On page 398 of South Carolina’s 2025-2026 budget there is a sentence about advertising money. The state’s parks and tourism agency “may carry forward any unexpended funds” on its advertising line into the new year, to spend on the same things. It is the boring kind of sentence nobody stops to read. The budget holds 269 sentences like it, each letting an agency keep money that would otherwise go back to the state’s main account. The kept money came to $3.4 billion. We counted every sentence.1
Money an agency has not spent when the budget year ends goes back to the General Fund, the state’s main account, unless the agency has specific permission to keep it.2 Those 269 sentences are the permission. The rule is a good one, because money that goes back has to be asked for again, out loud, in public.
The budget grants some of that permission to everyone, for an honest reason. One sentence, Proviso 117.23, lets every agency keep up to a tenth of its unspent money, because an agency that loses every unspent dollar at the year’s end has one incentive in its final month: spend it all before the clock runs out. That case is fair, and a tenth seems to be a reasonable amount.
Then come the other 268 sentences, each written into the budget the General Assembly passes, each letting a particular agency keep money beyond that tenth. Take two. The alcohol and drug abuse agency may carry forward unexpended funds “in excess of ten percent” of its appropriations, to fund opioid prevention, treatment, and recovery.3 Nobody argues with that purpose. But the sentence never says why that agency should not have to come back, and ask like everyone else. And the state’s film office keeps whatever it does not spend, with that year’s fine print directing up to $2 million of it into a new rebate program for film producers.4
The trouble is not any one sentence. The trouble is the sum. Nobody sees the sum until the money is already kept.
By the state’s own numbers, the money kept this way stood at $3.426 billion when the 2025 budget year closed. The state’s label for it runs seven words: agency carryover appropriations approved by the legislature. Money agencies kept.5 On August 18 the Comptroller General’s office posted its unaudited count for the year that ended in June: $3.1 billion, the fourth straight year above $3 billion.6
If the state is holding money instead of spending it, isn’t that just saving?
Real saving gets counted. The state has savings accounts, reported in one place: the General Reserve, the rainy day fund, at $740 million, the Capital Reserve at $370 million, the Contingency Reserve at $332 million, about $1.44 billion in all.7 None of the $3.4 billion sits in them. If this were saving, it would be flowing into those accounts. Instead it stays on the agencies’ books, while the cash sits with the State Treasurer, pooled and invested as state law directs.8 The dollars are not lost. And at the June 2025 close, the pile the agencies held was more than twice all three savings accounts put together, with no cap, no formula, and no page of the budget that shows its total.
That last part is how $3.4 billion hides in plain sight. Legislators write the sentences one at a time, each reasonable on its face, agencies keep the money, and no page of the budget adds it up. The natural question is which agencies held the biggest piles. That much the state publishes each August, agency by agency: Commerce topped the 2025 list, at $891 million.9 What no state document has ever published is the map from sentences to dollars, which of the 269 permissions kept which money. We built the sentence half of that map over the spring. Nobody has published the other half.
Kept money does not have to be asked for the way new money does. It does not have to be justified. A dollar that goes back must be requested next year against every other need in the state. A kept dollar needs only its sentence to reappear in the fine print. The sentences do expire. The legislature votes them back each year, in bulk, hundreds at a time. This spring, deadlocked over the new budget, it extended all of them in one housekeeping resolution.10 Every sentence has a constituency that knows its number to the dollar. The total has no constituency.
There is no lobby for adding things up.
A family runs everything through one joint account, and each year it hands out cash for the real needs: the tires, the roof. Whatever a family member does not spend, they keep, in an envelope on the kitchen counter. Nobody is stealing. The tires got bought. But the change never goes back into the account, and no one has ever counted the envelopes on the same day. The family also keeps $1,400 in a savings account at the bank, and that statement gets shown to anyone who asks. Ask this family what it has saved and you will hear the bank number. The envelopes hold $3,400.
The money in those envelopes started as yours. It came out of your paycheck before you ever saw it, and while it was yours you counted it to the dollar, because that is what you do with money you earned. The state’s answer to what became of it is 269 sentences in one document, a total in another, and no page connecting them. Maybe $3.4 billion is the right amount for the agencies to hold. Maybe it is not. That question belongs to the legislature, and to you, and nobody can take it up until somebody lays the whole thing on one page: each sentence, each agency, each dollar kept under it. As Comptroller General, I will publish that page every year. Putting the count in front of the people who can act on it is the job, and that job is the one I’m seeking.
Next week: The Growth. In 2009 the state’s main account held $120 million. Last year it held $6.6 billion, and the sentence that governs it has not changed a word.
Last week:
The Raise
Ten years ago South Carolina spent $6.8 billion on its operating budget. Last year it spent $13.8 billion.
The Raise
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.
The 269 provisos granting carryforward authority were compiled sentence by sentence, with page numbers, from Part 1B of H.4025, the General Appropriations Act for FY2025-26, as ratified May 28, 2025, and every row's classification was hand-checked against the ratified text on August 11, 2026. Five provisos counted as grants in an earlier machine pass were reclassified on hand-check because they direct the use of carried money without granting the authority to carry it; the count here is the hand-checked count. Proviso 49.3 (PRT: Advertising Funds Carry Forward), p. 398; the kept advertising money must be used for the same purposes, which the proviso lists: the Tourism Partnership Fund, Destination Specific Marketing Grants, and the agency advertising fund. Proviso 117.23 (GP: Carry Forward), p. 506. The General Assembly ratified the appropriations act for the year that began July 1, 2026, H.5126, on August 11, 2026 (R 276); the Governor vetoed certain items on August 17, and the General Assembly had not acted on those vetoes when this piece published. The 269 sentences counted here are the FY2025-26 act's, the permissions in force while this money was kept. The new act's sentences get their own count in this series once the vetoes are resolved.
