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☀️Sunny, with highs around 80. Sunset is at 8:24 p.m.

It’s the last day of June, and Massachusetts lawmakers are set to vote on a $61.4 billion budget bill. If you’re a regular follower of the Massachusetts budget process, this might come as a surprise: lawmakers have been late in delivering a budget every year since 2016, and a governor has not signed a budget into law before the new fiscal year’s start since 2010.

The new fiscal year starts tomorrow. Once the legislature passes a budget, Gov. Maura Healey has 10 days to review it and decide whether to sign or veto it. In the meantime, there’s a one-month temporary budget in place to keep the state running. You can dig a little deeper into the budget process below after a few more news items.


Four Things to Know

1. Babies born in Massachusetts today (and going forward) will be U.S. citizens, regardless of their parents’ immigration status. But the situation is more complicated nationwide after the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling Friday limiting the power judges in federal courts have over rulings that impact the whole country.

Massachusetts was one of the states that sued challenging President Donald Trump’s executive order to stop automatically giving citizenship to babies born in the U.S.; 28 other states were not. Supreme Court rulings typically take effect 31 days after they are made public, said Sarang Sekhavat of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition. “It’s a fairly close split,” Sekhavat told GBH’s Sarah Betancourt. “A child born in 31 days in half the states will be a citizen, but a child born [to parents without immigration status] in 31 days in the other half of the states won’t be.”

2. Harvard’s Kennedy School is making plans in case the Trump administration blocks its international students from entering the country this fall. The Kennedy School, where about half of roughly 700 students come from other countries, has agreements with the University of Toronto to let international students study there, either online or in person, with classes co-led by Harvard faculty.

Marjorie Hass, president of the Council of Independent Colleges, called it part of a “chaos tax: institutions are having to take not just their financial resources but their time; their energy to plan for chaos of the country’s own making,” Hass told GBH’s Kirk Carapezza. “It’s really a tragedy and it impacts negatively every student in the country.”

3. Workers at Fenway Park spent the weekend preparing for a possible strike. The workers — from the people at concession stands to warehouse workers to souvenir salespeople — are still on the job for now, but may walk off if they and their employer, food service giant Aramark, can’t reach an agreement on issues like pay and protections from job automations.

Ramon Suarez, a warehouse runner at Fenway and members of UNITE Here Local 26, said he hasn’t seen anything like this in his 12 years at Fenway. “This is my third contract. The first two we didn’t even have enough people like this to do it,” he told GBH’s Esteban Bustillos. “Veterans like myself and people who have been there 15, 20, 30 years are actually seeing that, hey, if you don’t say anything, you won’t get anything.”

4. Researchers at the Museum of Fine Arts made a discovery: two artifacts in their collection, a head made of terracotta and iron and a bronze plaque, had been stolen from Benin by British soldiers in 1897.

So museum officials decided to give them back to their rightful owners — the descendants of the oba of the Kingdom of Benin, now in Edo State, Nigeria. “If we discover something in the collection that we don’t rightfully own, then we have a responsibility to return it,” said Victoria Reed, the museum’s curator of provenance.


Broker fee limits, no new taxes in $61 billion state budget deal set for Monday vote

What’s in the $61.4 billion legislation designed to fund Massachusetts over the next year? Continued funding for MassHealth, about $1 million to help health centers that offer gender-affirming care and have recently lost federal funds, and a 12% boost to Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s office as lawyers “continue to push back against any unconstitutional actions taken by the Trump administration,” House Speaker Ron Mariano said.

Also in there: language that says whoever hires a real estate broker must be the one to pay their fee. Currently, landlords often hire brokers to help them rent out apartments and charge the fee to tenants upon move-in.

“The truth is, we started this process with a lot of uncertainty, certainly more questions than answers coming from the federal government,” House budget chief Aaron Michlewitz said. “I think we end this process with still a lot of uncertainty coming from the federal government, but we had to try to get this budget done as quickly as possible, as right as possible, without understanding – not knowing, really, the long term effects of what’s going to happen with Washington.”

If Massachusetts legislators pass the budget today, it will be before they (or anyone) know exactly what form this year’s federal budget will take. That legislation — this year called the Big, Beautiful Bill — is still in the hands of the U.S. Senate. If Congress passes massive cuts to Medicaid and other programs, as some Republicans have promised, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey might have to change how our state spends its money, too, according to reporting from the State House News Service. Almost 2 million people here use MassHealth, the state’s Medicaid program.

Get more details from GBH’s Katie Lannan here. Our politics team will be following today’s vote and reporting back to you.