Companies are fleeing, residents are bolting, colleges are closing, hospitals are bleeding, and the federal government is rerouting our funding to red states. Inside the unraveling of the Bay State’s future—and why the clock is ticking for all of us.
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Illustration by Comrade
Here’s the thing about Cape Cod potato chips: They were always about much more than the chips. They were about that low-slung building in Hyannis where, on rainy days, you’d take the kids to press their faces against Plexiglas and watch the chips tumble down the line. And at the end, somebody handed you a free bag, still warm.
Two brothers started the company in 1980 and named it for the place itself, which, in retrospect, was either a stroke of genius or a terrible idea, because once you name something “Cape Cod,” you are making a promise about where it belongs. The brand became the Cape in the same way Sam Adams is Boston or Ben & Jerry’s is Vermont. Which is why what happened next really stings. In time, the brothers sold the company. It got sold again. Eventually Campbell’s—the soup people—bought its parent company in 2017 and quietly moved almost all production to Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. By the end, the Hyannis factory was making just 4 percent of the chips—the place that gave them their name now basically a souvenir of itself.
This month, Campbell’s will shut it down. Forty-nine jobs will be gone. The chips will still be in nearly every American supermarket—they just won’t be made on Cape Cod by Cape Codders. Instead, the building will go dark. And another small piece of Massachusetts’ economic soul will pack up and leave.
Photo by CNMages/Alamy
It was hardly a surprise. The parade of departures in Massachusetts has become almost routine. New Hampshire politicians spent last year’s holiday season gloating over their latest gifts: business transplants like the 250 employees of power equipment manager SynQor, formerly of Boxborough, and security and healthcare technology company Analogic, gone from Peabody with 500 jobs in tow. Massachusetts’ Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act tracker reported an unusually high toll in January: 905 employees canned at 10 companies, from CRRC (the once-touted Chinese subway-car manufacturer whose woes have stalled MBTA service) and biotech stalwarts Takeda and Thermo Fisher to Zipcar—born in Cambridge in 2000, the kind of startup that Massachusetts used to mint and hold onto—and soup-and-sandwich staple Panera.
Other large layoffs can be traced back to last year. Sarepta Therapeutics slashed nearly 500 Massachusetts jobs, pharmaceutical giant GSK moved operations from Cambridge to Pennsylvania, and Symbotic, a Wilmington-based AI robotics firm—exactly the type of company Massachusetts is supposed to be incubating—cut 400 workers from its Andover facility. In December, Yankee Candle—the South Deerfield icon that built a tourist empire on scented wax—saw its parent company slash 900 jobs and shutter stores nationwide. Another Massachusetts original dramatically downsized.
And it’s not just companies leaving. Some aren’t bothering to come here in the first place. German biotech firm Repairon GmbH recently chose Providence over Boston for its first U.S. headquarters—picking Rhode Island over the ecosystem we’ve spent decades building and signaling that even our life-sciences pipeline is struggling to compete with cheaper, hungrier neighbors. HubSpot cofounder Brian Halligan captured the mood on X in January with a post that went viral in Boston tech circles: “I’m starting to worry about Massachusetts.” He should be.
We know companies are leaving. But so are the people. U.S. Census Bureau data shows 33,340 more residents left the state than came in during the year ending last July, and leading the exodus was young adults who in better times would be starting families and companies here. A Boston Globe/Suffolk University poll last fall also found nearly a third of respondents had considered leaving Massachusetts in the year prior over the high cost of living. One in three. Think about that at your next dinner party: Someone at the table is probably looking at Zillow listings in North Carolina.
Then there’s the forecast nobody wanted to hear. Boston University finance professor Mark Williams published a study last year that should have been a five-alarm fire: His analysis of the impact of President Donald Trump’s tariff hikes, immigration crackdown, and proposed cuts in medical and scientific research funding concluded that Massachusetts’ core industries would be “disproportionately harmed” by “shrinking commerce, growth, tax revenue and labor supply.” The numbers showed that higher tariffs alone could cut economic growth here by $12.8 billion, costing the state $1 billion in lost tax revenue and close to 80,000 jobs. That’s roughly double the population of Salem headed for the unemployment line.
