Duggan: Legislators’ Salaries Should Be Paused For Missing Budget Deadline

(Source: MIRS.news, Published 07/11/2025) Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, an independent gubernatorial candidate, says his first act as governor would be calling to suspend legislators' salaries if they don't meet their July 1 budget-making deadline. 

Starting in 2021, state law has listed a July 1 deadline for lawmakers to pass and present budget bills to the Governor ahead of the upcoming budget. However, there are no penalties for missing the deadline, which legislators did when they left Lansing for the Fourth of July holiday without finalizing a K-12 spending plan for the upcoming Fiscal Year (FY) 2026. 

money in chains on top of american flag

At the time, MIRS learned that Sen. Darrin Camilleri (D-Trenton) and Rep. Tim Kelly (R-Saginaw), chairs of the Senate and House's K-12 appropriations subcommittees, had not yet received spending targets from leadership which they would typically use to create final budget bills.

Additionally, the Legislative Services Bureau, which is responsible for bill-writing and checking for potential legal issues, had yet to start drafting a K-12 budget deal, which could take the bureau several days to do.

"We are just six weeks from the start of the school year and none of Michigan's 4,000 public schools has a real budget. Principals and teachers can't properly hire or plan for their school's opening without knowing their budget, and it's always our children who pay the price for this chaos," Duggan said in a Thursday press release. 

Duggan explained he promises that if salaries are held up, a school budget will be approved immediately. 

"If there's one issue that Democratic and Republican legislators agree on, it's that they all want their paychecks," he said. 

The press release describes his proposal to immediately suspend the salaries of all public officials – including the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor and all state senators and representatives – if state budget deals aren't adopted by July 1. 

Currently, the Governor earns a $159,300 annual salary on top of a $54,000 tax-free expense allowance, ranking 19th nationally when it comes to governors' paychecks. Meanwhile, Michigan ranks fourth in the country for legislative salaries, with senators and House members receiving $71,685 and a separate $10,800 tax-free expense allowance. 

The wages were highlighted in late April by the State Officers Compensation Commission, which approved asking lawmakers to adopt a 25 percent pay increase for legislators, justices on the Michigan Supreme Court and the other top statewide officials.

Looking back at budget deals starting in 1995, the Governor has signed school aid budgets as late as between Oct. 1 through Nov. 11. For example, ahead of the Great Recession beginning in December 2007, the school aid budget for FY 2008 wasn't voted out of its final legislative chamber until Oct. 30. At the time, Democrat Jennifer Granholm was governor and the Legislature was under Republican control. 

According to Ballotpedia, Michigan is one of only 10 states with a full-time legislature.

There's a national observation that the less a legislature meets on its own, the more power a governor has to order special sessions where they influence the agenda. As for proponents of legislatures with more condensed calendars, they think it could push lawmakers to work faster on policy and appropriations.   

Sen. Michael Webber (R-Rochester Hills) has often called for the Michigan Legislature to move to meeting for no more than 90 consecutive days a year outside extraordinary occasions called upon by the Governor. In early February, he introduced 

SJR A, believing if lawmakers had a tighter timeline, they could do the same amount of work with "a little bit more expediency with it, a little bit more sense of urgency." 

"A lot of these part-time legislatures, they probably got a lot more done in January than we got done in Michigan, and we're getting paid more than most of the legislatures that are part-time," Webber said to MIRS in February. "What I understand from my colleagues that I know in … part-time legislature states, (there's) still the staff, the members are still doing obviously the constituent work … but then they're also doing the work leading to the session, knowing it's a shot clock that starts." 

Although his resolution does not address salaries, Webber does project that if the legislative calendar were to change, so would the paychecks.