Our Massachusetts legislature is an outlier among state legislatures: the least productive and least transparent. In 2021, PDM convened a Legislative Reform Working Group that issued a report titled The Massachusetts Legislature: Democracy in Decline, which detailed the state of dysfunction and explored the causes. The Working Group and this report were the genesis of the Coalition to Reform Our Legislature (CROL), a bipartisan group including PDM that is committed to reform of the operation of the legislature.
In December 2025, CROL published an update to the 2021 report, entitled Democracy in Decline: Denial and Delay. In the four years since, the update details the lack of real progress despite heightened attention of the press to and awareness among the public of the problem, and the State Auditor’s efforts, still unsuccessful, to audit the legislature. It then assesses how the climate for reform has changed and whether and how the legislature has responded.
Earlier, in January 2025, CROL filed two bills in the 2025-2026 legislative session: H.D. 4303 / S.D. 1301 to reform the legislative stipend system by which leadership supplements members’ pay; and H. 3892 / S.D. 2614 to create offices of legislative research and fiscal analysis.
The two CROL bills were filed in accordance with House and Senate rules, yet both chambers bypassed the typical process of giving them bill numbers, assigning them to committees, and holding formal hearings on them, leaving the public in the dark about them. Therefore, CROL organized its own People’s Hearing on the bills on June 17, 2025, outside the Statehouse. The bills were presented and discussed in detail with testimony from a bipartisan group of advocates, former legislators, and members of the public. Those testifying unanimously supported passage of both bills.
Because CROL saw no hope that the legislature would enact stipend reform, it created the Legislative Effectiveness and Accountability Partnership (LEAP) committee to put the stipend reform bill on the ballot as an initiative petition. LEAP collected enough signatures of registered voters to qualify the stipend reform proposal for the November 2026 ballot. At least 74,574 certified signatures were required and LEAP collected 96,797 certified signatures. Thus, the stipend reform proposal will be transmitted to the legislature, and then, assuming the legislature fails to pass it into law, to the MA ballot on November 3, 2026.
BACKGROUND
The legislative stipend system in Massachusetts is by far the largest and most expensive in the country. Currently, the Speaker and Senate President control $5.3 million in extra pay annually for leadership and committee positions, which they assign, many of which involve little or no additional work or responsibility. The lure of extra pay and fear of losing it have made the stipend system a powerful tool by which legislative leaders exercise control over rank-and-file members.
Under CROL’s stipend reform bill, the number and dollar amount of leadership position stipends would be dramatically reduced (by half or more). Stipends would only be paid to legislators taking on significant work or responsibility (e.g., chairs of committees with 50 or more bills). Stipends would be further conditioned on committees operating in an open, participatory, and accountable way. However, every legislator without a leadership position stipend would receive an annual stipend of $16,409 to make it more affordable to serve in the legislature. Please see here for a detailed explanation of our stipend reform bill.
CROL’s other bill calls for the creation of two offices to be headed and staffed by non-partisan, independent experts in policy analysis, bill-drafting, and economics, including revenue forecasting and analysis of the fiscal impact of proposed bills. Massachusetts is unique among state legislatures in not having a dedicated office or committee tasked with providing research, analysis, and bill drafting services to legislators.