“Hold budgets flat across state government, keeping agency appropriations from growing rather than increasing spending.”
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Adversarial re-check: all four sources in the prior rating are real, live, and accurately quoted (I re-fetched each). The promise statement itself is confirmed verbatim in the primary record — Stitt's Feb. 5, 2024 State of the State on oklahoma.gov reads 'I'm calling for flat budgets across state government this year,' with the qualifier 'I'm not advocating for cutting core services.' Beyond the statement, the record shows sustained executive action across three budget cycles: Oklahoma Policy Institute's Capitol Update on the FY2026 executive budget confirms that 'for years, he has instructed his cabinet secretaries and agency directors to shrink employee count and cut unnecessary contracts'; his FY2026 executive budget proposed roughly $11 billion (about $1.4 billion less than the enacted FY2025 budget); and his Feb. 2026 FY2027 executive budget again 'spends fewer dollars than last year with most agencies getting no additional funds.' That is leadership beyond a single supporting act, which is what CHAMPIONED describes. Counter-evidence I specifically hunted for and weighed: (1) the enacted FY2025 budget grew in NOMINAL terms from $11.8B to $12.2B — it is 1.1 percent smaller only after inflation-and-population adjustment, so the very first cycle after the pledge was not nominally flat; (2) the FY2026 general appropriations bill (HB 2766) carried $783.5 million in FY2025 supplementals, pushing 2025-session total spending to about $12.87 billion; (3) agencies largely disregarded the directive, collectively requesting $1.65 billion (14.21%) in new FY2027 money with only about a dozen submitting flat requests (KGOU). Offsetting that, enacted appropriations went $11.8B (FY2024) to $12.2B (FY2025) to $12.08B (FY2026) — about +2.4% nominal over two years, i.e. flat-to-down in real terms, so the outcome partially materialized. Fairness test applied symmetrically: a governor of either party who authored three consecutive flat/reduced executive budgets, issued standing flat-budget directives to agency heads, and saw enacted appropriations end roughly flat in real terms — while the legislature (which actually writes appropriations) only partly complied — would earn CHAMPIONED, not FULL (the FY2025 nominal increase and the supplementals defeat 'essentially 100%') and not merely PARTIAL (the rubric assigns CHAMPIONED to a promiser who actively led and drove the effort even where not fully enacted). No evidence found of Stitt acting against the promise's direction; his tax-cut push is a revenue-side action, not an appropriations increase. Outcome and confidence stand as rated; I have added two independently verified corroborating sources.
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