In private briefings with local business executives and during interviews for this story, Williams updated his forecast to reflect what’s actually happening. Trump’s policies have become “a giant wrecking ball,” he says, coming on top of preexisting problems, including an aging population, declining fertility rates, and relentless cost pressures on childcare, healthcare, energy, and housing.
His prediction: Massachusetts “could head into recession by Q3 2026”—and Democrats winning the midterms won’t save us. Neither will Trump’s departure in 2029. “It will require multiple years after Trump is out of office for the state to regain its financial footing,” Williams says.
The question isn’t whether Massachusetts is in trouble. It’s whether anyone in charge has a plan.
Illustration by Benjamen Purvis
The wrecking ball has been busy.
In 2023, President Joe Biden’s administration handed Massachusetts a gift: ARPA-H’s Investor Catalyst Hub, one of three regional healthcare innovations hubs across the country. Governor Maura Healey called it “a huge win.” In its first year, the program pumped nearly $300 million into the state’s network of biomedical companies and nonprofits. It felt, for a moment, like the future arriving on time.
Then, in late January, an ARPA-H official notified the hub’s management firm of the federal government’s intent to terminate the agreement “in large part or in full.” Fifty-nine jobs at the hub faced elimination. But the real damage would extend to every company, hospital, and research organization connected to its pipeline—projects focused on cancer surgery, providing hospital-level care to rural areas, and lymphatic disease treatment. All of it at risk of vanishing.
The response has been swift yet so far futile. The written stop-work order, sent January 30 by ARPA-H Agreements Officer Steven Piggott, included a subject line reading “Stop Work and Termination,” its language directing the hub’s management firm to prepare a termination settlement proposal. After initial lawmaker pushback, an ARPA-H official called the closure plans “false,” insisting the agency was merely evaluating vendors, not closing any of the three hubs. But that wasn’t enough for lawmakers. U.S. Representative Lori Trahan wrote a letter to Trump and HHS Secretary Kennedy—signed by fellow Congressional delegation members Ed Markey, Elizabeth Warren, Jake Auchincloss, Seth Moulton, Richard Neal, and Stephen Lynch—calling the termination “a profound mistake and a blatant waste of taxpayer dollars” and demanding a Congressional briefing. Healey urged Trump to “immediately reverse this decision,” and while the feds announced some new funding for local researchers in early March, the future of the Investor Catalyst Hub remains in doubt.
ARPA-H is just the tip of the iceberg. A midwinter MassInc/Globe poll of scientists receiving NIH funding confirmed the worst: A third said their grant program had been terminated or the application process canceled; 42 percent have lost researchers to other countries; 31 percent have had potential hires reject their institution’s offers over immigration concerns; and 72 percent have had research projects delayed or canceled.
UMass Chan Medical School in Worcester, a major economic driver for central Massachusetts, laid off or furloughed about 200 employees in the wake of federal funding cuts last spring; by summer, outgoing Chancellor Michael Collins was predicting close to $100 million more in cuts. Without drastic changes, we’ll “lose a generation of scientists,” Collins has said. Tim Murray, the former lieutenant governor who now runs the Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce, sees the damage radiating outward to local suppliers, ancillary businesses, and nonprofits. “We’re very concerned about the long-term impact,” he says.
And then the Trump administration said the quiet part out loud. During a visit to the state that receives more of his agency’s funding per capita than any other, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya personally delivered a warning: Red states like Iowa, Nebraska, and Alabama deserve more of the pie. “I don’t see a future with Massachusetts not having support,” he told the Globe in December. “But I would love to see that kind of success spread all across the country.” Translation: Much of what you have is going to be redistributed, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
A month later, the federal Office of Management and Budget, headed by Russell Vought, piled on, ordering NIH and most other federal agencies to report all funding sent to a list of Democrat-led states—including Massachusetts—“in order to facilitate efforts to reduce the improper and fraudulent use of those funds.” And the assault extends beyond research. The Trump administration’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” could strip state healthcare coverage from 300,000 Massachusetts residents and cost the state $3.3 billion.
