Good morning,

Look… I’m not saying that Speaker Mariano reads the Saturday Scoop… but…

Last week, we discussed the potential impacts to reproductive healthcare in Massachusetts from Trump’s Big B***tiful Bill. We mentioned that the House was sitting on the Healthcare SHIELD Act, which would protect providers of gender-affirming and reproductive care in Massachusetts from outside scrutiny. I imagine some Scoop readers contacted your representatives to tell them: we want a vote on the SHIELD act! And guess what they did this week? 

Well, let’s see. Legislators held a hearing on Governor Healey’s $3 billion environmental bond bill, which has been criticized for not going far enough to address drought and other impacts. Another committee heard testimony on a bill that would implement a generational ban on tobacco products, which gaining steam at the municipal level. The old boys club on Beacon Hill was revealed to be alive and well as committee Chair John Lawn pled guilty to an OUI and fleeing the scene of an accident just blocks from the state house at 1:45 AM on Wednesday. And… (drumroll please) the Massachusetts House passed the SHIELD Act. 

These legislative activities took place amidst new Joint Rules, finally passed after years of organizing by Act on Mass and our allies in the movement for transparency on Beacon Hill. However, the actual implementation of these rules leaves us wondering: are they still trying to avoid scrutiny, or was this roll-out poorly planned? We’ll cover some of the gaps in rules implementation in today’s Scoop. 

For those interested in a full deep dive, we are hosting a “Transparency Campaign Update” with allies this Monday 7/21 at 6:30 PM on Zoom! Join us to discuss what these new joint rules mean for our organizing, how the House and Senate are implementing them (or not), and what we can do to hold them accountable.

GIVE US RECS TO VISIT YOUR DISTRICT>>

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State House Scoop

Passing SHIELD Act, state house takes first official anti-Trump move of 2025

Whether inspired by the Saturday Scoop or not, the MA House passed the SHIELD Act on Wednesday. The version passed by the House incorporates slight changes to the Senate version passed in late June. This bill aims to boost protections for Massachusetts providers of reproductive and gender-affirming care, to prevent targeting by out-of-state actors. The two chambers will now appoint a conference committee to hammer out a final version. 

The House vote was a departure from how most votes go in the Massachusetts House: the Democratic caucus did not move in lockstep. Five Democrats supported a Republican-filed amendment that would have extended additional protections to parents seeking to block their children’s access to gender-affirming care: Rep. Colleen Garry of Dracut, Rep. Francisco Paulino of Methuen, Rep. David Robertson of Tewksbury, Rep. Alan Silvia of Fall River, and Rep. Jeff Turco of Winthrop. Three of these Dems voted against the final bill: Garry, Silvia, and Turco. 

Although the fact received little fanfare from members of leadership, this bill is the first to be passed as part of the Senate’s underwhelming “Response 2025” initiative, which they announced in April. 

Let’s read that again: a full six months into the Trump administration’s dismantling of the federal government, the Democratic-supermajority Massachusetts state house has produced its first real policy response to protect its own citizens. About time fellas! 

Slow rules implementation– preserving opacity or poor planning? 

Not sure about you, but my calendar reads July 19th, 2025. That means we’re almost a full month since June 23rd, 2025, which is when the House and Senate announced their finalized agreement on Joint Rules, codifying some of our key transparency changes. 

Unfortunately, it seems like someone has forgotten to tell the House and Senate! In a joint investigation with Progressive Mass, we documented several transgressions of the new Rules. 

The biggest offender is the House’s new rolling deadline. As a reminder, the House introduced a new rule to their House rules and the Joint Rules which gives House members a 60 day deadline to report on a bill following its’ hearing, with a possible 30 day extension. Yet, an analysis of hearings this year demonstrates that no committees took action within 60 days of their hearing. Of 15 committees that have now passed 90 days since their hearing, only 6 have taken the required action on their bills. Of those 6, only 3 have made the associated vote public on the website– and each has put it in a different location. 

Other rules changes have also been ignored by Joint Committees. Some advocates have had to scramble as hearings are scheduled with fewer than 10 days notice. The FY 2026 budget was seemingly passed the same day it was released from conference committee, in violation of the new rule requiring 24 hours to read conference committee reports. Lastly, not all committees have been making plain language bill summaries public prior to hearings– despite the rule requiring them. 

Luckily, you’ve got a watchdog team following up on these. I recently called the Joint Committee on State Administration and Regulatory Oversight regarding the missing bill summaries for their recent hearing. It was not clear that staff had been informed that summaries are supposed to be posted prior to the hearings. Once I mentioned the new rule, a staff member told me, very kindly, that “the rules change happened very recently,” but they’d be willing to email me the files once they were ready. 

Which reminds us: ultimately, the implementation of many of these rules changes will be a question of staff capacity. Staff may not have a role in making sure that bills are being voted on on-time. Yet, for new measures such as public committee votes, public testimony, and plain-language bill summaries, the change consists of making information clear and putting it on the legislature’s website. This can be time-consuming, and you can rest assured that it won’t be the electeds inputting “yeas” and “nays.” 

House and Senate leaders had 6 months– without much else to do– to prepare for these rules changes. They could have and should have gotten ready by boosting staff capacity and ensuring that staff were well-briefed on new expectations for transparency disclosures. In fact, in past years, representatives have cited the potential burden on staff as a reason for not supporting transparency changes. Yet, now that leadership has green-lighted transparency changes, it is not clear that staff has gotten the support needed to fully implement them. 

This echoes an unfortunately common theme in the Massachusetts State House. Although staff form the backbone of the work done in the People’s House, they are chronically underpaid and overworked. They also remain one of the only workplaces in the state without the right to collectively bargain. Staffers should have a seat at the table in decisions that impact their working lives and the quality of legislation they handle, which touches all of our lives. 

