Statement on North Carolina’s Approved Budget

The North Carolina Black and Brown Policy Network rejects the final budget because it fails to provide what North Carolinians, especially our Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American and Pacific Islander, low-income, and other marginalized communities, actually need.

It is a part of our state leadership’s job to be accountable to the people they represent. It is also their responsibility to draft equitable legislation, especially as it pertains to a state budget, one of the MOST important pieces of legislation for our state. But instead, they decided to prioritize their own political gain over the actual needs of the people of North Carolina.

From the beginning, lawmakers have been gambling with the lives of our people through a months-long closed-door process. This way of operating completely eliminated the opportunity for any input from the public, and it stripped the opportunity for ALL lawmakers to adequately and meaningfully review the final language.

As a network, we want to applaud the tireless efforts of advocates who fought for Medicaid expansion for over a decade in this state. Make no mistake. It was due to the power of the people that we have even reached this moment in our state’s history. However, that does not eliminate the dire impact that this entire budget will have on the people of this state, nor does it excuse the moral failure of our legislators denying coverage for over 600,000 North Carolinians for this many years. Lives were lost as our legislature waited to provide the relief that was absolutely due to the people.

The people of North Carolina deserve a budget that uses our public dollars to fund the things that the public has asked for day in and day out. Affordable housing, quality and equitable education, environmental protection, and truly accessible and fair elections.

They also deserve a budget that doesn’t function as a power grab that blurs the lines separating the legislative and judicial branches of government in North Carolina, or that confirms the suspected collusion between two of the three branches of an independent government in our state, making it clear that any illusion of democracy that still existed has been snuffed out.

We will always support the notion that the voice of the people should be what informs our state’s budgeting process or any other legislation in this state. As a network, we will continue to demand that transparency, democracy, and inclusivity sit at the core of how we conduct business here in North Carolina.