Rob Schofield
Several important policy priorities have defined conservative Republican governance of North Carolina during the last 15 years — the culture wars, the effort to make elections more partisan and voting more difficult, the explosion of private school vouchers. But if there is a single phenomenon that has stood out above all others, it has been the relentless crusade to defund core public structures and services.
Thanks to an ongoing series of regressive tax cuts, the falloff in what North Carolina invests in state government as a share of total state income –— by far the best indicator of overall capacity and effort — has been precipitous. In 2024, for instance, the state General Fund budget was around 21% lower by this measure than it was in 2009. In previous years, the gap exceeded 30%. All told, North Carolina has disinvested in government to the tune of tens of billions of dollars over past decade-and-a-half.
For those who might still harbor any doubts as to why so many of a fast-growing state’s public school classrooms, DMV offices and correctional and mental health facilities lack adequate numbers of fully trained and qualified personnel, look no further than these dollar figures, and the low employee pay and poor benefits to which they have given rise.
Weirdly, however, despite the obvious cause-and-effect nature of this situation, conservative politicians have clung to a strange brand of denial over the years that, in turn, has helped spur a kind of vicious downward cycle.
Here’s how it has worked:
When GOP lawmakers assumed control of the General Assembly in 2011, the watchword was attacking “government bureaucracy.” Spurred on by people like national right-wing activist Grover Norquist, who infamously and gruesomely bragged that his mission was to shrink government down to the size “where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub,” conservative pols made attacking state employment in Raleigh a top priority.
Department of Public Instruction employees — the people charged with the unenviable task of monitoring and assisting 115 school districts as they employed tens of thousands of educators and educated over a million children — were regularly dismissed as useless functionaries, authors of burdensome “unfunded mandates,” and inhabitants of the “pink palace” (a derisive reference to the Department of Public Instruction office building that was located just north of the Legislative Building).
And so it was that the General Assembly enacted big tax and spending cuts in response — some over the objection of Democratic governors, and for four years, with the aid of a Republican chief executive.
The result, unsurprisingly, was that core services like schools, mental health, transportation, public safety, and environmental permitting — plagued by funding cuts and staff reductions — all struggled mightily to keep up with rising demands of what remained a fast-growing population.
And it wasn’t long before the falloff in services produced scads of constituent complaints. Frustrated by things like teacher shortages, massive waits from services for people with developmental disabilities and basics as simple as driver’s license renewals and construction permits, North Carolinians spoke out and made their unhappiness known. It continues to this day.
Here, however, is the wrinkle that’s especially maddening.
Rather than responding to the complaints about inadequate services by restoring funding and at least placing a hold on more tax cuts, the same politicians who imposed the big cuts in the first place joined the chorus of complaints. Instead of acknowledging how their policies had demoralized and overwhelmed the state employees who remained, GOP lawmakers decried the decline in services, made a regular show of interrogating agency heads, and advanced two new solutions: privatizing public services and lowering standards.
Indeed, both of these “solutions” are being advanced this year as GOP lawmakers promote ideas like increasing caps on public school class sizes, privatizing DMV services, allowing driver’s licenses to be renewed less frequently, doing away with environmental reviews of new developments near waterways, and lowering building code standards — ostensibly to promote Hurricane Helene recovery.
And, of course, the final step in this whole destructive cycle comes when, claiming to be motivated to improve quote “efficiency,” the same politicians advance legislation to start the whole process over again by pursuing still more tax cuts and threatening more state agency job reductions. See, for instance, the new state Senate budget proposal and the so-called DAVE Act bill that would empower state Auditor Dave Boliek to act as a kind mini-Elon Musk.
Taken together, it’s enough to make a body think that Norquist’s morbid fantasy may just have been the plan all along.
The bottom line: slashing funding for basic public services for the purpose of improving outcomes makes no more sense than draining blood from an anemic patient or forgoing the basic upkeep of one’s car or home. And right now, it’s long past time for our state to break this vicious and destructive cycle.
NC Newsline Editor Rob Schofield oversees day-to-day newsroom operations, authors regular commentaries, and hosts a weekly radio show/podcast. Republished from ncnewsline.com.
