Massachusetts rang in the new fiscal year on Monday without a full state budget in place, extending its string of late budgets into a 14th consecutive year.
A team of six state lawmakers is still working to strike a deal between competing $58 billion budgets the House and Senate passed earlier this year.
While the two budget bills propose a similar amount of spending overall, they allocate that money differently. The Senate focuses its spending on health care, education and local aid, while the House drilled in on areas including transportation, energy and the environment and workforce measures, according to a Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation analysis.
Budget negotiators from both the Senate and House have said in recent days that they are making good progress.
Senate budget chief Michael Rodrigues, a Westport Democrat, said it’s the quality of the spending plan that matters. He told GBH News he’s proud that recent budgets have boosted the amount socked away in the state’s rainy-day savings account and contributed to a bond-rating increase, even though they landed late.
“At the end of the day, the finished product speaks for itself,” Rodrigues said. “They’re good budgets. And we’re working as hard as we can to get it done as quickly as possible.”
Only two states, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, entered fiscal 2025 on Monday without a final budget at least on the governor’s desk for review, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers.
Gov. Maura Healey signed a roughly $7 billion spending bill on Friday that will keep state programs and offices funded through the end of July. The passage of these one-month interim budgets, now a common summertime practice, keeps Massachusetts from risking a government shutdown when negotiations over the full annual budget drag on past the start of the fiscal year.
While there aren’t the dramatic stakes of a shutdown like when the federal government is late with a budget, the delay can still come with consequences.
State Sen. Ryan Fattman, a Sutton Republican, said it can be difficult for cities and towns — particularly smaller communities — to nail down their own spending plans without knowing the final amount they’ll receive from the state to support their schools and other local programs.
“I mean, that’s problematic,” Fattman told GBH News. “So how do you budget? You can predict, but not with 100% certainty.”
Along with the spending differences, the fate of several key policy proposals hinges on the budget talks.
Community college students, for instance, are waiting to find out if they’ll need to pay for class this fall, or if the final bill adopts the Senate’s plan to eliminate tuition across the state’s 15 community college campuses. And officials at the state Lottery are watching to see if they get the green light to begin offering games online, as envisioned in the House’s budget.
At the same time that lawmakers are negotiating a budget, they’re also trying to reach deals on other legislation including a gun reform package, updates to veterans’ benefits and services, and a bill that would require employers to disclose pay ranges in job postings. Two multi-billion dollar bills that are priorities of Healey’s — one focused on housing and the other a sweeping economic development bill — are expected to end up on the negotiating pile as well, and lawmakers will be working to reconcile them all by the July 31 end of session.
Rep. Todd Smola, a Warren Republican who is one of three House members on the budget conference committee, said the minority GOP caucus worries about bandwidth with “all these very big-ticket important issues that are stacking up.”
“And, of course, I’m not so sure we do our best work when we let all these important issues stack up on top of one another,” Smola told reporters last week. “And we’re chasing a deadline.”
A looming deadline can serve as a powerful tool to unjam a legislative bottleneck, though often not until the last minute – or technically after it, in the case of the budget.
“It’s a negotiation, and no one wants to give up their position until they’re faced with the inevitable result that they’re not going to prevail, so you hang in there and you make your arguments repeatedly,” House Speaker Ron Mariano, a three-decade veteran of the Legislature, said last week. “Having done tons of conference committees, you hate to surrender, and that’s just the nature of the negotiations.”