Massachusetts isn’t the only blue state in the federal government’s crosshairs. But we’ve done little, if anything, to avoid the line of fire. From the scorched-earth rhetoric of our Congressional delegation (Senator Warren: Trump has the “most corrupt administration in our lifetime”) to Healey’s broadsides (“We have a president who throws temper tantrums like a two-year-old. No disrespect to two-year-olds”) to Mayor Michelle Wu’s salvos (“a tyrant desperate for the respect he will never earn”), Massachusetts politicians have sharp-elbowed their way to the forefront of the anti-Trump movement. On target and in tune with local voters? Perhaps. But when federal funding is the leverage and the other side has shown it will use it punitively, political pugilism has a cost. Local chambers of commerce have joined forces with their red-state counterparts in the Business for Federal Research Funding Coalition—a bipartisan network of more than 80 business groups across 36 states—trying to make the case through less inflammatory channels. “It’s hard for businesses in blue states to be heard on this issue,” Greg Reibman of the Charles River Regional Chamber told the Globe in May of last year. “By being part of a coalition from across the nation, we hope our concerns will transcend the partisan divide.”
Good luck with that. A more likely preview of what’s coming is Moderna: The Cambridge biotech flagship of COVID-19 vaccine fame saw its stock crater after the FDA issued a rare refusal to even review the company’s new mRNA flu vaccine—a decision widely attributed to the agency’s top vaccine regulator, an RFK Jr. appointee. The agency reversed itself a week later, but the damage was done. The message to every biotech company in Cambridge was that the rules can change overnight—and that being in Massachusetts makes you a target.
The external assault is real, deliberate, and unprecedented. But it landed on a patient that was already sick.
Here’s what few people want to admit: It’s not one crisis. It’s at least three. Higher education, healthcare, and biotech—the three bedrocks Massachusetts has been telling itself make it unsinkable—are all unraveling at the same time. And because they’re interlocking, each one accelerates the collapse of the others. Universities train the talent. Hospitals employ it. Biotech commercializes it. Lose one pillar, and you have a problem. Lose all three at once, and you don’t have a downturn. You have a structural collapse.
Start with higher education, which has seen a dozen colleges close or merge over the past decade, from the Boston Conservatory in 2016 to Eastern Nazarene College last year—one of the nation’s worst attrition rates. Moody’s issued a negative fiscal 2026 outlook for higher ed nationally, citing caps on federal student loans, cuts in research grants, and a projected decline in high school graduates. Looming over it all: artificial intelligence advances that threaten to render parts of the traditional college model obsolete. National enrollment dropped 15 percent from 2010 to 2021. “Twenty to twenty-five percent of all colleges are going to close,” says Brandeis University president Arthur Levine. “If federal cuts continue, it’s going to be a huge economic problem for Massachusetts. If another nation were doing to us what we’re doing to ourselves, we would declare it an act of war.”
And the customers who might have saved us are going elsewhere. A generation of high school seniors who once dreamed of New England campuses are choosing Sun Belt schools—drawn by lower tuition, warmer climates, and job markets that don’t feel like a gamble. The ones who do want to come here increasingly can’t justify the cost: A four-year degree at a private Massachusetts university can reach $400,000 before a student earns a dollar. Some institutions are already experimenting with three-year degree programs to stanch the bleeding, compressing the model in ways that cut a full year of tuition revenue—and a full year of the local economic activity that comes with it. If that’s the next iteration of higher education, what comes after it is anyone’s guess. But it almost certainly involves fewer students, fewer professors, and fewer dollars flowing through Massachusetts.
