NJ’s $58 billion state budget needs transparency. This new tool can help

New Jersey’s state budget stands at a record $58 billion this year — up from $35 billion just eight years ago. That sentence alone is cause for concern, but I would venture to say the budget process itself is an even larger cause for concern.

The budget process is a well defined 11-month process that includes planning, department prioritization, budget recommendations with supporting documents, and budget analysis. The process can be found on the website of the Department of Treasury: https://www.nj.gov/treasury/omb/budgetprocess.shtml

Despite this well defined process, each year, a portion of the state budget is allocated to municipalities and nonprofit organizations without any public process or apparent consideration of merit-based criteria. In 2024, 236 “extra” line items totaling $562,106,000 were added by the legislature. In 2025, 509 “extra” line items totaling $693,128,250 were added by the Legislature and this year, the governor has submitted 143 line items for consideration.

New Jersey deserves transparency from Trenton lawmakers

At Garden State Initiative, New Jersey’s most prominent right-leaning think tank, we thought this was worth a thorough examination. Whether you are a taxpayer, journalist, business owner, government advocate, state employee or you are employed by or receive services from a nonprofit organization, you deserve transparency into how spending decisions are made behind closed doors. It is, after all, our money Trenton is spending.

My predecessor, and our current Board Chair Regina Egea, was one of the first prominent people in Trenton to speak out on this issue back in 2021 and again last year when she penned an op-ed calling for significant reform. She was joined by members of the New Jersey press corps and several special interest groups in sounding the alarm on a system that is quite clearly broken and in need of repair.

Along the way, GSI has been sharply critical of one-shot budget gimmicks, the absence of meaningful multi-year planning, and failure by our leadership in Trenton to clearly articulate the future costs of financial obligations. Worthy ideas, such as multi-year budget assessments, requiring annual spending to be completely and truly covered by annual recurring revenues; and mandating the final state budget bill to be made public seven days before a vote for final passage to allow for more scrutiny, have all been ignored.

The fact that the state’s spending plan — which was 583 pages long last year and included nearly 500 specific line items representing $800 million in funding for local governments and nonprofit organizations — was literally dropped in the laps of many state legislators only hours before they were expected to vote on it, is unfair and disingenuous to the state’s defined budget process.

Last year, this budget drop, coupled with a new law that severely curtailed New Jersey’s groundbreaking Open Public Records Act became the last straw.

Track spending with NJBudget.com

In response, this year, aided by funding from a NJ Civic Information Consortium grant, GSI just launched a new website — NJBudget.com — with easy-to-use tools designed to provide transparency to the state budget for citizens and journalists curious about how and where taxpayer dollars are being directed.

The new site, which GSI encourages everyone reading this column to check out and use, provides easy search tools to uncover how much a specific county, legislative district, municipality or any individual organization receives in tax dollars from otherwise unsupervised portions of New Jersey’s 2024 and 2025 state budgets and the governor’s proposed 2026 budget. This new tool allows for greater scrutiny on the funding of special line items and assists citizens who want to provide feedback to their legislators on the proposed budget resolutions prior to final adoption in June.

As our state is staring over the precipice of a fiscal cliff that threatens to force tax increases on every resident and business owner; and facing 20% increases in our electricity bills resulting from an aspirational New Jersey Energy Master Plan, we at GSI are hopeful that we can help blaze the trail toward a new, bipartisan era of accountability and transparency around the budget. We hope you find the site informative and stay tuned for future enhancements that will expand the site with more budget analysis in the future.

Audrey Lane is the president of Garden State Initiative. Lane served as a government policy and strategic messaging professional on both the municipal and state level and served as an elected councilwoman in her home borough of Mountain Lakes. She is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and was selected as a member of the American Enterprise Institute Leadership Network in 2021.