Analysis: Moore’s delicate balance as the session gets under way

Gov. Wes Moore (D) addresses the Maryland Senate on the first day of the 2025 session, as Senate Preident Bill Ferguson looks on. Photo by Bryan P. Sears.

Gov. Wes Moore (D) made the scene across Annapolis Wednesday, as tradition dictates for governors on the opening day of the General Assembly session.

He started the day at a forum sponsored by The Daily Record, presided over a meeting of the Board of Public Works, visited both chambers of the legislature for their inaugural floor sessions, met with reporters individually and in a press gaggle, and dropped by several receptions sponsored by lobbying firms and interest groups.

At each event, Moore displayed his usual irrepressible optimism about the future of Maryland, and hailed his “partners” in the legislature and advocacy community. But he also struck a sober note, highlighting the state’s challenging fiscal picture and the uncertainty over the impact the incoming Trump administration could have on the state’s fortunes.

What was notably missing from Moore’s multiple presentations, on day one of the 90-day legislative session, was a specific or defining agenda for the next three months, or a list of priorities.

Some of that will take form next week, when the governor releases his annual budget proposal. With the state facing projected deficits of almost $3 billion, Moore said Wednesday that he’s planning for $2 billion in cuts and that he’s asked state agencies to go line-by-line through their budgets and “find these inefficiencies.”

“You’re going to see them come from a collection of buckets,” he told reporters at a news conference.

Two sources familiar with the administration’s thinking said one of the largest single cuts would be a trim of about $110 million from the University System of Maryland.

Sources familiar with the budget proposal also said it will likely include what was described as a “Maryland Stadium Authority model for major IT projects.” Details were not available and it is unclear if that model would be a standalone agency or rolled into another existing department such as the Department of Information Technology.

Even if Moore achieves his targeted cuts, that would leave about $1 billion of structural deficit for fiscal 2026 unaccounted for. But he repeated his mantra Wednesday that “the bar remains very high” for tax increases.

Echoes of Hogan

As for the rest of his agenda, Moore said it will fully develop later rather than sooner, given the transfer of power about to take place in Washington, D.C.

“Over the next 90 days, we need to figure out what’s going to happen with the new federal administration,” he said in an interview Wednesday. “And that’s a huge factor.”

Moore is now halfway through his four-year term — a fact that seemed to almost surprise him when a reporter mentioned it. He came into office with a lofty agenda, vowing, among other things, to eradicate childhood poverty, reorder the state economy, build the Red Line in Baltimore and confront climate change.

Progress on those fronts has been incremental, and now Moore and other policymakers will be preoccupied by “the two storms,” as he describes them — the deficit and the incoming Trump administration. But Moore is undaunted and said Maryland’s potential will not be diminished.

“I inherited a tough economy, right?” he said in the interview with Maryland Matters. “I inherited an economy that was in a fiscal crisis, I inherited an economy that was in a multibillion-dollar structural deficit. So it’s not like that has changed — I inherited that. That was my day one reality. I think about what we’ve been able to navigate in those first years despite these choppy waters.”

Throughout the day, Moore took some not-so-subtle jabs at his predecessor, former Gov. Larry Hogan (R), without naming him.

“I inherited a structural deficit that was the largest we’ve seen in two decades,” he said during The Daily Record event. “That was completely papered over by [federal] COVID money. We didn’t actually address the structural issues.”

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It’s a time-honored tactic for governors to blame their predecessors for the state’s fiscal condition and economic climate they inherited: Hogan routinely criticized his immediate predecessor, former Gov. Martin O’Malley (D), practically until the day he left office.

What’s noteworthy about Moore is that in many ways, he is promoting an agenda that isn’t dissimilar from Hogan’s, whether it’s holding the line on taxes, pushing to grow the state’s economy to generate more revenues, boosting the state’s business climate, resisting spending mandates, scaling back certain regulations, and reforming procurement practices and other government programs. And he’s been more vocal about these priorities as the state’s financial condition worsens.

“We’ve got to make it easier for businesses to come to our state and thrive and grow and grow,” he said during his news conference.

Moore, like Hogan, does not always communicate his positions to lawmakers in advance.

Two years ago, he surprised Democrats in the House and Senate with a call to end the automatic increases on the gas tax tied to inflation, but that policy remains intact. In December, he caught lawmakers off guard again when he called for the General Assembly to pass a bill to allow beer and wine sales in grocery stores and other retail outlets and have the measure on his desk by the end of session.