The truth is that the pipeline is already collapsing. At UMass Chan, Ph.D. admissions plummeted from 73 to 13 in a single year. Harvard is cutting science Ph.D. enrollment in half. Boston University has paused admissions in six fields entirely. The students who would have become the next generation of researchers aren’t just going elsewhere—in some cases, the programs that would have trained them no longer exist. And the researchers who are already here are being recruited away. Australia’s Monash University has invested $10 million to lure more than a dozen American academics from Harvard, MIT, Dartmouth, and Cornell—offering stable funding and academic freedom that Washington, DC, is no longer willing to guarantee.
Our hospitals aren’t faring much better. Only six of the state’s nearly two dozen healthcare systems boasted positive operating budgets last year; the median operating margin for acute care hospitals dropped to negative 2 percent. Mass General Brigham, the state’s largest and wealthiest system, underwent hundreds of layoffs last year in an attempt to close a $250 million budget gap. UMass Memorial Health, facing an $86 million operating loss in the first half of fiscal year 2025 alone, shuttered a behavioral health program, a teen substance abuse treatment center, and two primary care clinics. “It’s going to get ugly the next three years,” UMass Memorial CEO Eric Dickson told the Globe in December. “I mean, I should have retired last year.” At Boston Medical Center, where more than 40 percent of patients are on Medicaid, an ER physician told the Globe she’s watching “the seams of our healthcare system come apart.” And the Steward Health Care collapse—which killed Carney Hospital in Dorchester and Nashoba Valley Medical Center—is still sending shockwaves through the system. The Big Beautiful Bill’s Medicaid cuts, meanwhile, could strip another $424 million a year from Massachusetts hospitals—with the hardest hit falling on safety-net facilities where uninsured and Medicaid patients are most concentrated, and where experts warn the cuts could trigger bankruptcies.
But if our long-running eds-and-meds boom is cracking, at least we have biotech—the golden goose, epitomized by the gleaming offices and labs that transformed Kendall Square from a string of parking lots to the global epicenter of cutting-edge research. Right?
Not so much. “We’ve been on the most incredible run in the biotech community since 2010, but like most industries, we are seeing a pullback, a retrenchment,” says state Senator Barry Finegold, chair of the legislature’s Joint Committee on Economic Development and Emerging Technologies. “We’ve never had as much open lab space.” While innovators keep cranking out new products, last year’s 14 percent growth in new drug development nationwide still lags well behind China’s 37 percent increase—and Massachusetts, the industry’s center of gravity, is feeling the squeeze. According to a recent MassBio report, the state’s share of national venture capital dropped by 2 percent, and the number of funded companies slipped by 13 percent. And if it isn’t New Hampshire luring our golden geese away, it’s Rhode Island, spending millions through initiatives like the state’s Life Science Hub to siphon our companies and persuade new ones to settle there instead of here.
What about the clean energy sector, another focus of investment in the state budget? Surely that will pick up the slack? Not likely, given the Trump administration’s open hostility to alternative energy development. “Nobody has pockets like the federal government,” notes Mark Melnik, director of Economic and Public Policy Research at the UMass Donahue Institute. “Any kinds of investments in offshore wind or solar, so much of that needs to have some kind of relationship to where the feds see the economy going.”
“This is probably the most precarious I can recall the Massachusetts economy being,” Melnik adds. And while the professional and executive classes are feeling extraordinary heat, broad swaths of the rest of the population already seem to be cooked.
United states of America Map Isolated 3d Render Illustration
The macro numbers tell one story. Living here tells another. The issue that tops every poll of citizen concerns is housing, and the gridlock plaguing the local real estate market “feels like the perfect storm,” says Michael Carucci, the Massachusetts executive vice president for real estate brokerage Serhant. The squeeze is coming from the White House—higher tariffs inflating construction costs—and from inside our own house, where “taxes are quietly becoming the new interest rate,” Carucci says. “The typical buyer is no longer looking only at price but total cost of ownership.”
