4 days Ago By Matthew Medsger
Senate lawmakers will be joining their colleagues in the House by filing a budget proposal that does not include any new tax proposals. Senate President Karen Spilka said Sunday that the upper chamber would be filing a spending plan this week that holds the line on taxes, even as Beacon Hill contends with ‘chaos’ from Washington. ”The senate budget will not have any new taxes,” she said Sunday during an interview with NBC10 Boston.
The Senate Ways and Means Committee is due to unveil its proposed fiscal 2026 spending plan on Tuesday, and the upper chamber will likely spend most of May debating the matter. Spilka said the past few months have been “crazy” and “chaotic” but nevertheless “very, very busy.” “We are trying to focus on what we need to get done as a State Senate and a Legislature in order to do the people’s business,” Spilka said.
“At the same time, we all know and we can’t ignore the chaos that’s going on at the federal level, because the Trump Administration changes, not monthly, not weekly, not daily, but hourly in reversing what it pronounces,” she said. She said the Senate has launched a coordinated response to the Trump Administration by the Committee on Steering and Policy, and that she sees that “there is a sense of urgency” for the state to respond amid rapidly shifting federal priorities. The committee is “looking at other ways” to fill gaps created by Trump’s cuts to the federal government — whether they are policy moves or budgetary steps — to help veterans, farmers, seniors, children, and those with special needs beyond the services already provided by the Bay State, Spilka said.
While Bay State lawmakers do what they can to protect the residents of the Commonwealth, Spilka said that it’s up to Congress to rein in the volatilities of the Trump Administration. Trump’s oft-employed tariff powers were not originally invested in the executive branch, and could be reclaimed by Congress if the House and Senate make it so. “Congress needs to act.
Congress needs to pull back the power that they have ceded to the president,” she said. The state Legislature is currently crafting the 2026 fiscal spending plan, and Spilka said that budget writers are unable to “do this in a vacuum” and pretend like they are “unaware of what’s going on” in Washington, but “the senate has always held very strong values” around lowering costs for families. House lawmakers approved a nearly $61.
5 billion budget plan last Wednesday in a vote of 151 – 6. That proposal is about half-a-billion less than Gov. Maura Healey offered in her 2026 budget plan, which came out before the full scale of Trump’s tariff proposals were known.
A slight increase in year-over-year spending proposed by the House — with or without an accompanying tax increase — was not met with universal praise, despite the fact only six lawmakers opposed the spending bill. “Beacon Hill has once again shown its commitment to secrecy over sound fiscal policy. The House tacked on $81 million in new spending over their original proposal.
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This was negotiated behind closed doors and rammed through massive, opaque consolidated amendments,” said Paul Diego Craney, Executive Director of the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance. “The secretive process demonstrates just how broken and dysfunctional Beacon Hill is and how badly the public needs the legislature to begin to abide by the audit law they passed in 2024,” he continued..
