Who Governs Maryland?

A power map of the people who make decisions in this state — and who they answer to.

By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews

ANNAPOLIS — Every year, for 90 days, Maryland’s General Assembly convenes, passes several hundred bills, and adjourns. The governor signs them at a ceremony. The press covers what passed. The session ends.

What that narrative misses is the machinery underneath it — the network of legislators, lobbyists, campaign committees, and nonprofit organizations that shapes what gets introduced, what gets a hearing, and what quietly disappears. Maryland has a civics-textbook government: an elected governor, a bicameral legislature, regular elections, transparent public records. It also has a power structure that operates largely outside the frame of that textbook.

Understanding who actually governs Maryland in 2026 requires looking at four interlocking layers: the executive, the legislative leadership, the lobbying class, and the money — and asking, at each layer, who these people answer to.

The Executive: A Governor Looking Past Maryland

Wes Moore is the most visible figure in Maryland government and, increasingly, one of the most visible Democratic politicians in the country. He is a gifted communicator, a decorated veteran, a bestselling author, and the only sitting Black governor in the United States. He is also, by any honest accounting, a governor whose attention is divided.

Moore’s travel record across the past year — five campaign stops across Virginia in a single day for a race he had no stake in, a fundraising brunch in Aspen, appearances in South Carolina, a trade mission to Japan and South Korea that cost Maryland taxpayers $322,000, commencement addresses booked in Pennsylvania and North Carolina in presidential battleground states, a Labor Day weekend on George Clooney’s yacht in Italy that wasn’t on his public schedule — reflects a man managing two parallel careers. His approval in Maryland has fallen below 50% for the first time since taking office. He was booed at the Orioles home opener for the second consecutive year. Eight of his 27 cabinet secretaries resigned in roughly two years, a turnover rate the Baltimore Sun described as unprecedented.

Post-session assessments put a finer point on it. Maryland Matters’ review of the 2026 session described Moore as a “mixed bag.” He entered the session facing more than a dozen veto override attempts from the previous year, vocally unhappy Democratic lawmakers over the reparations commission, a redistricting push that collapsed publicly, and an announced slate account targeting members of his own party — a move that signals his relationship with the Democratic caucus he nominally leads is fraying from within.

Maryland’s structural deficit didn’t build itself while Moore was in Annapolis. It built itself while he wasn’t.

None of this is illegal or even unusual for an ambitious politician in a powerful position. But it does raise a structural question: who is actually running Maryland’s executive branch on a day-to-day basis? When the governor’s chief legislative officer appears as a featured guest on a top lobbyist’s podcast series, when cabinet secretaries turn over at a rate described as unprecedented, when the governor’s primary response to one of the largest sewage spills in American history is a social media fight with the president — the question of executive governance is not rhetorical.

Maryland’s structural deficit didn’t build itself while Moore was in Annapolis. It built itself while he wasn’t.

Moore answers to Maryland voters, in theory. In practice, he answers increasingly to a national Democratic constituency that has little interest in the state’s structural deficit, its aging infrastructure, or its credit rating. The Moody’s downgrade didn’t make his national stump speech. The DLS fiscal projections didn’t come up at the NAN convention. The 278 days left on his first-term clock is a campaign applause line, not a governing one.

The Senate: Ferguson’s Institution

Bill Ferguson has been Senate President since 2020. He is, by any structural measure, the most powerful person in Maryland government — more powerful, in most practical respects, than the governor.

Ferguson controls what his chamber considers. He controls committee assignments, which determines which senators have leverage and which do not. He controls the Senate Rules Committee — a body that holds no public hearings, maintains no regular schedule, and has no dedicated staff — and which he used this session to kill a redistricting bill that had the governor’s backing, the House Speaker’s backing, and the personal endorsement of the U.S. House Minority Leader. When Moore told Ferguson, “Don’t play with me,” Ferguson ignored him. The bill died in committee without a vote. Confetti fell at midnight.

Post-session reviews named Ferguson an unambiguous winner. He withstood pressure from the governor’s office, House leadership, and national Democrats on redistricting, and in doing so consolidated rather than fractured his caucus — pulling a chairmanship from a senator who broke with him, then watching his fellow Democrats unanimously reelect him as leader. He enters the 2026 election cycle as the most institutionally secure figure in Maryland government. The irony is not subtle: the man who blocked the governor’s top priority is more popular within the Democratic establishment than the governor.

Ferguson made a defensible institutional judgment on redistricting that events elsewhere have partially vindicated. He has been a careful steward of his caucus. In certain respects, he has governed the Senate with more institutional discipline than Moore has governed the executive branch.

The man who blocked the governor’s top priority is more popular within the Democratic establishment than the governor.