Even at the higher end, the pressure is mounting. Immigration policies are scaring off international students who used to snap up luxury condos. Affluent homeowners are eyeing escape from stiff income and estate taxes. And “will there ever be enough affordable housing?” Carucci asks. Don’t hold your breath.
Five years after Beacon Hill approved the MBTA Communities Act—a historic effort to penetrate the zoning barriers cities and towns have erected against affordable housing—the results are meager. A January study by the Boston Foundation found projects spawned by the act would add up to “substantially less” than a one percent increase in the housing stock. Not to mention, rents are at historically high levels, while vacancy rates are lower than ever. The state’s own website is unusually blunt about it. On mass.gov: “People move away from MA for many reasons, but housing cost is at the top of the list for many.” And an initiative headed for this fall’s ballot to restore rent control—32 years after it was banned statewide—would, Healey warned, just make things worse by stifling new production. “Investors in housing have already pulled out of Massachusetts because they’re concerned about rent control,” she told Boston Public Radio.
She’s not wrong. Jeff Kanne, whose firm, National Real Estate Advisors, manages roughly $10 billion in pension investments and has funded some of Boston’s tallest new towers, says he’s done deploying capital here. “My capital can go anywhere in the United States,” he told the Globe. So right now, he’s sending it to Atlanta and Washington, DC.
But housing is only part of the problem—the commercial real estate collapse threatens the services that make a city livable. There may be short-term political gain in Wu’s demonization of the commercial real estate industry during her push to raise commercial property taxes to offset plummeting downtown office values. It’s easier to blame fat-cat developers than to explain a structural budget crisis. But with a report from a nonpartisan Tufts think tank and the Boston Policy Institute (BPI) forecasting a $1.7 billion shortfall in Boston’s revenues due to the office-market implosion, the implications for regular working people are stark. As the BPI put it: “Tax shortfalls curtail city services, which makes the city less appealing, leading to additional declines in property values, and then further tax shortfalls and more service cuts.”
That’s the dreaded “doom loop” we wrote about in this magazine in June 2024—lower property values, less revenue, fewer services, repeat. Williams frames the endgame bluntly: “As the state’s population shrinks, its tax base also falls, putting greater pressure on affordability, providing further incentives for younger and prime-age workers to seek employment and set down roots elsewhere. When residents leave Massachusetts, they take their belongings and earnings, too. A growing tax base is lost.”
You can see it in the Boston skyline, once teeming with construction cranes. In Kendall Square, a restaurant owner told the Globe his business dropped 5 to 8 percent last year—the NIH cuts reaching all the way down to the lunch crowd. Statewide, according to the Federal Reserve, the unemployment rate jumped to nearly a half-point higher than the nation’s by year’s end. Employers shed a net 4,500 jobs in 2024 and 2025. Strip out healthcare hiring, according to a Globe analysis, and the losses would have exceeded 20,000. In September alone, according to a report from the state’s Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development, the state lost more than 11,000 jobs—the worst single month since the onset of the pandemic. “In some of the construction trades, half the workers are unemployed,” reports Chrissy Lynch, president of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO. And while chronically struggling regions like Springfield and Worcester have been hit hard, so, too, has the more affluent Boston/Cambridge/Newton region, with joblessness up a half-point year-to-year.
Last one to leave the state, turn off the lights. If you can afford to keep them lit in the first place. Public outcry over the nation’s third-highest electricity rates forced Healey to delay new clean heat standards until 2028—coming on top of delays in offshore wind power expansion and electric-vehicle sales quotas, a telling acknowledgement of the role sky-high electricity costs are playing in the affordability crisis.
The Associated Industries of Massachusetts (AIM) Business Confidence Index tells the rest of the story: Employers “remained pessimistic for an 11th consecutive month,” weighed down by “tariffs, federal immigration enforcement and the cost of doing business in Massachusetts.”
Eleven months of pessimism. And counting.
State leaders know there’s a problem. They just can’t agree on what to do about it.
