To Understand DOGE Backlash, Look at Mass. School Spending

Plus, Brits, Dartmouth push to accept Gazan refugees; Car dealerships sell for $1.34 billion

Will Austin of the Boston Focus substack has a graph of Boston school spending, staff, and enrollment.

There’s so much noisy resistance to the cuts in government spending being implemented by President Trump, Elon Musk, and the Department of Government Efficiency that I thought it might be clarifying and illuminating to take Trump, Musk, and DOGE out of the equation and look at a state-and-local government case-study.

“Boston Public Schools spending more per student than any other major city,” was the headline over a May 2023 report from Boston’s WHDH television, about “the 2021 Annual Survey of School System Finances released earlier this month by the U.S. Census Bureau.” The article said, “Boston tops the list of the 100 school systems with the most students, spending $31,397. New York comes in second, spending $29,931. Washington D.C. is third, spending $24,535 in per pupil expenditure.”

Will Austin

of the

Boston Focus

substack, whose report alerted me to this issue, has a neat chart showing how Boston school staffing and spending has grown while the enrollment has declined.

What’s funny is that you can read Austin’s report about “big budgets, big expenses,” and then look at a letter sent this month to Governor Healey and the state legislature from the “United for Our Future Coalition,” which includes the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents, Massachusetts Association of School Committees, Massachusetts Teachers Association, American Federation of Teachers Massachusetts, Massachusetts School Counselors Association, Massachusetts PTA, Boston Teachers Union,” and others.

That letter speaks of “the pressing funding crisis in our public schools,” and “the chronic underfunding of PreK-12 public education,” and contends, “While there are many fiscal pressures on school districts, and important fixes in school funding and school building policies are needed beyond those listed below, several financial challenges in particular have worsened the already-strained budgets.”

Leave Musk and Trump out of the picture. Massachusetts has been governed by a Democrat or a moderate Republican (Charlie Baker) and Boston has had a Democratic mayor for many years. Yes, inflation is a factor and yes, Boston and Massachusetts like other public schools are dealing with the end of the federal pandemic relief spending windfall. But the point is even with Democrats and no Musk and Trump, you can have government operations that appear in relative terms to be extremely well funded, serving diminishing populations, with more unionized government employees rather than fewer. And the interest groups backing the programs—the unionized government employees and the manager-agents—the school committees, the superintendents—can still find a way to describe the prospect of diminishing spending growth as a “crisis.”

If it’s a funding “crisis” even in Massachusetts public education, imagine the volume and intensity of the resistance when someone like Musk or Trump seriously wants to balance the federal budget. While Musk and Trump’s styles and their political opponents are factors in generating the resistance, also a factor is the fundamental underlying reality that the whole system in government tilts toward spending more, not less. It takes enormous effort to change that, whether it is Washington or Massachusetts.

A British push to accept Gazans: When President Trump floated his idea of allowing Gazans to resettle elsewhere, the “experts” and much of the media immediately dismissed it as a nonstarter.