Wes Moore Knows What Happens When the Systems Fail. Now He's Running One.

Maryland's governor has spent three years building policy around what he lived.

Jun 18, 2026

Wes Moore’s first book begins with a line that doubles as a governing philosophy: “The other Wes Moore is a drug dealer, a robber, a murderer. I am a Rhodes Scholar, a White House Fellow, a former Army officer. Yet our situations could easily have been reversed.” Two boys, same name, same neighborhood, different outcomes. Moore spent the next fifteen years arguing that the difference between those outcomes was structural, not personal. Then he became governor of Maryland and started building the structure.

Three years in, the architecture is visible.

Lining Up the Levers

Moore has assembled something rarer than a good program. He has assembled three policies aimed at the same problem from different directions.

The ENOUGH Act, passed in 2024, is the anchor. The name stands for Engaging Neighborhoods, Organizations, Unions, Governments, and Households. It is the most ambitious state-run, place-based anti-poverty initiative in the country, targeting communities where at least 20 percent of children live in poverty. What makes it structurally unusual is how it works: the state funds the planning process itself, so communities with the deepest need but the least organizational capacity can compete. The first round of grants reached 27 organizations across all 12 eligible counties.

Alongside the ENOUGH Act, Moore has invested in violence prevention as a public safety and economic strategy rather than a policing problem. The Group Violence Reduction Strategy, a program the state has supported and helped fund in Baltimore, works by engaging directly with people identified by their communities as being at the highest acute risk of involvement in gun violence, as either a potential victim or a perpetrator. Community members, credible messengers, and faith leaders make direct contact. Those who accept services receive intensive life coaching, housing assistance, employment support, and cognitive-behavioral therapy through two nonprofits: Youth Advocate Programs and Roca. Since January 2022, 97.7 percent of participants have not reoffended.

The ENOUGH grants and the violence-prevention investment were designed to reinforce each other. A community organization called Tendea Family used an ENOUGH grant to launch Drug Free Down Da Hill, a neighborhood patrol that finds people struggling with addiction and connects them with recovery, job training, and housing, while also providing mental health support, food, and clothing. Moore described it at the Center for American Progress IDEAS Conference last week. His gloss: “They came up with the idea. Not the state.”

Moore also signed the Expungement Reform Act of 2025, which removed a legal trap that had permanently barred thousands of Marylanders from clearing their records because of minor technical probation violations, many dating back decades. Criminal records are barriers to employment, housing, and education. Moore frames expungement as workforce policy.

The logic is the same across all three: the conditions that produce poverty, violence, and workforce exclusion are interconnected, and policy works better when it addresses them collectively.

What the Numbers Show

Baltimore’s homicide numbers over the past three years are, by any honest measure, extraordinary. The city recorded 201 homicides in 2024, a 23 percent drop from 2023, which itself had seen a 20 percent drop from the year before. In 2025, the number fell to 133, the lowest in nearly 50 years. Juvenile victims of homicides and non-fatal shootings fell 74 percent in a single year.

The evidence supports treating violence as a public health problem with economic roots rather than a policing problem alone. A University of Pennsylvania evaluation of the Group Violence Reduction Strategy, the policy with the strongest formal evaluation behind it, found that in the first 18 months after the program launched in the Western District, homicides and shootings fell by roughly 25 percent, the equivalent of 60 fewer victims, with no evidence that crime simply moved elsewhere in the city. The program has since expanded to five of Baltimore’s nine police districts, and the numbers have continued to fall.

Arne Duncan, who served as CEO of Chicago Public Schools and then as US Secretary of Education before founding the violence prevention nonprofit Chicago CRED, arrived at the same conclusion through a different experience. After speaking with incarcerated people in Cook County jail about what it would take for them to put down their guns, he wrote that the loss of jobs and educational opportunities in high-poverty neighborhoods is the primary driver of violence, not policing failures. Chicago, using a similar community violence intervention model, is on track to close 2025 with homicides down roughly 50 percent from their 2021 high.

What Travels and What Doesn’t

Maryland’s specific policy architecture will not be directly replicated elsewhere. What travels is simpler: the principle that communities closest to the problem are closest to the solution, and that the state’s job is to fund the process of finding it and funding the implementation. Moore, from his own experience, understood the need to make sure on-the-ground voices participate in the program development and the need to bring policies in alignment with each other. That is not a talking point. It is a theory of change.

The next installment in this series looks at Governor Beshear from Kentucky. All installments are collected here.

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