State leaders know there’s a problem. They just can’t agree on what to do about it. “It’s true we’re facing headwinds, and we’re looking at the different ways to address them,” said Healey in her January State of the Commonwealth Address. “Donald Trump has made cuts and caused chaos,” she added as she rolled out her FY27 budget plan in mid-February. But while political leaders from the State House to City Hall are busy touting small-scale gestures—like a 10 percent cut in gas bills and 25 percent cut in electric bills this winter that utility companies will claw back later this year—and convening earnest discussions about competitiveness and affordability, the question remains: What, exactly, is the plan?
Williams’s assessment is that the political class doesn’t really grasp the scale of the disaster. “There’s not a sense of urgency—I don’t feel that at the governor’s level or Wu’s level,” he says. “I don’t see them thinking from a macro perspective. We can’t be Trump-proofed.”
As businesses and residents flee to greener pastures, Governor Maura Healey has acknowledged the state faces economic headwinds. / Photo by Scott Eisen/Getty Images for Vox Media
Healey pushed back. “While Massachusetts faces economic headwinds driven by federal policy decisions and high costs,” she told Boston, “my administration is clear-eyed about the work required to address them.” And her administration has been anything but idle. During her three years in office, the governor has produced a 2023 economic development plan called “Team Massachusetts: Leading Future Generations,” signed the $4 billion Mass Leads Act funding everything from AI hubs to climate tech, created a Competitiveness Council of 20 business and labor leaders, and filed a $400 million DRIVE Initiative to backfill federal research cuts. Healey also cited more than 30 companies that have recently moved headquarters here, opened offices, or expanded their footprint—including Hasbro, Lego, and prominent players in biotech and AI.
On paper, it’s an impressive portfolio. In practice, the results tell a different story. Massachusetts has become one of only four states with fewer private-sector jobs than before the pandemic—roughly 24,000 lost since January 2020, according to the Pioneer Institute. And from April through June 2024 alone, the state experienced a net loss of more than 5,000 businesses.
The political system backs Williams up. Healey’s 2023 tax-cut package—designed to make the state more competitive—was heavily watered down by the legislature, and her effort to give cities and towns more revenue-raising ability was dead on arrival. Wu’s commercial-property tax plan, which critics warned would accelerate the business exodus, couldn’t make it through the Senate. The state’s two most prominent leaders proposed and pushed hard for their biggest economic ideas—and neither could get them done.
While the evidence mounts, some on Beacon Hill whistle past the graveyard. “Our recent revenue numbers continue to show the resiliency of our economy,” House Ways and Means Chair Aaron Michlewitz said at a budget hearing in February. “While some folks are almost wishing us into some type of recession for political gain, the leadership in this State House will continue to navigate our fiscal stewardship with persistence.”
That’s not stewardship. That’s denial. And Williams calls recent state and local budget increases—well in excess of inflation—a sign of exactly that.
But denial is only part of the problem. In the basketball parlance so beloved by Healey, a former Harvard point guard, our political culture is like a star center whose ability to pivot toward the hoop is blocked at every turn by a swarming defense. Organized labor, a potent force on Beacon Hill, often throws up roadblocks to cost savings, education reforms, and responses to fast-moving developments like the AI revolution—Lynch, the AFL-CIO president, warns the state is “behind in understanding the consequences.”
Meanwhile, the pace of everything from permitting to transportation projects has been stifled. “Decisions that might take weeks are now taking months,” Murray says. “There’s gotta be an urgency across the board.”
And yet the constraints of rivalries, ideology, and special-interest pressure pale in comparison to what the citizens themselves may impose. This year’s ballot is on track to offer a record number of binding questions, including strict statewide rent control, a 20 percent cut in the state income tax, and the repeal of legal recreational marijuana sales—each of which would shrink state revenue at the worst possible time. “Ballot questions appeal to base interests,” says Eastern Bank executive chair Bob Rivers, who led the failed 2024 resistance to dumping MCAS test passage as a high school graduation requirement. Adds Brooke Thomson, president and CEO of AIM: “There’s a desire for sledgehammer-type solutions when what you need is a scalpel.”