But institutional discipline is not the same as transparency. Ferguson’s power is exercised through mechanisms — committee assignments, floor scheduling, the Rules Committee — that are largely invisible to the public and entirely unreviewable by voters. Bills do not fail in his chamber; they evaporate. Senators do not break with him; they calculate the cost and fall in line. He has constructed an institution where dissent is managed before it surfaces, which is a remarkable achievement and a democratic problem simultaneously.

In a functioning two-party system, that would be a problem with a remedy. In Maryland, where Democrats hold a 2-to-1 registration advantage and Republicans haven’t held a legislative majority in decades, it is simply the condition. Ferguson answers to his 34-member Democratic caucus. In practice, he answers to himself. And there is no structural mechanism — no competitive election, no credible primary threat, no opposing caucus with leverage — that changes that.

The House: Transition and Consolidation

Adrienne Jones served as House Speaker for six years, becoming the first woman and first Black legislator to lead either chamber of the Maryland General Assembly. She stepped down in December 2025. Her successor, Joseline Peña-Melnyk, ran her first session this year — by most accounts competently, keeping debates civil until the final four minutes when the chamber erupted over the Voting Rights Act.

Peña-Melnyk reorganized House committees, elevated five women as new committee chairs, and created the first new standing committee in at least a decade. She navigated a difficult budget year and a contentious immigration package without losing control of her caucus — until she did, briefly, at 11:56 p.m. on the final night. By the standards of a first session, it was a qualified success.

Staff networks blur institutional lines in ways voters never see.

What the transition also produced is a consolidation that rarely gets discussed. Jones’s departure removed the longest-serving institutional counterweight to Ferguson in Annapolis. Her chief of staff, Matt Jackson, moved directly to a senior adviser role in Ferguson’s office — a lateral transfer that illustrates how staff networks blur institutional lines in ways voters never see. Peña-Melnyk is newer to the job, still establishing her relationships with the lobby corps and Senate leadership. In the interim, the House functions somewhat less as an independent power center than it did under Jones, which means Ferguson’s institutional dominance is, at least for now, more complete than at any point in his tenure.

The Lobby Corps: 741 Registered, $86 Million Spent

Maryland had 741 registered lobbyists for the 2025–2026 session. Organizations spent more than $86 million on lobbying during the most recent full reporting period — a 28% increase since 2021. More than 91 cents of every lobbying dollar went to compensating advocates for special interest groups.

The top of the pyramid is small and well-documented. Timothy Perry, a partner at Perry White Ross and Jacobson, is a former chief of staff to the late Senate President Mike Miller — the man who held Ferguson’s seat for three decades. Perry regularly reports the highest earnings of any lobbyist in the state, routinely clearing $2 million in a single six-month session cycle. The revolving door from Miller’s suite to the private lobbying market is not a metaphor in Maryland. It is a documented institution with names, dollar amounts, and Ethics Commission filings attached to it.

In a competitive state, the lobby has to hedge. It gives to both parties, plays both sides, and operates with some caution because any bill can be defeated by a functioning opposition. In a supermajority state, there is no hedge needed. You buy access to the majority and the majority governs. The $86 million is not the cost of influence in Maryland. It is the cost of the only game in town.

Lisa Harris Jones of Harris Jones & Malone became the first woman and first person of color to top the state’s lobbyist earnings list, reporting $2.67 million in a single six-month period. Her client list reads like a ledger of Maryland’s regulated industries: BGE, Microsoft, McDonald’s, Home Depot, Walmart, the Baltimore Orioles, data centers, gaming interests, building contractors, and financial firms. Her firm’s public content features conversations with Moore’s chief of staff and his chief legislative officer. The access is not incidental. It is the product, built over two decades of careful relationship management with whoever holds power in Annapolis — and whoever holds power in Annapolis knows it.

The lobby does not always win. Exelon — whose BGE subsidiary is among Harris Jones’s clients — watched its top legislative priority this session, a bill that would have allowed it to own its own energy sources, die without serious floor consideration. But the loss cost Exelon nothing in access. The relationship is structural, not transactional, which is precisely what makes it durable. You don’t pay $2.67 million because every bill passes. You pay it because the relationship is always in the room.

In a competitive state, the lobby has to hedge. It gives to both parties, plays both sides, and operates with some caution because any bill can be defeated by a functioning opposition. In a supermajority state, there is no hedge needed. You buy access to the majority, and the majority governs. The $86 million is not the cost of influence in Maryland. It is the cost of the only game in town.

The disclosure problem compounds the structural one. An independent audit by the nonprofit research group F Minus found that three major Annapolis firms — Capitol Strategies, Cornerstone Government Affairs, and Evans & Associates — disclosed bill numbers for their fossil fuel clients only 55% of the time, despite extensive documented legislative activity. Maryland’s disclosure law is permissive enough that “general representation” qualifies as a complete filing. The public cannot know which bills were targeted, by whom, or what positions were taken. In a single-party supermajority state with no functional legislative opposition, that opacity is not a technical problem. It is a governance problem.

