SEATTLE — State lawmakers are heading into what is expected to be a “tight” budget season.

According to the Washington State Office of Financial Management, revenue collections for the 2025-2027 biennium are forecast to be $390 million lower than when the budget was enacted in May.

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That means a major budget shortfall, and that the supplemental budget will likely yield more reductions than new investments.

“There’s no question this is going to be a challenging budget year,” Ohio House Majority Leader Joe Fitzgibbon (D-West Seattle) said. “And it’s not a year we’re likely to see a lot of new investments in things like healthcare, childcare or food assistance.”

The supplemental budget can act as a way for lawmakers to make adjustments to their main operating budget for the biennium. Fitzgibbon said that throughout the upcoming budget process, they will look at all the programs funded by the state and decide where the “least harmful” places are to make reductions.

Here are what Fitzgibbon said are the big-ticket items the state budget funds: K-12 education, healthcare and human services, services for people who are elderly, services for people with developmental disabilities, foster care programs, higher education, and prisons.

He said, last session, money was tight too, and there are not a lot of obvious places to make cuts. But said, for example, because of changes to sentencing laws and changes to “help people reoffend less,” the state’s prison population was reduced, and therefore, a prison could be closed, saving the state money.

“Those only get you so far, and so we’re going to look at the ways in which we can ask school districts, healthcare providers, and others too to operate more efficiently within the resources that we are able to allocate their way,” Fitzgibbon said.

The state is also facing another big hurdle come 2026: major cuts to Medicaid and SNAP from the federal government.

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“Back-filling the cuts from the federal government is probably beyond what we have the ability to do as a state because those cuts are so large,” he said.

Across the aisle and chamber is Senator Chris Gildon (R-Puyallup). He is the operating budget ranking member of the Senate Ways and Means Committee and the Republican budget leader in the Senate. Gildon agreed, this is going to be a tight budget year.

“Coming off of last session where the legislature passed historic levels of tax increases, and the revenues have not come in as they were expected to come into,” Gildon said.

But he thinks cuts can be made in several areas that will not be harmful. For example, he said a recent audit found that 130,000 people are enrolled in Washington State’s Medicaid rolls, but also in another state.

“And that means that they were enrolled in Washington State, and we were paying the monthly premiums, and they were also enrolled in another state that is paying monthly premiums for those people,” he said. “So certainly, cleaning up the roles of state Medicaid, I think we’ll find substantial savings.”

Gildon also listed several other areas where the state can make up money, like:

Making it so the working families tax credit can only be claimed for the current year, not retroactively for years past. Creating a lower cap for the mileage reimbursement that state employees receive, it is currently 70 cents per mile, at promote usage of the state motor pool.

Gildon also warned that over the four-year cycle, the budget shortfall is going to be even larger than $390 million. In fact, he points to a study done by the Senate Ways and Means Fiscal Analyst, showing that the budget shortfall is projected to grow to $1.1 billion by the end of the 2027-2029 biennium, “that needs to be made up in some manner.” He said the “Save Washington Budget,” as proposed by Republicans last session, would be a good place to start.

As far as priorities go, Gildon said he has three that he wants to ensure are fully funded in the upcoming years.

“If I had to rank order, the top there are K-12 [public education], public safety, and our social welfare net to protect the vulnerable amongst us,” he said.

Governor Bob Ferguson plans to introduce his executive budget in mid-December, before the Washington House begins work on it in January. Though not supermajorities, Democrats in the Washington House and Senate hold significant majorities and can pass the budget bill without support from Republicans.