Gov. Josh Shapiro’s 2026-27 budget would spend about $53.2 billion.

The proposed 2026-27 budget, like his initial proposal for the 2025-26 budget, relies on pulling deeply from reserve funding, set aside in past years by lawmakers to ensure the state was ready for future crises and on revenue from activities for which the legislature is still considerable distance from agreeing on regulatory frameworks — recreational marijuana and skills games.

The 2025-26 budget, of course, was ultimately more than four months late to passage. State lawmakers already are echoing many of the concerns the expressed one year ago about the Shapiro administrations approach to proposing an annual budget.

Many of the concerns with the state government taking on new, costly responsibilities paid for with draining money saved for crises are, if anything, more valid today after Pennsylvania did exactly that last year. Setting Pennsylvania further down that course will lead to a time when the state runs out of savings — and has to either greatly increase an already-considerable tax burden or drastically cut programs in communities — or, more likely, both.

As we noted a year ago — and before — the state also has to contend with court rulings that funding public schools by district has led to unconstitutional imbalances. Any success in resolving the future of education funding and, in a similar vein, property tax relief will almost certainly compete for state tax dollars as well.

We appreciate that many lawmakers recognize the drawbacks and disadvantages of any tendency to overspend tax dollars. We particularly appreciate the success they had in reducing the current budget from the same assumptions and irresponsibilities the governor proposed a year ago.

We only hope that the process toward reaching that conclusion with this budget isn’t more months of a missed deadline — and wish the traditional February proposal offered numbers closer to the realities that working Pennsylvanian families face and the financial challenges ahead for their state.