Chicago’s most momentous budget season in recent memory begins this coming Thursday with the Chicago Board of Education’s vote on a budget for the school year that already is underway.
Shortly thereafter, a working group appointed by Mayor Brandon Johnson is scheduled to submit a preliminary report with recommendations both for cost reductions and revenue increases in the 2026 budget. The deadline for that submission is Sunday, Aug. 31.
And then in mid-October, Johnson is slated to propose his own budget, which will kick off a series of City Council hearings and likely weeks of negotiations between various factions on the council and the mayor’s office to hammer out a spending plan by the end of this calendar year.
For the mayor and his progressive allies on the school board and the City Council, these coming weeks in short are a test. Can progressives, no longer able to sidestep the stark budgetary realities that have been well understood now for months, make the tough decisions that those in the positions they hold are called upon to make when they seek these seats of responsibility?
It’s fair to say that Chicago hasn’t been well governed since the onset of the pandemic. Billions in federal pandemic aid temporarily papered over structural deficits at Chicago Public Schools and in city government. Both entities foolishly used the largesse to substantially expand their unionized staffs and now don’t have the revenue base to support those higher costs.
Progressives have advocated for every tax idea imaginable to fill the breach and have been stymied by legal and political impediments, particularly the inconvenient fact that most of their tax-the-rich schemes require state approval, which hasn’t been forthcoming.
Now it’s showtime, folks. We will get our first indication of whether adult governance will prevail on Thursday, when the school board finalizes its budget.
Interim CPS CEO Macquline King offered a budget that closes a gap of hundreds of millions without cutting classroom resources. But in so doing King rebuffed the mayor who supported her for the CPS post. She decided CPS couldn’t cover $175 million of the contribution Chicago must make to the badly underfunded Municipal Employees’ Annuity and Benefit Fund of Chicago, which funds retirement benefits for CPS employees as well as city workers. By state law, that duty belongs to city government, not CPS.
A majority of school board members, most of whom the mayor appointed, are pushing for CPS to make the payment and take on hundreds of millions in high-priced debt to do so — a decision, we’ve emphasized before, that would be highly irresponsible and likely would mean more downgrades for a school district already with a credit rating well below investment grade. Will any of those school board members back down and do the responsible thing Thursday?
That will be the first sign Chicagoans get of how Johnson and his allies intend to plug budget holes that, between CPS and the city of Chicago, exceed $1.5 billion.
Within a few weeks, between the school board’s action and the recommendations of Johnson’s budget working group (as well as City Hall’s response to those suggestions), we should have a much better idea than we do now of whether pragmatism will hold sway in resolving Chicago’s budget crises. Will unionized city workers be asked to make sacrifices to help balance the budget or will Johnson and fellow progressives put most of the onus on taxpayers?
Johnson isn’t the only Chicago politician responsible for the city’s current sorry predicament. Since Rahm Emanuel left office after two terms as Chicago mayor, this city has grown the size of its government even as its leaders knew federal aid was transitory and the exorbitant bill to shore up Chicago’s underfunded pensions only would grow for the foreseeable future.
But Johnson is the man who asked for the responsibility to govern. It’s past time to do so.
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https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/08/26/editorial-chicago-budget-brandon-johnson-schools-deficits/
