Like a hurricane visible on radar well before it strikes land, a budget crisis is coming to Oregon. This fiscal storm, triggered by a reckless Congress, threatens to wreak havoc on funding for Oregon schools and other vital services.

To prepare our state to weather the storm, the Governor should convene a special session of the legislature, separate from the already scheduled special session addressing transportation funding. The focus of this new session would be to ensure Oregon does not replicate wasteful tax cuts recently enacted by Congress, which will deprive our state of precious resources at a time of extreme risk. Oregon lawmakers need to act now, before it’s too late.

Many Oregonians know that the Republican budget bill passed by Congress in July, the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, cuts Medicaid and nutrition assistance to help pay for massive tax cuts mainly benefiting the rich. Some of those cuts to health care and nutrition assistance will be borne by individuals, while others will shift some of the cost of these services to the states.

Those cuts will happen gradually and play out over several years, ratcheting up pressure on the state budget. They are a crisis Oregon will need to address.

But more urgent still — the hurricane fast approaching — is the loss of state revenue triggered by the tax cuts in the Republican budget bill. Oregon’s tax code automatically replicates federal tax changes in an approach known as “rolling reconnect.” 

Rolling reconnect means Oregon is on course to double down on many of the new federal tax breaks. In the current two-year budget period, these changes will cost Oregon nearly one billion dollars in lost revenue, money that won’t be available to help pay for schools, services for foster children and seniors, affordable housing, and more. All of our communities will feel the impact.

These tax cuts will become Oregon law without any legislators voting for them, without any public hearings in Oregon, and without any careful consideration of the harm. And because of the rushed process used to ram through the Republican budget bill, there was little to no debate in Congress about the tax changes.

If they had looked closely, they would have realized how wasteful and inequitable they are. The changes, for example, include a new deduction for interest on new car purchases, which overwhelmingly benefits high-income households. They also include several new business tax breaks. The most costly example is one allowing companies to fully write off the costs of major investments in the year they are made, rather than the traditional approach of spreading the write-off over several years. While this is partly a shift in the timing of the tax deduction, the coming few years are exactly when Oregon will need those revenues to offset the additional costs of keeping Oregonians insured and fed.

It’s not written in stone that Oregon must follow “rolling reconnect.” Many states, including California and Idaho, use a “static” connection: they link to the federal code as of a specific date, and then make deliberate choices about which federal changes to replicate. They don’t hitch their wagon to the federal train — a train that can easily go off the rails as a result of an irresponsible Congress.

As it has in the past, Oregon should revert to a static connection. It’s common-sense budgeting. It allows Oregonians to decide which tax policies make sense for our state. It allows us to go in a different direction when Congress succumbs to the influence of the rich and big corporations. 

Oregon lawmakers need to act quickly. Many of the tax breaks are already active. Waiting until the 2026 short legislative session to confront the problem would seal the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. That’s because the 2025 tax filing season starts around the same time as the legislative session next February, so millions of Oregonians will likely have filed their state taxes by the time the Oregon legislature acts. Requiring Oregonians to amend their taxes later in the year seems like a practical and political impossibility.

Some crises arrive unexpectedly, but some come with plenty of warning. Oregon lawmakers have had plenty of warning that Oregon’s automatic connection to the federal tax breaks passed by Congress would trigger a big loss of revenue. This hurricane has formed and is headed here. The Governor and Oregon lawmakers need to protect Oregonians from as much devastation as possible by acting now.