Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell administers the oath of office to Lisa Cook to serve as a member of the Board of Governors at the Federal Reserve System during a ceremony at the William McChesney Martin Jr. Building of the Federal Reserve May 23, 2022, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook will challenge her removal, her attorney said Tuesday, arguing President Donald Trump “has no authority” to fire her.

Trump announced late Monday that he would fire Cook, the first Black woman to serve on the Federal Reserve Board, over allegations that she falsified documents to obtain a favorable mortgage rate. She has not been charged with a crime. 

Cook has consistently voted not to lower interest rates, rejecting requests Trump has made of the independent central banking board.

Cook’s attorney, Abbe David Lowell of Lowell & Associates, said in a statement to States Newsroom that she would sue to block the firing. Former president Joe Biden appointed Cook in 2022. Her term ends in 2038.

“President Trump has no authority to remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook,” Lowell said. “His attempt to fire her, based solely on a referral letter, lacks any factual or legal basis.”

Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, referred Cook’s mortgage application to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution. Pulte has made similar accusations against political enemies of the president.

Pulte has accused New York Attorney General Letitia James, who investigated Trump’s business dealings and won a finding of fraud in state court, and California U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff, who led the investigation into Trump’s first impeachment inquiry, of mortgage fraud.

Trump posted a letter on social media, arguing that the allegations of Cook’s mortgage fraud had called “into question your competence and trustworthiness as a financial regulator.” 

He said the Federal Reserve Act gave him the authority to dismiss a governor for gross misconduct. 

Trump’s fight with Fed

The president defended his decision to dismiss Cook to reporters during a more-than-three-hour Cabinet meeting. 

“We need people that are 100% on board,” Trump said, adding that he’s already considering someone else for the job.

Cook is not the only Federal Reserve Board member Trump has trained his criticism on. He has long gone after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell for not lowering interest rates. 

Trump has pushed for lower interest rates to boost the economy, but rates have remained lower amid concerns that the president’s tariffs will produce price hikes. 

“I think we have to have lower interest rates,” Trump said Tuesday. 

Dems defend Fed independence

The dismissal has drawn outrage from economists and Democrats, including the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, Yvette D. Clarke of New York.

“President Trump is attempting to oust Dr. Lisa Cook — the first Black woman to serve on the Federal Reserve Board — with no credible evidence of wrongdoing,” she said in a statement.

“Let’s be clear: this is a racist, misogynistic, and unlawful attack on the integrity and independence of the Federal Reserve,” Clarke said. “It is a dangerous attempt to politicize and exert control over the central bank — one that will only continue to damage the economy, harm hardworking Americans, and undermine our credibility on the world stage.”

Heather Boushey, a top economist under the Biden administration, said in a statement that Trump’s move to fire Cook undermines the independence of the Federal Reserve. 

“It is clear from his actions that he does not believe he is bound by rule of law, but can — and will — intimidate experts to bend to his own ends,” Boushey said.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a late Monday statement that any attempt to fire Cook “shreds the independence of the Fed and puts every American’s savings and mortgage at risk.”

“This brazen power grab must be stopped by the courts before Trump does permanent damage to national, state, and local economies,” Schumer said. “And if the economy comes crashing down, if families lose their savings and Main Street pays the price, Donald Trump will own every ounce of the wreckage and devastation families feel.”

The top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, Richard Neal of Massachusetts, slammed the president, calling Cook’s firing unlawful. 

“President Trump’s illegal removal of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook is (an) economic assault,” Neal said in a statement. “Instead of taking responsibility for his own economic failures, he’s manufacturing a villain to blame. As seen around the world, politicizing the central bank means rampant inflation, higher mortgage rates, unstable retirement accounts, and more uncertainty for the people. All of which will threaten the financial security of every American.” 

A sign acknowledging Stewardship program support at Firemen's Park in Verona. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

Democrats in the Wisconsin state Legislature released their proposal for saving the broadly popular Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Grant program from lapsing next year. The bill marks the latest step in a legislative effort to save the conservation program — a goal for which members of both political parties have expressed optimism.  

The stewardship grant program through the Department of Natural Resources allows the state to fund the purchase and maintenance of public lands. Created 35 years ago, the program is supported by a large swathe of Wisconsin voters, but a subset of Republicans in the Legislature have grown increasingly hostile to its continuation. 

Those Republicans argue the burden of land conservation falls largely on their rural districts in northern Wisconsin, which has the most land available for recreational purposes but the state purchasing that land takes it off the property tax rolls.

Republicans have also complained that the program lacks legislative oversight since the state Supreme Court ruled in a 6-1 decision last year that the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee doesn’t have the authority to hold up projects through the program. 

