Pennsylvania lawmakers’ immediate first order of business after giving approval to a 2025-26 state budget — more than four months after the June 30 budget deadline — should have been approval of a process to repay counties and school districts for their interest costs necessitated by the budget impasse.

For the benefit of anyone who has forgotten, lawmakers’ budget irresponsibility necessitated borrowing by counties, school districts and others in order to continue operating until legislators abandoned their political game-playing at others’ expense.

Actually, the only entities that benefited from the budget snafu were the lenders who profited from the borrowing in question — certainly not the state’s taxpayers who otherwise fund the entities whose money supplies were being depleted by the legislative inaction.

Yet, during the next election cycle, incumbent lawmakers will be on the campaign trails pounding their chests about their fiscal responsibility, neglecting their stubborn attitude regarding the basic principle of compromise.

In contract negotiations, the best agreements are those where neither side can claim total victory; in public budget negotiations, the best spending packages are those in which neither political party can claim total victory.

Perhaps that’s what finally happened in Harrisburg after more than four months, but it took lawmakers that long to wake up to the necessity of finally giving up on achieving a budget coup and, instead, authorize a spending package in which the business of government could begin returning to normal — without a total legislative winner.

Certainly, state residents will hear much about fiscal responsibility as 2026’s legislative campaigning gets underway, but those touting it won’t be focusing on how such responsibility was ignored during the months without an approved budget and the fiscal worries that caused on so many fronts.

Voters attending campaign events during the coming months should spend less time “paying homage” to their elected leaders and more time asking tough questions and expecting accurate, to-the-point answers, rather than a “talking around” the issue.

But along came Dec. 8 and state lawmakers still had not resolved the loan-interest issue. The Mirror’s headline over an article emanating from CapitolWire was “State could repay districts for loans to pay bills.”

Could? By then the state should have coughed up the money to make the payments in question, but lawmakers apparently were just starting to get serious about the need to come forward with the money.

Fiscal responsibility? Certainly not fiscal urgency on behalf of the budget impasse’s victims.

In its Nov. 22-23 edition, the Mirror editorialized in favor of an overhaul of the state’s budget process, in order to avoid repeats of what happened this year. In addition to a budget-process overhaul, however, Harrisburg also needs an overhaul of its fix-the-damage urgency.

During the budget quicksand, the state treasurer launched a program providing loans to counties, pre-schools and social service agencies. According to the article that the Mirror published on Dec. 8, 62 organizations took out more than $42 million in loans through the Treasury program.

The budget deal included a provision allowing agencies that took out Treasury loans to get their interest waived, but the new budget included no provision to reimburse entities that rely on state funding and were forced to take out loans from other lending institutions — entities such as schools, government agencies and related groups..

The Dec. 8 article reported on an effort to fix that — nearly a month after Nov. 12’s budget approval.

Why nearly a month delay for a need so obvious?

The need for shame is abundant.