A pattern three years in the making: Moore claims the wins, buries the cuts, dodges the questions, and sends his communications team to handle the rest.
By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
Governor Wes Moore is running for reelection on a record he has spent three years carefully constructing — one press release, one signing ceremony, and one carefully selected metric at a time.
This week, his office celebrated Maryland ranking 3rd nationally in education recovery growth pace. Last month, he announced he turned Maryland’s deficit into a surplus. He has taken a bow for Blueprint education funding, the Red Line’s revival, and job growth. Every announcement comes with the word “historic” attached.
There is a different version of each of those stories. It involves the Maryland General Assembly, nonpartisan fiscal analysts, a Moody’s downgrade, and a pattern of the governor claiming credit for outcomes his own proposals would have prevented.
Blueprint Education Funding: He Tried to Cut It
In January 2025, Moore proposed what advocates immediately called a quiet dismantling of the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future — the landmark 2021 education reform law he inherited and has since claimed as a signature achievement.
His budget proposed cutting Blueprint funding by approximately $218 million in FY2026 alone — a 14% reduction. Over five years, the cuts would have reduced Blueprint investment by as much as $2.2 billion through 2029, with long-term projections reaching $6.2 billion through 2033, according to Maryland Matters analysis.
The specific proposals: a five-year pause on teacher collaborative time, a freeze on community school funding increases for two years, cuts to special education funding, reductions for English language learners, and a 69% slash to behavioral health wraparound services.
The response cut across party lines — for entirely different reasons.
On the left, the House Appropriations Committee rejected the cuts outright. Del. Vanessa Atterbeary, chair of Ways and Means, said plainly: “I don’t like to say pause, it’s a cut. When you cut the funding, you are leaving a gap where some kids are, quite frankly, going to be caught out there and left behind.” Strong Schools Maryland interim director Riya Gupta called it “a specific cut to students living in poverty, Black and brown students, multilingual students.”
On the right, the reaction was no less complicated. Del. Joshua Stonko, a Carroll County Republican who has called the Blueprint the “Blueprint to Bankrupt Maryland’s Future,” still voted present rather than for the cuts — because, he explained, Moore’s proposed pause on collaborative time would have pushed class sizes in Carroll County to 50 students per teacher and eliminated reading, math, and media specialists entirely. “This is a really complex bill for me,” Stonko said, “because I’m trying to think about my general view on budget and tax and spend and all of those issues, and then the impact to my jurisdiction.”
The point is not that everyone agreed the Blueprint was worth protecting. Many Republicans remain opposed to the law on principle and always have. The point is that Moore’s specific proposed cuts were badly structured enough to alarm even lawmakers who wanted to cut Blueprint spending — because the cuts fell heaviest on the students and districts least able to absorb them, and because the implementation damage would have been immediate and irreversible.
The legislature rejected most of Moore’s proposed cuts. They fully restored community school funding. They reduced the collaborative time pause from five years to three. They protected poverty grant increases Moore sought to freeze.
At the signing ceremony, Moore thanked lawmakers for their “partnership” and said the bill was “an important step forward.” His press release this week celebrates $572 million for community schools and calls it a historic investment.
The legislature is the reason that money exists. Moore is the reason it almost didn’t.
The Deficit-to-Surplus Claim: What He Isn’t Saying
For more than a year, Moore has repeated a consistent line on the campaign trail and in press releases: he turned Maryland’s deficit into a surplus. It appears on his campaign website. He said it in March 2025, again in April, again in July, and again after launching his reelection bid.
The factual record is more complicated, and Moore has so far declined to answer questions about it directly.
When Moore took office in January 2023, Maryland had a $5 billion surplus. By the 2025 legislative session, the state faced a $3.3 billion deficit. Moore closed that gap through a combination of $2 billion in spending cuts and a record $1.68 billion tax-and-fee package — the largest tax increase in Maryland history.
His messaging shifted during the session: the original surplus, he now says, “wasn’t real” because it relied on one-time federal COVID funds. But nonpartisan analysts at the Department of Legislative Services have continued to project consecutive billion-dollar shortfalls ahead — $1.4 billion in FY2027, growing to $3.2 billion by FY2028, and approaching $4 billion by FY2030.
In May 2025, Moody’s downgraded Maryland’s bond rating from AAA to Aa1 — ending a streak of more than 50 years at the highest rating. The agency cited the state’s economic underperformance, high fixed costs, and structural fiscal exposure. It was the first such downgrade in over three decades.
Moore’s response was to call it a “Trump downgrade” and issue a press release touting that he had “turned a deficit into a surplus.” The same week, Spotlight on Maryland spent three days attempting to ask Moore a direct question about his budget claims. His team repeatedly denied access. When a reporter shouted a question at a public event, Moore appeared to briefly acknowledge it and kept walking.
The question Moore has not answered: if he turned the deficit into a surplus, who turned the original $5 billion surplus into a $3.3 billion deficit?
The Red Line: Revived on Paper, Stalled in Practice
Moore has consistently cited the Red Line revival as one of his signature achievements — a correction of former Governor Larry Hogan’s 2015 decision to cancel the east-west Baltimore transit project and return nearly $900 million in federal funding.
