What Are We Getting?

Montgomery County Public Schools receives $3.6 billion per year — half the county's entire budget and more than the total operating budget of Howard County government. MCPS spends $210 million above what the state of Maryland requires. The result? Only 35.7% of students are proficient in math. Only 57% can read at grade level. For Hispanic and Latino students, just 32.1% are proficient in reading — a 46-point gap from their white classmates.

Meanwhile, MCPS administrative overhead runs at 45% of the budget, compared to 37% at Fairfax County Public Schools. That 8-point gap on a $3.6 billion budget translates to roughly $288 million per year in excess overhead. The workforce grew 13.3% over a decade even as enrollment flattened and then began declining.

The question isn't whether education matters. It's whether $3.6 billion is producing $3.6 billion worth of education. By every measurable outcome, it is not.

Montgomery County residents are roughly twice as likely to be victims of violent crime compared to Fairfax County residents, per capita. In 2023, Montgomery County experienced a 38% increase in homicides while Fairfax County saw a 21% decrease. The police department has lost 194 sworn officers in five years and now operates with a 14% vacancy rate among sworn staff.

The 911 Emergency Communications Center hit a 43% vacancy rate in FY2024. Police had to combine radio channels. Priority response times increased more than 17%. Patrol overtime surged 54%. Pension changes effective January 2025 mean up to one-third of the remaining force could be eligible to retire simultaneously.

The county spends $296 million on policing. It's not a funding problem. It's a retention, competitiveness, and management problem.

In July 2024, Montgomery County's rent stabilization law went into effect, capping annual rent increases at CPI plus 3%, with a hard cap of 6%. The stated goal was to protect renters. The actual result? Developers stopped building.

Multifamily building permits collapsed to just 54 in 2025 — a 96% decline. The county has 23,000 approved but unbuilt multifamily units sitting idle across 79 projects. Developers have the green light but won't break ground. Meanwhile, Fairfax and Arlington counties are far outpacing Montgomery in permit issuance. Housing units in Montgomery County grew just 1.0% from 2020 to 2024.

Rent control was meant to keep people housed. Instead, it froze the supply of new housing while demand kept growing.

Montgomery County's per capita income growth ranked 28th out of 30 peer counties studied by the county's own planning department. Discovery Communications left Silver Spring for New York in 2018 — the first Fortune 500 departure from Maryland in decades. Amazon chose Arlington, Virginia for HQ2. Maryland had offered $5 billion in incentives. It wasn't enough to overcome the tax differential.

Today, office vacancy in the Rockville-Bethesda corridor sits at 18.9%. Prince George's County now generates more new businesses than Montgomery County (22,452 vs. 16,471 in 2022). The county has lost 26,000 middle-income residents over two decades, while Fairfax lost only 2,500. The county's economic development corporation has had three CEOs in nine years and graduated exactly one company from its incubators in 2024.

The county added 1,218 full-time employees between FY2015 and FY2024, growing the workforce 13.5% while the population grew about 8%. In FY2026 alone, 156 new positions were created — plus 1,023 FTEs mandated by the Blueprint for Maryland's Future.

And yet: the grants office had 1.5 people doing the work of 3.5. The OIG was denied access to government records in February 2026 for the first time in Inspector General Limarzi's tenure. MCPS never collected $372,100 in contractual penalties from the electric bus vendor. The OIG found 85% of short-term rentals were unregistered.

The county doesn't need more people. It needs to deploy the people it has toward the things that matter.

Montgomery County maintains a AAA bond rating and 11.2% reserves — both indicators of technical solvency. But solvency is not efficiency. Revenue projections have been revised $854 million downward over six years. Moody's flagged the county's reduced OPEB pre-funding as "credit negative." The county faces a structural deficit of approximately $115 million as spending commitments outpace revenue growth.

The county has not published a comprehensive fiscal sustainability plan that reconciles its spending trajectory with realistic revenue projections. The question is not whether a correction is coming. It's whether it will be planned or forced.

A AAA bond rating means the county can borrow money. It doesn't mean the money is being spent wisely.