Mayor Brandon Johnson announced Tuesday he will not veto the 2026 budget passed by aldermen, conceding a historic struggle that reached the brink of a government shutdown and burned his goodwill with the City Council.
Speaking outside the mayor’s office on the fifth floor of City Hall, Johnson confirmed he will not veto the $16.6 billion counterproposal to his spending plan for next year, despite his ongoing objections to his council rivals’ package, which nixes his corporate head tax. His decision comes days before the end-of-year deadline to either finalize a budget or imperil vital city services as well as tens of thousands of paychecks.
“I will not add the risk and speculation of a government shutdown to the profound worries Chicagoans face,” Johnson said, before expressing optimism about his stalled progressive agenda. “Aren’t you glad that we have many more budgets to pass?”
The mayor walked up to the microphone to a chorus of applause from leftist community organizers and aldermen who stood behind him, and asserted that the progressive movement is here to stay.
He again described as “morally bankrupt” his opponents’ reliance on $90 million from selling city debt to balance their spending package, but he opted not to veto it. Instead, Johnson took the unusual step of not signing the budget, a symbolic move he hopes will allow him to avoid responsibility for any negative fallout from the plan while letting it take effect.
In an attempt to block his political foes from having the last word, Johnson signed two executive orders. One is aimed at upholding police overtime restrictions undone by aldermen, while the other bans the sale of medical debt such as ambulance rides to balance the city’s budget.
He framed the moves as him standing up to his obstinate council counterparts, taking particular aim at aldermen’s debt collection plan, even as he admitted he would permit the rest of the alternate budget to go through.
“I don’t want to give a signal to the people of Chicago that I support what I believe is one of the most detrimental and immoral aspects of this budget,” Johnson said of the debt collection component. “Many people talk about sending the wrong signal to corporations. I can hardly wait till we have politicians … that are more concerned about the signals that we send to working people.”
Johnson’s surrender reflected not just concerns about the fallout from a shutdown, but also his diminished standing over the City Council, which passed a budget over the mayor’s objections for the first time in four decades.
The opposition bloc led by moderates, including his own Finance Committee chair, Ald. Pat Dowell, 3rd, appeared far closer to a 34-vote veto-proof margin than he was to a 26-vote simple majority — or 25, for a tie-breaker — and members of that group expressed confidence that if Johnson did strike down their package they would pick up the votes they needed to override him.
Throughout hours of floor speeches on Saturday, aldermen across the city’s political spectrum blamed him for how the 2026 budget fight grew so unmanageable and caustic. Then they voted 30-18 on the remainder of the spending package, after a 29-19 vote on a revenue package.
The mayor has argued the alternative plan relies on faulty assumptions that ultimately make it unbalanced, such as its plan to sell to debt collectors $1 billion in long-outstanding money owed to the city for pennies on the dollar.
It isn’t clear what the mayor’s executive order on medical debt will mean for that key part of the aldermen’s budget plan. Asked what hole that could blow in the $90 million expected from the debt sale, Johnson stressed to reporters his order does not imperil that plan while remaining mum on how it is expected to work.
The mayor often responded to questions Tuesday about the chaotic process with soaring declarations that his rivals inside and outside City Hall were usurping the will of Chicagoans. He hinted that the fight to reinstate a corporate head tax was not over, either.
“This is the office of the mayor, and I’m the mayor,” Johnson said. “As far as our power is concerned, who’s questioning our power right now? … Check the power. The power is in the hands of the people.”
He called out Springfield leaders who he said should “put more skin in the game,” political groups backed by big business interests that mobilized to kill his head tax and national media outlets that opined on the process.
Referencing a Washington Post editorial titled “Chicago has lost its mind,” which criticized his budget’s head tax and other “gimmicks,” Johnson said, “There is a deliberate, concerted effort to stop a progressive working-class movement.”
But with a veto looking like a losing proposition, he instead tried to claim a win with the budget hand he was dealt. Johnson’s closest ally, the Chicago Teachers Union, released a statement last weekend foreshadowing that strategy: “We fought for a budget that puts people first and we won … That’s more than we’ve won in a budget fight in years.”
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CTU President Stacy Davis Gates, speaking before Johnson on Tuesday, asserted that “the people in this coalition, and my union” are the ones who “hold this city down.”
“A supermajority of Chicagoans believe that rich people should pay their fair share,” she said. “So it’s going to happen.”
So ends the mayor’s third, and grimmest, budget process. Left in its wake are a City Council undergoing a generational political realignment, a mayor’s office increasingly isolated on the fifth floor of City Hall and a budget plan all sides admit is imperfect.
The proposal that passed contains a mix of untouched Johnson proposals — which his allies have been celebrating as a victory — as well as slight tweaks to his original plan and wholesale revenue changes.
Much of Johnson’s original proposal is fully intact. That includes a $1 billion tax increment financing surplus to yield $572 million for Chicago Public Schools and $233 million for the city; short-term borrowing to cover the cost of back pay for Chicago firefighters and legal settlements; and borrowing plans for infrastructure improvements.
The city’s tax on personal property leases, which applies to everything from car rentals to cloud computing, goes up from 11% to 15%, while the congestion zone for ride-share trips on Uber and Lyft is expanding.
The head tax is gone. There is no major property tax hike either, save for a $9.1 million increase dedicated to averting cuts at the city’s libraries, and there’s no hike in garbage fees, an idea the opposition bloc initially floated.
And the alternative budget restores the full advance pension payment, which Johnson’s original proposal had cut by roughly half. The revenue plan relies on a constellation of new taxes and raised fees that Johnson did not initially pitch, such as virtual and traditional advertising on city property, major changes to liquor taxes and legalizing video gambling across the city.
Avoiding a government shutdown diminishes the risk of a ratings downgrade, but experts have said, based on recent trades, that buyers of Chicago debt are already expressing their doubts. And all corners of City Hall agree: What transpired the last few months hardly solves the city’s intractable fiscal issues that could portend an even tougher budget fight for 2027 — when an election looms.
Outside City Hall’s suite of aldermanic offices, a trio of Johnson opponents held their own victorious, and weary, Tuesday news conference.
“I think the mayor found a way to abdicate all leadership in this budget,” Ald. Bill Conway, 34th, told reporters. “His role in this was either sign the budget or veto the budget, and he somehow found a third way that showed even less leadership.”
Conway fist-bumped his colleague Ald. Scott Waguespack, 32nd, before they spoke. Ald. Gil Villegas, 36th, added that their coalition was “confident” they would have overridden a veto, claiming progressives were “prepared to align themselves with us because they were not prepared to shut down the city.”
Waguespack also reflected on the left-leaning council bloc that he used to helm under his then-foe, former Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
“I used to head the Progressive Caucus, and I think the extreme measures that they were taking, the inability to show up … it does a lot of damage to the progressive movement,” Waguespack said.
Away from City Hall, Ald. Nicole Lee, 11th, another leader of the aldermanic opposition, pointed out the coalition always said the mayor could shape the debt plan as he sees fit, including by not selling medical debt. She also likened the mayor’s use of executive orders to President Donald Trump’s reliance upon them at the federal level.
“I would have thought there would have been a better way to actually come together and talk about this more,” she said. “There was compromise on this budget. We have values too.”
Tribune reporter A.D. Quig contributed.