Cue the budget battles

House Republicans ghost the group project … ICE raids hit Phoenix … And even Garrett has his limits.

Arizona’s House Republicans are set to drop the first draft of budget bills today.

Before you get too excited, there’s one big problem: Senate Republicans have a completely different plan.

The House is reconvening from break, and its budget guru, Republican Rep. Matt Gress, said House Republicans will introduce their budget plan today and “proceed forward under the direction of the speaker.”

Luckily, we got our hands on a leaked House budget proposal — so we (and you!) have a better understanding of House Republicans’ plans than senators do right now.

Meanwhile, Senate Republicans’ budget authority, Republican Sen. John Kavanagh, has no idea what House Republicans’ budget contains. He’s in active negotiations with Gov. Katie Hobbs’ staff for his caucus’s budget.

“I think that you'll see a lot of similarities in Senate priorities and House priorities in the budget that we introduced tomorrow,” Gress told us.

But Kavanagh said the House isn’t conferring with the Senate on budget talks, “for the first time in 19 years that's ever happened — I'm at a loss to understand.”

He thinks Senate Republicans are ahead in the strange budget standoff, because they’re the ones “negotiating the deal” that Hobbs may actually sign.

The document outlines a lot of interesting spending proposals by category, including one titled “Election Integrity” that proposes giving money to the Republican Maricopa and Yuma county recorders, but not the Secretary of State.

There’s also a “Wins for the Governor” category. The caucus proposes giving Department of Public Safety and corrections officers a 5% raise, something Hobbs asked for in her January budget proposal. The document outlines funding for other Democrat-pacifying programs like child care subsidies, free student lunches and restored funding to Adult Protective Services.

Still, it’s a way off from the budget Hobbs proposed.

The item that most caught our attention is $1.7M for an ICE contract at the Maricopa County Jail, but Gress told us that item is a mistake — it’s supposed to fund kitchen and laundry upgrades at the jail, he said.

That’s one of the many problems that arise from politicians hashing out a massive state spending plan behind closed doors. We depend on document leaks and the lawmakers who call back to figure things out. (Shockingly, a whole lot of Republican lawmakers didn’t return our calls yesterday.)

While the documents House Republicans drop today will look different from the leaked overview, House Democrats are already objecting.

House Democratic Leader Oscar De Los Santos called the budget proposal "a joke and a farce” and said it doesn’t represent what Democrats negotiated.

“It's a haphazard House Republican-only budget that's built to appease the hard-right Freedom Caucus – and as anyone could predict, it's awful…,” he said. “A plan that is this harmful for our constituents and for working families in our state is a nonstarter. While House Republicans have been MIA from the bipartisan negotiations, House Democrats look forward to getting back to the real table and finish up the real, bipartisan budget."

De Los Santos is concerned about the document’s accounting for $50 million in savings “for AHCCCS reforms: eligibility redeterminations, more.” That could mean kicking people off the state’s Medicaid system.

Gress said it kind of does mean that.

Republicans want to make AHCCCS determine someone’s eligibility for services every quarter instead of every year and reduce retroactive eligibility, or how far back in time health insurance coverage applies after someone enrolls.

“There will be people who do not qualify because they make too much money and they shouldn't be on the system,” Gress said.

The proposed Medicaid changes are based on Rep. Michael Carbone’s HB2449, which Hobbs vetoed over concerns it would "expend state resources on inefficient administrative redundancies with no clear return on investment.”

Democrats are also worried about a renewed fight to fund the Parents as Paid Caregivers Program, or PPCG, which pays parents to care for their disabled children. Lawmakers and disability advocates won a hard-fought battle to fund the program through the end of this fiscal year.

Gress said the budget proposal fully funds the program and increases funding in the Division of Developmental Disabilities, which runs the caretaker program, by $500 million.

But Republicans want to subject parents to “reporting requirements” like “the utilization of services by disability type” and break down how many PPCG recipients file W2s and 1099s, Gress said. (To clarify, Gress believes parents would only have to do the tax form reporting; he thinks they already have to report what kind of disability services they provide.)

Gress and Rep. David Livingston led efforts to cut back the program this year, so Democrats are still skeptical.

When we asked Gress about the Democrats’ opposition, he told us they haven’t communicated their budget asks, “so I suspect their priorities are the governor's priorities.”

He said House Republicans sent Hobbs’ office budget proposals two weeks ago, and they haven’t heard back.

De Los Santos told us if Gress doesn’t know what Democrats want, “it’s because David Livingston literally left the negotiating room and flew to Michigan. Because of that, the House Republicans have been MIA at the real negotiating table where the actual bipartisan work is getting done.”

The Governor’s Office didn’t return calls for comment on what they make of all of this.

