Colorado lawmakers finally finished the state budget this weekend after proving, once again, that when government says it is working for you, it may first need to sit there and read 661 pages out loud like a hostage video for process nerds.
The Denver Gazette reports the House wrapped work on the $46.8 billion 2026-27 budget after four days instead of the usual two, thanks to Rep. Brandi Bradley forcing the full bill to be read at length by computer, a maneuver that turned the Capitol into the world’s most expensive audiobook and briefly gave Colorado the appearance of a state governed entirely by spite, clerical endurance, and cafeteria coffee.
What followed was the kind of majestic late-session professionalism voters have come to expect. Leadership delayed the reading, resumed it, capped final debate to an hour, then watched 45 minutes of that hour get eaten by a fight over whether Colorado Parks and Wildlife should spend $264,238 in general-fund money to buy more wolves for the wolf program that now unites ranchers, Republicans, and increasingly irritated Democrats in mutual disbelief.
“I’d like to say to my ranchers that we’re not using their taxpayer dollars to introduce more wolves into their backyards,” one Democrat said, in the sort of sentence that usually arrives right before a party discovers it has accidentally built a bipartisan coalition against itself.
Even House Speaker Julie McCluskie backed the move, noting the wolf reintroduction had not gone well and had come with significant cost. Which is an elegant legislative way of saying the state rolled out a ballot-box nature fantasy and then acted shocked when rural Colorado noticed the carnivores were not symbolic.
Elsewhere in the budget circus, lawmakers restored money and staff to the Unclaimed Property Trust Fund after Republicans accused Democrats of balancing the budget by stealing Coloradans’ money with extra paperwork. Another proposal to slash every agency budget by 3% failed, presumably because the building was already operating at the outer edge of what the human spirit can survive.
The larger numbers are their own little horror story. House Democrats said lawmakers had to cut $1.2 billion in general funds by reducing Medicaid reimbursements and services by $270 million, reallocating $570 million that had already been invested elsewhere, lowering reserves by $340 million, and shaving another $150 million from smaller departments. They also found savings in employee compensation, flattened contractor rates, trimmed health disparity grants and water quality programs, and cut early childhood caseload spending, which is the government equivalent of emptying every junk drawer in the house while insisting the family finances are fundamentally strong.
Meanwhile, two Republicans were absent without permission during budget weekend, including Scott Bottoms, who skipped out while running around the GOP assembly in Pueblo trying to become governor. Legislative leaders declined to have state patrol drag anyone back to the Capitol, choosing instead the more traditional Colorado model of passive-aggressively docking per diem while the state budget smoldered in the background.
In the end, the budget passed, the package moved on to the Senate, and the House was able to celebrate another successful exercise in democratic stewardship, where nobody looks competent, everybody looks tired, and the public gets handed a $46.8 billion document wrapped in procedural bullshit and told this is what governing looks like.
Source: The Denver Gazette
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