Sen. Mary Felzkowski (R-Tomahawk), one of the program’s strongest critics, has suggested she’d support re-authorizing the program if it included provisions that capped the amount of government-owned land in a county or allowed counties to sell off existing conservation land.

Without action, the program will end next summer. In his initial budget proposal, Gov. Tony Evers had asked for the program to be provided $100 million per year for 10 years. The version of the budget signed into law in July did not include the program’s re-authorization. 

Another bill authored by Republican Rep. Tony Kurtz (R-Wonewoc) and Sen. Patrick Testin (R-Stevens Point) would re-authorize the program for six years at $28 million per year. To gain the support of the Republicans who want more oversight of the program, the bill would require that any land acquisitions that cost more than $1 million be approved by the full Legislature. 

Tuesday’s proposal from Democrats would re-authorize the program for six years at $72 million per year. The bill would also create an independent board with oversight authority over the program. 

The 17-member board would include members of the majority and minority in both chambers of the Legislature; two representatives from environmental organizations; two representatives of hunting, fishing or trapping interests; two DNR representatives, including one member from the Natural Resources Board; one representative from the Department of Tourism; one representative of the outdoor recreation industry; one representative from the Ice Age Trail Alliance; a representative of a federally recognized Native American tribe in the state; one local government representative and two members of the public. Members of the board would serve staggered three-year terms. 

Under the bill, the board would meet at least quarterly and have the authority to advise the DNR on all projects through the program. On projects involving grants of more than $2.5 million, the board would have full approval authority. If the board doesn’t meet to vote on a project within 120 days, it would be automatically approved. 

The Democratic proposal has been co-sponsored by all 60 Democrats in the Assembly and Senate, signaling the broad support for the bill among the Democratic caucuses. 

Sen. Jodi Habush Sinykin (D-Whitefish Bay) tells the Wisconsin Examiner that the proposal involves a lot of thoughtful effort from Democrats trying to make a “good faith” effort to answer Republican concerns about oversight over the program while getting it re-authorized. 

“Our intent in introducing these companion bills in the Senate and the Assembly was premised on a great deal of thought and seriousness,” she says. “That we have the expectation that Republican legislators will take it seriously, because, like us, they have been hearing from their constituents and constituents from across the state. This is an issue that people in Wisconsin 90% approve and they want action, and they want legislators to demonstrate that they can work together and lead with our shared values to get something done.”

In a statement, a spokesperson for Kurtz said his intention remains working to find a bipartisan solution to re-authorizing the program. 

“It’s always been our intention to find a bipartisan path forward to ensuring the Stewardship Program’s future,” the spokesperson said. “We haven’t reviewed their proposal yet, but look forward to continued discussions on this important issue this fall.”

Charles Carlin, the director of strategic initiatives at the non-profit land trust organization Gathering Waters, says the fate of the program is now up to Republican leaders and their ability to compromise. Carlin points out that it’s clear there aren’t 17 Republican votes in the Senate to support reauthorization. 

“As far as anybody can tell, there’s not 17 Republican senators that are going to vote to reauthorize Knowles-Nelson,” he says. “If they were to choose that strategy of trying to do this with only Republican votes, my fear and expectation is the bill would wind up becoming so weighed down with poison pills and anti-conservation measures, it would wind up not being a workable proposal. On the other hand if leaders in the Senate were willing to say ‘OK, this can be a bipartisan exercise, nobody’s going to get quite what they want,’ I think we’re going to see there are 15 Democratic senators eager to find a solution and we could get a decent bill passed with pretty overwhelming support from both parties.”

Carlin says he sees the Democrats’ oversight board idea as a good way to avoid the Joint Finance Committee “veto fiasco” that previously held up projects through the program while allowing the board to make “smart, educated and informed decisions” separate from the political games of the legislative process. 

However in recent years under Wisconsin’s divided government, legislative proposals have been met with hopes for bipartisan compromise only to end in partisan bickering. Last session, a proposal to get $125 million out the door to clean up PFAS contamination across the state died after initial optimism after Democrats and Republicans couldn’t agree on the bill’s language. 

“That’s a real concern. Where we had the most heartburn and worry coming out of the state budget, this Legislature does not have a good track record of getting things done,” Carlin says. “Even though there were promises made that legislators would come back to work and get Knowles-Nelson done, there’s not a lot of precedent for legislators working together. There are folks on the Republican Senate side who are simply not going to work in good faith to get this done.”

He says Felzkowski’s ideas on the subject are “not serious proposals” but that there are 10 or 12 Republicans in the Senate who value conservation and understand how important it is to the state’s voters. 