The bill is not one of the governor’s priorities. On Wednesday, however, he chastised lawmakers who so far appear to be digging in against his call.

“It’s not even my bill,” Moore said during The Daily Record event. “I just think the General Assembly should listen to the people on this and I think they should do the work.

“And when they do the work, I think they will come to whatever they believe to be the right solution that addresses all the concerns, all the questions. But I just think all the people in the state of Maryland have been speaking fairly clearly on this and the General Assembly has not heard it,” Moore said.

It wasn’t like Hogan once comparing the 90-day session to spring break for irresponsible lawmakers, but the comment did not soften the stance of some legislators.

“I think the House and Senate are listening to the people and small-business owners,” said Senate President Bill Ferguson (D-Baltimore City). “The issue that the people are most worried about is closing the $3 billion deficit, appropriately.”

House Economic Matters Chair C.T. Wilson (D-Charles), whose committee has jurisdiction over liquor issues, said he “takes great umbrage” at Moore’s comments.

“We have done the work in the past,” he said. “While it might be new to him and his administration, it is not new to the General Assembly. It is not new to me as chairman. It is not new to me as a member of the Economic Matters Committee.

“I take umbrage to the fact that somehow, some way if we don’t come to his solution, we haven’t done our work — because we do our work,” Wilson added.

Wilson described himself as a supporter of Moore’s but said the governor’s approach on the issue of expanded alcohol sales “seems shortsighted.”

“It’s like you’re picking a fight with people that can fight and have just as many rocks as you do,” Wilson said. “We are an equal branch of government … and I pray that the governor realizes that we do our job and take our job seriously.”

One clear difference between Moore and Hogan: Hogan killed the Red Line, in 2015, and Moore has been working to revive it. During his news conference Wednesday he did not say what kind of mode of transit he’s seeking or how he thought potential federal funding would be impacted by the new Trump administration. But Moore was steadfast in his insistence that an east-west transit connector is vital to the economic health of the Baltimore region.

“You cannot have economic mobility if you don’t have physical mobility,” he said.

‘We’re thinking about what is possible’

Some Democratic lawmakers, after eight years of Hogan, said they’re surprised that Moore hasn’t offered them more guidance or a concrete agenda for them to consider early in the session.

“I think that would be helpful,” said Del. Pam Queen (D-Montgomery), who co-chairs the legislative Study Group on Economic Stability. “You would think, because we’re all of the same party, we’d have more of that, especially in difficult times.”

Queen, who has been in the legislature since 2016, said the third year of a term is often when a governor and his administration become more sure-footed and assertive with the legislature, “so this is the year when you’d expect that kind of thing to happen.”

Ferguson said it makes sense to see what the early policy moves are out of the Trump administration and the all-Republican Congress before fully advancing a legislative agenda in Annapolis.

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“What today looks like, on Jan. 8, is entirely different than what the world looks like on April 1,” he said.

Del. Regina T. Boyce (D-Baltimore City), vice chair of the House Environment and Transportation Committee, said that even as they wait for a more comprehensive agenda from the Moore administration, lawmakers are intent on moving their own priorities.

“We’re thinking about what is possible with the budget,” she said. “As Speaker [Adrienne] Jones says, we won’t balance the budget on the backs of education, on the backs of health, on the backs of transportation, and ultimately, on the backs of poor people. We’ve got to ensure that we’re funding our priorities and keeping the promises we made.”

Moore told Maryland Matters that the progress his administration has made in the past two years gives him hope for what’s possible under the challenging conditions the state is facing now.

“We’ve really been able to break the back of violence and homicide in Baltimore and across the state and have real momentum to be able to go further now and get more done,” he said.

“That we’ve been able to go from being 43rd in the country in the state on unemployment to having one of the lowest unemployment rates in our country, because of the investments we’ve made, and also the investments in trade programs and apprentice programs. That we were able to lead in a time of absolute crisis in one of the largest and sustained maritime tragedies in our nation’s history and know that the bridge is being to be rebuilt on our watch with federal funding,” he said.

Asked, as he looks ahead to the changing of the guard in Washington, what the Democratic “resistance” ought to look like, Moore replied, “I haven’t put much thought into it. I say, ‘I’m not the leader of the resistance, I’m the governor of Maryland.’”

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