In practice, the lobby corps serves a structural role in Maryland that goes beyond influence-peddling. It is one of the only organized forces that can shape legislation from outside the Democratic caucus. The bills that pass, the ones that die, and the ones that never get introduced often reflect the priorities of the 741 registered advocates more than the priorities of the 4.3 million Marylanders who don’t have one.

The Money: Where It Goes and What It Buys

Maryland’s campaign finance system is, by American standards, relatively regulated. There are contribution limits. There are disclosure requirements. There is a public financing option. The rules exist. The gaps in the rules also exist, and sophisticated political actors know exactly where they are.

The more revealing layer is the nonprofit-to-political pipeline — the network of federal PACs, dormant campaign committees, leadership funds, and aligned advocacy organizations that moves money in the space between what the campaign finance rules regulate and what they were designed to prevent.

MDBayNews has documented this pipeline in the context of Montgomery County Council Member Will Jawando’s race for county executive. Jawando has built his campaign around a simple, clean message: he is the candidate of small donors, grassroots organizing, and public financing. He was the first candidate certified for Montgomery County’s Public Election Fund in the 2026 cycle. He quotes John Lewis. His website says, “This is how democracy should work.”

Federal records tell a more complicated story. Jawando’s dormant U.S. Senate campaign committee — which raised $1.3 million during his 2023 Senate bid before he dropped out — contributed $115,000 to the Working Families Party PAC in the spring of 2025, across two transfers: $15,000 in March and $100,000 in April. These were among the final disbursements before the committee formally terminated, closing with a cash balance of $24.20. Five months later, in September 2025, the Working Families Party endorsed Jawando for county executive, committing field staff, digital infrastructure, and organizational muscle to his campaign.

Whether the $115,000 influenced the endorsement is a question none of the parties has answered. What the records show is that the money came first. Jawando’s campaign slogan is “this is how democracy should work.” Federal records suggest democracy, for Jawando, works differently depending on which account is cutting the check.

Jawando has not explained the connection publicly. Montgomery Perspective, a Maryland political watchdog, has called on state authorities to formally investigate whether Jawando’s conduct is consistent with Montgomery County’s public financing law. As of publication, no state authority has announced an investigation.

The mechanism is not unique to Jawando. Across Maryland’s political ecosystem, leadership PACs, nonprofit advocacy arms, and dormant federal committees move money in ways the state’s disclosure system was not designed to track. The entities are legal. The transfers are disclosed — sometimes. The effect is a parallel financial infrastructure that runs alongside the public financing system rather than through it, available to candidates who know how to use it while they campaign on not using it.

The System as a System

Maryland’s Democratic establishment is not a conspiracy. It is a network — of people who know each other, who have worked for each other, whose campaigns were funded by the same donors, whose bills were shaped by the same lobbyists, and who largely share a set of priorities that they have governed by, with supermajority power, for more than a decade.

The structural question is not whether any of these individuals are corrupt. Most are not, by any legal standard. The question is whether a system this closed, this internally reinforcing, and this insulated from meaningful electoral competition produces good outcomes for the people it governs.

Maryland Republicans have warned for years that one-party rule without accountability produces exactly this — deferred deficits, opaque lobbying, and leaders who answer to a network rather than a constituency. The 2026 session did not prove them wrong.

The evidence from the 2026 session is not encouraging. The budget is balanced on assumptions. The structural deficit is deferred, not resolved. The Moody’s downgrade stands. The Potomac is cleaner than it was in February, but the pipe remains 60 years old. The lobby spent $86 million, and the public still cannot reliably track what it was spent on. The governor who presided over all of it was in New York telling a crowd he has 278 days left in his first term.

Maryland Republicans have warned for years that one-party rule without accountability produces exactly this — deferred deficits, opaque lobbying, and leaders who answer to a network rather than a constituency. The 2026 session did not prove them wrong. The minority’s role in this system is not to govern — it is to lose loudly and be quoted in the final paragraph of accountability pieces. The governing is done by the network: the Senate president, the lobby corps, the campaign finance ecosystem, and a governor whose ambitions have outrun his term.

Maryland is well-governed in the sense that its institutions function, its elections are held, and its laws are followed. It is less well-governed in the sense that the people who run it are accountable primarily to each other — to the caucus, to the fundraising base, to the lobby corps, to the national party — and only secondarily to the Marylanders who will pay the bills when the deferred decisions finally come due.

That is who governs Maryland. The harder question is who Maryland is governed for.

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SOURCES: Maryland Matters, FEC, F Minus, Baltimore Banner, CNN, Fox Baltimore / Spotlight on Maryland, Inside Climate News, MDBayNews, Montgomery Perspective, UMBC Institute of Politics poll, April 1, 2026.

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