On June 27, the Republican-controlled legislature sent Hobbs a budget that gave her nearly everything she wanted, including “fully funding” for education. Some Republican legislators bent over so far to please Hobbs that they created a fair amount of friction among their ranks. They did so in the spirit of cooperation, to avoid a state government shutdown.
However, just 12 days later, on July 9, Hobbs wasted no time in stabbing those legislators in the back by claiming that they are allowing public schools to go underfunded. The occasion of her rant was a claim made by NBC Channel 12 news that Empowerment Scholarship Account recipients are “hoarding” $440 Millions of funds received, apparently to use those funds to help fund college educations.
Arizonans deserve transparency and accountability for how their money is being spent. Instead, $440 million in taxpayer dollars is being hoarded in private accounts while public schools go underfunded. We need some guardrails to protect Arizona taxpayers. https://t.co/t32xw1xMBo
— Governor Katie Hobbs (@GovernorHobbs) July 9, 2025
Even the highly-biased NBC article admitted that what the “hoarders” are doing is not unlawful. It should be clear to anyone who looks at the facts that this action by Hobbs is not about underfunding education, but about the education establishment losing control over indoctrination of the relatively small percentage of students that participate in the ESA program.
Even Hobbs herself, in her Governor’s website description of the budget deal, listed several education-funding items, including fully funding of K-12 education and a 2-year waving of the Aggregate Expenditure Limit. This latter item warrants further explanation.
In 1980, the voters of Arizona approved Proposition 109 which established the Aggregate Expenditure Limit (AEL) in the Arizona Constitution. The margin of approval was an overwhelming 82% YES to 18% NO.
Even though the AEL was a limit on K-12 and Community College funding, it was a very generous limit.
It set the then current year, 1980, as a baseline and limited the growth of future funding to the percentage of growth in student enrollment, plus the percentage of inflation, plus a 10% bonus.
In addition to that, it included a mechanism for overriding the limit. The legislature could override the AEL by a concurrent resolution approved by at least 2/3 of both chambers of the legislature.
That is exactly what the legislature did this year, except that they did two years at once. SCR1041 overrides this year’s limit and SCR1042 overrides next year’s limit.
One last point regarding education funding is that for quite some time now, education funding has comprised well over half of all expenditures at both the state and the county level. That leaves less than half to meet other obligations, like law enforcement, infrastructure, healthcare, etc.
Our governor should be thanking the members of the legislature for their generosity toward public education instead of bashing them for bogus education underfunding.