Massachusetts Legislation: All Churn, No Output?

With MA being given the prestigious Black Hole award, I wanted to see how productive MA is in terms of legislation. So below is a crude comparison in terms of numbers. It seems MA is pretty slow and it's not altogether clear why, though reform groups have been highlighting this.

In 2023, FiscalNote (a nonpartisan legislative analytics firm) ranked Massachusetts the least effective state legislature in the entire country. Out of 10,508 bills introduced that year, only 21 were enacted. That's an enactment rate of 0.2%. FYI: The next-worst state was Minnesota at 1.39%.

10,508 bills filed. Twenty-one became law. In a full calendar year. Yikes!

Over the full two-year session (2023–2024, the 193rd General Court), Governor Healey signed 391 session laws from about 10,159 bills filed. That's an enactment rate of 3.8%. That sounds better until you realize it represents a 45% decrease from the previous session under Governor Baker, which produced roughly 711 laws.

I pulled together what I could find for the four neighboring New England states, using the most recent completed session for each. Fair warning: these aren't perfectly apples-to-apples because Massachusetts and Vermont run two-year sessions while Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire run annual ones. But the broad picture is still hard to argue with.

Connecticut's part-time legislature passed nearly as many bills in a single year as Massachusetts managed in two. New Hampshire, where 400 House members are paid $100 a year and serve as volunteers, enacted roughly as many laws in one session as our full-time, fully salaried legislature did in a full biennium.

What are MA legislators doing with their time? That seems almost ridiculous.

It seems, yes, significantly —- at least if we look at raw numbers. The 192nd General Court (2021–2022, Baker's last session) produced roughly 711 session laws. Healey's first session came in at 391. That's a drop alright.

BUT the governor signs or vetoes what reaches his or her desk. The pipeline is controlled by legislative leadership. So the 45% drop isn't really a Baker vs. Healey story. It's a story about the legislature itself slowing down.

Several reform groups have been trying to explain (and fix) the problem, and they mostly point to the same cluster of structural issues.

Act on Mass published a report in February 2025 called "Full-Time Pay, Part-Time Progress" that laid out the core irony: Massachusetts is the only full-time legislature in New England, yet at the start of the new 2025 session, every single one of its part-time neighbors had already made committee assignments, started hearings, and passed at least one bill —- while Massachusetts hadn't even begun. Their diagnosis is that the lack of transparency allows leadership to delay proceedings indefinitely, and that the system rewards party loyalty over actually getting things done.

The Coalition to Reform Our Legislature (CROL) — a bipartisan group that grew out of a 2021 report called "Democracy in Decline" — goes after the power structure directly. Their big finding: the Speaker and Senate President control $5.3 million in extra pay annually through leadership and committee stipends that they assign at their discretion. Many of those positions involve little or no additional work. If your stipend depends on keeping leadership happy, you're not going to push a bill that leadership hasn't blessed. CROL also flagged something I found genuinely surprising: Massachusetts is the only state legislature in the country without an independent, nonpartisan research office. Legislators don't have their own policy analysts — they depend on leadership's staff for information, which just reinforces the power imbalance.

CROL updated their report in December 2025 — "Democracy in Decline: Denial and Delay" — and said nothing meaningful had changed.

GBH ran a piece in August 2024 asking the obvious question: "Why does the Massachusetts Legislature wait so long to do so much?" The answer, broadly, is that leadership uses the end-of-session deadline pressure to control what makes it into omnibus bills negotiated behind closed doors. Instead of steady legislating over two years, the bulk of policy gets crammed into the final days.

And there's a ballot initiative brewing. CROL's stipend reform proposal collected 96,797 certified signatures (they needed 74,574) and will be on the November 2026 ballot if the legislature doesn't pass it themselves. The reform would tie stipends to actual performance — legislators would only get extra pay if they're doing real committee work and meeting transparency standards like holding public hearings, public markups, and recorded votes. In other words, it would take the Speaker and Senate President's main reward-and-punishment tool and hand it to voters instead.

I woudn't hold my breath. It's like the hedgehogs voting to be in the race with the hares.

The Senate has already asked the Supreme Judicial Court for an advisory opinion on whether the ballot question is even constitutional (feels like that is their response to most things) —- but it tells you everything you need to know about how they feel by it.

I realize comparing a US state legislature to a national parliament is a bit like comparing apples to a completely different fruit. But the population sizes are surprisingly close —- Ireland has about 5 million people, Massachusetts has about 7 million — and the contrast in how legislation moves is kind of wild.

In 2024, the Irish Oireachtas (that's the national parliament) initiated 98 bills and enacted 48 of them. All 48 were government bills. Over the full term of the 33rd Dáil (2020–2024), about 199 bills were published and roughly 190 were enacted — a conversion rate above 95%. Ireland typically passes 40–50 Acts per year to govern the entire country.

Massachusetts passes roughly 195 per year (half of 391 over two years) to govern one state.

