Maryland Cuts the Wages of the People Who Make Everything Else Possible
By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
Every May 1st, labor gets its moment. Unions march. Politicians invoke the dignity of work. The governor issues a statement.
None of it will mention Idris Idowu.
Idowu is a direct support professional — a caregiver for Marylanders with developmental disabilities, the kind of worker who helps someone bathe, eat, communicate, and navigate a world that was not designed for them. He testified in Annapolis earlier this year as the General Assembly debated a second consecutive round of cuts to the Developmental Disabilities Administration, the state agency that funds his work and the work of thousands like him.
“I have a family of four depending on me,” he told rallygoers. “My children look to me to keep a roof over their heads or food on the table. Now you are proposing wage cuts — let me be clear about what that means for people like me. It means choosing between groceries and electricity.”
The legislature went ahead anyway.
They ran the same playbook. They moved the number. They blocked the most damaging individual caps. They called it a partial victory.
In April, Gov. Wes Moore signed Senate Bill 282, Maryland’s fiscal year 2027 budget, into law. Buried inside its $70.8 billion in spending was $126 million in cuts to the DDA — the second consecutive year the agency has been reduced. The year before, $164 million was cut after advocates spent months in Annapolis fighting a proposal that would have been three times worse. This year, they ran the same playbook. They moved the number. They blocked the most damaging individual caps. They called it a partial victory.
The cumulative damage from enacted state cuts is approaching $290 million over two budget cycles. Because DDA services are funded through Medicaid waivers — matched dollar-for-dollar by the federal government — the real-world impact is closer to twice that figure in total lost resources.
What that looks like on the ground is not an abstraction. It looks like reduced wages for the workers who provide one-on-one support to people with the most intensive needs. It looks like reimbursement rate cuts to community providers already operating under financial strain. It looks like the exit of experienced caregivers from a field that cannot afford to lose them.
Maryland already faces a projected shortage of 38,000 behavioral health workers by 2028. The budget that just passed makes that problem worse, not better.
Direct support professionals occupy a peculiar position in the American labor landscape. The work they do is irreplaceable — there is no automation coming for the job of supporting a nonverbal adult with complex medical needs through a morning routine — and yet the field has historically paid poverty-adjacent wages, offered minimal benefits, and suffered turnover rates that would be considered a crisis in any other sector.
In recent years, Maryland had begun to correct this. The state adjusted DDA reimbursement rates specifically so providers could raise wages and reduce the churn that destabilizes care. The investment was working. Two years of cuts are eroding it.
The mechanism matters here. When the state cuts what it pays providers, and cuts what families in the self-directed care model can pay the workers they hire directly, those workers leave. Not out of disloyalty. Out of arithmetic. A guest commentary published in the Baltimore Sun during the session put it plainly: lower compensation drives workers away, reduces availability, and increases turnover — and when the workforce becomes unstable, the burden does not fall on the system. It falls on the individual.
For the families of the roughly 19,000 Marylanders who depend on DDA services, that burden lands in the most personal possible way. Some have already absorbed it. A 60-provider survey conducted during the session found more than $35 million in uncompensated care — services delivered and not yet paid for — that providers are carrying to keep clients stable. That is not a sustainable model. It is a system held together by people doing more than they are paid to do, because the alternative is that someone gets hurt.
There is a version of this story in which the Moore administration’s position is defensible. DDA spending grew by more than $920 million during this administration. Enrollment in self-directed services increased by more than 30 percent in both 2023 and 2024. The agency has consistently overrun its annual budget. State analysts described the DDA’s finances as, in their own characterization, a black box — resistant to the kind of scrutiny that responsible fiscal management requires.
These are legitimate concerns. A program that spends 42 percent above its original appropriation in a single fiscal year creates genuine pressure on a state already staring down a $1.5 billion structural deficit. The administration is not wrong that something needed to change.
But there is a difference between managing unsustainable growth and cutting the wages of caregivers who make $15 an hour. The state has moved aggressively on the latter without demonstrating, in any public-facing way, a serious plan for the former. The DDA’s financial opacity was not created by Idris Idowu. He is paying for it anyway.
May Day belongs to workers. Not just the ones with union cards and pension plans, but the ones doing the work that holds the most vulnerable members of society together — quietly, daily, for wages that do not reflect what that labor is actually worth.
Maryland’s direct support professionals showed up in Annapolis this winter. Hundreds of them, alongside the people they care for and the families who depend on them. They testified. They rallied. They moved the number.
Then the legislature voted 102-13 to pass the budget anyway, and the governor signed it.
This is who Workers’ Day is for. They are still waiting for someone to notice.
Sources: Maryland Matters, Baltimore Sun, MDBayNews, FOX45/Spotlight on Maryland, WYPR.
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