balancetheDEbudget.com · Verification Appendix · July 28, 2026

Where every number came from

This document accompanies Balance the Delaware Budget, an interactive tool at balancetheDEbudget.com built on Delaware's Fiscal Year 2027 General Fund. It lists every figure used, the account code and source document for each, and the arithmetic proofs that the figures reconcile to the totals printed in the underlying acts. It also states plainly what in the tool is not a sourced figure. The checks below run in your browser when this page loads.

Summary of checks

All four run live on page load

Proof 1 — Departments reconcile to the Act's grand total

Source: Senate Bill 335, 153rd General Assembly, Section 1

The Act prints its own grand total on the TOTALS page (page 63 of 240). The 24 department totals below are transcribed from the "TOTAL — [department]" line at the end of each department's section, General Fund column. Page numbers are from the Act's own printed index.

DepartmentAccount codeAct pageGeneral Fund ($ thousands)

Proof 2 — Programs reconcile to their department

Source: Senate Bill 335, Section 1, division and internal program unit lines

Figures here are in thousands exactly as the Act prints them, which is why they reconcile precisely. The interactive tool rounds to the nearest hundred thousand for legibility, so a column of programs there may appear to miss its department total by a rounding step. Each department below is followed by the divisions inside it. Every group must sum to its department total. Where a department's General Fund appropriation sits in a single division, the Act's own line items are used instead and are labelled as such.

Proof 3 — Revenue reconciles to the DEFAC forecast

Source: DEFAC General Fund Revenue Worksheet, June 15, 2026, FY2027 June estimate column

Seventeen lines, four of which are shown with the components DEFAC publishes. The worksheet prints net receipts of $7,224.4 million.

Revenue line$ millions
One presentation choice to note

DEFAC lists "Other Revenues" at $91.6 million and "Less: Other Refunds" at $15.3 million as two separate lines. The tool combines them into a single net line of $76.3 million. That is a display decision, not a data change, and the total is unaffected.

Proof 4 — The appropriation limit

Source: DEFAC Balance and Appropriations Worksheet, June 2026

Delaware's Constitution caps appropriations at 98 percent of projected revenue plus unencumbered cash carried in from the prior year. The tool reproduces DEFAC's own published calculation rather than substituting its own.

Amendment log

Acts reviewed for changes to SB 335 Section 1

SB 337, Grants-in-Aid Act, signed July 15, 2026 — reviewed, no effect on this tool

The bill's title states that it amends the Fiscal Year 2027 Appropriations Act, so it was read in full. Section 35 is the only section that touches SB 335, and it replaces Section 8(g)(3), an epilogue provision on salary supplements for state agency teachers. Section 36 reprograms $1,485.0 thousand of Fiscal Year 2026 one-time funding under 85 Del. Laws c. 63. Neither changes any Section 1 appropriation. All 134 program figures and 24 department totals stand as enacted.

The Grants-in-Aid Act's own appropriations total $99,407,051, printed in its synopsis and split across four sections. Those funds are appropriated to grant recipients and are not part of the operating budget's Section 1.

Independent confirmation, July 30, 2026. A separate review of the Governor's Legislative Advisories #45 through #50, which catalog every act signed through July 23, 2026, found no other act touching FY2027 Section 1. The only FY2027 General Fund appropriation acts are SB 335 (85 Del. Laws c. 324), SB 336 (c. 325), SB 337 (c. 347) and HB 500. The same review confirmed that DEFAC has not met since June 15, 2026 and has issued no revised FY2027 estimate, so the revenue figures and the appropriation limit in this tool are the current official ones.

Later supplementals, transfers between line items, and mid-year reprogramming are not reflected. Anyone republishing this tool after the General Assembly reconvenes, or after the next DEFAC meeting, should re-run this log. Note also that HB 500 was returned to the General Assembly on July 7, 2026 with the Governor's objections to a $35 million Legislative Hall item; that item sat in the bond authorization column, so the General Fund figure used here is unaffected, but a veto override would change the capital budget's all-sources total.

