Hobbs vows to veto all bills until disability funding crisis resolved
Governor’s veto threat met with Republican resistance while families fear devastating program cuts
By: Caitlin Sievers – April 17, 2025 4:24 pm
Gov. Katie Hobbs said on April 17, 2025, that she won’t sign any bills that aren’t already on her desk unless Republicans negotiate an end to the funding crisis that threatens to shut down services for disabled Arizonans. Photo by Jerod MacDonald-Evoy | Arizona Mirror
Arizona’s Democratic governor has promised to veto every piece of legislation that Republicans send to her until the legislature passes a “reasonable, negotiated” funding bill to prevent the state’s Division of Developmental Disabilities from going broke next month.
Republicans who control both the Arizona House of Representatives and Senate responded that they’ve already introduced proposals in both legislative chambers that would get DDD through the end of the fiscal year on June 30. But Gov. Katie Hobbs, as well as dozens of parents of developmentally disabled people who rely on DDD programs and services, have said the drastic cuts in the Republican bills are untenable.
House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Livingston on Thursday likened Hobbs’ moratorium on signing legislation to the whining of a child.
“It doesn’t surprise me that she did that, because she’s not getting her away. And she will not get her way,” he said.
Livingston did not mention the thousands of Arizona children with developmental disabilities and their families who won’t “get their way” under the Republican proposal, which could lead to some of them being institutionalized instead of being cared for in their homes by family members.
Christian Slater, Hobbs’ spokesman, told the Arizona Mirror in a statement that Livingston was “engaging in political warfare” that will directly hurt Arizonans with conditions like autism, cerebral palsy and down syndrome.
“It is not ‘whiny’ to stand against Representative Livingston’s shameful attacks on Arizonans with disabilities,” Slater said
Senate President Warren Petersen told the Mirror in a written statement that the Republican proposal to fund DDD through the end of the fiscal year was “working through the legislative process.”
“We just held a stakeholder meeting Wednesday morning, and I anticipate there will be changes to the bill’s language before it is sent to the Governor’s Office for signature in the very near future,” Petersen wrote.
Identical bills advanced through their respective chambers’ Appropriations committee on April 15, amid outcry from disability advocates and the families who would see their care reduced. Hobbs has said the bill is a “complete nonstarter” and many advocates for the developmental disability community have called the GOP proposal “unworkable.”
Caught in the middle of this political fight are people like Phoenix mother Jessica Grace, who uses the Parents as Paid Caregivers program that sits at the center of the DDD funding debate. Grace, like many others in her position, can’t work outside the home because she can’t find alternative care for her teen sons, who have autism and intellectual disabilities and cannot safely be left unsupervised.
The PPCG trains parents and then pays them to provide in-home care to their own children, but only if they require “extraordinary care” above and beyond typical parenting tasks. That might include assisting a teenager who has cerebral palsy, autism or cognitive disabilities with tasks like bathing, dressing and eating. The program was initially entirely federally funded, but beginning this month, the state is on the hook for around one-third of the cost.
The program has expanded over the last year from about 3,000 participants to around 6,000, which came with substantial cost increases, accounting for a large chunk of a $122 million shortfall in the DDD budget. That shortfall threatens to shut down services for disabled people in Arizona at the end of the month, when the division runs out of money to pay its providers, unless the Legislature acts.
Since January, when Democratic lawmakers first introduced a supplemental funding bill to fill in the funding gap, Livingston has blamed the shortfall on budgetary mismanagement by the Hobbs administration and has consistently called for deep cuts to the Parents as Paid Caregivers program. He has pointedly accused Hobbs of executive overreach for continuing the program after legislative Republicans refused to allocate funds specifically for it in last year’s budget.
Republicans looking to cut costs for PPCG say they want to see the services that parents are now being paid to do instead be provided by third-party contractors. But parents and advocates say that’s just not feasible, as there’s been a workforce crisis stretching back more than 20 years because the jobs to provide in-home services are both difficult and low-paying.
During an April 15 House Appropriations Committee meeting, more than a dozen advocates, many of them parents of developmentally disabled people, begged Republicans to continue funding the PPCG program with a 40-hour-per-week cap set to begin in July.
The proposal that was ultimately approved that day would require the state to ask for permission from the federal government to cap the PPCG program at 20 hours per week by next June, a change that would devastate some families.
In a move that clearly angered some members of their own party, House GOP leaders placed three additional Republicans on the committee just minutes before the meeting began so that they would have enough votes to kill a bipartisan amendment that would have kept the cap at 40 hours per week.
“He couldn’t even pass his proposal through his own committee without stacking it full of political allies,” Slater said. “Representative Livingston needs to listen to the bipartisan leaders who oppose his shameful political theater, put politics aside and do what’s right for the people of Arizona.”
After her amendment failed by one vote, Rep. Julie Willoughby, a Chandler Republican and a nurse, broke down in tears as she apologized to the parents and advocates in the room.
“I choose you as my hill to die on. I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m pro-life, and I’m pro-life through the entire spectrum of life.”
House Democrats announced that they voted against every bill that came up for a vote on Thursday in solidarity with Hobbs and the developmentally disabled community.
Republicans chided Democrats for voting against unrelated legislation on Thursday because of their frustration with the DDD funding bill. They especially chastised Democrats for voting against Senate Bill 1462, which would expand the state’s “revenge porn” law to include AI-generated images made to look like an identifiable person.
In reality, all but one of Democratic lawmakers’ no votes made zero difference on whether legislation passed or failed on Thursday, and they likely would have voted against some of the proposals anyway. The only proposal that failed in the House on Thursday because of Democratic dissent was Senate Bill 1661, which pertained to broadband expansion programs in small counties. The proposal failed on a vote of 19-39, with 14 Republicans voting against it, alongside Democrats.
Both Republicans and Democrats on Thursday continued to release statements accusing one another of playing political games at the expense of people with disabilities.
“Governor Hobbs’ decision to hold every bill hostage because she didn’t get her way on a blank check is not leadership — it’s political blackmail,” House Speaker Steve Montenegro said in a statement. “She created this crisis by foolishly expanding the DDD program without legislative approval or funding in place, and now she’s throwing a tantrum because the Legislature is doing the responsible thing: funding services while putting guardrails in place to keep the program from collapsing.”
Hobbs is hardly the first governor to use the veto pen — or the threat of it — to get the legislature to act on an unrelated issue. In 2021, Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, said he would veto bills until a budget was passed. And his predecessor, Jan Brewer, also a Republican, issued similar ultimatums in 2012 and 2013.
Recall petition
On Thursday, some of the parents of people with developmental disabilities who have been pushing for supplemental DDD funding launched a recall effort for Republicans Montenegro and Livingston, along with Reps. Matt Gress and Michael Carbone.
As first reported by the Arizona Republic, they will have to collect tens of thousands of signatures by Aug. 15 to put the legislators on the ballot for a recall election.
Livingston accused the parents of disabled families of being backed by “senior members” of the Democratic Party before conceding that it could simply be because his critics are upset he is blocking funding for DDD.