“If they really engage with the Democrats’ proposal and find middle ground, we can find that success without too much heartache,” he says. “We do know that everybody’s constituents want to see this get done.”

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The Hubert H. Humphrey Building, the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, D.C., as seen on Nov. 23, 2023. (Photo by Jane Norman/States Newsroom)

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s administration demanded Tuesday that dozens of states remove from sex education materials any references to a person’s gender departing from their sex assigned at birth, or lose federal funding.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families warned in letters to 40 states, the District of Columbia and several territories that they could lose a total of $81.3 million in remaining federal funds for the Personal Responsibility Education Program, or PREP, if they do not get rid of these references within 60 days. 

The policy appears to target any reference to transgender or nonbinary people. For example, in a letter to an adolescent health program specialist at Alaska’s Department of Health and Social Services, the federal agency asked that a definition of transgender and related terms be deleted from school curricula.

In a statement shared with States Newsroom, Laurel Powell, a spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization, said the move was part of Trump’s “all-out fight to erase government recognition of transgender people.”

“Sexual education programs, at their best, are age-appropriate, fact-based and informative at a time when young people need this information to keep themselves healthy,” Powell said. “When they do not acknowledge the existence of trans people they fail in their goal to inform, and cutting this funding denies young people the information they need to make safe, healthy, and informed decisions about their own bodies.” 

PREP focuses on preventing teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, and targets youth who are experiencing homelessness or in foster care, or reside in rural areas or places with high rates of teen birth, according to the agency. 

The states that HHS sent letters to Tuesday are: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming. 

Latest demand

The demand marks the latest effort from the administration to do away with “gender ideology,” which the administration says includes “the idea that there is a vast spectrum of genders that are disconnected from one’s sex.” 

GLAAD, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group, noted in a fact sheet that “gender ideology” is “an inaccurate term deployed by opponents to undermine and dehumanize transgender and nonbinary people.”

The letters came less than a week after the administration terminated California’s PREP grant after refusing to remove “radical gender ideology” from the education materials. 

Failure to comply with this demand, the agency said, could result in the “withholding, suspension, or termination of federal PREP funding.” 

“Accountability is coming,” Andrew Gradison, acting assistant secretary at HHS’ Administration for Children and Families, said in a statement. 

Gradison added that the administration “will ensure that PREP reflects the intent of Congress, not the priorities of the left.”

The effort also comes as the administration continues to crack down on gender-affirming care.

Trump signed earlier executive orders that: restrict access to gender-affirming care for kids; make it the “policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female;” bar openly transgender service members from the U.S. military; and ban trans women from competing on women’s sports teams. 

Protesters gather outside of the Milwaukee FBI office to speak out against the arrest of Milwaukee Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)

A federal judge on Tuesday denied a motion to dismiss the criminal charges against Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan in the immigration enforcement-related case that has drawn national attention as an example of the Trump Administration’s effort to punish judges it sees as antagonistic to its increased deportation efforts. 

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman issued a 27-page order denying Dugan’s motion. Dugan’s attorneys had filed to dismiss the case earlier this summer, arguing that the prosecution violated judicial immunity and represented extreme federal overreach into the operations of the state court system. 

Dugan was arrested in April after federal prosecutors alleged she had acted to conceal a man without legal authorization to be in the U.S. from federal agents. The man, Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, was in Dugan’s courtroom to appear for a hearing on a misdemeanor battery charge against him when agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Drug Enforcement Agency and FBI came to the courtroom to arrest him. The agents were in possession of an administrative warrant signed by an ICE official, rather than a judicial warrant granted by a federal judge. 

The administrative warrant did not give the agents the authority to enter private spaces in the courthouse. 

Dugan directed Flores-Ruiz and his attorney out a side door of the courtroom, which led them to the same hallway where the agents were standing but not directly past them. An agent rode down in the elevator with Flores-Ruiz and he was later arrested on the street. Dugan has been charged with a felony and a misdemeanor for allegedly trying to help Flores-Ruiz evade arrest.

Adelman’s decision Tuesday is an important step toward Dugan’s case moving to a trial. In his order, he cited the report of U.S. Magistrate Judge Nancy Joseph several times. Joseph had recommended that the motion to dismiss not be granted. 

“There is no basis for granting immunity simply because some of the allegations in the indictment describe conduct that could be considered ‘part of a judge’s job,’” Adelman wrote. “As the magistrate judge noted, the same is true in the bribery prosecutions, concededly valid, where the judges were prosecuted for performing official acts intertwined with bribery.” 

Adelman gave Dugan’s attorneys until Sept. 3 to appeal his order. If the order is appealed, Dugan’s trial likely wouldn’t occur until 2026. However if there isn’t an appeal, a trial could take place much sooner.

