Attorney General Dana Nessel criticized Consumers Energy on April 1 for seeking a rate hike request shortly after the Michigan Public Service Commission approved a $154 million increase it sought in an earlier request.

The earlier request, from 2024, was settled on March 21, 2025, Danny Wimmer, press secretary for Nessel, told Michigan Capitol Confidential in an email. Consumers gave the state its filing announcement for that increase on March 29, 2024, with a full application coming at the end of May of that year.

On March 28, 2025, Consumers Energy went back to the state for another increase, Wimmer told CapCon. He added that the company said it would file a formal application on or after June 2.

The attorney general quickly panned the request. “They’re back with their hands out before putting any of their new earnings to work for their customers,” Nessel said of the utility’s latest request for a rate increase.

“The Attorney General intervenes in every utility rate hike case before the [Michigan Public Services Commission] by filing testimony to address where the utilities’ purported investments don’t chiefly benefit their customers or when they seek ratepayers funding of efforts meant to enhance their profitability, rather than reliability, affordability, or grid resilience,” Wimmer wrote to Michigan Capitol Confidential in an earlier email.

The state allows energy companies to request a rate hike every 12 months.

Jason Hayes, director of energy and environment at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, called the latest request “audacious.”

State government is supposed to protect consumers from unreasonable rate increases, Hayes said.

“Put simply, monopolies are gonna monopoly,” said Hayes in an email to CapCon. “Government officials have left Michiganders trapped, with no options but to face skyrocketing prices for some of the nation’s least reliable services from utilities like Consumers and DTE.”

Legislators killed the state's electricity choice law in 2008, Hayes said, and residential rates have surged 75% since then. The result, he said, is that the state went from being 10% below the national average in rates to being 10% above it.

“And Attorney General Nessel’s public outrage is, at best, laughable,” Hayes said. ”She and Gov. Whitmer have actively worked to fuel this crisis with their net-zero fixation and relentless attacks on affordable, reliable energy options like Line 5.”

Consumers Energy has told state regulators that it intends to file a rate request no sooner than June 2, Katie Carey, director of media relations at CMS Energy, told CapCon in an email. The utility must file a notice because of a 2016 energy law, she added.

Consumers Energy has received the following rate increases since 2020:

• $100 million in 2020
• $27 million in 2021
• $155 million in 2023
• $92 million in 2024
• $154 million in 2025.

CMS Energy, the company that owns Consumers Energy, had a 13.23% increase in profits year-over-year in 2024, according to Macrotrends.

In 2019, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer campaigned on fixing the damn roads. She pitched a 45-cent-per-gallon gas tax hike that lawmakers rejected.

Six years later and as a second-term governor, Whitmer called again for new taxes to fix the roads. She wants to raise the corporate income tax from 6% to 8.5% to raise $1.6 billion, tax marijuana 32% at the wholesale level to raise $470 million, and to make $500 million in unspecified spending cuts.

“To my friends in the GOP: Fixing the roads in a sustainable way means looking for new, fair sources of revenue,” Whitmer said in a Jan. 16 press release.

The governor claims that fixing roads and lowering costs for Michiganders have been a top priority. But her 2026 budget proposal called for more taxes: a 1,200% increase on fees for dumping trash and higher fees for hunting and fishing licenses. There are also higher taxes on vaping projects, but the proposal contains no funding mechanism for fixing roads. The budget would increase spending by $1 billion and add 800 state employees to the payroll.

“Fixing the damn roads has been a top priority of mine since day one, but the work is far from over,” Whitmer said in a February social media post. “We’ve got a plan to continue fixing the roads — lowering costs, improving safety, and ensuring that next time, EVERY month can be just as great as August.”

Whitmer suggested spending $7.8 million in 2026 — her last year in office, due to term limits — to study a road funding solution. In her first year as governor, 2018, Michigan’s budget was $56.8 billion. The proposed 2026 state budget is $83.5 billion, or a 47% higher, despite a meager population increase of 120,000 new residents.

Michigan should have spent part of its $9 billion surplus on fixing the roads, Sen. Aric Nesbitt, who’s running for governor in 2026, said on social media Feb. 26.

Instead, Nesbitt continued, the state spent $4.5 billion on corporate welfare, $125 million on a battery plant involving a company tied to the Chinese Communist Party, $15 million for aerial drone projects, and $10 million on a zoo.

“Like every Democrat governor before her, she’s pushing for higher taxes in the name of fixing the roads and once the money is in her hand she’s going to spend it on everything but,” Nesbitt wrote.

In 2025, Michigan’s budget contained $1 billion in pork spending, Michigan Capitol Confidential reported last year.

In the 2024 budget, taxpayers funded a $5 million study to analyze a possible vehicle mileage tax.