The workforce education investment account (WEIA) is a fund subject to the outlook, and revenues in the account are dedicated to higher education and workforce development. Revenues come from the advanced computing surcharge and a portion of other business and occupation taxes on service and other activities.

Originally, expenditures from the account were required “to supplement, not supplant, other federal, state, and local funding for higher education.”

In 2025, the Legislature increased the taxes that are deposited in the WEIA. At the same time, the operating budget amended the WEIA statute to read: “Except in the 2025–2027 fiscal biennium, expenditures from the workforce education investment account must be used to supplement, not supplant, other federal, state, and local funding for higher education. It is the intent of the legislature to continue this policy in the 2027–2029 fiscal biennium.”

This allowed the Legislature to shift $400 million in general funding for the University of Washington (UW) from the general fund–state (GFS) to the WEIA in the 2025–27 biennial operating budget.

Now, the 2027–29 budget request from UW includes a “fund source realignment” at the carry-forward level that would shift $315 million from the GFS to other funds. Public documents do not provide any more information, but the Office of Financial Management (OFM) confirmed that this $315 million is shifted to the WEIA. This means that, in the 2027–29 carry-forward level, WEIA revenues supplant at least $715 million in GFS funding for higher education.

The $400 million shift that was adopted in 2025 took place in the second year of the biennium. Consequently, the outlook for the 2025–27 budget biennialized the amount and assumed that $715 million in funding would come from the WEIA instead of the GFS in 2027–29. (Note that there is no way to know from public budget documents that this happened in the outlook. OFM told me about the outlook assumption in the course of responding to my question about the fund realignment in the UW budget request.)

It’s not clear to me what can happen with this supplantation, legally. If legislators want to continue this $715 million swap, will they have to continually amend the statute to reflect the current and next biennium? Or, has the $715 million swap effectively reset the supplantation calculation? For example, if the swap hadn’t happened in the original 2025–27 biennial budget, GFS appropriations for UW would have been $884.1 million. Including the swap, the GFS carry-forward for 2027–29 is $223.3 million. Is $223.3 million the amount that can’t be supplanted going forward (even if there are no additional changes to the statute)? Or is it $884.1 million?

I think the plain reading of the statute is that the swap can occur in 2025–27 and be assumed in the outlook for 2027–29, but then it must be reversed in the actual 2027–29 budget. But we’ll see how the Legislature handles this legal question in the next budget bill.

Of course, ultimately, whether to continue the supplantation at all is a policy question. The forecast of WEIA revenues has increased significantly with the increased tax rate and cap, but the WEIA surcharge was adopted along with the promise that it would be used to supplement other sources of higher education funding.