Third in a series on provisos, the short instructions in the state budget that move money and keep it moving.
This year’s state budget gives the Department of Education $185.1 million for school buses. The number is public and easy to find.1 But that is not all the department has to spend on school buses.
The same budget carries at least eight separate provisos, special instructions that direct how money can be used. Each one lets more money flow into the bus operation, carry forward from year to year, or stay with the buses once it arrives.2 They sit scattered across hundreds of pages, and nothing in the budget puts them together.
One proviso lets unused General Fund money become bus money. When the department docks a school district’s transportation money to cover unauthorized mileage, the two can agree to move it, and it can become bus money. What the department earns selling fuel, used buses, even a whole bus shop, can become bus money. Education Improvement Act money and lottery money can become bus money too.
Money an agency does not spend by June 30 normally goes back into the state’s checkbook to be handed out again. Carryforward is what keeps that from happening, so the money stays where it is and the path stays open into the next year. Eight of them, all running one way.
Picture a garage with the family bus parked inside. The front door is the budget, and you can stand there and watch $185.1 million drive through it. The garage has eight more doors, and every one of them opens inward.
One of those doors shows how far the money can travel. This year’s budget appropriates one dollar for School Bus Purchase from the lottery, then directs to the buses all unclaimed prize money above the state’s $23.5 million estimate. The budget calls that second amount “All remaining.”3 Last year, that one-dollar line produced $14.1 million in bus-purchase money. The final figure cannot be known when the budget is adopted, because it depends on how much prize money nobody comes to collect.
That is not hidden. It is simply not included in the $185.1 million number, and that is the challenge with the way South Carolina uses provisos and carryforward. The legislature can print an appropriation in one place, create another source of money somewhere else, and allow money to carry forward. Every step of that is lawful, and each provision may make sense by itself. Nothing in the rules requires anyone to gather the pieces, so they stay scattered across the act. Taken together, they build a budget that cannot tell you what a program actually has available to spend.
The buses are a good example because South Carolina owns and maintains its entire fleet, about 5,700 buses.4 For decades no law required replacing them on any schedule, and when that requirement finally passed in 2007, the money came in fits and starts.5 When you cannot count on the money, you take what you can get when you can get it. Funding has improved since, with more than 4,850 buses added over the past decade.6 The extra doors are all still open in that budget, and seven of the eight sit in the one passed this summer.
The Department of Education’s own accountability report spreads bus spending across at least seven lines.7 You have to find them and add them up yourself. Even then you are looking at what was spent, never at one number showing what the system had available to spend.
Nobody is hiding this. Some of the money cannot be known in June, because it depends on what the department does not spend, what lottery players never claim, and what the bus shops earn. The trouble is what happens next. Nobody adds it up afterward either.
The buses are one program in one agency. This year’s budget carries 269 carryforward provisos like these, by our line-by-line count.8 The buses are not the problem. They are the example. If one program can have eight separate paths for money to arrive, stay and roll forward with no page showing the total, ask what happens when that practice runs 269 times.
You can read every page the legislature passed and still not know where the money goes, when it gets there, or how much is left. Money taken out of a paycheck should not require a scavenger hunt to follow.
The state’s books already hold these numbers. I am running for Comptroller General, and when I take office I will put them on one page, program by program, where a taxpayer can find them.
A budget nobody can add up is a budget nobody can manage.
Next Week: Keeping $3.12 Billion in Change
Last week:
The Growth
Second in a series on provisos, the short instructions in the state budget that move money and keep it moving.
The proviso file behind this piece was built by the campaign’s volunteer research team. The work in this series is theirs as much as mine.
Ratified FY2025-26 General Appropriations Act (H.4025), Part 1A, Section 1 (H630), pg. 2. VII.B Bus Shops: $170,327,375 total funds. VII.C Buses: $14,777,299. Total VII: $185,104,674. Under Proviso 1.17, funds in the two bus lines are interchangeable for bus purchases.
All from the ratified FY2025-26 act. Provisos 1.35 (carry forward and expend any General Fund balances for school bus transportation); 1.1 (transfer prohibition; the exception lets the department transfer funds deducted and retained from a school district's transportation allocation to reimburse the cost of unauthorized mileage, the transfer to be agreed upon by both the district and the department, and those funds may be transferred into the school bus transportation operating account); 1.8 (collect, expend, and carry forward revenue including sale of fuel and sale of used school buses); 1.53 (retain proceeds from sale of any bus shop, for transportation purposes); 1.17 (bus fuel, parts, maintenance, and purchase funds carried forward year to year); 1A.63 (prior-year EIA cash and unappropriated EIA funds carried forward and spent in a required order, with item (2) directing $35,000,000 to the Department of Education for school buses); 3.7 (all Education Lottery Account revenue carried forward); 1.12 (bus shops sell maintenance and fuel to districts and public agencies on a cost-reimbursable-plus basis, generating the revenue Proviso 1.8 retains). Ratified pages: 1.1 p. 269; 1.8 pp. 275-276; 1.12 p. 276; 1.17 p. 277; 1.35 p. 284; 1.53 p. 292; 1A.63 pp. 330-331; 3.7 pp. 335-336. Proviso numbers are specific to this year's act and change from year to year.
Ratified FY2025-26 act, Proviso 3.7(E)(4) and 3.7(F), pp. 335-336: School Bus Purchase appropriated at $1, with unclaimed prize funds above the Board of Economic Advisors estimate of $23,500,000 directed to School Bus Purchase as "All remaining." SCDE's compliance memo reports $14,119,074 disbursed for School Bus Purchase in FY2024-25. The $1 is this year's appropriation; the $14.1 million is last year's disbursement. Other bus money outside the $185.1 million front door includes Part 1A Section VIII.G, Transportation (EIA), $22,032,195
Legislative Audit Council, A Review of South Carolina School Bus Operations, April 2001 (LAC/SDE-00-1), synopsis p. v and p. 2, for the state-ownership finding. Fleet count: about 5,700 state-owned buses (SCDE news release, October 21, 2025).
LAC 2001, p. 13 (no formal replacement schedule then in law); Act 79 of 2007, codified at S.C. Code § 59-67-580(A); SCDE, Update on South Carolina's School Bus Fleet, November 2016, p. 1 (state ownership since the 1950s) and p. 2 (purchase table: FY2008-09 and FY2011-12 zero ordered and zero delivered; FY2009-10 and FY2010-11 two hybrids each; the table's asterisk notes a purchase contract was in the procurement process during FY2011-12; ten-year totals 2,267 ordered against a 3,800 target).
SCDE 2024 Annual Accountability Report (H630), discussion p. 3 (288 buses replaced in fiscal 2024); SCDE/SCDPS release, October 21, 2025 (more than 4,850 buses added over the decade; average fleet age cut roughly in half).
SCDE 2024 Annual Accountability Report, Budget Data, pp. 17-22, FY2024 actual expenditures: Bus Shops $167,194,376; EIA Transportation $21,505,154; School Buses $15,557,086; Bus Purchases $4,490,713; EAA Transportation $2,400,732; Bus Leases $2,132,954; EEDA Transportation $494,370. An eighth line, Support Operations, mixes bus costs with nutrition, building, and other services and cannot be cleanly assigned.
The count is of carryforward provisos in Part 1B of the ratified FY2025-26 General Appropriations Act, from the campaign's line-by-line read of the act; published in this series August 25 ("The Pile of Money").