THE SAYING about New England’s fluid weather – wait a minute, and it’ll change – could also apply these days to the pronouncements coming out of Washington.
The Trump administration’s blizzard of activity in the first few weeks of the second term included a freeze on federal grants and funds. Two federal judges blocked it, and the Trump White House rescinded its initial memo on the freeze. But in the aftermath, there is a sense of unease about what could happen next. The forecast is cloudy.
Gov. Maura Healey fielded questions on federal funding, and the potential loss of it, throughout this week from reporters. “When President Trump does something like that, it has a direct and negative impact on so many people, real people who are counting on funding,” she said. “I’ve got seniors who are counting on some assistance to pay their heating bills through a federal program. We’ve got daycare centers that rely on the ability to get funds from the federal government to keep those child care centers open.”
The state budget last year relied on $14.3 billion in federal revenue, out of a total of $65.5 billion. Her budget proposal for fiscal year 2026, which starts this July, relies on $16 billion in federal funds. That’s more than the nearly $9 billion that exists in the state’s rainy day fund.
That explains why even longtime budget experts are struggling to get their hands around the scale of the problem. “Where do you start? I think that realization of the challenge of where to start is indicative of how interrelated the state economy and state public finance is with the federal level,” said Doug Howgate, the head of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, which regularly analyzes the state budget.
The range of impact “makes your planning challenging,” but various scenarios should be considered to quantify the possibility, he added. Some plans from 2013, when there was a shutdown of the federal government, might need to be dusted off.
One step towards that is last week’s letter from William McNamara, the state comptroller, and Matt Gorzkowicz, Healey’s budget chief, asking various agencies across the state to prepare for the effect of a federal funding pause. The letter came out just before a federal judge blocked the pause, but the work continues to ascertain a federal funding freeze’s implications.
Amid that scramble, another federal memo, this one out of the federal Department of Transportation, calls for directing funding in a way that gives “preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.” The memo names the type of capital investment grant as was used to help fund the MBTA’s Green Line extension into Somerville and Medford, completed in 2022.
Massachusetts has low birth and marriage rates, and Healey said she does not see a connection between federal transportation funding and those rates. “It’s concerning to governors around the country because people rely on transportation just like they rely on child care and infrastructure,” she said.
Congress holds the constitutional power of the purse, but state officials also bear some responsibility in making sure their applications for funding are in order, according to transportation advocates like Stacy Thompson.
“The Trump administration has made it clear they’re being retaliatory towards states, they’ve made targets of states they perceive as liberal,” she said. “They are seeking to pull back funds where they can. The mechanisms by which they can do that are somewhat complex. I don’t envy any state right now trying to figure this out. You’re putting yourself at greater risk if you miss a deadline or you have a publicly contentious meeting.”
She pointed to the Allston I-90 project as an example. Even with a friendly administration in Joe Biden’s White House, Massachusetts struggled to meet deadlines necessary for the megaproject, which involves a new commuter rail station on the MBTA’s Worcester/Framingham line, new open space on the Charles River, and turning an elevated section of the Massachusetts Turnpike into an at-grade highway.
Thompson said complex projects like the one in Allston often take longer and cost more than initially planned. “This is a new level,” she said. (State transportation officials have tapped a former Biden administration official to be the executive director of a Megaprojects Delivery Office, with a portfolio that includes the Cape Cod bridges and the Allston project.)
Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Healey tried to strike a hopeful note about beating back potential cuts to federal funding across the board.
“We’ve been clear this is not something that the state can just make up for out of the state general fund. We just don’t have the funds to be able to do that,” she said. “But hopefully common sense will prevail and the Trump administration will continue to fund very important things, Medicaid, access to health care, infrastructure, money to fix our roads and bridges, money for our veterans, for law enforcement, for food, for housing.”
A similar optimism was inherent in the version of the New England weather saying put forward by Mark Twain: Wait a minute, and it could get better.
What sometimes goes unmentioned is that the weather could get worse, too.
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