Even before Gov. Maura Healey entered the heart of campaign season — one that has been defined by skyrocketing energy costs and affordability issues — her administration has seemed sensitive to the price tag attached to the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars likely needed to support a sweeping green transition.

Community colleges, with their enrollment buoyed by tuition-free policies in recent years, "remain the largest source of new transfers at the state universities," said Mario Delci, associate commissioner for research and planning.

“Because restriction of firearm possession by those deemed too young to handle them safely outside of supervised settings is consistent with the nation's regulatory tradition," Wolohojian wrote, the majority upheld the lower court’s conviction.

Gov. Healey is right to look at this issue. Unfortunately, the proposal included in her supplemental budget bill, called “The Great Divide Act,” will likely only make the problem worse.

We should be fighting against that market domination, not enacting legislation that further enables it.

Given recent AI hacking incidents, CommonWealth Beacon checked back in with state officials to see how they’re protecting resident data flowing through an AI assistant. Here’s what you need to know.

Ballots are already printed with Oliver's name next to Minogue's as a joint ticket, and over 200,000 voters have already cast their ballots through early voting.

A debate between the campaigns supporting and opposing ballot Question 3 and the effort to bring all-party primaries to Massachusetts

For the first time since Barack Obama was president, Massachusetts did not land in dead last in Ballotpedia's biennial assessment of state legislative competition across the country.

Despite clear evidence that cannabis has had negative health effects in Massachusetts, our state has done little to survey and confront these harmful consequences.

The modernization project is a key phase of MassDOT's Springfield Area Track Reconfiguration Project, which will upgrade tracks, signals, and other infrastructure to ease a major rail bottleneck in the city by reducing conflicts between freight and passenger trains. West-East Rail construction is set to begin next year.

Gov. Maura Healey and Republican challenger Mike Minogue clashed over rising energy costs, abortion rights, and accountability for misconduct in their second and final gubernatorial debate before Election Day.

A project already pockmarked with delays and growing costs will once again stretch on longer than MBTA officials hoped, this time due to federal scrutiny of components shipped from China.

Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed.

Roughly 55 percent of Massachusetts adults who have opioid use disorder and are enrolled in MassHealth will need to satisfy new federal work requirements outlined in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

The change, if implemented, would “dramatically and inaccurately favor southern states where many northern residents, sometimes called snowbirds, spend some or all of the months of December through March, despite spending a majority of their time voting in and paying taxes to northern states like Massachusetts," Jessie Partride Guerrero, director of data services at the Metropolitan Area Planning Commission, testified.

As lawmakers debate the Massachusetts Data Privacy Act, they should be careful not to adopt an approach that unintentionally makes it harder and more expensive for local businesses to compete, grow, and innovate online.  

Regular people’s ability to sue businesses for the alleged violation of a law is called private right of action, and it is a necessary inclusion if the future Massachusetts data privacy law is to truly protect citizens’ rights, safety, and privacy. 

Schools can apply for funding and then use it for "age-appropriate" classroom instruction, materials, educator training and resources to help families support healthy social media use, according to the Healey administration.

Danielle Allen, a Harvard University professor who founded the group advancing Question 3, and Jordan Berg Powers, chair of Voting Rights MA, which is opposing the ballot initiative, faced off in a debate about all-party primaries, which is shaping up to be perhaps the most controversial of the nine ballot questions that will appear before Massachusetts voters in November.

Massachusetts public schools are entering an era of fewer children and students, but the causes and consequences of that decline look markedly different depending on where a district is located.

The legal challenge comes as the country considers the messy legal question of whether reproductive care services are being provided where the patient is — which may be a state with a ban — or where the abortion medication is issued.  

The complexity of our few bills tells us very little, if anything, however, about the quality of the bills or of the process that produced them. In fact, the complexity of bills covering multiple topics often only adds to the dysfunction and underperformance of our Legislature.

Democracy depends on being able to give positive and negative reinforcement to elected officials. Constituents should be able to praise legislators for what they do right and criticize them for what they do wrong. Omnibus bills weaken that ability, and that’s the point. 

The modern trend of relying on omnibus bills for routine legislative work is not a neutral choice. It turns a simple democratic process into a labyrinthine ordeal.