Special Briefing on State Budgets: The Big Squeeze

Join William Glasgall, Penn IUR Fellow and Volcker Alliance Public Finance Advisor, and Susan Wachter, Co-Director of Penn IUR and Wharton professor and our expert panel as we address the rapidly darkening outlook for state and local budgets and what this means for policymakers, taxpayers, and investors. Panelists include Jonathan Womer, Director, Rhode Island Department of Administration; Emily Brock, Director, Government Finance Officers Association Federal Liaison Center; Shelby Kerns, Executive Director, National Association of State Budget Officers; Vikram Rai, Head of Municipal Markets Strategy, Wells Fargo; Teryn Zmuda, Chief Economist, National Association of Counties.

As the widely adopted July 1 start of their new fiscal year approaches, many states are facing fiscal challenges that few governors were anticipating as they delivered their annual budget messages only a few months ago. Even though states started 2025 projecting healthy cash reserves of almost $300 billion, that cushion will be tested by the Trump administration's suspension of tens of billions of dollars in U.S. grants as well as potential cuts by Congress to federal Medicaid funds. A possible threat to the federal tax exemption on most municipal bonds, the impact of a global tariff war, and the rising likelihood of a U.S. recession will also further constrain state and local budgets even as several years of record post-COVID federal stimulus comes to an end.

This briefing is the sixtieth in a series of sixty-minute online conversations featuring experts from the national research networks of the Volcker Alliance and Penn IUR, along with other leading academics, economists, and federal, state, and local leaders.

Special Briefings are made possible by funding from The Travelers Institute, the Volcker Alliance, and members of the Penn IUR Advisory Board. Recordings of the entire Special Briefings series are available on the Volcker Alliance or Penn IUR websites.

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Director Jonathan Womer has a strong record of public service, both in Rhode Island and in the nation. From 2015-2021 he served as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget at the RI Department of Administration, where he worked collaboratively with the Governor and General Assembly to develop and implement the annual budget for the state. During his previous tenure at DOA, he also redesigned business processes, implemented a cloud-based budgeting system, established the state’s fraud data analytics section, and created a cohesive statewide rule-making process.

Director Womer has also served as Deputy Director for Management and Chief Information Officer for the North Carolina Office of the Governor, as Associate Vice President for Finance and Economic Analysis at the University of North Carolina, and most recently as Senior Advisor to The Policy Lab at Brown University. He holds a BA in Public Policy from Duke University and both a Master of Public Policy and a Master of Science of Information from the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor. 

Emily Brock serves as Director of GFOA’s Federal Liaison Center. Emily leads coalition and advocacy efforts of the Public Finance Network in Washington DC. Her advocacy includes anticipating and responding to federal legislative and regulatory activities that impact the finance functions of state and local governments and public sector entities including tax reform, municipal securities disclosure and public pension and benefit issues. Emily also serves as staff on GFOA’s Debt Committee, working with committee members to develop best practices that promote sound financial practices for local, state and provincial governments.

Shelby Kerns serves as the Executive Director of National Association of State Budget Officers. Prior to coming to NASBO, Kerns served as Deputy Director at the Idaho Department of Labor, having previously worked in the Idaho Division of Financial Management from 2009-2019 (the state's budget office). In her prior position as Budget Bureau Chief, she led staff in developing, presenting, and advocating for the Governor’s Executive Budget. As a past member of NASBO, Kerns served for two years on the association’s Executive Committee. Earlier in her career, Kerns was executive director of the Idaho Rural Partnership, program director at the Idaho Association of Realtors, and assistant executive director of the Idaho Wool Growers Association. Kerns received a master’s degree in business administration from Northwest Nazarene University and a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Idaho. 

Kerns was a Guardian ad litem for children in foster care from 2000-2020; a Family Advocates Board Member from 2016-2019; the 2015 Tribute to Women and Industry Award Recipient; and Idaho Business Review Women of the Year Recipient in 2009. 

Vikram Rai is the Lead Strategist at the municipal division at Wells Fargo. In his last assignment before Wells Fargo, Vikram was the Head of Municipal Strategy team at Citigroup where his role entailed developing macro and sector specific trading strategies by performing macro and fundamental credit analysis. In addition to Municipal Strategy, Vikram also led the Short Duration Strategy effort with a focus on money market instruments (USTs and Corporates) to optimize funding and returns while ensuring risk and liquidity levels for Citi’s institutional clients. He also covered ESG Strategy. Before joining Citi's municipal division in 2013, Vikram was a Mortgage and Rates Trader with a focus on Constant Maturity Mortgages (CMM), TBAs and Total Return Swaps (TRS) on Government Bond Indexes. Vikram was also Citi's liaison to the U.S. Treasury. He is frequently interviewed on TV (CNBC, Bloomberg) and widely quoted in print (WSJ, FT, Bloomberg etc.) Vikram has consistently been top ranked in the All-American Institutional Investor survey and the Greenwich Survey, in multiple categories.

Before joining Citigroup in 2008, Vikram worked for the hedge fund, Old Lane LLP in the private equity division. Vikram started his professional career as a microchip designer at Sun Microsystems and then worked in the same capacity at Oracle Corp. Vikram has an MBA in finance from the University of Chicago and bachelor’s in civil engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology, India. Vikram is a CFA Charter holder. 

Teryn Zmuda is the chief research officer and chief economist at the National Association of Counties (NACo), overseeing the Programs and Practices Division and the Research and Data Analytics Division. Teryn leads efforts to promote NACo as a thought leader, leveraging research and best practices to elevate the county role across the spectrum of local government authorities and policy implementation, within the nation’s intergovernmental system. She also leads NACo's economic analysis, representing the county perspective in federal policy, and guides the development of the issue-focused programmatic work, including peer learning networks and cohorts. Teryn holds an M.A. in applied economics from George Washington University and a B.A. in sociology from the University of Maryland.