With his first budget plan in, Moore’s proposals begin to take shape against a backdrop of uncertain financial forecasts

Gov. Wes Moore leaned back on the couch in his sparse office — undecorated, so far, aside from a portrait of Frederick Douglass — in the State House and said with a smile that the $63 billion budget he’d just proposed should be anything but surprising. The Democratic governor campaigned on his support of transportation investments, such as the Baltimore east-west light rail route called the Red Line, and education initiatives, like the decadelong program to invest in public schools, called the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future. Each — the Blueprint specifically and transportation projects generally — would get $500 million boosts in the budget plan he announced Friday.