“And it really doesn’t matter
If I’m wrong, I’m right
Where I belong, I’m right
Where I belong.
See the people standing there
Who disagree and never win…
And wonder why they don’t get in my door.”
- The Beatles (“Fixing A Hole”)
Less than three years after promising to rebuild Maryland’s government by staffing up thousands of long-vacant positions, Governor Wes Moore is abruptly slamming the brakes with a statewide hiring freeze, voluntary buyouts, and a quiet dismantling of the same workforce he spent most of his term rebuilding. It is the kind of maneuver that only a technocratic spin doctor could try to dress as “responsible, deliberate, and innovative,” as Moore declared in a staff memo… a memo that conveniently avoided on-the-record questions from the press.
Thanks to Pamela Wood’s reporting for The Baltimore Banner, we now know the Moore administration is planning to eliminate jobs, freeze hiring, and consolidate offices, all to patch together $121 million in savings for the upcoming fiscal year.
But let us not forget how we got here. Moore and his confederates in the General Assembly are scrambling to paper over the consequences of their own lamentable budget decisions.
This is not fiscal responsibility. This is window dressing. The $3 billion in total cuts being trumpeted by Moore’s legislative allies, such as House Appropriations Chair Ben Barnes, are a direct reaction to a budget that exploded in size under Moore’s watch. The very structural deficit the governor now claims to have “put in order” was fueled by his own free-spending, tax-hiking agenda. This is the same agenda that grew the government faster than Maryland’s economy and imposed long-term obligations with no long-term plan or stable sources of revenue.
When Moore took office, he repeatedly criticized the Hogan administration for leaving the government too lean and hollowed out. He promised to hire at least 5,000 workers to fix what he described as “chronic understaffing.” He called it a moral mission to restore public service. He even launched a program to funnel laid-off federal workers from the Trump administration into Maryland’s civil service.
What happened to those promises?
Pamela Wood’s Banner report notes that the Moore administration will not say which vacant positions are being eliminated or who will be eligible for buyouts. They will not even disclose the terms of the buyouts.
That silence is telling.
The truth is likely inconvenient: many of the jobs Moore so proudly filled are now being quietly erased, and the state has nothing to show for them except a ballooning payroll and worsening public services.
AFSCME Maryland Council 3, which represents more than 26,000 state workers, warned about “chronic understaffing, dangerous working conditions, and unsustainable workloads.” It turns out the Moore administration’s hiring binge was a mirage. It was indeed a public relations effort masquerading as governance.
Republicans, for their part, are crowing about this U-turn. Senate Minority Leader Steve Hershey correctly labeled the move a “textbook example of how Republican fiscal discipline ends up saving the day.” House Minority Leader Jason Buckel went further: “The level of government employee growth under this administration is unaffordable and unsustainable.”
They are right… but this was no accident. Wes Moore is not reluctantly cleaning up someone else’s mess. He is cleaning up his own mess with a broom made of broken promises.
The Moore administration blew out the budget with permanent programs and short-term thinking, pretending federal COVID dollars and accounting gimmicks would somehow carry the day. They oversold Marylanders on the fantasy of expanded government and undersold the cost.
And now, barely sixty days after declaring victory over the deficit, the Moore administration is quietly hollowing out the government again. This time it is not for ideology, but out of sheer desperation.
The same governor who campaigned on a message of “leaving no one behind” is now turning his back on the very workforce he promised to rebuild. The Moore administration’s so-called turnaround is no triumph. It is a cautionary tale of reckless expansion followed by quiet retreat, all packaged in the language of innovation.
I hope his supporters see the irony of Moore’s DOGE program. This mismanagement from our part-time governor is not acceptable.
Clayton A. Mitchell, Sr. is a life-long Eastern Shoreman, an attorney, and former Chairman of the Maryland Department of Labor’s Board of Appeals. He is co-host of the Gonzales/Mitchell Show podcast that discusses politics, business, and cultural issues.
Paula Reeder says
Mr. Mitchell, I sure wish you would stop barking up the Moore tree long enough to recognize and take ownership of the havoc the Trump administration and his GOP enablers in Congress – including Andy Do Nothing Bootlicker Harris – is wreaking on MD’s residents and our state economy with its unjustified firings of thousands of federal worker state residents, cancellation of tens – if not hundreds – of millions in Congressionally approved federal grants and contracts to MD companies, corporations and non-profit organizations, cuts in federally funded healthcare and education programs and other pending harmful depradations affecting middleclass and poor Marylanders; all for the purpose of justifying massive tax breaks for billionaires and other ultra wealthly scabs. Your beloved GOP (including the previous Governor) is, in fact, the nexus of MD’s current financial issues and concerns. That being the case,you’re clearly barking up the wrong tree and it’s growing more and more tedious, unsupportable and aggravating with each passing day. Quit it already!