Michigan House GOP facing pressure over ‘ghost employees’, but leadership says it’s a real problem

Michigan House Speaker Matt Hall (R-Richland Township), flanked by Reps. Matt Maddock (R-Milford) and Ann Bollin (R-Brighton). Sept. 3, 2025 | Photo By Kyle Davidson/Michigan Advance

Much has been said about the Michigan House Republican claims about “waste, fraud and abuse” in government and the allegedly bloated budgets the state has produced since the pandemic days of 2020, but for Speaker Matt Hall, the “ghost jobs” issue is a real problem.

The House GOP is hoping the state will adopt some form of its $78.5 billion proposal that contains massive cuts to agencies and programs across the board. At present, those talks remain at a standstill.

One of the major mantras in the House GOP’s budget talks is the caucus’ belief that the state’s agencies have tens of thousands of positions funded in previous budgets, which remain unfilled. Hall (R-Richland Township), House Appropriations Committee Chair Rep. Ann Bollin (R-Brighton Township) and the committee’s vice chair, state Rep. Matt Maddock (R-Milford), have repeatedly called those unfilled positions “ghost jobs” and accused the agencies of keeping the money while in an attempt to fund other priorities – all while holding onto “phantom employees.”

There has been some discrepancy on how many of those phantom positions exist, but Hall, in an interview with Michigan Advance, said something needs to change and that eliminating the excess dollars in various budgets for employees he says that aren’t there was a good first step.

“We’re entering a post-COVID era, and you’re either going to have to raise taxes to continue this level of government or you’re going to have to go back to what was normal pre-COVID,” Hall said of the GOP’s budget considerations and cuts. “With some of the Medicaid changes, that’s even more real than it might have been before.”

The speaker added that his team’s understanding of “phantom employees” has only grown since they’ve had a chance to dig into the issue through the budget process.

“Every week that goes by we get more information,” Hall said. “When we were coming into this, we thought it was about $500 million and then we realized that it was more like $750 million. So we came out with a number that was our best guess.”

Democrats in both chambers of the Legislature and the various heads of several state departments have said that they are flatly wrong.

The Department of State Police has been a major target for cuts to department resources. State Police Director Col. James Grady said last week that $40.2 million in budget cuts proposed by the House, and the slashing of an equivalent 297.5 full time positions for post operations, would be devastating.

The situation has led to accusations from Democrats that House Republicans were the party of defunding the police, which Hall and others have brushed off, saying they are attempting to route budget funding into a public safety trust fund aimed at boosting spending for local law enforcement.

Other department heads or their spokespeople have also said that the House was dealing with bad or outdated information to reach their phantom jobs claims.

Senate Democrats have also chimed in, saying that if the GOP budget team was worth its salt, it wouldn’t interpret the unfilled jobs as a clear example of wasteful spending and taxpayer dollar abuse.

The House Republican calculus on phantom jobs

Information provided to the Advance shows that the House GOP budget team pulled its information from multiple state agency reports.

They include quarterly full-time equivalent jobs reports that multiple departments are legally required to publish on their websites; and annual reports from the state’s Civil Service Commission, showing the backend accounting system.

The quarterly reports look at how many actual employees, or FTEs, each department has in that quarter, but they don’t account for overtime or additional dollars for a given position. For example, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources might have 1,700 employees in the winter time, but in the summertime, they could have double the amount of employees. House leadership posits that as you go through the year, accounting for overtime, the overall number of employees might be somewhere closer to the middle.

As for the annual reports, the House has used those to get more real-time, backend accounting looks at the number of filled and open full-time equivalents the departments have, but those are not quite as official or authoritative as the quarterly reports.

State Police and the Department of Corrections have been targets for House Republican oversight since they took back the chamber in 2024, following two years of a government trifecta. Grady has been called into House Oversight Committee hearings over the last year to touch on a number of issues the caucus has with his leadership of the state’s largest law enforcement agency. Corrections has also seen some pushback from representatives and senators alike when it comes to staffing and security issues.

With phantom jobs in focus, Hall and his team are claiming that Corrections consistently has 600 to 700 unfilled FTEs, not accounting for overtime, and about 2,900 unfilled deputy positions in State Police consistently over the last few years.