Cold as ICE: Rumors of Phoenix-area ICE raids that broke out Monday night turned out to be true, and several businesses and at least one home saw activity from immigration officials yesterday, the Phoenix New Times’ TJ L'Heureux and Morgan Fischer report. The activity started at a Phoenix gas station around 6 a.m., and reporters saw a convoy of ICE vehicles at a Glendale Walmart. Almost all of Phoenix’s main broadcast channels covered Homeland Security Agents’ raid on a Peoria home — which was not an immigration sweep, but a drug and human smuggling raid, per the agency. Protesters were skeptical and showed up en masse. Police used a Taser on at least one of them.

No help wanted: Gov. Katie Hobbs and every other Democratic governor released a statement supporting California Gov. Gavin Newsom as he continues to clash with President Donald Trump over Trump’s decision to send the National Guard and the Marines to the LA protests. Even Secretary of State Adrian Fontes got in on it, noting he’s a former Marine and calling the president’s actions “blatantly unconstitutional.”

“I'm disgusted that this proud force for freedom is being deployed on American soil. Honorable troops are being used as pawns in the President's machinations, a President who has never served and has belittled our servicemen and women at every opportunity,” he wrote in a statement.

Measles on the move: Arizona has its first measles cases of the year. Navajo County reported four cases on Monday from non-vaccinated people that officials say came from a single source, the Republic’s Stephanie Innes writes. Meanwhile, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. removed every member of a CDC committee on immunization practices because “A clean sweep is needed to re-establish public confidence in vaccine science,” per the Associated Press.

Tased and confused: Law enforcement technology company Axon squashed negotiations with Scottsdale for its headquarters project. The $60 billion company said Scottsdale’s City Council has made it nearly impossible to finalize a plan for its international hub, which included a hotel and apartments near the Loop 101 and Hayden Road, per the Arizona Mirror's Jerod MacDonald-Evoy. State lawmakers canceled a public vote on Axon’s headquarters earlier this year, and Axon President Josh Isner told KTAR the company will move forward with a downgraded version of the development.

“The internal politics of the City Council currently make it impossible to reach an agreement,” Isner said. “I have never seen such a toxic environment in my life. We put a great deal on the table and we tried our best.”

At least the charges are real: Former Republican Rep. Austin Smith, an election denier, was charged with 14 felony and misdemeanor counts over allegations he forged nomination signatures in his reelection bid last year, Attorney General Kris Mayes announced yesterday. Smith served one term representing Surprise-area Legislative District 29 and dropped his reelection campaign after Democrats challenged his signatures. Smith reportedly left his job at Turning Point after the fake signature allegations, but KJZZ’s Wayne Schutsky found his LinkedIn page, which suggests he returned to the job this year.

Unfortunately, we can’t just forge your name as a paid subscriber. We depend on real readers like you to keep this newsletter running.

Deputizing the desert: Two Arizona sheriff’s offices joined the list of local agencies working with federal immigration enforcement this year, Axios’ Jeremy Duda and team write. The Navajo and Yuma county sheriff's offices applied for new 287(g) agreements, which certify local agencies to enforce immigration law. The state corrections department, Mesa and the La Paz, Pinal and Yavapai county sheriff's offices already have some form of the agreement. Meanwhile, Arizona State University told international students to get back in the country by June 9 — the day President Donald Trump’s travel ban took effect — and not to leave until they finish their degrees, per ABC15’s Rachel Louise Just.

Make Utilities Great Again: Republican Reps. David Marshall and Ralph Heap announced they’re running for the Corporation Commission at a press conference alongside Freedom Caucus Chair Sen. Jake Hoffman, which seems to be a new trend. Hoffman is gathering far-right Republicans to challenge further-center ones in next year’s primaries, the Capitol Times’ Reagan Priest reports. Neither Marshall nor Heap has utility-specific experience, but they say current commissioners Kevin Thompson and Nick Myers aren’t doing enough to push the Trump agenda.

A preemptive derailing: Valley Metro wants to extend the light rail west toward the state Capitol, but it has to get approval from the Joint Legislative Budget Committee to do so, the Republic’s Mary Jo Pitzl reports. Co-chair and Republican Sen. John Kavanagh called the extension a waste of money.

ABC15’s Garrett Archer spends an exhausting amount of time dispelling election myths on Elon Musk’s hellscape.

He took a break from that and let Grok do the work of explaining to suspended former attorney Rachel Alexander, “in third-grade level English,” why Democrats aren’t voting with ballots from inactive voters.

“Studies show cheating like this is super rare in Arizona — only a few cases out of millions of votes,” Elon Musk’s AI, Grok, explained.

The AI response didn’t sway Alexander, who, last we checked, still had all the time in the world to continue beefing with the Data Guru on Twitter.