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Doug Howgate’s resume includes a rise through the ranks of the Market Basket in Fitchburg, a job at the pharmacy at Hanscom Air Force Base, and a stint at the Worcester art gallery at the college he was attending, Holy Cross.
Good jobs for a teenager from Townsend, near the New Hampshire border, but also random ones. In 2003, there was a recession happening, and there weren’t many jobs for political science majors like himself who were entranced by Aaron Sorkin’s TV show “The West Wing.” Howgate was considering law school.
A college field trip to the State House changed his trajectory, setting him on the path to becoming one of the most closely read, and highly respected, budget analysts on Beacon Hill. “It just so happened to be a Ways and Means hearing,” Howgate, who has been the president of the business-backed Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation since January 2023, said of that springtime college tour.
The head of the Senate internship program turned out to be a Holy Cross grad, as was Howgate’s state senator at the time, Bob Antonioni.
An internship led to a job as a legislative aide. Antonioni was the Senate chair of the Legislature’s Education Committee “when the state was going through another school finance reform discussion, and I got assigned school finance because, honestly, no one else wanted to do it,” Howgate recalled with a chuckle. “It just was such a cool opportunity to see policymaking in action. It's not like I was crafting the details of that at the time, but you got to be in the meetings and in the room for some of it. And I knew early on, ‘Oh, I think I want to do something like this for my career,’ as opposed to going to law school.”
Chapter 70 — Beacon Hill shorthand for state aid to public elementary and secondary schools — can be an intimidating topic for anyone. “It was definitely intimidating to me as a 22-year-old kid,” Howgate said. “And so you kind of say to yourself, ‘Well, let's start small. Let's try to understand the big picture of how this thing works together.’ Then you start to think about what we are hearing from folks about what's wrong with it. And trying to fit all that into a little bit of a model you have in your mind about how this issue works, and what are some of the pluses and the minuses?” That approach, in Howgate’s view, can apply to any number of different policy areas.
Howgate charted his start on Beacon Hill during a sit-down with MASSterList inside high-ceilinged Boston News Cafe, next door to Boston City Hall, back in April, just as a busy budget season was starting up. Howgate, who is 45, picked the location, a favorite haunt of his, due to its combination of always available seats and natural light from the tall windows.
As we tucked into our lunches I teased him over his resume having stints with the state Senate three different times. There was his time with Antonioni and later jobs as a budget director for Senate Ways and Means and a senior adviser to Senate President Karen Spilka. And yet his analyses are still trusted by House lawmakers, I said.
“I always found everyone, every office has their own incentives and things they do,” he responded with a smile, remembering a meeting when he was 22 that made an impression on him. He sat down with charter school proponents and representatives of teachers unions in separate meetings. Each side rejected that the opposing side had any compelling motives that activated them.
“For me, in working in the Senate, and I think I would have been the same way had I worked in the House, there's always gonna be a room to disagree,” he said. “The nature of the system is conflict, right? But as long as you assume that your counterparts want to advance good policy, they want to do things that make sense and try to work within that prism, I've always found that to be a much more constructive prism to work through.”
When he was working for Senate Ways and Means, Howgate interacted often with the MTF, which was headed by Mike Widmer. Gov. Deval Patrick had proposed a tax on software in 2013, something MTF opposed. It was a unique experience of learning to work with people “even when you’re not on the same page,” Howgate said. “I remember talking to them afterwards, thinking about what might be next, talking about MTF. I ended up staying at Ways and Means for another year and a half.”
Widmer would eventually leave and Howgate landed at Massport as deputy chief of staff. Widmer’s successor Eileen McAnneny reached out to him. “They were looking for someone to do some of their budget stuff. Obviously, I had a background in that,” Howgate said. “One of the things I love about MTF is there's not that many places you can work that are respected, credible, and also have a wide breadth of what they focus on. And so it's not just policy area X or Y, but you can do a little bit of everything, which I always really liked. And so it just seemed like a really good place to maintain that jack-of-all-trades path in the policy world, and that was the connection.”
In his time at MTF — he returned in 2021 as executive vice president after two years in Spilka’s office, and then ascended to MTF president — Howgate has earned a reputation as a fast-talking straight-shooter when he appears before committees. He and his team, he said, look to “carve out a path where people read what we say first and listen to what we say, and don't immediately start with the idea that, well, of course they're going to say this because of X, Y and Z.”
Accuracy is key, according to Howgate, and something he stresses internally. “We do feel like we have a unique role and unique opportunity of writing about these things, doing it in a way that people need,” he said.
Gin Dumcius is the former editor of MASSterList.
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HAPPENING TODAY
8:30 | Group Insurance Commission meets | More Info and Livestream
11:00 | Gov. Healey attends the Black and Latino Legislative Caucus's Juneteenth flag-raising ceremony. First Lady Lydgate and Lt. Gov. Driscoll are also attend. Other speakers includes Reps. Williams, Tyler, Vargas and Fluker-Reid, and Sen. Miranda | Out front of the State House
10:00 | Senate President Spilka, Ways and Means Chairman Rodrigues and Health Care Financing Chairwoman Friedman hold a press conference to discuss the primary care bill (S 3116) expected to pass the Senate today that looks to pump billions into the sector and grow the workforce | Senate Reading Room
12:30 | Mayor Wu gives remarks at the City of Boston’s Juneteenth flag raising ceremony | City Hall Plaza, 1 City Hall Square, Boston
1:30 | Ballot Law Commission plans to continue hearings on two objections seeking to disqualify Republican candidate for lieutenant governor Anne Manning Martin from the ballot | 1 Ashburton Place, 17th floor conference room, Boston
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FROM BEACON HILL
CLOSING IN ON ENERGY: Senate Ways and Means Chair Michael Rodrigues said he hopes to release the chamber’s long-awaited energy bill on Thursday, while energy point-person Sen. Michael Barrett said “new ideas” have emerged over the last few days, causing delays. — State House News Service
CURBING WRONG-WAY DRIVING: Gov. Healey announced on Wednesday increased efforts to prevent and identify wrong-way driving, and said the state has already seen the new systems working. — GBH
FINAL GRAD REQUIREMENT RECS DROP: Final recommendations issued Wednesday on graduation requirements for high schoolers suggest students must pass end-of-course exams, finish a capstone-like project, and more, beginning in 2032. The recs come less than two years after voters chose to get rid of the MCAS standardized test as the state’s grad requirement. — Boston Globe
MICHLEWITZ ON RENT CONTROL: House Ways and Means Chair Aaron Michlewitz said Wednesday that proponents of the rent control ballot proposal need to get "a large group of other folks in the real estate community on board" for a true compromise to materialize. — State House News Service
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HOLYOKE BANS AI DATA CENTERS: The city of Holyoke became the first community in Massachusetts to ban artificial intelligent data center development over 12 megawatts, including one $200 million project already in the works in the city. — Daily Hampshire Gazette
WARREN BACKS LANDER: U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren endorsed former Mayor Wu aide and first-time candidate Daniel Lander in his race to unseat Sen. William Brownsberger, who was part of Senate opposition to Wu’s proposal to shift property tax burden that died on Beacon Hill. — Boston Globe
MOULTON STAKES: Congressman Seth Moulton, while serving on the House Armed Services Committee, holds stakes worth at least $1 million in startups linked to the defense sector. — WBUR
ISLAND LOCKUP: All six of the towns on Martha’s Vineyard recognized the Dukes County Sheriff’s Office as the island’s “regional lockup location,” which officials said was necessary to secure state funding for the longtime service. — MV Times
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