Corrections has had significant challenges in terms of staffing and recruiting, despite the department’s best efforts to boost recruitment and try to relieve the department of mandatory overtime shifts, which has affected morale and conditions from the corrections officers down to the prison population itself.

The Advance asked if those unfilled positions in Corrections were more a symptom of the challenges it has faced in recent years than a sign that the department was trying to misuse its funding.

In response, House officials have said that in 2025, according to their accounting, Corrections had 2,700 unfilled positions. Its budget proposal for the next fiscal year pulls out 775 of those positions, and the House appears confident that the department would still have enough wiggle room to hold new corrections classes of 100 recruits each and then use the leftover money to incentivize higher wages.

For State Police, the House GOP has calculated that it had found 738 so-called “phantom jobs,” but is only getting rid of 435 of them in its spending proposal. It has said the cuts would still provide for overtime, two trooper schools in the next fiscal year and give them greater flexibility.

The House considered that the problem might stem from a wage issue in the department for corrections officers, and the same might be true for State Police. That’s why, despite clamouring for the cuts in “phantom jobs,” the House GOP is hoping to give each department close to 20% raises with enough room for recruitment and overtime.

But is it really a fraud?

Calls for state government to mind its budget better have resonated with a wide swath of voters and leaders of all political stripes ad infinitum, but the new GOP ethos of targeting programs it doesn’t like has faced backlash as its leaders – much like Elon Musk and the  Department of Government Efficiency he formerly led – have claimed that those same programs are evidence of fraud and abuse of power.

Such was the mantra for Medicaid cuts at the federal level, and the dismantling of federal influence or involvement in public education.

Still, Hall said there is a legitimate concern when looking at past budgets and the departments’ own reports of seeing money go in for a specific purpose and then not being used for that purpose – in this case, the hiring of additional positions with a range of duties that never materialize.

For the House GOP, even in the best case scenario of the department not using the money for a nefarious purpose, that’s still money sitting in a vault somewhere because of what the caucus claims is a bad accounting process.

That was the House GOP’s most salient argument, the Advance was told, as to why the state doesn’t appear to have money to pay for a long-term $3 billion roads plan or properly fund K-12 and higher education.

There have also been accusations that the state departments have been using those unused funds as a sort of reserve or slush fund that no other previous Legislature was willing to give them as a specific line item.

“The more you comb into it, you can categorize some of this stuff as … gaming it so it looks different than what their intent is,” Hall said.

In the case of State Police, House Republicans claimed that the department is using that money for things like office supplies and building maintenance, whereas the caucus also claims that Corrections has in the past rolled its FTE line into its facility line items.

House leadership is making the case that many of the departments do this and label those efforts to move money around as work projects, but it has been told that both State Police and Corrections don’t do that, and just end up keeping the FTE money and still use it for other purposes.

State Police spokesperson Shanon Banner, in a statement to the Advance, said that all FTEs are critical and the department is constantly working to fulfill them.

Corrections, when asked to respond to the GOP’s claims, deferred comment to the State Budget Office. 

When asked, Lauren Leeds, communications director with the budget office, said: There are no phantom jobs.

The cuts have to come from somewhere, GOP says

As evidenced by public comments from Senate Majority Leader Winnie Brinks (D-Grand Rapids) and her appropriations team, the Democrats in the upper chamber aren’t buying what Hall is selling.

Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D-Royal Oak), in a recent news conference, said that Hall’s assertion that eliminating “phantom jobs” would be a massive fix to state budgeting – and his team’s labeling that as fraud – showed either a “stunning ignorance of basic budgeting, or it’s a deliberate attempt to mislead the public.”

Hall countered by telling the Advance that it shouldn’t be this difficult to eliminate money for positions that he insists aren’t there, and that was one of many reasons why budget talks have stalled. The longer the negotiations go on, or don’t, the GOP claims it has a better understanding of the financial issues that have stymied growth in the state.

“Brinks doesn’t believe there’s any waste, fraud or abuse,” Hall said. “What I’m saying is, if we can’t even cut ghost employees from the budget, then we’re never going to get a roads deal because they’re only going to do tax increases. … They ask for more money than they need and they keep it.”

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