Oct. 31, 2025 | This Week in Government | Michigan’s Legislative Standoff, Pandemic Debt Reckoning, and Historic Tech Investment For Michigan

House Speaker Matt Hall said that he does not plan to send the nine bills from last term to the governor’s desk, despite the Court of Appeals ruling earlier this week.

Judge Thomas Cameron, writing for the majority, ruled on Monday that Court of Claims Judge Sima Patel correctly ruled that the Constitution requires the House to present the bills, though they were the bills of a prior Legislature (See Gongwer Michigan Report, October 27, 2025). The court remanded the case to Patel to formally order the House to transmit the bills to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer for a signing decision.

“We plan to appeal,” Hall, R-Richland Township, said during a press conference on Thursday.

Among the nine bills in question is one (HB 6058  of 2024) that would require governments to pay a greater share of their employees’ health insurance premiums.

The remaining legislation still held in the House includes three bills allowing Detroit history museums to seek a property tax millage from Wayne County voters (HB 4177  of 2023, HB 5817  of 2024 and HB 5818  of 2024); bills that would put corrections officers into the State Police pension system (HB 4665  of 2023, HB 4666  of 2023 and HB 4667  of 2023) and exempting public assistance, disability and worker’s compensation from garnishment to repay debts (HB 4900  of 2024 and HB 4901  of 2024).

Michigan residents will have to wait until at least next week to see if the Legislature can agree on a supplemental spending bill putting funds toward food assistance amid the ongoing government shutdown.

The Senate passed a $71 million supplemental funding proposal on Thursday that would provide some funding to backfill the expected halt of federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program monies that is to be paused effective Saturday.

Because the Senate used SB 182  as a vehicle bill for the supplemental, the House cannot take it up until next week at the earliest, which drew criticism from Senate Republicans prior to the vote. Republicans called the move by Senate Democrats political theater.

“This bill by Democrats is performative. It’s fake,” House Speaker Matt Hall, R-Richland Township, said of the Senate legislation. “The real solution is what Gov. Whitmer and the House Republicans are working on together.”

Thursday’s Senate action came as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced $4.5 million in aid to help food banks meet demand over the next two weeks if the U.S. Department of Agriculture sticks with its plan to stop SNAP funding on Saturday during the shutdown.

A lawsuit from Democratic attorneys general that seeks to order President Donald Trump’s administration to resume SNAP funding during November is also pending in federal court.

Senators voted 27-4 for SB 182 , which would provide $50 million to the Department of Health and Human Services for emergency food assistance. A further $10 million would go toward the state’s agricultural surplus system and $10 million for emergency food bank grants. A total of $1 million would also expand the Double Up Food Bucks program.

An estimated 1.4 million Michigan residents will be affected by the suspension of SNAP benefits beginning Nov. 1 if allowed to proceed.

House Democrats have proposed a roughly $600 million supplemental to backfill the cost of SNAP benefits for two months (See Gongwer Michigan Report, October 28, 2025).

“What we’re doing today is not a permanent fix,” Sen. Sarah Anthony, D-Lansing, said. “Our resources are limited, but we have a responsibility to provide for the people of this state.”

Anthony called the bill a stopgap measure and said more is needed to help residents.

Sen. Jonathan Lindsey, R-Coldwater, said the bill language is vague and was provided to Republicans only minutes before the vote. Despite this, he said he would support the bill.

Lindsey also questioned the seriousness of Democrats to find a solution prior to Saturday because they were moving a Senate bill, triggering the five-day rule for movement in the House.

“This is all political theater,” Lindsey said. “I will say to my Democrat colleagues, if you’re serious about an effort, and there’s still time this week, come sit down and talk about a solution that could actually help the people of Michigan. I’m open to that conversation.”

Senate Majority Leader Winnie Brinks, D-Grand Rapids, told reporters it was unclear what may be possible in terms of getting money to SNAP recipients on their electronic benefit transfer cards. The idea behind SB 182  is to set up the fund within DHHS so the money can get to those who need it, she said.

“We are doing our part now with the legislative ability and power that we have, and we are certainly hopeful that Matt Hall and House Republicans will take this up and move these dollars through and get this to the governor’s desk,” Brinks said.

Brinks said the funds would come from the General Fund.

“In an ever-evolving environment with the different realities changing even hour-by-hour sometimes, we will probably be having additional conversations on this,” Brinks said, adding that more funding may be necessary in the weeks ahead.

Sen. Jim Runestad, R-White Lake, was one of the four votes against SB 182 . He told reporters the bill was a joke. He said if Senate Democrats were serious, they would have amended a House bill, sent it over to the House and passed a bill immediately.

“They could have worked with the House. It could have been something that maybe we could have been unanimous on, if they really wanted to make a difference,” Runestad said. “They didn’t want to make a difference. That’s why we wasted all that time. That’s why they gave it to us at the last second. That’s why they used a first-chamber instead of a second-chamber bill. That’s why it was done the way it was done.”