Control over staffing is also another way that House and Senate leadership maintain control over rank-and-file members. For all these reasons, Act on Mass has madeS.1343/H.2093,** An Act relative to collective bargaining rights for legislative employees**a main priority of our Good Government Agenda. 

With the new rules changes in mind, please make sure your representatives are co-sponsoring this important legislation and let them know that you support staffer’s rights to a healthy and productive work environment. 

SUPPORT LEGISLATIVE STAFFERS>>

Worth reading

Some other important stories from Beacon Hill this week: 

Transparency on Tour: Progress Report

Let's keep building our movement! Upcoming dates: 

  • Church Green Farmers Market Taunton, July 20th - 9 am - 1 pm in Taunton
  • East Boston Farmers Market, July 23rd - 3 pm - 6:30 pm at Central Square Park in East Boston
  • Mission Hill Farmers Market, July 25th - 11 am - 6 pm at Roxbury Crossing Station in Boston
  • Pittsfield Farmers Market, July 26th - 9 am - 1 pm at Pittsfield Common in Pittsfield
  • Davis Square Farmers Market, July 30th - 12 pm - 6 pm in Somerville
  • Lynn Ward 4 Community Festival, August 2nd - 11 am - 4 pm at High Rock Park in Lynn
  • Fall River Farmers & Artisan Fair, August 3rd - 10 am - 2 pm in Fall River
  • Central Square Farmers Market, August 11th - 12 pm - 6 pm Central Square, Cambridge

If one of these are in your district or a district you want to visit, join us to table!

HELP US HIT 40 DISTRICTS THIS SUMMER>>

Missed a Scoop or two? You can find a full archive of all past Saturday Scoops on our blog.

Syd's Sprinkles: Protecting Bay Staters from surveillance tech 

A statewide debate about cooperation of local law enforcement agencies with immigration enforcement enters new territory: did you know that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) entities have access to information that local law enforcement agencies compile via surveillance technology?

Unfortunately, they do. And recent reporting indicates that the Boston Police Department (BPD) hasn’t been following a 2022 ordinance meant to protect people’s privacy from new surveillance technology. 

In 2021, the City of Boston voted on and passed an ordinance which requires “community control over police surveillance (CCOPS).” This ordinance was meant to stop BPD from surveilling communities without their involvement in the decision-making process. 

When the ordinance went into effect in 2022, even existing surveillance technology used by BPD was required to resubmit for approval from the Boston City Council before it was able to be used again in neighborhoods across Boston. 

As of February 2024, the Mayor has also been required to submit an annual report on how the technology has been used, which allows the City Council to make adjustments to their approvals accordingly. 

During the approval process, Bostonians are able to testify either in favor or against the use of the surveillance technology both in person – during hearings held by the City Council – and virtually – via emails to the City Council. 

While there is much more to the ordinance, which you can read about on the ACLU’s website here, the bottom line is that there are meant to be protections and opportunities for communities to advocate either for or against the use of surveillance technology based on the wishes of the people of Boston. 

Unfortunately, and somewhat unsurprisingly, this ordinance has not been followed correctly by the BPD: recent reports reveal that around the 2024 presidential election and again in February 2025, BPD deployed new surveillance technology without getting the prior approval of the Boston City Council. 

While there are situations – i.e. “exigent circumstances” – where the heads of the various governmental offices are able to use new technology without prior approval, like the presidential elections in November of 2024, Flipside News reports that there is seemingly no explanation for the deployment of the surveillance technology in February of this year. 

In writer Yawu Miller’s piece for The Flipside entitled “Boston police deploy surveillance tech without council approval,” it is reported that some of the new technologies that BPD deployed without the City Council’s approval has also been used in the past, such as during post-9/11 national security surveillance by the federal government. 

Today, this same software and others like it are being deployed against people peacefully protesting the war in Gaza, which groups like the Muslim Justice League – a group whose purpose is to “to educate, organize, and advocate for communities whose rights are threatened under national security pretexts” – find troubling. Furthermore, the technology is not being targeted at everyone: Miller points out that it is especially troubling that BPD did not use this surveillance technology during a violent march conducted by Patriot Front, a white supremacist group, in downtown Boston in 2022, during which a Black man was assaulted.  

In relation to federal agencies having access to local information and profiles built by these surveillance technologies, there is actually an agency that was established with federal funding that has the sole purpose of sharing information between federal and local agencies. The federal government, including immigration enforcement, and federal agencies have access to this information through the Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC). 

With federal agencies under the Trump administration clearly targeting certain members of our communities, BPD’s noncompliance with the 2022 ordinance and the federal government’s access to the information collected by unapproved surveillance technology is troubling. 

If local law enforcement is willing to disregard municipal ordinances, we need our state government to step in to protect us. Lawmakers could move to protect people from the selling of their location data that is stored on their cellular devices like the Location Shield Act. They could also act directly on cooperation with ICE by passing the Safe Communities Act, which prevents local law enforcement from working with ICE. 

If you’d like to see protective legislation passed in the face of an increasingly threatening federal administration, reach out to your legislator and urge them to support the passage of the Location Shield Act (H.86, S.197) and the Safe Communities Act (H.2580, S.1681).

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Take Action

Tell Gov. Healey and your reps: no to $360 million in new prison spending!

Our allies at Free Her MA have put together an action kit: use it today to take a stand against new prison spending! 

"NO" TO $360 MILLION FOR WOMENS PRISON>>

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That's a wrap! Enjoy your weekend– we'll be back next week. 

In solidarity,

Scotia

Scotia Hille (she/her)

Executive Director, Act on Mass