FY2025 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report, Notes to the Required Supplementary Information, Budgetary, Note 4, printed page 199: unexpended appropriations lapse on July 31 unless the department or agency is given specific authorization to carry them forward. The budget year ends June 30; unexpended appropriations lapse a month later, on July 31. The report presents the General Fund two ways; this piece uses the budget version throughout, the state's own name for which is the Budgetary General Fund, because the subject here is what the legislature votes on and what is left over afterward. The second, larger presentation adds federal money and revenue earmarked before it reaches that budget. Both are correct; every figure in this piece is on the budgetary basis.
H.4025 Part 1B as ratified, Proviso 37.4 (DAODAS: Carry Forward Unexpended Funds), p. 381, in full: "The Department of Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse Services is authorized to carry forward from the prior fiscal year into the current fiscal year unexpended funds in excess of ten percent of the agency's general fund appropriations to continue to fund prevention, treatment and recovery services for opioid addiction services and addiction programs as prioritized by the department." The sentence states the use of the money; it states no reason for exceeding the ten percent limit. Verbatim from the ratified act, confirmed against the page image August 11.
H.4025 Part 1B as ratified, Proviso 49.24 (PRT: Local Film Carry Forward), p. 400: "Any unexpended funds authorized or appropriated to the Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism for the South Carolina Film Commission may be carried forward. For Fiscal Year 2025-26, up to two million dollars of these carried forward funds shall be used to create a pilot program," a state rebate of 25 percent of production costs for film projects budgeted between $250,000 and $999,999. Verbatim from the ratified act, confirmed against the page image August 11.
FY2025 ACFR, transmittal letter, p. 9, for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2025. One sentence there states the full composition of the $6,604,224,000 balance after reservation: agency carryover appropriations $3,426,000,000; unassigned surplus $1,736,000,000; General Reserve $739,568,000; Capital Reserve $369,784,000; Contingency Reserve $332,294,000. The balance also appears on the budgetary comparison schedule, printed page 194, which prints figures in thousands; amounts here are written out in full. The Comptroller General's year-end release dated August 18, 2026 restates the same June 30, 2025 composition to the dollar.
Agency carryforward at four consecutive year-ends, each from the Changes in Budgetary Fund Balance schedule (page 2) of the Comptroller General's annual year-end release: $4,051,397,824 at June 30, 2023 and $3,596,433,851 at June 30, 2024 (August 20, 2024 release); $3,425,988,050 at June 30, 2025 (August 18, 2026 release, matching the FY2025 ACFR; the August 18, 2025 release's preliminary figure ran $175 lower); $3,123,389,420 at June 30, 2026 (August 18, 2026 release). The June 30, 2026 figures are unaudited.
Balances from the same source as note 5. The three accounts work differently, which is why the state keeps three. The General Reserve Fund is written into the state constitution, Article III, Section 36(A), and must hold a set share of the previous year's General Fund revenue; voters raised that share from 5 percent toward 7 percent in 2022, phased in half a point a year, and the requirement for the 2025-26 budget year is 6.5 percent. It covers a year-end revenue shortfall and must be paid back within five years. The Capital Reserve Fund sits in the same constitutional section, 36(B), must equal 3 percent of the previous year's revenue, is used first to offset midyear budget cuts, and refills the General Reserve when that fund is drawn down. The Contingency Reserve is different in kind: no formula sets it, and it receives year-end surplus. The figures in the text are the balances the state reported on June 30, 2025. Published figures for the following budget year run higher, because they state the requirement for that year rather than the balance on hand at the close of the last one: the Department of Administration puts the General Reserve requirement for 2025-26 at $839,262,964 and the Capital Reserve at $387,352,137. At June 30, 2026, on the year-end release's unaudited figures, the three funds held $1,952,507,831 in all (General Reserve $839,262,964, Capital Reserve $387,352,137, Contingency Reserve $725,892,730, the last having received the prior year's surplus under S.C. Code Section 11-11-320), and the agencies' kept money, at $3,123,389,420, was about half again their sum. This piece counts all three funds as the state's counted savings; an internal convention elsewhere counts only the two constitutional funds. Both treatments are defensible; this series counts all three because all three appear in the state's own one-sentence accounting. Sources: S.C. Constitution, Article III, Section 36; S.C. Department of Administration, Informing the Public, budget FAQ.
FY2025 ACFR, Note 4 (Deposits and Investments), printed page 85: "By law, all deposits and investments are under the control of the State Treasurer except for those that, by specific authority, are under the control of other agencies or component units." Note 1.e (Cash Management Pool), printed page 79: amounts not required for operations are held in investment securities within the state's cash management pool, administered by the State Treasurer. Statutory authority: S.C. Code Section 11-9-660(A), giving the State Treasurer "full power to invest and reinvest all funds of the State" in the instruments the section lists. Both ACFR pages confirmed against page images August 11, 2026.
Appropriations Carried Forward to FY25-26, in the Comptroller General's year-end release dated August 18, 2025, p. 5: Commerce, $891,009,914, the largest total of any agency, followed by Transportation ($563,110,062) and Higher Education ($462,773,094). The figures are unaudited. The August 2024, 2025, and 2026 releases each carry the agency-by-agency table; those are the three editions checked for this piece.
S. 769 of 2026, the continuing resolution, ratified May 13, 2026 (R. 128) and signed by the Governor May 15, 2026: "The effective dates of Parts IA and IB of Act 69 of 2025 are extended until the effective date for appropriations made in the General Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2026-2027." Act 69 of 2025 is H.4025, the budget whose Part 1B holds the sentences this piece counts. Quote confirmed verbatim against the official bill file and its rendered page image, August 11, 2026.