What is not a sourced figure

Read this part first if you are checking the tool for accuracy

Resolved: all four act totals are now sourced from the acts

An earlier draft of this tool treated the space under the cap as a single derived block and inferred roughly $238 million of General Fund cash inside the capital budget. That inference was wrong. House Bill 500, Section 3, states the figure outright: $289,073,915, and the same number appears as the General Funds column total in its Section 1 Addendum. Grants-in-Aid is $99,407,051 from the SB 337 synopsis. The one-time supplemental is now sourced too: SB 336 states $146,199,300 in words in its own text, appropriated to Contingencies and One-Time Items (10-02-11). Every figure in the tool now comes from an act or a DEFAC worksheet.

Corrected: why the four acts total more than the cap

An earlier draft explained this by saying that both SB 337 and HB 500 were passed under Article VIII, Section 3 by a three-fourths vote and were therefore excluded from the limit. That was too broad. The correct account is narrower.

Three of the four acts are counted against the cap. SB 335, SB 336 and SB 337 total $7,242,401.9 thousand, which fits under the $7,480.5 million limit with $238.1 million to spare. Only HB 500's $289,073,915 sits outside it. Under 29 Del. C. § 6532, and its constitutional counterpart at Article VIII, Section 6(b), an act approved under Article VIII, Section 3 is not considered an appropriation for purposes of the limit. Section 3 is the borrowing provision: "No money shall be borrowed or debt created... but by an Act of the General Assembly, passed with the concurrence of three-fourths of all the members elected to each House." A bond bill is that act.

SB 337 also carries a three-fourths enacting clause, which is what caused the original error. Its source is Article VIII, Section 4, which requires that margin for appropriations to any county, municipality or corporation, and grants-in-aid pay fire companies, senior centers and nonprofit corporations. It is a separate provision and it does not exempt the act from the cap. SB 335 and SB 336 both use the plain enacting clause with no three-fourths language.

This remains a legal reading rather than a printed figure, and it is the one item in this appendix that most warrants confirmation by the Controller General's office.

Resolved: the apparent contradiction in DEFAC's worksheet

DEFAC's Balance and Appropriations worksheet shows a combined "Supplemental" line that includes cash sent to the bond bill inside its Total Appropriations figure, which appears to show DEFAC counting bond cash against the limit. It does not. That part of the worksheet is a cash-balance accounting: it tallies every use of cash in order to derive the ending unencumbered balance and the reserve ratio. The constitutional compliance test is the separate Appropriation Limits block lower on the same page. DEFAC's December 2025 expenditure worksheet confirms the split by listing "Supplementals" and "Cash to Bond Bill" as distinct lines.

Transcription method

Figures were extracted from the text layer of the Act's PDF rather than keyed by hand from print. The reconciliation checks above would catch any wrong digit, because a single altered figure breaks its department sum and the grand total. They would not catch two figures transposed between lines within the same department. A spot-check of a sample of lines against the PDF is recommended before publication.

Column assignment

The Act prints General Fund and Appropriated Special Fund figures in adjacent columns. On lines carrying only one figure, the correct column was inferred and then confirmed by whether the department reconciled. Every department does reconcile, which is strong evidence the assignments are right, but the method was inference rather than direct column reading. The affected lines are the Judicial Central Services Account, the Insurance Commissioner, the State Lottery Office, Regulation and Licensing, Corporations, the State Banking Commission, Unemployment Insurance, and four lines within Agriculture. All were assigned to Appropriated Special Funds and therefore carry $0 General Fund.

All narrative content is editorial

The "pros and cons" panels, the Discretionary / Mixed / Mandated / Volatile tags, and all 156 program descriptions were written for this tool. They are not drawn from any official document and represent one reading of what these programs do and what changing them would mean. Reasonable people will disagree with some of them. The dollar figures carry no such caveat.

Sources

Direct links, all primary