Idaho has faced budget crunches before.

The same can’t be said for most Idaho lawmakers.

They are facing an unsavory and unfamiliar task: making wholesale and permanent cuts in state spending.

State GOP leaders are almost putting a glib face on it all. “This is a walk in the park,” House Speaker Mike Moyle, R-Star, told reporters Thursday morning. But when the 2026 session formally begins on Jan. 12, two years’ worth of budget problems will await returning lawmakers.

First, they will need to balance the books for the current budget year, settling up a $40 million shortfall. And that’s just the warmup. For the next budget year, beginning July 1, they are facing a ginormous gulf between spending requests and projected revenues — $555 million. That translates to roughly a 10% gap; this year’s general fund spending exceeds $5.5 billion.

The Legislature has one job: Pass a balanced budget. Everything else is often noisy but ultimately optional. The budget is their sole constitutional mandate. And this one job hasn’t been this tough in nearly 20 years.

The last time Idaho had to cut state budgets midstream came in 2020 — when tax collections cratered during the COVID-19 pandemic. But that was a different animal of a downturn. Uncle Sam came to the rescue of struggling state governments, infusing $1.25 billion of federal aid into Idaho’s coffers.

Many Idahoans love to disparage federal money, much like they downplay the pandemic itself. Still, the federal money afforded lawmakers the luxury of using a one-shot windfall to reverse budget cuts, in areas such as education.

And most current lawmakers weren’t even around for the COVID crunch anyway. Only 33 of Idaho’s 105 sitting legislators were in office on March 13, 2020, when Gov. Brad Little issued a statewide coronavirus declaration.

The Great Recession offers another comparison — but again, not a precise one. A 2008 collapse in the housing market threatened an economic meltdown, and the federal government pumped huge stimulus payments to the states. It wasn’t enough to prevent unprecedented cuts in Idaho K-12 spending, but it did mitigate some of the pain.

And only four current lawmakers were in the Legislature in 2009, as Idaho began dealing with the Great Recession fallout: Reps. Judy Boyle, R-Midvale; Brent Crane, R-Nampa; and Joe Palmer, R-Meridian; and Moyle. (Little was around at the time, serving as lieutenant governor, and current Lt. Gov. Scott Bedke was serving in the House.)

It isn’t just dollars that are scarce this year. Institutional memory is also at a premium.

It goes without saying, but it bears repeating, that no one is coming to Idaho’s rescue this year. This is a self-inflicted crunch — caused not by a mortgage crisis or a global pandemic, but by Idaho’s own fiscal decisions, including a $453 million binge of tax cuts and tax credits from 2025. “It’s our fault,” Senate Minority Leader Melissa Wintrow, D-Boise, said during Thursday’s Idaho Press Club legislative preview.

Since the feds aren’t rolling in with an armored truck filled with money, Little and a Republican-dominated Legislature will be forced to get out of this mess, performing without a net.

And in December, the Legislature lost one of its most seasoned and savvy number-crunchers.

Rep. Wendy Horman, House co-chair of the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee, announced her departure from the Legislature to take an appointment with the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services.

Earlier this week, Rep. Josh Tanner took the job as co-chair. Tanner, R-Eagle, is in his second legislative term. Horman, R-Idaho Falls, was in her seventh term.

Horman has no reservations about her successor.

“Rep. Tanner knows those budgets as well as I do, if not better in the case of (the Department of) Health and Welfare, and he has a work ethic second to none,” she said in an interview this week. “He is well prepared to take the role of chairman.”

But for most legislators — and not just Tanner, although he will surely command a large share of the attention — there isn’t much time for on-the-job training.

JFAC hopes to finish writing budget bills on March 12: nine weeks from today. Along the way, JFAC will have to come up with a revenue forecast for 2026-27 — and a year ago, this committee was stalemated on this all-important spending target until March 5.

In the meantime, the Legislature’s tax committees will have to decide whether and how to go along with the tax cuts in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Act. That pricetag is up in the air — but one forecast puts the bill at $284.4 million, and whatever the final cost, widen the gulf between spending requests and cashflow.

The wider the gap, the smaller the chance that K-12 continues to survive unscathed. Little spared K-12 from the 3% budget cuts he imposed across the rest of state government in August, but Idaho School Boards Association deputy director Quinn Perry is worried. “I’ve tried really hard to make no promises to our school board members about the realities of the budget,” she said during an Idaho EdNews podcast interview Tuesday.

The wider the gap, the greater the chance for additional higher education budget cuts — on top of Little’s $13 million in cuts from August. And the greater the chance legislative hardliners could finally get their wish, killing Little’s $75 million-a-year Idaho Launch postsecondary aid program.

With all of this in play in 2026, 2008 and 2009 is a touchstone.

This week, Horman told EdNews that JFAC leadership and budget staff have spent time studying Idaho’s response to the Great Recession. They found an executive order from Gov. Butch Otter’s administration, a fiscal triage memo that identified constitutionally mandated programs, critical programs and, well, everything else.

Horman said the 2026 Legislature faces a similar job — protecting essentials like public education and public safety, prisons and Medicaid and the rising cost of state employee benefits. “Those are things that are going to be necessary increases in this year’s budget, which will mandate necessary decreases in other parts of the budget.”

Also worth noting: Her list of essentials takes up most of the state budget and leaves little on the chopping block. K-12 alone accounts for nearly half of the budget.

Horman and other GOP leaders are also quick to point out the differences between the Great Recession and the present day. Of course, that just underscores the disconnect between Idaho’s fiscal malaise and its economic health.

“This is not in any way 2009,” Little told reporters Thursday, pointing to a Great Recession-era unemployment rate of 10%. November’s jobless rate, announced Wednesday, was 3.7%.

On Thursday, Moyle said the Legislature can and will easily find 5% to cut from budgets (although that wouldn’t be enough to erase a possible 10% gap between requests and revenue). The cuts won’t be as “draconian” as the Great Recession-era cuts, he said. But it might pit agencies against each other, as they try to avoid the Legislature’s focus.

“It’ll be entertaining, too, to watch,” he said.

So at least one pre-session prediction will come true.

Kevin Richert writes a weekly analysis on education policy and education politics. Look for his stories each Thursday.