The Massachusetts state budget is late (again). Should we care?

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It’s a new year, fiscally that is. July 1 marks the start of FY25, as the folks in the finance department say.

And once again, the Massachusetts state budget is late.

It’s become the norm on Beacon Hill. The last time Massachusetts enacted a state budget before its July 1 deadline, Barack Obama was in the early half of his first term as president and Jayson Tatum was doing interviews on the school bus.

Massachusetts is the only state in the country with such a lateness streak. In fact, according to my colleague Steve Brown’s chronicling, the budget has made its deadline only five times this century.

Top lawmakers say it’s not a big deal; they can pass monthly stopgap spending measures (as they did last week) to keep paying the bills. “I’ve had no constituent call me,” state Sen. Michael Rodrigues, one of the Legislature’s top budget-writers, told reporters last year.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t real-life impacts. Last year’s month-late budget complicated efforts to roll out new initiatives like free community college for those over 25 and free school meals. Some teachers saw union-negotiated cost-of-living raises briefly delayed.

Erin O’Brien, a political science professor at UMass Boston, says those may seem like small inconveniences. But together, they fuel a simmering disillusionment with government.

“It contributes to this idea that government is inefficient,” O’Brien said.

So, why are they regularly late?

For starters, the state budget is a big bill. It spans hundreds of pages and tens of billions of dollars — and is regularly packed with new (and sometimes controversial) policies that lead to drawn-out negotiations between the House and Senate. Massachusetts also has a more professionalized legislature than most other states and “drives the bus” on the budget more than its peers, according to O’Brien.

“They’re not a rubber stamp for the governor,” she said.

Lawmakers also are typically in session at the State House through July anyway. In 2019, then-Gov. Charlie Baker argued the extra month “usually ends up producing a better product than simply getting there by June 30.” And in all but three years since 2000, lawmakers have sent a budget to the governor before Aug. 1.

Perhaps the biggest reason for the chronic tardiness: little incentive to do better. Massachusetts has notoriously uncompetitive legislative races. Democrats have firm supermajorities in both chambers, where incumbents face few challengers. And voters have not shown they care about the perennial delays.

“If there were electoral consequences, they’d get it done on time,” O’Brien said.