Washington ? Earlier this month, two dozen men and women celebrated amid confetti and crowds after they won gubernatorial races. Well, the party’s over.

The mood sure is shifting in Annapolis, Lansing, Santa Fe and Nashville. And for good reason. Just this week came the bleak news that the financial state of the states hasn’t been this bad since World War II. In a third of the states, spending isn’t growing at all this year; it’s shrinking.

“These new governors are going to be in serious trouble,” says Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont, who is leaving office to seek the Democratic nomination for president. “They’re going to face very big deficits and spending problems that haven’t been addressed.”

Already the gloomy assessments are flowing. In Maryland, the new governor, GOP Rep. Robert Ehrlich, faces a revenue shortfall estimated at about $1.7 billion over two years. That’s so dire that the state comptroller, William Donald Schaefer, upbraided the sitting governor, fellow Democrat Parris Glendening, at a Board of Public Works meeting last week. “I want to commend you,” said Schaefer, himself a former governor. “You left $480 million due for this year.” Then, in a reference to Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, who lost this month’s gubernatorial race, he blamed the Democrats’ loss of the Governor’s Office on Glendening himself, saying, “You double-crossed your lieutenant governor. But outside that, you’re all right.”

The transition isn’t quite that bitter elsewhere, but nowhere is the news good. The National Governors Assn. and the National Association of State Budget Officers released a report this week showing that many of the states already have imposed budget cuts ” some have drawn on rainy-day funds ” and suggesting that even bleaker days are coming. Here’s one measure: In fiscal 2001, state spending grew at 8.3 percent. In fiscal 2002, it grew at only 1.3 percent ” and is expected to be at about the same level in fiscal 2003.

In a few weeks, many states will have new revenue and spending estimates that will give comfort to no one. “The new governors are going to realize that the magnitude of the problem is worse than they even thought during the campaign,” says Raymond C. Scheppach, executive director of the governors’ association. “During election seasons, politicians don’t spend a lot of time re-evaluating revenues. Now they will. There’s no earthly reason to think things will be better.”

Already half the states have enacted across-the-board cuts and drawn on rainy-day accounts. Some 15 states have laid off employees. Another 13 have reorganized their programs to trim expenditures. “Many of these budget-balancing actions,” the report warned, “are one-time only and cannot be used again.” These semi-annual fiscal surveys of the states never make for rollicking reading, but this version is downright terrifying.

An important part of the problem, of course, is the general state of the economy. When things aren’t perking along nationally, people buy fewer goods ” and thus sales-tax revenues don’t meet expectations. (They didn’t. Fiscal 2002 sales-tax collections were 3.2 percent below projections.) When incomes don’t rise substantially, income-tax revenues stay stagnant ” or fall. (More bad news here. Personal-income tax revenues were nearly 13 percent below expectations.) Indeed, four out of five of the states collected less revenue this year than they had planned. But by far the worst news came from corporate income tax collections. They were 21.5 percent lower than projected.

So what are the states doing, besides moaning (and looking to Washington for help)? They’re doing what they have to do, given that, unlike the federal government, most of them have to live within their budgets. They’re cutting programs, of course. (The plans for bioterrorism preparedness in Nebraska and the expenditures for the Ohio Schools for the Blind and the Deaf avoided the budget ax, but much else did not.) And they’re raising taxes. (Here come the new cigarette taxes in Connecticut, the corporate income tax hike in New Jersey and the increased booze tax in New York.)

Overall, new taxes and fees for fiscal 2003 will bring in about $8.3 billion, which is the largest tax increase in more than a decade. So much for this being the era of lower taxes.

The state budget report opens with seven sobering words: “Nearly every state is in fiscal crisis.” And while that trouble is not confined to Beacon Hill in Boston, or to Capitol Square in Topeka, or to the graceful state capitol in Salem, Ore., that is constructed from gray marble from Missouri and black marble from Vermont, it would be misleading to suggest that there isn’t anything wrong with the state of the states that a national economic recovery wouldn’t cure.

A third of state budgets are tied up in health expenditures; they are only going up. A principal revenue source for many of the states, the sales tax, is out of synch with the economy; the tax misses services, which are a growing part of the economy, and Internet sales, which are also growing.

And so the sobering reality of life is a new federalism of an entirely different sort: The problem of the states is a national problem.

David Shribman is a columnist for The Boston Globe.