must win.
To do so, we have to build more semiconductor chip fabrication facilities, also known as fabs. Fabs are the most advanced factories on the planet and take an enormous amount of time and resources to build. A single chip plant uses more steel than the Mackinac Bridge. A dozen times more cement than Ford Field. And more miles of cable than Michigan coastline. All this work takes thousands of union construction workers around two years to complete. Once up and running, a chip plant supports thousands of good-paying local jobs.
Chips are the brains of devices we use every day and power the invisible systems that make modern life possible. They make trillions of calculations a second, allowing you to send texts, write emails, play music, or order delivery. They store information, from your photos and documents to all our medical records and financial data.
A fab is the kind of transformational project where a dad can work on pouring the foundation, his daughter can help wire it up to the grid, and his grandchildren can work inside, making the chips our world needs. It's an intergenerational investment that makes an entire region an economic magnet, inspiring families to move here and put down roots.
For a long time, the U.S. made 0% of the world's advanced chips. We ceded far too much ground to foreign competition. Now, thanks to plants being built nationwide, we're growing fast. Michigan should get in on the game. I've been advocating for this directly with the Trump Administration and their new US Investment Accelerator.
Together, let's land and start building a chip plant in Michigan by the end of next year.
It won't be easy, but that's okay. We can do hard things.
Over the past six-and-a-half years, I've found that leadership is about fighting hard, often quietly, for your big goals. It is your tolerance for taking a few punches to win the fight. Leadership is your ability to do hard things. Today, I've outlined a few of the hard things we've already done and laid out three more—literacy, roads, and chips—that we must do.
But as I wrap up, I want to speak to the moment we're in. The only certainty about the next few years is uncertainty. And while there's a lot to celebrate about the work we've done and will continue to do in Michigan, much of our fate is tied to decisions made down in DC.
I know you all are trying to read the tea leaves and figure out how your business, your community, your family will be affected by changes in national policy. As governor, I'm watching every twist in the tariff story and tracking ongoing efforts to strip billions out of Medicaid and SNAP, among so many other issues. These are serious issues with huge stakes for Michiganders, from workers in the auto supply chain to parents figuring out next month's budget.
We can do hard things in Michigan, yes, but we are living in hard times. We have to acknowledge what's within our control and what's not. I can't control the global tariff war and its impact on our economy. I can't control what happens in DC that, let's be honest, will hit Michigan harder than other states.
My commitment to you, as it always has been, will be to do everything in my power to move Michigan forward. I'll work with anyone to make life a little easier for our families, our businesses, and our communities. That's why I ran for governor in the first place. For a long time, especially in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Michiganders were pessimistic about our state's future. Compounding events like the Detroit Bankruptcy and the Flint Water Crisis made that worse. The fundamentals were broken and people had lost trust in their government.
In 2018, I ran for governor to tackle both those big challenges. I wanted to fix the fundamentals and restore trust… to give people confidence that Michigan is headed in the right direction. Today, I'm proud that Michiganders feel more positive about our state's direction despite ongoing uncertainty about the national direction.
I know you feel it too. Just think for a second about the looks people used to give you 10 or 15 years ago when you told them where you were from. Remember how it made you feel. Compare that to today. We learned just a few weeks ago that Detroit's population has grown again, for the 2nd time in nearly 70 years. That's incredible. We should all feel proud of our flagship city, a place that has risen from a past defined by hardship to a future driven by endless possibilities. Detroit does hard things.
As a state, we've done a lot over the last couple of years, but we're not done yet. Let's continue leading by example as a state that does hard things in the right way. And let's remember that we're all on the same team—Team Michigan. Thank you.
and contributed to this report.