Commentary

Wes Moore’s foreseeable victory has allowed him and his team plenty of time to develop policy priorities, and his transition team’s Executive Policy Committees have already gotten to work on how to achieve goals that will fall under the Departments of the Environment, Commerce, Education, and more. But the incoming administration has done little to telegraph how it will manage the Department of Agriculture, and as Josh Kurtz recently noted in Maryland Matters, it’s hard to speculate directly on appointments. Without public clues as to who the administration is considering to lead the department, all that’s available is to lay out what directions they might take and why.

People who do not live in Baltimore have always engaged in cross-border opinionizing by freely offering comments about the city and how its government ought to be run. County residents like to get into city business, and it’s good they care. I get mail all the time from readers who have much to say about the city where they work, once lived and sometimes visit. I welcome and consider their opinions, as long as they emanate from sincere desire to see Baltimore improve and not from some sick glee at the city’s struggles. The latter gets the delete key.

A law enforcement strategy emerged in the 1990s that employed stepped-up policing of lesser infractions under the theory that people targeted under this approach would be prevented or deterred from committing more serious crimes. “Broken windows” policing was a phrase applied broadly to the strategy used in New York City in the 1990s in reaction to rising violent crime and an expanding illegal drug trade that plagued some of the city’s neighborhoods. The city experienced sharp declines in murders and other violent crimes.

Dorian Walker, the executive director of Family Survivor Network, told us he went without pay for all of 2020 so his nonprofit could afford to continue delivering services to youth impacted by violence in Baltimore. The reason for Walker’s salary sacrifice? Late payments his organization was owed by the city. Our research shows that payments to nonprofits are frequently delayed a year or more past their original due dates. For a large nonprofit, with reserves and a line of credit, this gap often represents an unplanned bridge-loan to the city. For small ones, like Walker’s, it’s an existential threat.

Americans keep having to learn and relearn the same sorry lesson: Protectionism makes our supply chains less resilient, not more. This may again become painfully evident when tariffs on baby formula return in two weeks. For much of 2022, parents across the richest country in the world struggled to feed their babies. At the worst point of the infant-formula shortage, out-of-stock rates reached 74 percent nationally and 90 percent in a handful of states. Shortages landed some babies in the hospital.