The systems are so different that the raw numbers are almost misleading. Ireland runs a Westminster-style system where the government controls the legislative agenda tightly — bills that get introduced are mostly expected to pass because they've already been through the policy machinery. Private Members' Bills rarely become law. Massachusetts is the opposite: thousands of bills enter the system with no realistic chance of passing — not mainly because of citizen petitions (that's only about 2–3% of filings), but because legislators refile the same failed bills session after session and there's no friction to filing in the first place.

But here's what I find interesting: both systems get criticized for the same underlying problem — that ordinary legislators don't have much independent power. In Ireland, the whip system means backbenchers mostly vote as they're told (more on this soon as a recent story from Ireland around fuel protests has brough this into focus). In Massachusetts, leadership decides which bills see the light of day. Different mechanics, same complaint.

A few things worth keeping in mind before drawing grand conclusions from this table:

You'll sometimes hear that Massachusetts files far more bills than its neighbors because of the "right of free petition"; a provision in Article 19 of the state constitution that lets any citizen ask their rep to file a bill on their behalf. That's true, it is unusual to Massachusetts, and it does sound like it would inflate the numbers. But when WBUR actually counted these citizen-filed "by request" bills, they found about 192 in a single session out of more than 6,000. That's roughly 2–3% of the total. Remove every single citizen petition from the count and you'd still have ~9,800 bills and 391 enacted. The right of free petition is interesting, but it doesn't explain the productivity gap here really.

From what I can see, the real inflation comes from refiling. instaTrac, which runs the MassTrac legislative tracking platform, found that 48% of bills filed in the current 2025–2026 session are refiles i.e. the same or substantially similar legislation that was filed in a previous session and didn't pass. Out of 6,853 bills submitted, roughly half already went through the process once, died in committee, and got filed again. There's no limit on how many times a legislator can refile the same bill! The trend has been growing over time, with a big spike in the 2021–2022 session (partly attributed to COVID pushing things onto the back burner) and only a slight decline since.

Are these substantive rewrites, or just copy-paste resubmissions? The Massachusetts legislature's own glossary defines a refiled bill as "a legislative document similar to or exactly the same as one that was presented to the General Court in a previous biennial year." So from that definition, I guess you can always change the document date and submit again - bizarre. instaTrac's MassTrac platform has a text comparison tool that lets you see the diff between versions. Some legislators do genuinely improve their bills between sessions, building co-sponsor support and refining the language. But when 48% of your filed bills are refiles and the enactment rate is still stubbornly low, it's hard to argue that most of them are coming back meaningfully improved. A lot of this looks like the legislative equivalent of hitting "resend" on an email nobody replied to.

So between citizen petitions and refiles, roughly half the bills entering the system aren't new legislation at all. They're either constituent requests nobody expects to pass or zombie bills making their second, third, or tenth lap because leadership let them die in committee last time, and the time before that. The system generates the appearance of legislative activity while much of the same material cycles through over and over without being acted on.

It feels like the equivalaent of that co-worker running around your office carrying a laptop pretending to look busy.

Here's what is notable: our neighbors don't really have this problem, and it's partly by design. Connecticut is one of 23 states that prohibit bill carryover entirely; bills don't survive from one session to the next, so if you want to try again, you start from scratch. Rhode Island runs annual sessions where bills that aren't passed by June need to be reintroduced the following year — similar clean-slate approach. New Hampshire has a two-year cycle, but committees can vote to "retain" a bill for further study, which is an affirmative decision —- someone has to decide the bill actually deserves more time, rather than just letting it quietly die and get refiled. Vermont runs a two-year biennium like Massachusetts, so bills can technically carry over, but Vermont files fewer than 800 bills per session compared to MA's 10,000+, so even if some get refiled, the scale is completely different.

Massachusetts combines three things none of its neighbors do simultaneously: no limit on refiling, no friction to filing, and a massive volume of bills. The result is a system that's uniquely good at generating legislative churn without legislative output.

On the other side of the ledger, a single MA omnibus budget bill can contain dozens of policy changes that other states would pass as separate legislation, so raw bill counts undercount actual policy output too. New Hampshire is an outlier in the other direction -- 400 volunteer legislators paid $100/year is a very different animal. And enacting fewer bills isn't automatically bad; it could reflect higher standards, if the low output were coming from genuine deliberation rather than a structural bottleneck.

The reform groups would argue that last distinction is exactly the point. It's not deliberation. It's a system where too few people control too many decisions, and everyone else waits.

I started this as a quick numbers exercise and ended up reading about a much bigger picture on how the Massachusetts legislature actually functions, or doesn't. The raw productivity numbers are striking, the comparison with neighbors is unflattering, and the structural explanations from Act on Mass, CROL, and others are hard to dismiss.

I'll be watching that 2026 ballot initiative closely. If Massachusetts voters get a direct say on whether to reform the stipend system that keeps legislative leadership in control, that could be the most consequential vote on State House reform in decades.

-- Emma

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