Brian Shortsleeve, CommonWealth Beacon
February 5, 2026

MASSACHUSETTS IS HEADING toward a fiscal reckoning, and Maura Healey and Beacon Hill are pretending not to see it. Tax revenues are slowing, costs are rising, and the Healey administration continues to grow state government as if the bill will never come due. That approach is not sustainable. It is dangerous. And it is already hurting families, cities and towns, and our economy.

The warning signs are in the governor’s own numbers. Budget writers are building the next state budget on the assumption that Massachusetts will collect $44.9 billion in tax revenue, growth of roughly 2.4 percent excluding surtax revenue. Yet even under the administration’s own projections, spending is growing faster, at roughly 3.8 percent. That gap is not a rounding error. It is the definition of a structural deficit, and it is widening.

Midway through fiscal year 2026, tax collections are up only 1.9 percent, well below earlier projections. Rather than adjusting spending to match revenue reality, the Healey administration is relying on increasingly aggressive budget maneuvers to claim balance on paper.

In 2025 alone, Gov. Healey filed and signed $4.7 billion in supplemental spending bills, blowing past the roughly $61 billion budget lawmakers approved and taxpayers were told to expect. A $2.45 billion closeout bill signed in August carried nearly $1 billion in net new costs even after offsets. Earlier in the year came a $1.3 billion supplemental spending bill in June, $756 million in April, and another $130 million in July.

Supplemental budgets were once reserved for true emergencies or narrow cleanups around the budget’s edges. Under Maura Healey, they have become a routine way to expand spending outside the normal budget process, with less scrutiny, less transparency, and no long-term plan to pay for it.

What makes this budget especially reckless is not just how much the administration is spending, but how it is choosing to get to balance. The budget relies heavily on one-time solutions and accounting maneuvers: changing the pension funding schedule, draining reserves from the Education and Transportation Innovation and Capital Fund, which is funded by the 4 percent income tax surcharge on high earners, delaying taxpayer savings from federal tax changes, and adjusting capital gains thresholds.

These are not reforms, but shell games that push costs into the future.

The Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation warns of an “elevated reliance on one-time solutions” and projects that the Commonwealth is heading toward a $3 billion structural deficit if current trends continue.

The most troubling example is the misuse of the income tax surcharge. Voters were told the surtax would be dedicated to long-term investments in education and transportation infrastructure. Instead, for the second year in a row, budget writers are spending the entire surtax projection in the operating budget, including to backfill the MBTA’s operating deficit. As the Taxpayers Foundation notes, this undermines one of the primary purposes of the surtax and exposes the budget to serious risk, since capital gains revenue is volatile and unpredictable.

Using fluctuating capital gains revenue to fund recurring operating costs is the fiscal equivalent of using a one-time bonus to cover your monthly mortgage. It works until it doesn’t, and when the market turns, taxpayers are left holding the bag.

At the heart of this fiscal imbalance is an economic record that is shrinking the tax base itself. Under Maura Healey, Massachusetts ranks bottom five in the nation for private-sector job growth. Nearly 5,000 businesses have closed, and 12,000 private-sector jobs have been lost.

If Massachusetts had merely grown at the national average over the past three years, we would have added roughly 100,000 additional jobs. Those jobs would have generated close to $1 billion per year in tax revenue through income and sales taxes. That revenue is now missing, and not because of bad luck, but because of policy choices that drive employers and workers out of the state. That lost revenue will compound year after year if we fail to get back on a growth trajectory.

This is how fiscal crises are made. Spending grows faster than the economy. Taxes, fees, and mandates choke growth. Fewer taxpayers remain. Revenues lag. One-time fixes replace real reform. When the math finally catches up, the pain does not stay on Beacon Hill. It lands on families through higher property taxes, higher fees, fewer services, and fewer jobs.

A shrinking private sector cannot support an ever-expanding public sector. Massachusetts needs a course correction that slows spending growth, puts an end to budget gimmicks, performs real audits, and introduces policies that restore economic growth so families and businesses can afford to stay.

Gov. Healey has chosen the opposite path. She owns this budget trajectory. Ignoring the warning signs will not make them disappear. It will only ensure that when the correction comes, it will be sharper, more painful, and more disruptive for the people of Massachusetts.

Brian Shortsleeve is a Republican candidate for governor.

This article first appeared on CommonWealth Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.