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U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy rides on a FrontRunner train in Salt Lake City during a media event on Monday, April 7, 2025. (Photo by McKenzie Romero/Utah News Dispatch)

Three states are at risk of losing some federal transportation funding because they are not enforcing President Donald Trump’s executive order that commercial truck drivers must be proficient in English, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Tuesday.

New Mexico, Washington and California will have 30 days to comply with the order or risk losing funding from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration — among the smaller of the Transportation Department’s agencies — Duffy said, standing behind a lectern with an “America First” banner on it at the department’s Washington, D.C., headquarters.

California stands to lose $33 million, Washington could lose $10.5 million and New Mexico would lose $7 million, Duffy said. He urged the states to comply with the executive order, which Trump signed in April and took effect in June, or face increasingly draconian penalties.

“We don’t want to take away money from states,” Duffy said. “But we will take money away and we will take additional steps that get progressively more difficult for these states. There’s a lot of great tools that we have here that we don’t want to use.”

All three states contributed to a Florida crash this month in which three people were killed, Duffy said. The truck driver involved had a commercial license from California and Washington, and had been pulled over for speeding in New Mexico prior to crashing in Florida, Duffy said.

“So this one driver touched all three states,” he said.

The Florida driver, an immigrant from India who did not have permanent legal authority to be in the country, made an illegal U-turn on the Florida Turnpike, according to local reports.

Duffy said the Florida driver did not understand road signs, but did not further specify how his lack of English comprehension led to the crash, which reportedly involved making a U-turn across lanes of traffic. But Duffy repeatedly said the issue was one of safety.

Duffy said that when the Trump executive order went into effect, it received negative publicity.

“There was a lot of press that complained to us that we were being unfair to people, that we were being mean to people,” he said. “And what we said was, ‘No, this is a safety issue.’ Making sure drivers of very heavy, 80,000-pound rigs can speak the language is truly a critical safety issue. And some complained about it.”

Newsom hits back

On social media, California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s press office said the federal government approved a permit for the Florida driver.

“This is rich,” Newsom’s office wrote on X. “The Trump Administration approved the federal work permit for the man who killed 3 people — and now they’re scrambling to shift blame after getting caught. Sean’s nonsense announcement is as big a joke as the Trump Administration itself.”

A DHS spokesperson denied the federal government issued the driver a work permit and blamed Newsom.

“These innocent people were killed in Florida because Gavin Newsom’s California Department of Motor Vehicles issued an illegal alien a Commercial Driver’s License—this state of governance is asinine,” a spokesperson wrote in an email to States Newsroom.

Newsom has increasingly over the past few months used his social media channels to mock Trump. 

Washington State Patrol spokesman Chris Loftis wrote in an email that the agency was “reviewing the matter with our state transportation partners” and would soon have a more detailed response.

A spokesperson for Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson, a Democrat, said he had not received Duffy’s letter. 

“We will review it when we receive it and carefully evaluate next steps,” the spokesperson, Brionna Aho, said. 

That state’s Gov. Bob Ferguson, a Democrat, made a defiant statement last week about complying with the Trump administration’s demands on immigration enforcement.

“Washington State will not be bullied or intimidated by threats and legally baseless accusations,” he wrote to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi.

He has amplified that message several times since.

The New Mexico Department of Transportation deferred a request for comment to the state’s Department of Public Safety, which did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.

Investigating testing

Duffy said he was puzzled by commercial drivers who were able to pass a skills test without understanding English, and said the department was investigating that issue.

“This is something we’re looking at and working on when someone, an individual, comes in to take their test to become a commercial driver, and then they do a skills test… at that point, it would be clear that this driver doesn’t understand all the road signs and doesn’t speak the language, but miraculously, they’re passing the skills test,” he said. “I think any common-sense analysis would say, well, that doesn’t make sense.”

The federal department would be looking at whether the skills tests are being correctly administered and whether there is “some gaming of the system that we have to address.”

Milwaukee Fire Department Chief Aaron Lipski. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)

“We’re gathered here today to help people,” said Aaron Lipski, chief of the Milwaukee Fire Department, during a Monday press conference with local and state elected leaders, the American Red Cross and first responders, calling for more volunteers to staff emergency shelters in Milwaukee serving people displaced by unprecedented floods.  

Lipski praised the Red Cross as “an amazing partner,” but added,  “When we see them feeling the strain, we feel like we should step up and help.” 

Following the historic Aug. 9-10 floods which overwhelmed the streets and infrastructure across Milwaukee County, the Red Cross opened two emergency shelters for people who could not return to their homes. Those two shelters were closed down and re-located to Marshall High School, with about  50 people reportedly depending on the shelters. 