The reversal of Hogan’s cancellation is real and meaningfully Moore’s doing. But the current state of the project tells a more complicated story.
As of May 2026, the Red Line remains mired in planning uncertainty. No final route has been selected. No federal funding commitment exists. Senate President Bill Ferguson recently told reporters the project is “unlikely” given the current federal environment. The Trump administration has shown no interest in funding the project, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has been openly hostile to blue-state transit priorities.
The state has spent $11 million on the project, with another $151 million budgeted — against a total estimated cost of $3.2 billion to $7.2 billion depending on the final route. Half of that was expected to come from federal sources that no longer appear forthcoming.
Beth Osbourne, director of Transportation for America and former assistant U.S. transportation secretary, put it bluntly: “States that don’t have clear and limited priorities themselves are not well-positioned to get federal dollars and deliver projects. Control what you can control.”
Moore’s press office continues to cite the Red Line revival in his reelection materials. The project’s own timeline suggests he will not see it completed during a second term, even under optimistic assumptions.
Job Announcements: 4,000 McDonald’s Jobs, One Day After the Downgrade
The day after Moody’s stripped Maryland of its AAA bond rating — ending a 50-year streak and raising long-term borrowing costs for taxpayers — Moore held a ceremony at the State House to announce a partnership with McDonald’s franchise owners to bring 4,000 jobs to the state.
Spotlight on Maryland asked Moore’s office whether the jobs were new positions, summer hires, or temporary placements, and whether the McDonald’s Archways to Opportunity program was designed to connect existing employees to education benefits rather than create net new employment. The governor’s office did not answer either question.
A Baltimore financial services professional who reviewed the announcement told Spotlight on Maryland the job announcement appeared “more political than focused on addressing the state’s looming $1.9 billion budget deficit.”
The pattern recurs across Moore’s job announcements: a company relocation or expansion is announced with a press release, the headline number leads, and the qualifying details — whether jobs are net new, what incentives the state provided, what the total subsidy per job works out to — are left for others to calculate.
The Communications Operation
Underlying all of this is a communications apparatus that is, by any measure, aggressive. Moore’s office has denied interview requests from Spotlight on Maryland on a near-weekly basis for years. His spokespersons have been documented targeting journalists who ask unflattering questions — a pattern MDBayNews has previously reported.
The formula is consistent across every category: announce the win loudly, attribute the underlying work to the governor’s leadership, omit the complicating context, and decline comment when pressed.
On education: Moore claims the recovery ranking, not the proficiency gap. On the budget: Moore claims the surplus, not the downgrade. On the Red Line: Moore claims the revival, not the stall. On Blueprint funding: Moore claims the investment, not the cuts he proposed.
None of these claims are outright false. That is precisely what makes them effective, and what makes the pattern worth naming.
What the Pattern Costs
Maryland is entering another election cycle in which the governor’s record will be shaped primarily by what his communications team chooses to emphasize. The DLS projections show billion-dollar deficits returning within two years. The Blueprint implementation gaps remain. Baltimore City’s core educational indicators have deteriorated over eight years. The Red Line has no funding path. The bond rating is no longer AAA.
These are not Republican talking points. They are the documented findings of nonpartisan state analysts, independent ratings agencies, and Moore’s own budget office.
A governor who genuinely believes Maryland is “leading the national comeback” should have no problem answering questions about it. The fact that his team spends more energy managing the narrative than defending the record is itself a data point.
Sources: Maryland Matters, “Governor’s budget deceptively reneges on the promise of the Blueprint,” January 24, 2025. Maryland Matters, “House committee rejects Blueprint cuts, in first step toward showdown with Senate,” March 1, 2025. Maryland Matters, “Blueprint bill that avoids some of the most severe education cuts is signed into law,” May 7, 2025. The Daily Record, “Moore, Democrats at odds over proposed cuts to education reform plan,” March 5, 2025. DBK News, “4 bills Gov. Wes Moore proposed that failed to pass the 2025 Maryland General Assembly,” April 17, 2025. The Baltimore Banner, “How the relationship between Gov. Wes Moore and lawmakers was tested in year 3,” April 9, 2025. CNS Maryland, “Gov. Moore’s cuts to Blueprint plan face major pushback,” February 21, 2025. Spotlight on Maryland / Fox Baltimore, “Gov. Wes Moore dodges questions, touts surplus as billion-dollar deficits grow,” May 2026. Spotlight on Maryland / Fox Baltimore, “Gov. Wes Moore slammed for touting 4,000 fast food jobs as another $1.9B deficit looms,” May 2025. Eye On Annapolis, “Moody’s Downgrades Maryland; Moore Downgrades Accountability,” May 15, 2025. Maryland Department of Legislative Services, Fiscal Briefing FY2026 and FY2027 projections. The Baltimore Banner, “What will Gov. Wes Moore do about the Baltimore Red Line plan?,” June 27, 2025. Bloomberg, “Baltimore’s Red Line Transit Project Struggles to Pick Up Speed,” November 18, 2025. Governor Wes Moore press releases and campaign website, 2025–2026. Wikipedia / public record: Governorship of Wes Moore.
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