Property taxes have been hiked 13% on top of last year's 10.4% — the largest hike Boston has seen in nearly two decades. Electric bills keep climbing. The streets are full of potholes. The parks are full of needles. The cost of living here has gotten steep enough that 180,000 residents have packed up and left Massachusetts since 2020. And yet, somehow, Mayor Wu has grown the city budget by more than a billion dollars since taking office, and still finds Boston short.

Yes, she's cutting things — veterans, firefighter cancer screening, the lines that actually keep the city running. The total budget is still up by a billion. The belt isn't being tightened; the money is being moved. In the middle of all this, Mayor Wu also received a $43,000 raise — comfortably waved through by a city council majority loaded with her own allies. The same council, days earlier, killed a resolution to restore the firefighter cancer screening that the mayor cut. Coincidence is a strong word. So is rubber stamp.

This week, Boston's nearly $1 million Office of LGBTQIA2S+ Advancement co-sponsored a "Trans Period Pride" event at the Boston Public Library — free period underwear handed out at the door, a "consciousness-raising discussion on menstrual equity and the experiences of trans menstruators" on the agenda. The same library is running 19 drag queen story hours for children in June alone. The same city was, last month, writing $500 yoga and massage vouchers for "LGBTQ+ migrants" — until Mass Daily News exposed the whole thing and Wu was forced to walk it back.

This is also the administration that, in the same fiscal year, proposed cutting Veterans Services by 14% — and is reportedly preparing to walk the cut back after weeks of public backlash, per councilor Erin Murphy, who said she was "hearing encouraging news" the administration would fully restore the line. The same budget quietly refused to restore $1.4 million in federal funding for firefighter cancer screening, money that had paid for hundreds of skin-cancer screenings and caught two potential melanomas in its most recent year. A late council resolution to restore the firefighter money was killed when one of Wu's own councilors objected on the spot. Veterans are reportedly getting their funding back — only after public outcry and council pressure. Firefighters are not.

The math here is not difficult. With a billion dollars more to play with than when she took office, Mayor Wu has stood up a constellation of new identity offices, each with its own staff, mission statement, and six-figure director. The Office of LGBTQ+ Advancement alone costs taxpayers nearly a million dollars a year. The city's DEI line item has ballooned from $900,000 in her first year to $22 million today. Until recently, the director of Boston's economic strategy was a $184,000-a-year history major hired to manage the worst commercial-real-estate collapse in living memory — all while embroiled in scandal. He has, thankfully, since been shown the door. The deputy director of the LGBTQ+ office was arrested for slamming a woman into a wall and kept on the city payroll for months — a story Mass Daily News broke on its very first day of publication. When you create the offices, the offices have to be fed. The basics get the leftovers.

There are addicts shooting up on park benches in this city, and children walk past them on the way home from school. Last fall, Mayor Wu's own health chief admitted to a stunned audience that Boston is handing out roughly 80,000 needles a month — at taxpayer expense, with no requirement those needles ever come back. They end up inside Back Bay apartment buildings, on the floor of the public library, in front of someone's child — anywhere, in other words, except a treatment program.

A man was found smoking crack, naked, on a Beacon Hill family's couch earlier this month after walking in through their front door. Residents in once-quiet neighborhoods have started documenting the chaos themselves, having long ago given up on the city doing it for them.

One does begin to suspect that the mayor's primary constituency is not, in fact, the people of Boston. Mayor Wu has spent the past year jetting to Munich for international conferences, giving speeches at Harvard, courting the national press, and signing Boston up for European mayoral pacts on pro-refugee policy. Last fall, she even flew to Nova Scotia to personally pick up the city's annual Christmas tree — a photo-op that ballooned into a roughly $13,000 taxpayer spectacle complete with personal photographer, police escort, and a waterfront hotel for her and her family.

Mayor Wu's posture toward the federal government comes with a price tag, and the people paying it are not the mayor. Boston has already lost roughly $355 million in federal funding, with another $280 million on the chopping block, as the city tangles with the Trump administration over its sanctuary stance. The mayor has been hiring the kind of DC and Manhattan lawyers who do not, as a rule, bill at Boston rates.

I get the politics. I get that ICE should not be raiding churches and schools, and that a city has a legitimate interest in protecting families simply trying to get to work. But Mayor Wu should not be proud, in 2026, that her sanctuary stand has at various times sheltered a convicted murderer and kidnapper and a man charged with possession of child sexual abuse material and indecent assault on a child until federal agents hauled them out themselves. That is not sticking it to Donald Trump. That is sticking it to the residents who have to live next door.