During the Monday press conference, Mayor Cavalier Johnson said the flood was particularly hard on people who already depend on strained public services, particularly unhoused people in Milwaukee. 

As of Aug. 19, more than 3,400 homes were assessed as either destroyed or sustaining major damage from the flooding, which occurred as some parts of Milwaukee County received over 10 inches of torrential downpour. The estimated price tag exceeded $34 million for public property damage.

“Now, we’ve all seen the shock and the tears in the eyes of folks who’ve been affected by those floods,” said Johnson. 

“The trauma’s enormous, and the sadness is really, really deep,” he added.  “… all these folks, they need a place to go — a safe place to go.” 

At least two people drowned during the floods, the mayor said, including 49-year-old Juan Carlos Sierra Campos, whose body was discovered in Lake Michigan the morning after the floods, and 72-year-old Isaias Serna, who was found drowned four days after the floods in Port Milwaukee. “Now, both these men apparently were unhoused individuals, and that circumstance may have been part of the reason why they ended up losing their lives,” Johnson said. Both men were reportedly known to live in the same encampment under the bridge, at the intersection of South Chase Avenue and South 1st St. Two other men from the same encampment are reportedly still missing.

“I want all of our neighbors to be sheltered, and to be sheltered safely,” said Johnson. “I want everyone within the sound of my voice to think, really take in account, about how you might be able to assist.” 

Milwaukee officials are calling on local residents to pitch in however they can. Whether by opening the doors of a church or business to become a shelter, or volunteering at an existing shelter. The Milwaukee Public School district has provided emergency shelter space, Johnson said, but that will be coming to an end in just a few days when the new school year starts. 

Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley said it made him feel hopeful to see residents step up to help each other. But he also said the struggle to find shelter for flood victims shows the severity of Milwaukee’s housing shortage. “The bottom line is this,” said Crowley, “we need more safe and accessible shelter locations throughout the community so when emergencies like the floods happen, we’re prepared.”  

 

 

Catherine Rabenstine, CEO of American Red Cross of Wisconsin, said that after disasters “one of the most urgent needs is a safe place to stay,” somewhere that “people can catch their breath, gather their thoughts, and begin to recover.” Many people who were  displaced by the floods can only find shelter space far from their own neighborhoods, schools, jobs and support systems, she said. “It makes an already difficult time even harder.” 

While the Red Cross has 14 shelter partner facilities across Milwaukee County, only two are located on the North Side “where most apartment fires occur, and where flooding recently hit the hardest,” said Rabenstine. She added,  “we need to grow this network, so that no family has to wait for safety.” 

Crowley, who has worked to create more affordable housing opportunities, said the flood’s impact has rippled out to touch other areas of need in  the community. 

“This has really shown …  that we have a huge need for housing just in general,” he said.  “ …  whether we’re talking about people being displaced due to the natural disaster, or people being displaced due to evictions or not having enough money to actually make their rent,” Crowley told Wisconsin Examiner, “I think this shows that we need greater partnership between municipalities, with the state, as well as the federal government to really focus on housing issues.

Scientists have long warned that more intense rainfall and greater flood risks would be among the ways climate change would affect Wisconsin. Rep. Omokunde, who has worked on climate change legislation, told the Examiner, “We know that when you  have fossil fuels that are burning, and they’re going into the air, it causes heavier rains. And we have to cut down our carbon emission. If it’s not more evident with these kinds of floods, it needs to be more evident now.”

Omokunde said that Wisconsin should focus on ways to capture carbon and support legislation to cut carbon emissions in half by 2030 and achieve net-zero by 2050. “So let’s come to the table, and come up with a plan to say that we need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions,” he said. 

Sen. LaTonya Johnson said that although the Legislature is on break, conversations are happening around the flood aftermath. Officials are also waiting to see how the federal government assesses the damage in Milwaukee, and whether additional federal assistance will be approved. “It’s still a huge concern for us, even with FEMA’s involvement,” Johnson told Wisconsin Examiner. 

While touring damage with Gov. Tony Evers, Johnson said she saw houses that had been completely washed off their foundations. ‘There is no salvaging those properties for some of those homeowners, but they still have mortgages,” said Johnson. “So what happens to those dwellings? And we know that even if FEMA does step up, their job isn’t to make people 100% whole. So what does that look like for some of those homeowners and landlords, and how do they get those properties back on the market?” With affordable housing already scarce in Milwaukee and Wisconsin, Johnson wonders what will happen “with even more houses taken off the market” due to flood damage.

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(The Center Square) – A federal judge denied Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan’s request to dismiss charges against her based on judicial immunity in a Tuesday afternoon ruling.

