NO SINGLE WORD BETTER encapsulated the sentiment on Beacon Hill in 2025 than “uncertainty.”
From the near-daily hand-wringing about the Trump administration’s latest actions to the prospect of voters seizing massive policymaking power in 2026 through a raft of ballot questions, state leaders spent much of the year sighing deeply and staring up at the ceiling.
Sure, there was some action, like banning renter-paid broker fees. But with most lawmaking decisions expected in the second year of the two-year term, and statewide officeholders up for reelection in 2026, this year featured far more sowing than reaping.
Here’s a look at the top five storylines that dominated the politics and policy landscape in 2025.
Trump’s second term upends Beacon Hill
This time a year ago, the Democrats who hold all the reins of state power were bracing for Donald Trump’s return to the White House after four years under President Joe Biden.
Today, those officials would likely say Trump’s second term has been even more damaging than they expected.
For most of the year, it seemed like Gov. Maura Healey, Attorney General Andrea Campbell, and legislative leaders were putting out — from their perspective — one federal fire after another. They careened through responses to major deportation efforts, offshore wind upheaval, disruption to food aid, and a new federal law that will reshape state budgets for years to come.
Reacting to the Trump administration became such a common thread that Senate President Karen Spilka and her deputies began branding some of their work, like an expanded law Healey signed shielding reproductive and transgender care from out-of-state or federal incursions, with the moniker “Response 2025.”
Many Massachusetts officeholders on the left are once again defining themselves in contrast to Trump, while Republicans here are still trying to thread the needle to show support for a president who remains unpopular among most Bay State voters.
Fiscal storm clouds continue to darken
Where would Massachusetts be without the millionaires tax?
The voter-approved surtax on the state’s highest earners — whose revenue must go to either transportation or education investments — has been mostly responsible for any bright lights in the state’s budgetary outlook over the past year, even if it might be due for a slight dip in the near future. All other tax collections (i.e., those that do not have specific constitutional limits on how they can be spent) are sluggish, employment growth has been flat for two-plus years, and state spending continues to rise at a significant clip.
And that’s all before accounting for the impending impacts of the federal reconciliation package, which officials say will trim $946 million in state tax revenue over a two-year period and shrink funding for health care by hundreds of millions of dollars.
State budget math has never been easy, but lately it’s as if the 10th-grade algebra problems have been replaced with college-level differential equations.
Continued cannabis chaos prompts reforms
Shannon O’Brien is back at the top of the Cannabis Control Commission more than two years after Treasurer Deborah Goldberg tried to oust her, but the regulatory agency and the industry it oversees remain in choppy waters.
The five-member panel is still operating shorthanded, a status it claimed for much of the year, and pressure points like the “wild west” of host community agreements continue to create headaches.
Stability could be on the way. After the controversy reached a boiling point, lawmakers advanced major reforms to the CCC’s operations and oversight of the industry itself. House and Senate negotiators still need to buff out some differences between their chambers’ versions of the bill, a compromise that’s more a question of when than if.
The commission is also checking off some items that have long lingered on its to-do list. Social consumption, often described colloquially as “pot cafes,” are on the verge of launching with the CCC’s latest blessing.
There’s another prospective disruption on the horizon, though: the 2026 ballot.
Opponents of recreational marijuana use, which voters legalized in 2016, are pushing a ballot question that would essentially revoke that authorization a decade later. The measure still has several hurdles to clear, as do 10 other proposals that could form a record-breaking field.
Legislature takes a long look in the mirror
It quickly became clear that legislative leaders did not like all the bad press they earned for last year’s chaotic wrap-up.
Speaking to fellow lawmakers to kick off the 2025-2026 term, House Speaker Ron Mariano lamented the “naysayers who couldn’t write enough about how incompetent we were.” A few hours later, Spilka contended that the Legislature’s “accomplishments are consistently overshadowed by a persistent negative media narrative.”
The scrutiny did achieve results, though. In June, after a characteristically long House-Senate negotiation punctuated with occasional disagreements, the Democrats who control both branches rolled out a package of internal rules reforms intended to make legislative operations more efficient and transparent.
Joint committees can now advance bills more quickly without first needing to secure buy-in from both representatives and senators, summaries must be published to make business more comprehensible to constituents, and some deadlines will work differently.
The most impactful changes are most likely backloaded. July 31, 2026, now marks the date by which major legislation needs to be passed by both branches and enter negotiations, not the date by which the House and Senate essentially need to reach compromise on anything significant — meaning the final few months of next year can still play host to substantial cross-branch bargaining and deliberations.
Theoretically, that should alleviate some of the end-of-session backlog that’s become notorious.
Maybe, just maybe, the July 31 lawmaking session will end before the sun rises the next day.
Audit law falls down a well
Sometimes, a landslide electoral victory just isn’t enough.
More than seven in 10 voters agreed to make clear in state law that the auditor has the power to examine the House and Senate, but more than a year after the body politic spoke, little has come of it.
Mariano and Spilka, long critical of Auditor Diana DiZoglio and her relentless approach, continue to insist that allowing her office to probe the Legislature represents a breach of the constitutional separation of powers. DiZoglio wants to litigate their arguments in court, but can’t do so without involvement from Attorney General Andrea Campbell, who says the auditor has not fulfilled all the necessary prerequisites for the next step.
Neither DiZoglio nor Campbell seem happy about the way their feud has stretched for months. Mariano and Spilka, meanwhile, have been mostly able to keep the curtain closed the way they wanted, offering up much smaller-scale external audits as an attempt at transparency.
The debate doesn’t end with the audit. DiZoglio has newly set her sights on another ballot question that would subject the governor’s office and the Legislature to the state’s public records law.
If legislative leaders keep information under lock and key from the auditor, her thinking goes, might as well circumvent their constitutional concerns and make it accessible to the public from the get-go.