Compounding crises and federal turmoil shaped the Massachusetts political world in 2025, and The Codcast, CommonWealth Beacon’s weekly podcast, spent the year picking the brains of experts in health care, climate policy, housing, education, and more.
How will changing coastlines impact where and how people live? Can we treat the causes of our primary care crunch? How is the state’s highest court weathering an era of historically low trust in the judiciary? What does a new Trump term mean for Massachusetts’s vital eds and meds sectors?
CommonWealth Beacon reporters moderated panels and guided conversations on some of the thorniest problems facing the state. Here are five Codcasts from 2025 worth revisiting — or checking in on for the first time — as the new year kicks off. (And don’t forget to listen to executive editor Michael Jonas’s conversation with Education Secretary Patrick Tutwiler from last week.)
The data purges begin (March)
Soon into the new Trump term, data began to vanish from government websites. That included erosion mapping from FEMA and long-relied-upon research sets from the National Institutes of Health. Reporter Jennifer Smith talked with Ariel Beccia, an instructor in epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who has since had her funding slashed, to discuss the effect of the Trump administration’s purges of health-related government data and researchers’ efforts to respond.
“A lot of people think these data sets are just used by academics to do research in the ivory tower, to work on their papers,” Beccia said. “But that’s not the case at all. It has such a direct implication on the lives and well-being of individuals and communities thorough the US and here in Massachusetts.”
Primary care crisis (August)
On the Health or Consequences series of The Codcast, John McDonough of the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health and Paul Hattis of the Lown Institute have dived deep into the primary care crisis in Massachusetts and nationally. The diagnosis is dire: profound burnout, understaffing, and pay issues are creating more incentives for new physicians to steer clear of primary care in favor of specialty practices. This is creating knock-on effects throughout the health care industry for patients and institutions alike.
In this episode, Hattis and McDonough talk with Eric Dickson, president and CEO of UMass Memorial Health.
“This will become a nation of people with chronic disease,” Dickson said. “And as the population ages and medications get better to keep people alive longer, it’s a little bit scary to think about the shortage of primary care that exists today, and how bad that will be 10 years from now, if something doesn’t change.”
Municipal budgets feeling the pinch (November)
As federal policy changes prompted Massachusetts officials to take a hard look at the state budget, CommonWealth Beacon took a look at the roller coaster of funding cities and towns. Reporter Chris Lisinski unpacked municipal finance with Massachusetts Municipal Association executive director Adam Chapdelaine, Amesbury mayor Kassandra Gove, and Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance executive director Paul Craney.
“There’s this friction for the taxpayer that their taxes are going up and they’re paying a lot here, but they are getting less for that dollar,” Gove said.
The guests debated how much of the municipal strain is a result of recent political developments versus longer-term structural factors and discuss the history and future of Proposition 2½.
Rising tides and retreating towns (May)
In a special live episode of The Codcast during a month of focused climate coverage, reporter Jennifer Smith and CAI radio’s Eve Zuckoff (now of WBUR) took a trip out to Provincetown to talk with local experts about how the Cape is working to weather the changing climate.
They were joined by Jay Coburn, president and CEO of the Community Development Partnership – the non-profit community development corporation serving the eight towns of lower and outer Cape Cod; Mark Borrelli, a coastal geologist and director of the Coastal Processes and Ecosystems Laboratory (or CaPE Lab); and Timothy Famulare, the community development director for Provincetown and formerly the town’s environmental planner and conservation agent.
The Cape and Islands have been grappling with dueling pressures: increased demand to live in these desirable coastal towns and the reality that the very thing that makes them so attractive is carving away at the available land.
Is the T turning it around? (July)
For years, the MBTA has been on a bumpy track. Between inadequate funding, weather crises like the winter of 2015, and dramatic scenes of buses or trains aflame, being in charge of the state’s major transit system was no easy task. Then Gov. Maura Healey tapped Phil Eng as general manager, and even through painful commutes, the tone has shifted.
Reporter Gintautas Dumcius (now author of State House News Services’s MASSterList newsletter) talked with Eng about his first few years helming the famously troubled MBTA. This was before Eng also took over as maybe-interim-maybe-permanent transportation secretary.
A civil engineer, Eng came to the MBTA from his post as president of the Long Island Rail Road in New York. From his vantage point as a newcomer, Eng said, “we were basically going towards shutting down the system, if you ask me, if we’d continued down this path.”