(The Center Square) – A group of Wisconsin Democrats are pushing to fund the state’s Knowles-Nelson Stewardship public land purchasing program with $72 million each year for the next six years while creating a new board to oversee future land…

(The Center Square) – Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources conservation wardens and county recreation deputies will be out Labor Day weekend looking to enforce and educate those driving all-terrain and utility off-road vehicles of state safety laws as part of…

(The Center Square) – There are felony voter fraud charges for a woman who used to work for the Milwaukee Police Department.

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• Pay raises and other efforts have done little to ease the 911 dispatcher shortage in Brown County: The county is short more than one in three of its needed dispatchers. 

• Boosting pay isn’t enough to attract and retain dispatchers, experts say – departments must boost morale, get creative with hiring and training and address the mental health toll the job takes. 

• Waukesha County officials made changes that show promise: The county’s 911 center went from over half-vacant to almost fully staffed in two years. 

• Furthermore, advocates support federal legislation that would reclassify all 911 dispatchers as first responders, which would allow dispatchers to access benefits like additional mental health resources.

For years, Brown County has struggled to hire people to answer 911 calls and coordinate responses to emergencies. Its emergency dispatch center was among many that grappled with worsened staffing shortages after the COVID-19 pandemic. 

But as the crisis eases nationwide, major shortages still beset Brown County’s 911 center. Despite past pay raises and other efforts, the county is missing more than one in three of its needed dispatchers. Industry experts say boosting pay isn’t enough to attract dispatchers nowadays. Departments must also boost morale, get creative with hiring and training and address the mental health toll the job takes. 

Waukesha County’s 911 center offers an example of how such measures can help alleviate shortages. It placed a laser focus on employee mental well-being and went from over half-vacant to almost fully staffed in two years.

The Brown County vacancies haven’t impacted how quickly dispatchers pick up the phone when residents dial 911 — employees still answer faster than the national standard recommends. But some county leaders are worried that mistakes will be made if the issue continues.

Only one of the five elected supervisors who helm a committee overseeing the county’s public safety operations answered calls and emails for this story. Supervisor Michael LaBouve, who represents most of the east side of De Pere, told Wisconsin Watch the county is following a plan to address the shortage and solving it is “going to take time.”

“I think we’re all seeing progress, so that’s all I have to communicate about that,” LaBouve said. “I feel good about what’s happening.”

But at 19 employees short, the center tallies more vacancies today than it did several years ago when the county first prioritized the crisis, and some are losing their patience. 

During a public meeting in late May, supervisors aired their frustration at the lack of progress. Dispatchers worked a combined 8,600 hours of overtime so far this year, the department said, and they’ve routinely taken to local government meetings to voice their experiences with stress and burnout. 

“Looking at us to go 60, 70, potentially 80 hours and being called in on the days off and 24/7 is just — it’s mind-boggling,” dispatcher Kirk Parker said during a May meeting. 

Money not the answer?

Staffing shortages have plagued the public safety communications industry for years, but the issue peaked during the COVID-19 pandemic. Between 2019 and 2023, about one in four dispatch jobs across the country were vacant, research by the International Academies of Emergency Dispatch suggested. 

There are still “alarming strains” on the industry, but there are recent signs of progress, said April Heinze, chief of 911 operations for the National Emergency Number Association, a national nonprofit of dispatch industry professionals. Research by NENA shows 74% of centers reported having vacant positions in 2025, improved from 82% in 2024. 

However, those improvements aren’t reflected locally. Brown County was short 19 staffers in early August, according to officials, leaving about 35% of the center vacant. 

“Like playing a game of Whack-a-Mole: as quickly as one issue can be addressed, another issue pops up,” Chancy Huntzinger, Brown County’s director of public safety communications, said in a statement to Wisconsin Watch. 

In 2023, in one of its first major efforts to attract and retain staff, Brown County’s Board of Supervisors voted to allocate over $400,000 for raises, retention bonuses and a starting pay boost. Pay now starts at $24.60 per hour, according to the department. 

But the raises haven’t attracted more staff the way county leaders hoped. The center is currently short more employees than when the pay bumps were approved.

“Obviously, pay is not always the most important thing,” Heinze said. Data from the study NENA completed in May showed the largest affliction for dispatchers across the country is burnout. 

Plus, the pay boost didn’t do much to make Brown County stand out to job seekers. The department’s minimum pay is middle-of-the-pack compared to other northeast Wisconsin counties.

Waukesha’s methods show promise

Roughly two hours south, Waukesha County’s 911 agency has made outsized progress in solving its dispatcher shortage. 

