When Josh Shapiro defeated Republican challenger Doug Mastriano by an overwhelming margin to become the Governor of Pennsylvania in 2022, the rumor mill immediately began to clatter, claiming that Shapiro’s win and subsequent new job would merely serve as a steppingstone to the U.S. presidency. 

While Shapiro decides whether to declare his candidacy for the 2028 election, it does not, for the moment, overshadow what has become an embarrassing display of dirty pool being played out in Harrisburg, as Democratic and Republican lawmakers confront the massive delay in passing the state’s 2025-2026 fiscal year budget.

This behavior has become commonplace in the rigid halls of Pennsylvania lawmaking; despite Shapiro proposing a $51.4 billion budget back in February, this latest snafu becomes the fourth consecutive year that the state budget will not be delivered on time. In short, the June 30 deadline has come and gone. The reason for the hold-up, Senate Republicans, House Democrats and Shapiro claim, is how much the proposed budget will spend, the degree to which public transportation should be funded and the nagging issue of determining how to raise the state’s revenues.

A generous chunk of Shapiro’s proposed increased funding was targeted toward helping residents pay for rising Medicaid costs, helping fund some of the poorer school districts in the Commonwealth and providing additional funding for public transportation. In response, Republicans in Harrisburg have cried poverty, saying that Shapiro’s bill is well above the state’s financial means. 

The yapping continues. 

The Northeast Republican Delegation of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives recently issued a press release excoriating the budget impasse, saying “The people of the Commonwealth deserve the services and programs they pay their hard-earned tax dollars for. This year’s budget was due on June 30, yet families, seniors and communities across Pennsylvania are now being held hostage by unnecessary gridlock in Harrisburg.”

Meanwhile, Shapiro has purposely swatted at a hornet’s nest, implying that Republicans are intentionally sitting on a budget resolution for political reasons, in an effort to discredit Shapiro, who may run for reelection next year. Add to this the possibility that Mastriano may want to re-enter the gubernatorial race, while state Treasurer Stacy Garrity – a Republican – has been widely speculated that she will also campaign to become Pennsylvania’s next governor.
As the two-sides-of-the-aisle finger-pointing continues in this quagmire of an impasse, those who are truly suffering are not our state’s elected lawmakers, but hard-working Pennsylvanians who voted their representatives into their offices because they trusted them to make the right decisions for all Pennsylvanians. That trust has eroded; for the last several months, funding estimated to total $2.5 billion has remained on hold for the state’s counties, schools, non-profit organizations and human service providers. Without a passed budget, state distributions to essential resources like child welfare services, assistance for the homeless, behavioral health care and alcohol and drug addiction recovery centers are currently stalled.

With each passing day that residents continue to hear the cheap and tawdry claims of “They Said, They Said,” the financial stranglehold on them – not the lawmakers - gets tighter and tighter, in the form of a noose, fastened by the hands of our state’s most influential lawmakers, painful and permanent.