MS House adjourns 2025 Session without budget. How much would special session cost?

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03-04-2025

The Mississippi Legislature's 2025 session is now effectively over, leaving the state without a $7 billion budget for the coming fiscal year and without a multi-million-dollar local project funding bill.
As a result, Republican Gov. Tate Reeves, who did not reply to requests for comment by press time, will now have the responsibility to bring lawmakers back to Jackson before July 1 and make them hash out $7 billion in state spending to avoid a government shutdown.
A special session would cost roughly $100,000 per day, which is just shy of the cost for an out-of-state student to obtain a four-year degree at the University of Mississippi.
On Wednesday, the House passed a resolution to suspend the rules of the Legislature and revive about 100 budget proposals that died over the weekend by legislative deadlines. Those deaths were attributed to House lawmakers not showing up on a Saturday workday, typically referred to as conference weekend, to finish budget negotiations between the House and Senate.
House Speaker Jason White, R-West, who authored the bill, put into its contents a deadline of 5 p.m. on Wednesday for the Senate to agree to the resolution so that budget and other discussions related to tax cuts and state retirement funding could continue, two hotly debated topics this session.
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The Senate didn't take the bait and gaveled out for the day before ever even discussing the resolution on the Senate floor. The House later kept its word and ended the session. The Senate is scheduled to re-meet Thursday morning.
With the House adjourning for the year, business between the two chambers can no longer continue, effectively ending the legislative session. The Senate can, however, continue meeting until April 6 and pass bills already sent over from the House.
Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann said he would send the resolution to a Senate committee for further work but also said Senate and House budget negotiators can just come back next week and restart budget talks while waiting for a special session to be called.
"This is not a yo-yo budget," Hosemann told reporters. "This is a $30 billion budget in which they have ignored the deadlines, failed to show up, repeatedly, taken their marbles home at least twice, and given us conflicting statements every other time. So, yeah, our guys are ready to do the budget, I'm going to ask that we start the budget next week, that our chairman get with their chairman, and we start the budget for next week."
A special session would give Reeves an enormous amount of power to set an agenda and require lawmakers to work on whatever legislation he wants in addition to the budget. That fact was not lost on White, who told reporters he wanted to workout a budget with Senate leadership before the end of the session on April 6 but did not have an agreement from Hosemann that budget talks would continue.
"(Reeves) always said he wouldn't call a special session on any item until there was an agreement, so that we didn't sit up here for days on end, wasting taxpayer money coming in or fussing and punching out," White said. "I suspect he would require that an agreement be in place before we come back. But even if we do have an agreement that's going to take a few days to work through those bills."
Hosemann and White's team had been in backroom meetings since Monday trying to find a path forward. While the House was generally in support of suspending the rules of the Legislature to extend the session and revive budget proposals, the Senate was not.
The Clarion Ledger polled 20 senators on Saturday, and of them, 15, including members of leadership, said they would not consider extending the session. Also, on Saturday several others, both Republican and Democrat, expressed not wanting to extend the session just so House lawmakers "could take a day off."
One of the sticking points of continued disagreements, White said, was whether to have a local projects funding bill, which is typically funded with $100-$400 million in capital expense funds spread for various projects around the state.
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Typical projects are for parks, public buildings and rural road projects.
White said the House wanted a projects bill and the Senate was leaving municipalities out on a limb without it, but Hosemann and his team would not entertain the idea. Hosemann responded by saying it was not fiscally responsible to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on local projects when the Legislature just passed a net $2 billion tax cut.
"If you're articulating that we got to watch our funds because of the tax cut or looming cuts from the feds, then we shouldn't be spending any capex (capital expense) money," White said. "But we can't pick and choose some big projects that look good for folks that might want to run for statewide office and not look to local governments."
Earlier in the session, lawmakers passed House Bill 1, which eliminated the income tax over a decade, cuts the sales tax on groceries to 5% and raises the gas tax by 9 cents. The bill also established a new, some call controversial, hybrid set of state retirement plan benefits for future public employees.
One issue with the bill is that it contained a tax cut trigger typo that more aligned with a House priority to quickly eliminate the income tax. The House discovered the mistake and went with it anyway, and Reeves later signed it.
Several senators said their unwillingness to consider a project bill came from frustration with the House for not sending the tax bill back to the Senate to fix the typo.
Hosemann also noted that just in the past few weeks, hundreds of millions of dollars in federal dollars flowing toward state health and education programs had been frozen, further justifying his decision not to have a projects bill this year.
Upon adjourning the session, White thanked House staff, members and his own staff for their work in the session. In his goodbye speech White said the house conducted its business fairly and efficiently.
Neither Hosemann or White had received word from Reeves' office on when the special session might take place or what items Reeves would put on the agenda.
Grant McLaughlin covers the Legislature and state government for the Clarion Ledger. He can be reached at [e-mail] or 972-571-2335.
This article originally appeared on Mississippi Clarion Ledger: Special session incoming as MS House adjourns 2025 Session without budget