When COVID-19 prompted the “Great Resignation,” dozens of dispatchers left Waukesha County Communications Center for higher-paying, lower-stress jobs in public safety technology startups, utility company call centers and other nearby 911 centers.

By October 2023, the center was over half empty. Down over 20 dispatchers, senior staff were forced to pick up call-taking shifts. Staff worked during their time off. Employees regularly picked up back-to-back 12-hour shifts.

“People were starting to feel burnt out, and really it became a snowball effect,” said Gail Goodchild, the county’s emergency preparedness director. “We saw bad attitudes. People didn’t want to come into work. The culture was waning.”

Department leaders realized they needed “all hands on deck” to turn things around, Goodchild said — which they did. According to NENA, they had only two vacancies in July. 

The department did raise pay, bringing the starting hourly wage to $29.44 from roughly $27. This helped, but “wasn’t the leading thing that really turned us around,” Goodchild said. Department leaders also parted with staff they felt “didn’t contribute to a positive culture.” They revamped their hiring and training processes and eased the job requirements. And they introduced an intense focus on dispatchers’ mental health.

Waukesha’s hiring process once heavily relied on CritiCall, a software commonly used in 911 centers that tests potential dispatchers’ skills at multitasking, decision-making, map reading and more. It was determined the test was “weeding people out that would have probably been a really good fit,” said Chris Becker, Waukesha’s communications operations manager. 

“We looked at our numbers in that and determined that there was no correlation between our successful trainees and their CritiCall scores being high,” Becker said. “So we tossed that out.” 

Now, the hiring committee strictly focuses on if a candidate will fit the department’s culture. To ensure people learn the hard skills the exam measures, the department has refined and revamped its training. (Brown County candidates must pass the CritiCall exam to be hired, and the county has not considered changing that, Huntzinger said.)

Waukesha also removed its two-year work experience requirement from the job description to yield more candidates, a move it may soon reverse because it’s seen that having “some of that life experience” is good, Becker said. 

Finally, the county ramped up mental health support to dispatchers. In addition to regular benefits offered in the county’s employee assistance program, it contracted a local mental health provider specializing in first responders. Dispatchers now regularly attend mandatory, confidential 90-minute meetings with the providers, who help employees work through vicarious trauma, a type of trauma common among first responders that compounds when hearing, reading or witnessing distressing events. The grant-funded initiative costs roughly $16,000 for 18 months, Becker said. 

“In case our staff ever gets to a point where they need them, they feel more comfortable to reach out for that help, rather than living with it and burying it and then getting to that point of burnout again,” Becker said.

Brown County has not explored increased mental health support as a method of retention. Staff are encouraged to visit the Public Safety Communications director’s office if they have concerns, and they can receive counseling benefits through the county’s employee assistance program, Huntzinger said. 

“We’re listening to people’s worst days, right? We hang up the phone when the first responders get there, and then it’s left to our imagination to fill in the blanks,” Becker said. “But some of those traumatic calls just don’t go away, and they’ll pop up at random times, or a call three years later will remind you of a call that you took, and you’re right back to that place again. … It’s super important for our staff to have that outlet.”

Looking ahead

After bumping pay, Brown County’s Board of Supervisors requested an independent review of the dispatch center in 2024. The report, delivered in January 2025, made 65 recommendations on how the center could improve operations and its staffing. 

The department has made mixed progress on implementing the recommendations, which vary in complexity, and gives monthly progress updates to the board’s Public Safety Committee.

Per the advice of the consultants, the department introduced employee referral bonuses and now has candidates visit the call center before they interview, rather than after.

The department will also hire “traveling dispatchers” — temporary contractors who will work at the center for six months to cover some shifts, Huntzinger said. She did not answer a question from Wisconsin Watch about how much this will cost the county. 

Next year, the center will introduce a new shift schedule to help it operate more effectively with less staff, Huntzinger said. Though consultants recommended the county’s “unnecessarily complex” schedule be changed immediately, it was delayed following employee pushback. 

The report also suggested the county “substantially expand” partnerships with local education institutions to create a pipeline of candidates. Northeast Wisconsin Technical College, which offers workforce training in emergency dispatch, said it has not been formally assigned  recruitment efforts but it aims to support the region’s workforce needs. 

In the last four years, 84 students have completed programs that certify them in emergency dispatch. Twenty-seven of those included a tour of the Brown County Dispatch Center.

“One of the biggest barriers is awareness,” Jeff Steeber, the college’s associate dean of public safety, said of the struggle to get students into the field. “Many students enter our programs without knowing that emergency dispatch is a viable and rewarding career option.”

Industry leaders have spent years advocating for legislation they believe would change this. 

