Maryland is asking whether governments should prepare for longer lives the same way they plan for roads, schools and the economy.
What happens when a government finally admits that people living longer isn’t a future problem – it’s today’s reality?
Most US states have published reports, convened commissions or launched task forces to prepare for aging populations. The challenge is that many of those efforts are tied to election cycles. A new administration arrives, priorities shift and carefully written strategies quietly disappear into archives. Maryland is attempting something different.
This year, lawmakers passed the Longevity Ready Maryland Act, permanently embedding a 10-year longevity strategy into state law while creating an Aging Resilience Fund to support future programs. Rather than introducing another initiative that could fade with changing political leadership, the state has effectively committed future administrations to continue building on a shared vision of longevity.
At the same time, the legislation confronts another issue that rarely makes headlines but is growing rapidly across America: older adults are now the fastest-growing group experiencing homelessness. Maryland’s response isn’t simply to spend more money on housing or aging services independently. Instead, it asks whether agencies that have traditionally worked in parallel can finally work together before people fall through the cracks.
Together, those two ideas may be what makes Maryland’s new law worth watching well beyond state borders.
Aging isn’t a healthcare problem anymore
It’s tempting to think of aging as something handled by hospitals, doctors or nursing homes. However, longer lives touch almost every part of society. If people routinely live into their 80s and 90s, housing needs change. Transportation changes. Careers become longer. Retirement looks different. Financial planning becomes more complicated. Communities have to think about how older adults remain connected rather than isolated. In other words, longevity isn’t a single department’s responsibility.
Maryland’s new law recognizes exactly that. The Longevity Ready Maryland Plan brings together multiple agencies under one long-term strategy with four broad goals: building a statewide longevity ecosystem, expanding economic opportunity, helping residents better prepare financially for longer lives, and supporting health, wellness and mobility as people age. Simply, living longer should not automatically mean navigating more complicated systems.
The legislation builds on an executive order signed by Governor Wes Moore in early 2024, which launched the state’s longevity initiative. Now, by writing the plan into law, Maryland has made it considerably harder for future governments to simply walk away from it. The law requires regular updates to the plan, public reporting on progress and ongoing oversight through an expanded Commission on Aging. That matters because demographic change doesn’t happen in four-year bursts.
State estimates suggest that by 2030, one in four Maryland residents will be aged 60 or older. By 2045, roughly 315,000 people are expected to be at least 85. These numbers are less a prediction than a countdown. Roads, schools and public transport are built decades ahead because governments know populations change slowly. Longevity may now require the same kind of long-range thinking.
“We’re aging as a state faster than the rest of the country,” Department of Aging Secretary Caramel Roques told WYPR [1]. “We are living longer. And so now the time is to consider, what are the things that we need to do, both as individuals, [and] what do we have to do as a state, as families, communities, as a society, to adapt to this new phenomenon?”
Can government work across its own silos?
Perhaps the more ambitious part of Maryland’s strategy isn’t the plan itself, but how it expects government agencies to work together.
Older adults often don’t experience problems one at a time. Someone struggling financially may also face housing insecurity, declining health and difficulty accessing transportation. Yet public services have traditionally been organized into separate departments with separate budgets. The new law attempts to blur those boundaries.
Roques notes that much of the support older adults receive doesn’t actually come through the Department of Aging, but through departments responsible for health, housing, labor and local services.
“The goal is to work with them to get things done,” she said. “What are the things that we can do cross-agency to assist those people as they come through, needing benefits, services, etc. So at the state level, we’re working, but at the actual delivery-of-service level, that happens in the local counties and municipalities.”
One early example is a collaboration with Johns Hopkins University, which developed a Memory Care Family Checklist to help families affected by dementia better understand available resources and build coordinated care plans.
Another focuses on one of America’s fastest-growing social challenges: older adults experiencing homelessness. By bringing housing and aging agencies into the same conversation, Maryland hopes to intervene earlier, before temporary hardship becomes chronic instability.
Funding for the long game
Maryland has also established an Aging Resilience Fund, giving the Department of Aging a dedicated, non-lapsing fund that can accept philanthropic contributions and carry funding from one year to the next.
Without a mechanism to retain donated funds, long-term projects become much harder to sustain. The new fund creates room to invest in programs that don’t fit neatly within annual budget cycles, from financial literacy initiatives to workforce development for caregivers.
“Lots of older people are pretty scared because they mistakenly thought their social security check was going to give them enough money to live on,” Roques said. “They didn’t understand that Medicare has co-pays and deductibles, and they sort of are finding themselves unprepared.”
Those concerns illustrate another evolution within longevity. Living longer is valuable only if people are financially, socially and physically prepared for those additional years.
What if longevity became standard government policy?
Maryland’s legislation takes effect on October 1, with annual progress reports required to keep lawmakers accountable and updated longevity plans every four years.
“We’re first in the country to have a longevity-ready plan, and I’m really proud of that, that Maryland is leading on that,” Roques said. “Because it’s a shift from, ‘Oh, we’re talking about the older people who live in our state now, and what are we going to do?’ We’re saying, ‘Yes, and this phenomenon of all of us living longer really needs special attention.’”
Whether Maryland becomes a national model will depend less on the law itself than on its execution. Cross-agency collaboration is notoriously difficult, and demographic change rarely delivers quick political wins. However, the state has introduced an idea that could reshape how governments think about longevity: that preparing for longer lives deserves the same permanence as any other core public investment.
If that vision succeeds, the Maryland of 2045 may look very different from today’s. An older resident navigating retirement could move more easily between healthcare, housing, financial guidance and community support without feeling like each service belongs to a different world. Longer lives would no longer be viewed as a growing burden, but as a stage of life society has intentionally designed for. If that future becomes reality, Maryland may be remembered not simply as the first state to pass a longevity law, but as the first to show what a longevity-ready society can actually look like.