Whitmer on Thursday announced the state will provide $4.5 million to the Food Bank Council of Michigan to help address shortages come Saturday.

“Hungry families cannot wait for folks in power in Washington, D,C., to do their jobs,” Whitmer said in a statement. “We take care of each other in Michigan, and we will continue bringing together public and private philanthropic resources to feed people as we hit day 30 of the federal government shutdown and approach the November 1 pause of SNAP. We will continue to do what we can in Michigan to help impacted families.”

On Wednesday, Whitmer and 20 other governors sent a letter to Trump urging the USDA to continue funding SNAP during the shutdown.

“Rather than allow millions of Americans to go hungry next month, we demand that USDA immediately release the multi-year contingency SNAP funding and supplement any shortfall by utilizing its interchange transfer authority to ensure full SNAP benefits are provided to the 42 million Americans who rely on them next month,” the governors wrote.

The Legislature’s actions came as a hearing was held on a lawsuit brought by 23 Democratic attorneys general, including Attorney General Dana Nessel, against the Trump administration over allegedly unlawfully suspending SNAP benefits. The federal judge hearing the case said Thursday she likely would order the administration to partially fund the program during November.

Hall, in a statement about the $4.5 million in food bank funding, said the state can assist residents in this way due to having passed a state budget earlier in the month.

“But this will never be a long-term solution and state government can only make up so much of the federal government’s spending,” Hall said. “Congress must follow our lead and keep more Michigan families from being hurt by this shutdown.”

Rep. John Roth, R-Interlochen, said state officials have consulted with food banks and the $4.5 million is what they said would be enough to help meet demand over the next two weeks.

“We’re not saying we’re covering every SNAP benefit in the state of Michigan,” Roth said. “What we’re saying is the food banks say this would cover them for two weeks. This is an ongoing assessment. This will be on a weekly basis. We will re-evaluate where we’re at and what we need.”

Michigan Catholic Conference President and CEO Paul Long in a statement urged the Legislature to ensure people do not lose food assistance and urged Congress to ensure SNAP funding does not stop.

“Michigan families and children should not have to go without food because of unrelated political circumstances outside of their control,” Long said. “We urge the state Legislature to continue taking steps to prevent individuals who are among the most vulnerable in our state from going hungry.”

The Senate on Thursday by a 19-13 vote along party lines adopted SCR 7 , which called on the Trump administration and USDA to continue SNAP funding. The House amended the resolution later Thursday to instead call on Congress to pass a clean continuing resolution to continue funding the federal government.

Hall said it was not a time to blame Republicans or Democrats but rather to act.

“There’s a time for disagreement in politics,” he said. “It’s not right now when, literally, people are about to lose their ability to feed their families. It isn’t right now. Right now is the time to come together and get it fixed.”

Unemployment Insurance Agency workers are taking shifts on the weekends and after hours to move through more than 18,000 appeals made by Michiganders to collection notices sent last month, when a court order’s expiration meant the agency had to resume efforts to reclaim money that was given in unemployment benefits during the early pandemic to people who did not meet eligibility criteria.

UIA Director Jason Palmer, new to the position as of earlier this year, testified before both the Senate Labor Committee  and the House Oversight State and Local Public Assistance Subommittee on Thursday to provide updates on the state’s efforts to recoup nearly $2.7 billion from more than 350,000 residents. .

Discrepancies between state and federal policies and other administrative issues during the rollout of emergency unemployment programs in the spring of 2020 led to millions of people across the country receiving unemployment benefits they likely would not have qualified for under regular circumstances. In some cases, benefits were fraudulently obtained, but significantly more common were instances of crossed wires, administrative issues and human error causing people who weren’t eligible to receive benefits.

Although he wouldn’t come to helm the agency for nearly another five years, Palmer described to lawmakers in considerable detail the circumstances under which UIA was operating at the beginning of the pandemic during his remarks on Thursday. With a staff of 750, the agency processed over 9.2 million pieces of mail from 3.5 million claimants, resulting in 5 million claims for a total of $41.3 billion in benefits being paid out.

Now, the agency is being hit with a different influx of activity as it responds to the court order to resume collecting the money that was never supposed to be doled out. Palmer said he’s been granting overtime for his employees and many have been working Saturdays to help process waivers and appeal paperwork filed in response to collection notices. Committee members asked whether UIA can balance that workload with its regular duties, to which Palmer responded it so far has been doing so.

“It is a lot of work. Our staff are working very hard. We’ve got the modernization that we’re working on, we’ve got the normal business of the (agency) and we have this,” he said. “We are keeping up. We’ve got some overtime that I’ve approved, allowing some staff to work on Saturdays, to work some of this backlog. We’ve extended the hours in the call center, we’ve shifted some staff around, and so naturally, there are some tradeoffs, but our metrics on claims and processing are all in good shape.”

