Can MD tell if build our future grants are actually creating jobs?

When Gov. Wes Moore signed the DECADE Act, short for Delivering Economic Competitiveness and Advancing Development Efforts, he extended a signature innovation program through 2030 and moved its administration to the Maryland Economic Development Corporation.

That handoff took effect on July 1, and the Build Our Future grant program will keep writing matching grants of up to $2 million to build the labs, clean rooms and specialized facilities that high-growth sectors depend on. Before the state commits the next several years of public money, it is worth asking a plain question: Can Maryland actually tell whether these grants produce technology jobs, or only whether they produce announcements? Right now, the honest answer is that it cannot.

Read part one of this series: Understanding what unaffordability means to MD residents

The scoreboard Maryland keeps today

The figures the state reports are real, and they are also the wrong kind of number. Across three rounds, the Department of Commerce has awarded nearly $23 million to 32 recipients, and the department credits those grants with supporting $75.5 million in private investment and an estimated 828 new jobs. Those are the headlines, and they describe activity rather than outcomes.

Dollars awarded measure how fast the state can move money. Leveraged investment measures what recipients pledged, not what cleared. The word doing the heavy lifting is “estimated,” because a figure produced at the moment of the award is a projection, not a result. A program can hit every one of these marks and still fail at the only thing taxpayers fund it to do: Move Marylanders into durable, well-paid technology jobs.

The five metrics that would actually answer the question

A credible audit replaces projections with tracked outcomes. Five metrics would do most of the work.

Start with jobs that materialized and stayed. A grant announced in 2024 should be judged by payroll that still exists in 2026 and 2027, verified against the state’s unemployment insurance wage records rather than the applicant’s forecast. Jobs counted at the ribbon cutting and never checked again are the easiest number in economic development to inflate.

Measure job quality, not just job count. A position paying well below the sector median is a different policy outcome than one paying above it, even though both register as a “tech job” in a press release. Wage levels, benchmarked against the relevant industry average, separate the two.

Test additionality, not attribution. The hardest and most important question in any incentive program is whether the funded activity would have happened anyway. If a company would have built the facility without the grant, the public dollars bought a logo on a banner, not a new outcome. Serious evaluations estimate this deadweight directly instead of assuming it away.

Calculate cost per durable job and benchmark it. Total public cost divided by jobs still on the payroll after two or three years is a number every other state incentive can be measured against. Without it, $23 million reads as large or small depending on which adjective the writer prefers.

Track capital deployed, not capital pledged. The $75.5 million in private investment is the program’s strongest selling point, and it carries weight only if the money actually arrives. Confirming deployment turns a pledge into evidence.

How to measure it without reinventing the wheel

None of this requires a new bureaucracy, which is the objection that usually kills measurement before it starts. Maryland already holds most of the data. Unemployment insurance wage records track employment and pay at the firm level. Tax filings track investment.

The missing pieces are a research design that builds a credible comparison group, so the state can separate the grant’s effect from the broader economy and an independent evaluator with no stake in the result. Pair that with a public, annual dashboard, and the General Assembly, the business community and the press would all read from the same numbers instead of competing announcements. Transparency of this kind tends to improve the underlying program because administrators allocate money differently when they know the outcomes will be scored.

The MEDCO handoff is the moment to build the scoreboard

Timing is the part of this that the DECADE Act gets right, even if by accident. The move to the Maryland Economic Development Corporation, which now administers the program under an authorization that runs through June 30, 2030, reopens the program’s operating rules, and reopened rules are the practical moment to install measurement. Build the reporting requirements in now, while the structure is being rewritten, and they become part of how the program runs. Leave them out, and the state reaches 2030 with five more years of awarded dollars and estimated jobs, and the same inability to say which grants worked. The cleanest mechanism is to make verified outcome reporting a condition of the program’s continued funding, so the next renewal debate starts from evidence rather than adjectives.

The bottom line

Maryland is not short on ambition, and it is not short on sectors worth backing. Quantum, cybersecurity and biotechnology are defensible bets for a state with this research base. What the state lacks is a way to know what its bets returned. An audit is not an argument against Build Our Future. It is the only way to learn whether the program has earned the larger commitment the DECADE Act just made to it. Install the scoreboard now, while the rules are open, or spend until 2030 still guessing.

Thomas Young  is an economist who builds models, researches the economy, advises on public policy, speaks at conferences, and enjoys thought leadership.