‘A loss to humanity’: Maryland approves big cuts to program funding to head off looming budget shortfall

For Maryland Public Defender Natasha Dartigue, the cuts to her office’s budget — a drop among the $148.3 million approved Wednesday morning to be slashed across state agencies by the Board of Public Works — is antithetical to the financial question state constitutional officers are attempting to answer.

Dartigue called herself and the hundreds of public defenders who serve marginalized and poor Marylanders “stone catchers” — those who believe it is their duty to catch the stones of grief and pain cast against defendants in criminal court.

“It is exhausting work. It is sitting with a person at their lowest moment. It is vital work. It is gritty, ugly-cry work, especially when you cannot catch enough,” Dartigue said in Annapolis moments before the proposed cuts were approved. “We are constitutionally mandated as the last shield of protection for the very people for whom this board seeks to fund better health care and childcare.”

Last week, Gov. Wes Moore proposed the rare cuts , which he described as “targeted and strategic,” to the recently enacted $63 billion budget as a measure to increase spending for childcare and health programming, like Medicaid.

The Board of Public Works has the authority to approve mid-year reductions to the state budget.

At Wednesday’s meeting, Moore explained that the cuts being made affect all of state government, including his and Comptroller Brooke Lierman’s offices, in an effort to protect Maryland’s fiscal future.

“I understand that some of these trims and haircuts are happening to organizations that we believe in deeply — that we support, and have been not just good to our state, but have been good to us, personally,” Moore said. “So I understand the difficulty, and I hope people also understand the difficulty about why these decisions have been made.”

The Maryland Office of the Public Defender represents indigent Marylanders across all 24 jurisdictions but, unlike state prosecutors offices, does not receive funding from local municipal budgets.

The $1,130,308 that the existing 1,105 employees in Dartigue’s office will no longer receive for salary adjustments this fiscal year represents only 0.7% of the $148,308,221 in budget cuts approved by Moore, Lierman and state Treasurer Dereck Davis, all Democrats. But it’s demonstrative of previous fiscal challenges felt across the board.

“OPD does not function well,” Dartigue said. “This is not only a loss to humanity, but it essentially stops the gears of the criminal legal system we know.”

The sentiment was not lost on the those who signed off on the budget cuts, each having heard from people pleading for them to maintain the budgetary integrity of their priorities.

“Every dollar that this state takes in and sends out — it benefits somebody,” Davis said. “It’s easy to say … in the abstract to cut, but when you have to look that group or those children or whomever in the eye and say that we have to reduce your program, then it doesn’t become so easy.”

Wednesday’s reductions, which account for about 0.2% of the state’s current $63 billion budget, will be effectuated largely through the reduction of program funding and hiring delays across nearly two dozen state agencies.

Maryland’s colleges and universities will see the most significant cuts. Over $28.5 million in program funding is poised to be stripped from Maryland Higher Education Commission, as will an additional $25.2 million in funding support for state-operated colleges.

Other state agencies taking some of the bigger budgetary blows include the Department of Health, which will lose $26 million in funding; the Department of Information Technology, which will lose $15.6 million; the Governor’s Office of Crime Prevention and Policy, which will lose $5.3 million; the Department of Labor, which will lose $4.9 million; and the Department of Housing and Community Development, which will lose $3.8 million.

The forthcoming budgetary cuts dovetail with a multibillion-dollar financial shortfall that has been on the state’s radar for years.

Moore said Wednesday that, upon taking office in January 2023, “Maryland’s business model was broken,” pointing to fiscal pressures caused by previous ballooned budgets that outpaced the state’s stagnant economy.

The decision to prioritize health care and childcare are economic ones because access to both provide Marylanders the opportunity to enter the workforce, he explained.

Maryland Department of Budget and Management Secretary Helene Grady said the top focuses of Wednesday’s cuts, which she called “very targeted,” were supporting economic growth, closing vacancies in state government jobs, refocusing on underutilized funds and delaying areas of new or increased funding. She said the cuts were undertook in anticipation of additional appropriations needed for Maryland’s Medicaid and childcare scholarship budgets as evidenced by expense trends from the fiscal year ended June 30.

“Challenges that have been years in the making cannot be solved overnight, and, frankly, the decisions being made today will not solve everything,” Moore said. “But they are an important step.”