Getting the state to the threshold of recouped funds requested by the U.S. Department of Labor – 68% of the $2.7 billion figure – is going to be a challenge, though, given the time that’s lapsed since the pause in collection was ordered by the courts. Palmer said that’s why the UIA lobbied against it in the first place: agency officials feared the more time claimants went without receiving a collection notice, the more jarring it would be to get one when the pause eventually was lifted.

Many workers who received collection notices in September, years after they likely last heard about the class-action suit on the news or received a similar UIA correspondence in the mail, were understandably panicked or immediately sought to appeal the state’s request for its money back, Palmer said.

Many claimants who were overpaid by the state had their collection noticed waived back in 2022 when the lawsuit was initiated, Palmer said, because a specific error which caused overpayment was the fault of the government and not their own. Others were granted for claimants determined to be facing particular financial hardship. The remainder of the claimants with overpaid benefits are generally those making up the population receiving collection notices in 2025.

Rep. Penelope Tsernoglou, D-East Lansing, inquired whether there was a legal pathway for the Legislature to waive all the remaining payments for claimants who had been overpaid during the pandemic and relieve undue stress the collection process has caused. Palmer responded that while UIA would comply with laws passed by the Legislature if waiver authority was expanded, Michigan would likely be at odds with federal law.

“I understand the instinct behind that question. And when you have people getting these bills, I understand the desire to help. If the Legislature was to expand waiver authority, we would do our duty and (follow) the law,” Palmer said. “There would still be a conflict with federal law, though, so we would have to balance that. As a result, there would be a risk to the federal unemployment insurance tax dollars that the state gets, because we would not be in conformity if we were waiving more than what we were allowed. And I suppose if we were waiving people for which unemployment insurance was not designed, it might create behavioral incentives that we wouldn’t want.”

Rep. Jason Woolford, R-Howell, who chairs the subcommittee, thanked Palmer “from the bottom of his heart” for appearing before it – a rare friendly moment between House Republican oversight leadership and Whitmer administration officials – and other committee members commended Palmer for his efforts to fulfill the legal obligations related to overpayments during the pandemic in a positive manner.

“You’ve been here twice now, and the agency’s been here a number of times now. I really appreciate you being here,” Rep. William Bruck, R-Erie, said. “You obviously came into quite a mess, and it appears that you are doing your best to try to repair a lot of damaged relationships and the issues within the UIA.”

The future of a new bill package on short term rentals is unclear, as the bills are already facing significant backlash from key interest groups, and one of the bill sponsors is already uncertain if there will be a path forward.

HB 5138 , HB 5139  and HB 5140  address short-term rentals and seek to provide communities with a lot of visitors a means for raising revenue to deal with the influx of people.

“There’s a genuine cost to those communities in essential services and infrastructure and in servicing that type of tourists that’s in and out for a relatively short stay,” Rep. Mark Tisdel, R-Rochester Hills said. “It’s enabling legislation that would allow the local government to agree to apply a tax to those short-term rentals, and that could also be extended to motels and hotels in the area to generate tax revenue to deal with very real costs.”

Tisdel, who is one of the bill sponsors, said there’s a real need to provide communities with an additional source of revenue.

“Tourists don’t treat your city the same way residents do,” he said. “This is just an opportunity for local communities to enact this kind of legislation. It would have to go on the ballot, and it’s enabling legislation. That’s all there is to it.”

The Michigan Restaurant and Lodging Association isn’t so sure.

“For nearly a decade, the MRLA has been steadfast in its support of a statewide approach to short-term rental regulation that improves consumer safety and fosters a level playing field with Michigan’s hotel industry,” Justin Winslow, president and CEO of the organization said in a statement. “While the MRLA welcomes Airbnb’s decision to finally answer the call to action, their idea of a solution to short-term rental regulation amounts to a long-term tax increase on Michiganders and is a crippling threat to our state’s hospitality industry. If enacted, the only thing Michigan will have achieved is a dysfunctional system that exacerbates neighborhood degradation without solving concerns over safety, housing or basic fairness.”

The Michigan Hospitality and Tourism Alliance, which includes the MRLA along with several other tourism organizations, also sent out a statement pushing back against the bills.

“Short-term rentals have directly benefited from tourism marketing efforts without paying equitable taxes or assessments to support them, and while reaping the rewards of increased visitation and demand. As the Pure Michigan campaign faces ongoing budget challenges, comprehensive short-term rental regulation should require all lodging properties to contribute to the tourism promotion that generates demand for their businesses,” the board of directors for the alliance said in a joint statement. “Instead, these bills propose a new general government tax that does nothing to strengthen Michigan’s local businesses or address tax parity.”

