What are Budget Provisos?

BY STEVE NUZUM

“In the committee rooms of this building, public hearings are held on proposed legislation. It is here that provision is made for the voice of citizens to be a direct part of the legislative process.”

-- Former South Carolina Speaker of the House Rex Carter

Each year, the South Carolina General Assembly makes by far the most changes to state education policy through a law many people probably don’t even think of as a law: the appropriations bills, also known as the budget.

And when the SC House of Representatives begins floor debates on the budget, halfway through the session (for the 2026 year, they just finished their first round of debates and sent their draft to the Senate), they can begin to add amendments to the budget bill, called “provisos”. 

Budget provisos, ideally, are one-year additions to the budget that legitimately focus on budget-related policy issues.

In practice, provisos are an easy way for state legislators to add directions, restrictions, and rules, for any entity funded by state tax revenue, to the state budget. And while there are technically rules about which amendments are “germane” (or relevant” to the budget), whether provisos are ruled out of order for germaneness often depends more on the party or faction in power than on the specific relevance of the proviso. 

And although each proviso expires at the end of the budget year, provisos are often habitually copied and pasted into multiple years of future budgets. (Unless a proviso is actively removed in a future year, it stays in the budget. Some proviso language has been copied and pasted again and again for decades.)

A graphic I created for ProTruth South Carolina outlining the budget process. 

What this means is that in South Carolina, legislators can-- and do-- sneak in language that has the force of law for multiple years, without going through the committee process, without public comment, and often without much time for anyone to know what they’re doing.

For example, while several bills that seek to defund or restrict “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives died early in the session in committee, the House recently debated provisos to add many of these restrictions into the budget, anyway. (The draft of the budget passed by the House, as of this writing, is available on the SC Legislature website; provisos are listed separately by agency.) 

Representative April Cromer evidently added one, for example, to prohibit any state funds to be used for “diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives”. Cromer and fellow Freedom Caucus member Josiah Magnuson repeatedly put up provisos to defund public entities based on their personal partisan and/ or religious ideologies.  (For example, as the South Carolina ACLU’s Paul Bowers put it in a recent Statehouse Dispatch,  two of the attempted provisos were intended to “slash funds to Clemson University because its president was insufficiently mournful about the death of Charlie Kirk, and to reduce funding to Tri-County Technical College apparently because a trans woman used a women’s bathroom on campus.”)

Another bill to teach firearm safety on school campuses, was filed only after the main sponsor was not able to sneak it in as a budget proviso in the House. (However you might feel about the need for schools to take a role in teaching gun safety, at least one of the bill sponsors has indicated he would like to partner with partisan gun rights groups to provide the education. This is certainly the kind of initiative, then, which vitally needs public feedback and transparency.) 

But the majority does not always rule outlandish culture war provisos not germane. 

For years, a budget proviso renewed in each budget also provided the basis for censorship and restrictions on books and topics related to race and gender. That proviso adopted language originally included in a Trump Executive Order (likely written at least in part by the self-proclaimed architect of the “CRT” panic, Chris Rufo) aimed at eliminating diversity training requirements in federal agencies. 

Perhaps because its language was ill-suited to apply to educational institutions, there was little effort to pass it through committees, and before the citizens of South Carolina during public review. Instead, it was added at the last minute to a budget, and carried over several times in new budgets.

The House has already included this language as a proviso in this year’s budget; if it passes, most South Carolinians will once again ever know. 

And it sometimes seems that the strategy of lawmakers acting in bad faith to get something crazy into the budget is to simply submit such a large number that some are bound to get into the final budget.

Similarly, I’ve seen copies of provisos filed by Freedom Caucus member Rep. April Cromer-- no friend to librarians-- that would restrict South Carolina public libraries from entering into agreements with state library associations like the South Carolina Association of School Librarians (SCASL) and the American Library Association (ALA), as well as prohibiting other types of expenditures for members of these associations. 

Many organizations and agencies currently fund participation in professional associations using state funds but some in the legislature have become fixated on conspiracy theories about the American Library Association and its affiliates. For example, another Freedom Caucus member, Jordan Pace, during last year’s House debate about a proposed online safety law, objected at length to the bill, on the basis that it would be implemented by librarians, who he said were likely to “indoctrinate” students because, he claimed, librarian education programs in the state were accredited by the American Library Association.

At another point in that meeting, Pace said, “The most recent South Carolina Librarian president was my journalism teacher in high school, and I’m very glad that her indoctrination didn’t stick, in my case.” (Pace’s former yearbook teacher is a former president of the South Carolina Association of School Librarians; she has stated publicly that Pace merely took pictures for the yearbook. Pace did not provide any evidence or examples on the House floor of how she had allegedly “indoctrinated him”.)

If at first you don’t succeed, try a budget proviso.

Cromer co-sponsored a bill with a similar anti-ALA aim this year, but that bill hasn’t made much progress and appears to be stalled in the House Education and Public Works Committee.  But if legislators can’t get a bill through the committee process (which often involve public hearings where members of the public can attend and provide written and/ or in-person comment), they can try to achieve a similar end through the much more opaque budget process. 

Former Freedom Caucus member Ryan McCabe also evidently plans to file a proviso that would require transgender and nonbinary students from living in group homes aligned with their gender identities. (This can create significant danger for children.) His bill to do exactly the same thing evidently died in committee. 

If it’s worth doing, it’s worth debating in subcommittees, committees, and on the floors of the Senate and House. 

There seems to be a growing bipartisan consensus in South Carolina that legislating by proviso is not a transparent or accountable way to do it. As the conservative-leaning State Policy Council put it in a breakdown of Fiscal Year 2026 provisos, “The merit of the majority of these issues is questionable at best but regardless, if lawmakers wish to make policy changes, they should sponsor a bill and send it through the legislative process.” Similarly, I’ve heard representatives of educational reading and civil rights groups call the process of legislating by proviso “cowardly”. 

But perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that this is the way many South Carolina legislators currently operate. After all, Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey famously said, during a floor debate about whether or not to put a Hate Crimes bill to a vote, “I don’t believe in democratic government with a small D; I think we should elect representatives to make decisions”. (The same Shane Massey has also railed repeatedly against elected State Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver’s efforts to “circumvent” the state voucher law by sending money to homeschool students, before telling her he was certain she would win reelection in November, either way, suggesting that his vision of a lower-case R “republican” government is one in which the “best” party is elected by the people, and the people are then stuck with whatever that party decides to do, indefinitely. 

But true representative government, as envisioned by the US system, doesn’t mean that once you’re elected you can do whatever you want. 

That’s why there is a plaque in the Blatt Building, where South Carolina House of Representatives committees meet, that reads, “This building belongs to the people of South Carolina. In the committee rooms of this building, public hearings are held on proposed legislation. It is here that provision is made for the voice of citizens to be a direct part of the legislative process. In this building, citizen and legislator formally meet, in mutual concern for the betterment of the state of South Carolina”.

Those words are from Rex Carter, who served as South Carolina Speaker of the House from 1975-1980. Maybe times have changed, but I think those are still words that both  public officials and citizens could stand to review every time they pass that plaque. 

Once South Carolinians do know about provisos added to the budget, it is often too late to do anything about them.  The only way to influence members of the SC House and Senate is likely to contact them now, during the budget deliberations process. Urge them to reject the adoption of amendments to the budget that go beyond the process of budgeting funds and instead function as less-democratic mini-laws that restrict the rights of South Carolinians and the ability of public institutions to serve the public.