Our brand new lieutenant governor has yet to learn the fine art of sitting within camera range during a big event. During Gov. Phil Scott’s budget address Tuesday, John Rodgers spent most of his time looking bored, which isn’t a great thing when he’s supposedly cheerleading for his fellow Republican,.

In fairness to Rodgers, it wasn’t the most inspiring of occasions. Scott’s much-touted budget address was kind of a tepid affair. The freshly reinforced Republican ranks in the House and Senate gave the governor some hoots and whistles as he entered and departed, but only managed a pair of half-hearted standing ovations during the speech.

I guess we shouldn’t expect anything different after eight years of this guy. But he and his minions have been talking a lot about bold action in 2025. And while there were bits of bravery peeking out here and there — like pushing his fairly radical public school reorganization plan and officially calling for a full retreat on climate action* — there was a hell of a lot more incrementalism. A whole bunch of initiatives with teeny-tiny price tags (on the scale of a $9 billion dollar budget), many more in $2-3 million range than anything truly impactful.

*”Brave” and “stupid” are not mutually exclusive.

There was also one huge omission. Scott never once mentioned the threat posed by Donald Trump to the federal funding that pays for so much of what state government does. He didn’t address any contingency planning or possible budgetary adjustments. It was a glaring omission on the very day when VTDigger reported that Team Scott “is trying to understand the potentially sweeping statewide impact” of Trump’s broad freeze on federal spending.

Maybe that’s because many of Vermont’s new Republican lawmakers are diehard Trumpers, and Scott might have gotten an unfortunate reaction from his “friends” if he said anything that even hinted at criticism of Trump’s scorched-earth approach to governance.

The standing ovations were mirror images of each other: A couple lawmakers rose to their feet, a few more followed suit, and eventually most or all the Republicans stood and clapped for a decent interval. Not much oomph to be seen; it was more dutiful than ecstatic. The two occasions, in case you were curious, were (1) when Scott called for a crackdown on repeat offenders and (2) when he insisted that Vermont effectively abandon all emissions reduction targets this side of the year 2050.

And here I recently saw Bill McKibben on TV saying that the climate is in such bad shape that immediate action is needed — the sooner and more comprehensive the better. That’s a big fat nah for the governor. He wants to rewrite the Global Warming Solutions Act to kill the provision allowing private groups to sue the state for failing to meet the 2025 and 2030 emissions targets.

Gee, but until now his administration had insisted we were on track to meet the 2025 targets. Huh. Guess they were lying about that.

Without mentioning 2025 or 2030, he said he would order his officials to prepare a plan to meet the 2050 targets. He didn’t even mention the Clean Heat Standard, which seems to be DOA by virtually unanimous consent — even though the admin’s scaremongering on cost has been shown to be vastly overblown. And he proposed expanding Efficiency Vermont’s remit to include climate action while not, as far as I could tell, proposing any increase in EV’s funding.

We didn’t get any more detail on his plan to overhaul the public education system and its funding mechanism. Instead, he promised to deliver legislation in the near future. He also called for spending $77 million from the General Fund to eliminate projected property tax increases in the next fiscal year, which is by far the single biggest new appropriation in his spending plan. Unmentioned in his speech but reported later by Vermont Public’s Peter Hirschfeld: Scott wants to save money by killing universal school meals, which remains his only tangible proposal for trimming school costs.

To his credit, he actually mentioned homelessness, kinda sorta. His budget includes $30 million (speech) or maybe $38.5 million (Hirschfeld) to extend the General Assistance Emergency Housing program for the new fiscal year. Unacknowledged: The widespread unsheltering triggered by this year’s cuts in the program, and the fact that proposing another year of motel vouchers just underscores his administration’s failure to come up with a plan to house the homeless and move us away from this wasteful system.

His approach to expanding the housing supply is primarily through regulatory reform designed to make it easier and less expensive to build. In terms of new spending, we’d get a million here, two million there, well-intentioned but on a scale far too limited to meet the problem head-on.

You know, if his much-touted Lean Management plan had ever realized the savings he promised — $50-60 million a year — he might have enough money to take some big swings. But it didn’t, and he won’t. So we’re stuck with the kind of incremental approach that has left Vermont drifting into deeper and deeper waters on a variety of fronts. Including, in the case of climate change, quite literally deeper waters. The next governor, whenever he or she succeeds Scott, is going to have a huge cleanup job to do. Today’s budget address didn’t change that.