Tisdel said although it may be true that the bills don’t address tax parity, they do provide a path for participation.

Rep. John Roth, R-Traverse City, who sponsored one of the bills in the package and co-sponsored the other two, said he expects that a lot of work will need to be done on the bills before they could move anywhere.

“I don’t believe all the information was communicated fully,” he said. “If anything happens, it’s going to take a lot of work. There are other bills being worked on.”

Roth said the opposition he’s heard from the tourism industry has been intense.

“There’s a lot of discussion,” he said. “To think these three would be the final bills? No.”

Although the tax would be on the ballot in jurisdictions where owners of short-term rentals would not be registered to vote, Tisdel said communities have the right to create regulations for themselves.

“That’s not your homestead property…You don’t have to keep a rental home there,” he said.

Further, he said homes that are listed on platforms facilitating short-term rentals, such as Airbnb, would have the tax applied through the platform, which would collect the fees and send them to the state.

“It’s just an opportunity to create a tax for your community,” Tisdel said.

He also noted the bills have yet to have a hearing.

Artificial intelligence behemoth OpenAI and its partners are planting a flag in Michigan, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said i Thursday in announcing via press release a multibillion-dollar development for a data center to be built in Saline Township.

The Saline Township date center is part of the $500 billion Stargate project, which is helmed by OpenAI, Nvidia, Oracle and other tech and finance giants, as the company’s push to build out its coming generation of computational infrastructure with data centers across the United States. The five initial sites selected include the Saline location and spots in Texas, Wisconsin, Ohio and New Mexico.

In a statement released Thursday, Whitmer said the Saline project will break the record for the largest economic investment ever made in the state of Michigan. Until now, General Motors held that title with its 2022 commitment to spending $7 billion on battery and electric vehicle manufacturing in the state.

Although a topline spending total for the Stargate project in Michigan has yet to be announced, the Wall Street Journal reported an estimate of $10 billion. Whitmer said over the course of developing the site, the project will generate 2,500 union construction jobs, at least 450 on-site jobs and 1,500 additional jobs within Washtenaw County.

“Today, we won the largest economic project in Michigan history,” Whitmer said in the statement. “This transformational new Stargate OpenAI facility, built by Oracle and Related Digital, will create 2,500 good-paying union construction jobs, more than 450 permanent high-skill, high-paying jobs on site, and 1,500 more in the community while helping us lead the future of advanced manufacturing and technology.”

Related Digital, the real estate developer founded by prominent University of Michigan donor Stephen M. Ross and involved in the project, is a familiar name to residents of the Saline area – it began site readiness work with local officials weeks before OpenAi and Oracle’s intentions for the 575-acre property became public. And local officials weren’t fully on board, either.

Initial requests by the company to rezone the former farmland for data center use were voted down by the Saline Township board in September when residents of the rural community voiced concerns about noise and light pollution and cited instances of other data centers around the country which drove up utility costs for residents in their neighborhoods upon moving in. Related Digital sued.

Two weeks ago, however, a settlement was reached between the township and Related Digital. The company will now provide $14 million to the township’s fire services, farmland preservation trust and community investment fund, sweetened by estimated annual local tax revenue of at least $1.6 million towards township government and $8 million towards local schools until 2039.

Planet Detroit reported the settlement contained additional assurances that the data center would only build on 250 acres of the 575-acre site, and the rest would be maintained for agricultural or natural conservation purposes. The agreement also ensures that water at the site will not be used for cooling. Instead, the facility will have its own well and wastewater treatment system and a noise limit of 55 decibels will be enforced on the development area.

Although Saline Township residents reportedly felt the data center plans materialized at breakneck speed, it’s been in the works for months. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, both big spenders on Republican campaigns and causes in recent years, appeared in the Oval Office with President Donald Trump the day after his second inauguration in January to announce Stargate and its ambitious plan to “re-industrialize the United States” – piquing the interest of the governor back in Michigan.

The governor’s office said Whitmer reached out to Altman not long after and met with him in February, making the pitch for one of Stargate’s planned 20 data centers to make its home in Michigan.

The main selling points? New laws passed by the Legislature and signed early this year exempting data centers from state sales and use taxes, Whitmer’s office said, plus proximity to the Saline area to two of the state’s large research universities in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti.

Conversations began in earnest by the springtime, and before long the governor had succeeded in her goal of securing a piece of what appears to be the next frontier in artificial intelligence for Saline Township.

“I’m grateful to these cutting-edge companies for betting on Michigan, building on our work to compete for and win big projects in next-generation industries from cars and clean energy to semiconductors and batteries,” she said. “We will continue working together at the state level to win more projects so we can create even more good-paying, local jobs for Michiganders and grow our economy. This investment from Oracle and Related Digital sends a simple message to anyone who wants to build the future – you can build it in Michigan.”