- “This is not a partisan issue,” North Carolina Secretary of State Elaine Marshall said. “The auditor’s recent DAVE Act report further underscores the difficulty and conditions facing state agencies. We (Secretary of State) have the technology improvements to help manage the flood of filings, but technology alone cannot solve this problem. People are essential.”
Council of State members, at their meeting on Tuesday, renewed calls for the General Assembly to pass a budget, as agency staffing fails to keep pace with growing workloads.
“This is no longer a challenge; it is a risk,” Secretary of State Elaine Marshall said of her agency’s situation. She said she started asking lawmakers for help in August 2023 as her agency’s workload had doubled since 2017 while staffing levels remained largely unchanged.
The General Assembly has operated without a full biennial budget since July 1, 2025, relying instead on mini-budgets and a 2016 state law that allows most existing budget spending levels to continue indefinitely. In June, the Senate passed a $5.4 billion stopgap funding measure that the House declined to take up in its entirety, opting instead for separate spending packages.
“This is not a partisan issue,” Marshall said. “The auditor’s recent DAVE Act report further underscores the difficulty and conditions facing state agencies. We [Secretary of State’s office] have the technology improvements to help manage the flood of filings, but technology alone cannot solve this problem. People are essential.”
She said there is a common misunderstanding about her agency’s funding. With very few exceptions, every dollar they collect is deposited into the General Fund, adding that last fiscal year, her office deposited nearly $220 million into the General Fund, with an annual appropriation of $19 million.
“Simply put, we’re the best returns on investment in the state government,” Marshall said. “With just 183 employees, that equates to more than $1 million in revenue per employee. If our agency were in the industry sector, our return on investment would place us in the same general range as financial and technology sector companies like Microsoft, Tesla, and Amazon.”
She added that her office is the first place in state government that many entrepreneurs encounter, yet her staff has the second-lowest, if not the lowest, paid, employees in state government.
“We’ve consistently communicated to the General Assembly leadership the need for additional staff positions,” Marshall said. “While there’s growing awareness on Jones Street, the reality remains that there has been no budget for two years to address these challenges. Make no mistake, I would not raise this issue at the Council of State meeting unless I believe that everyone at this table will be impacted, if you aren’t already, if a viable path forward is not found.”
She ended by stating that the General Assembly needs to reinvest in her agency so North Carolina can maintain its competitive advantage as the No. 1 state to do business.
Marshall had plenty of support, including Department of Insurance Commissioner Mike Causey, who stated that he doesn’t think there is an agency that couldn’t use more staffing, including his own department.
“But both the Senate and the House, when they came out with their proposed budgets, they were asking us as a self-funded agency to cut 20 positions or $2 million from our budget at a time when we need to be adding that many or more,” he said. “So, it’s, as the State Budget Office said correctly, it’s a challenging time for agency heads because we have positions that we need to fill, but we can’t fill because they’re frozen, and we’ve agreed to abide by the legislature that we would not fill those positions.”
Causey added that they were fortunate in 2017 to be able to ramp up their criminal investigation division when the legislature approved 43 new positions for his agency, which have helped increase the amount of revenue that goes into the General Fund by over $1 billion, even though they are self-funded by the Insurance Regulatory Fund, which comes from taxes.
Democratic Gov. Josh Stein also echoed Marshall and Causey’s call for a budget to be passed.
“We have public safety officers that are not getting paid well, we have teachers who are earning less money on a real basis today than they were a year ago, and we’re already among the lowest paid teachers in the country,” he said. “We’re 49th in the country in the funding level and 50th in the country in funding effort in terms of the share of our state’s GDP. These are numbers in which we can take no pride. The state needs to ensure that we have adequate funds to pay Medicaid, which we’re going to run out of money in March or April, and that’s an unacceptable outcome. So, the legislature needs to pass a budget.”