What to do about that $3B liability bomb

Cloudy days for the Sunshine Committee, a zero-job economic forecast, how not to handle succession planning, the revolving door spins, and a Re-Wire reminder.

Washington state government screws up. With more than 75,000 employees and a portfolio that includes literal life-or-death tasks, bad things are going to happen. When they do, victims are going to get paid.

But what’s happened in the past three years is nuts. Since the pandemic, the state’s liability costs have more than quadrupled, as Jim Brunner at The Seattle Times has documented. The number of individual claims spiked since 2020, but what makes this a fiscal crisis is the number of mega-dollar settlements. Cases costing more than $100,000 have tripled, and the overall costs hit $500 million in 2025, even as the state is shoveling money out to hired-gun defense firms. Crisis gets thrown around a lot, but this is a real one.

The Department of Enterprise Services’ annual 2025 tort liability report reads like a Russian novel of woe and chaos.