Can Massachusetts be saved? The people who know the economy best don’t sound optimistic.
Can Massachusetts avoid catastrophe? We’ve been down before and bounced back. But the people who know the economy best don’t sound optimistic.
“I do think there are thoughtful conversations happening,” says Melnik of UMass. But former State Treasurer Steve Grossman, now CEO of the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, calls for a “radical re-imagination” of priorities and policy because “leadership at every level doesn’t fully understand the crisis that is at our door.” For his part, Williams urges state and local leaders to stop enacting policies that weaken Massachusetts’ competitive advantages. The ideas shared with us by political and business leaders are sensible and achievable—and, given the political realities, likely doomed to die in committee.
Senator Finegold, who sits on the Competitiveness Council created last fall by Healey, identifies construction regulations that slow housing development as an obvious target for reform and urges a reduction in long waiting lists for vocational/technical schools. Cubby Oil & Energy president Charlie Uglietto, who served on Charlie Baker’s Commission on Clean Heat, calls for a turn away from electricity-or-bust toward incentivizing renewable diesel, as other states are doing: “Take a look at what would economically work while we’re trying to meet these goals and not set hard caps that can’t be met.”
Housing reform, more vocational training opportunities, renewable diesel—sound ideas, all of them. But against a $12.8 billion tariff hit, a brain drain of 33,000-plus residents a year, and a federal government actively redistributing our funding—sensible may not be enough. The hard truth is that all too often we’d rather be right than competitive.
Can we muster some humility and, while resisting the worst of Trumpism, reinvent ourselves as a place willing to shed political and ideological baggage before it drags us under?
Consider the alternative. New Hampshire’s politicians spent the holidays bragging about every company they’ve stolen from us. Rhode Island is landing the German firms that used to come here without a second thought. The vultures aren’t circling. They’ve already landed.
Listen closely, and you can already hear what comes next if nothing changes.
Empty storefronts.
Deserted lab space.
Vacated neighborhoods.
And on the floor of the abandoned Cape Cod potato chip factory in Hyannis—the phantom crunch of chip fragments that no one is around to step on.
The Damage, at a Glance
24,000
Number of people who lost jobs in Massachusetts since January 2020.
5,333
Number of businesses that closed in the state from April through June 2024.
6
Number of healthcare systems, out of nearly two dozen, that ended last year with positive operating budgets.
905
Number of jobs lost in Massachusetts in January 2026 alone.
$12.8 billion
Projected loss in economic growth from tariffs in the state.
$1.7 billion
Forecasted Boston revenue shortfall due to the office-market implosion.
33,340
Net number of residents who left the state during the year ending last July.
12
Number of colleges closed and merged over the past decade.
The Plan for Massachusetts’ Future—and Why It’s Stuck
The Idea: Governor Healey’s 2023 tax cuts.
The Status: Watered down by the legislature.
The Idea: Revenue-raising authority for cities and towns.
The Status: Dead on arrival.
The Idea: Mayor Wu’s commercial-property-tax increase.
The Status: Killed in the Senate.
The Idea: The MBTA Communities Act.
The Status: Estimated less than a one percent housing increase after five years.
The Idea: The DRIVE Initiative ($400 million to backfill federal research cuts).
The Status: Filed.
The Idea: Mass Leads Act ($4 billion to fund everything from AI hubs to climate tech).
The Status: Signed.
The Idea: Clean heat standards.
The Status: Delayed.
The Idea: Offshore wind expansion.
The Status: Delayed
The Idea: Electric-vehicle sales quotas.
The Status: Delayed.
The Idea: State Senator Barry Finegold’s housing/zoning reform.
The Status: Proposed.
This article was first published in the print edition of the April 2026 issue, with the headline, “Going, Going…Gone.”
