June 19, 2025 09:36 AM UTC

Barb Kirkmeyer Blames "1-Party Control" For GOP-Made Budget Crisis

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• by: Colorado Pols

As Colorado Newsline reports, we’re seeing the first estimates now of what the impacts will be to Colorado’s state budget if the Republican trifecta in total control in Washington, D.C. passes the “We’re All Going To Die Act” budget reconciliation package that will cut funding from Medicaid, food assistance, and innumerable other programs that Coloradans depend on:

Colorado could face a budget crunch totaling in the billions of dollars if a sweeping tax and spending bill proposed by President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress becomes law, analysts warned state lawmakers on Wednesday.

The so-called budget reconciliation bill has passed the House and is now being considered in the Senate, which has offered its own version with slightly different policy points. State economists from the governor’s Office of State Planning and Budget relied on the House-passed version for their analysis…

In addition to those new costs, the tax changes considered in the reconciliation bill could add up to a roughly $600 million hit to Colorado’s state tax revenue. An economic recession, the odds of which the governor’s office now estimates at 50%, could cause another $1.6 billion budget hole.

“We do have a potential of a recession and potential of reconciliation… that could really wreak havoc in where we are from a budget perspective,” Ferrandino told members of the Joint Budget Committee, who use quarterly economic forecasts like the one presented Wednesday to craft the state budget.

In short, if the GOP budget bill passes in Washington, it’s going to bust Colorado’s budget by another $1.6 billion–over the diffcult budget choices already made to balance the state budget in this year’s legislative session. Add in the pain from a recession principally caused by President Trump’s erratic trade policy and we’re looking at the biggest fiscal crisis for Colorado since the Great Recession.

If you’re a Republican in Colorado not yet blackout drunk on MAGA Kool-Aid and therefore required to provide responsible answers to justify this completely artificial crisis being manufactured by fellow Republicans in Washington, this extremely unpopular budget bill is a big problem getting worse by the day. At the top of the list of Republicans charged with intelligibly processing the local impacts of the federal budget is the ranking Republican on the state’s Joint Budget Committee and all-but-declared candidate for governor Sen. Barb Kirkmeyer. In January, as CBS4 reported after the administration paused a multitude of federal funding streams, Kirkmeyer told Democrats not to panic:

Kirkmeyer — who sits on the Joint Budget Committee with Bridges — says it would have been nice to get a heads-up from the administration, but she says there’s no reason to panic.

“I would tell everybody ‘Take a deep breath. Let us start sorting this out,'” she said.

After hearing this latest forecast on the impact of the federal budget bill yesterday, however, soon-to-be candidate Kirkmeyer was in full partisan attack mode. Unfortunately, Kirkmeyer swung so hard at these latest budget estimates she punched herself out:

The polls agree that this self-inflicted pain is indeed the product of “1-party control!” The problem for Kirkmeyer is that no matter how much local Republicans try to deflect the blame, voters will not blame Colorado Democrats–or Democrats in any other state–for cuts that are solely the fault of Kirkmeyer’s fellow Republicans in Washington. After all, these are the same cuts that fellow Republicans are either celebrating or complaining aren’t sufficiently painful.

For this intractable contradiction, Republicans in the states like Barb Kirkmeyer have no good answers. Kirkmeyer’s instinct in these moments is to attack, but there’s no one to plausibly attack except her fellow Republicans–and (heaven help her) Donald Trump himself.

If Kirkmeyer can’t be honest about what the voters can see with their own eyes, she’s done before she even begins.