Harger: Washington’s budget went from $33 billion to $80 billion. Two former Democratic governors claim Olympia has lost the thread
Jul 20, 2026, 7:26 AM | Updated: 1:17 pm
“There’s no budget discipline.”
That’s Gary Locke. Democrat. Governor of Washington from 1997 to 2005. He told The Center Square that on Thursday, at a business summit in SeaTac, about a legislature run by his own party.
He wasn’t finished.
“I think spending is out of control in Olympia,” Locke said. “They need much more discipline. They need to set priorities.”
He’s the second former Democratic governor to say a version of this in three months. Back in May, Christine Gregoire stood in front of a similar crowd and did the math out loud.
“I left office with a budget of $33 billion. And the budget today is $80 billion,” Gregoire said. “I think that’s a little bit too much of a growth.”
Then she added the line that probably got her uninvited from a few dinner parties: “We don’t really have an income problem. We have a spending problem.”
Two Democratic governors. Same warning. Three months apart. Neither one running for anything, neither one with a thing to gain, and neither one getting much of a response from the building they’re describing.
What they’re pointing at is arithmetic. Nobody here is saying stop helping people with addiction, or homelessness, or schools. They’re saying you can’t build permanent programs on money you already know is going away, and then act stunned when the bill arrives.
Pay attention to who’s saying this
Gary Locke and Christine Gregoire ran this state for a combined 16 years. Between them, they’ve balanced more budgets than anyone currently working in Olympia, and they know what one looks like when it’s heading somewhere bad.
Locke was governor when Washington was landing the companies that made this state rich. Gregoire steered us through the Great Recession without the wheels coming off. The competitive advantages they protected are why Washington has the third-highest per capita GDP among the 50 states.
Gregoire endorsed Bob Ferguson. She campaigned for him. And here she is, publicly telling his administration the direction is wrong.
When the woman who helped build the house says the foundation’s cracking, you don’t tell her she doesn’t live there anymore. You get a flashlight.
The one-time money problem, explained at kitchen-table volume
The pattern is easy to follow once you’ve watched it a few times, and it starts with good intentions.
You get a pile of money that shows up once. Federal relief, a settlement, a good year. You use it to start a program. The program helps people, which is the point, and it also creates a group of people who now depend on it. Then the one-time money does the thing one-time money does. It runs out.
Now what? Locke laid it out.
“When that one-time money goes away, how are you going to continue that program?” Locke asked. “And then you create all this dissatisfaction and disappointment among the interest groups. So, do you then raise revenues?”
You know the answer. Everybody knows the answer.
So you raise taxes to keep the program running. And then next session, that new revenue gets committed to the next round of programs built on the next pile of one-time money, and the whole thing starts over.
I had questions about the millionaire’s tax. So does Gary Locke
The 9.9% tax on income above a million dollars was sold as the answer to the shortfall.
Locke, who is not exactly a tax-cutting crusader, looked at the books and asked the obvious question.
“They say that this was necessary to balance the budget, but even with that money, they’re facing a deficit. And will they even be able to use that money for the programs that they promised the voters?”
A former Democratic governor just asked whether his own party’s signature new revenue can pay for the things it was promised to pay for. The answer, according to Olympia’s own projections, is no. There’s still a deficit two years out.
When you take in more money than you ever have and still can’t cover the bills, the problem is on the other side of the ledger.
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‘So what would you cut?’
That’s the response every time somebody brings this up, and I understand why. It’s a good question, and it puts the other guy on defense. Which program for people with disabilities are you eliminating? Which shelter closes?
But it skips a step. Before we get to what gets cut, somebody should explain why permanent obligations keep getting built on temporary money in the first place. That’s the decision that creates the crisis. Everything after it is just triage.
Locke had a system for this. Priorities of Government, he called it, back in 2002. Every agency ranked its programs by how much they mattered to the public. You fund from the top down until the money’s gone. Uncomfortable, unglamorous, and it forced people to say out loud what they valued most.
Nobody’s doing that now.
Watch how next session goes
I’ll make a prediction, and I hope I’m wrong.
The session opens in January with a lot of talk about being sensible. Fiscal responsibility. Tough choices ahead. Everyone will sound very serious about it.
By March, the language shifts. We have no choice. These are services we promised. The need is greater than ever. And the ask will be bigger than last year’s, because the deficit will be bigger than last year’s.
I’ve watched this cycle through the campgrounds that couldn’t open, through a decade of spending that doubled while the results got worse, and through record tax collections that somehow still came up short. It’s the most reliable thing in Olympia.
Locke’s warning belongs on every desk in that building, whatever party they belong to: “Pretty soon, people are going to say, ‘Wait a second, I can’t trust those folks.'”
Two people who ran this state for 16 years are standing outside the door, telling anyone who’ll listen that the numbers don’t work. They have no campaign to fund and nothing to sell. They’ve just seen enough budgets to know how this one ends.
And Locke already showed the way out. Priorities of Government was a spreadsheet and the nerve to use it. Nothing fancier than that.
The math is the math.
Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here.