The federal 911 Saves Act, championed by both NENA and Waukesha leaders, would reclassify all 911 dispatchers as first responders for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which currently lists them as clerical or secretarial employees, alongside office clerks and taxi dispatchers.

This would allow dispatchers to access a slate of benefits, such as increased mental health resources, and it would reinforce the cruciality of the job, Heinze said.

“You hear little kids say, ‘I want to be a firefighter. I want to be a police officer,’” Goodchild said. “They don’t look at a 911 telecommunicator dispatcher as a career path. That hurts the industry, too.”

Eighteen states have passed their own laws reclassifying telecommunicators, but Wisconsin is not one of them.

“We’re hopeful this year that it is going to (pass), and it would help us, I think, very, very, very much,” Heinze said. 

Miranda Dunlap reports on pathways to success in northeast Wisconsin, working in partnership with Open Campus.

Brown County’s 911 dispatcher shortage is relentless. What will it take to fix it? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

The hospital is planning to stop offering inpatient psychiatric care at Aurora Sheboygan and use the space to create additional inpatient medical surgical bed capacity.

The post ‘A loss for our community’: Sheboygan hospital plans to shut down inpatient psychiatric beds appeared first on WPR.

A Wisconsin man who faked his own death in Green Lake last year has been sentenced to 89 days in jail — the same amount of time he evaded law enforcement.

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Wisconsin Democratic lawmakers are introducing a bill to reauthorize the state’s land purchase program at $72 million annually over the next six years and create a board to oversee spending on conservation projects.

The post Wisconsin Democrats put forth bill to reauthorize state’s land purchase program appeared first on WPR.

Debra Gillispie’s grief journey took her from outrage and a mission to shut down a bar, to driving across the country and back, to 20 years of leading local advocacy and reform efforts, and ultimately, to the prison that’s holding the man who killed her son.

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Two Wisconsin Congressmen are engaged in an ongoing, public feud that has escalated to personal attacks online and an in-person quarrel that was captured on camera.

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The case against Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan will move forward following a federal court ruling. Dugan is accused of helping a man evade ICE by ushering him through a side door of her courtroom.

The post Criminal case against Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan will move forward, court rules appeared first on WPR.

California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom departs after speaking about the Election Rigging Response Act at a news conference earlier this month in Los Angeles. California Democrats promised to retaliate if Texas gerrymanders its congressional map, and approved a new map that will go before voters in November. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

When California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom unveiled his plan to retaliate if Republican-led Texas redrew its congressional districts to favor the GOP, he affirmed his support for less partisan maps — and then promised to “meet fire with fire.”

“We’re doing it mindful that we want to model better behavior,” Newsom told reporters in Los Angeles earlier this month, nodding to the independent system his state currently uses to draw districts. “ … But we cannot unilaterally disarm. We can’t stand back and watch this democracy disappear.”

President Donald Trump’s call for Republicans to redraw U.S. House districts so the party can win more seats in the 2026 midterm elections — to gerrymander them — has triggered a redistricting frenzy this summer that also threatens to prompt moves by Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri and New York, among others. Ohio was already set to redraw its lines, even before the current fracas.

The battle for partisan advantage is placing Democratic politicians, advocates of less partisan maps and others who support curbs on gerrymandering in an uncomfortable position, pitting their desire for change against fears that Trump will take advantage of their scruples to wring more GOP seats out of a handful of key states. Some say they accept that Democratic states need to respond, while others warn retaliation will only yield short-term gains.

The Texas House passed a new map on Wednesday, clearing the way for a final vote in the state Senate and Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s signature. In California, lawmakers passed their own map on Thursday, setting up a statewide vote in November over the new districts.

Other states are now likely to follow, as Republicans and Democrats scramble for a political leg up.

But gerrymandering opponents say the current moment has the potential to produce new energy for their movement. More people are paying attention to gerrymandering, they say, and new polls show the public opposes the practice. The rush to redraw maps demonstrates the need for Congress to set national limits, they say.

“I think that the gerrymandering wildfire that we’re seeing across the country right now calls real attention to the urgent need for a national standard,” said David Daley, an author of books on gerrymandering and a senior fellow at FairVote, a Maryland-based nonpartisan group that supports ranked choice voting and multimember House districts to end the practice. “We will never have reform if a handful of states can act on their own.”

At the same time, some gerrymandering opponents fear states will unravel hard-fought victories. They wonder whether temporary measures, such as California potentially setting aside the independent commission it uses to redraw maps, could become permanent.

‘An unprecedented time’

State legislatures exercise primary control over congressional redistricting in 39 states, according to All About Redistricting, a compendium of information on map-drawing hosted by Loyola Law School in California. While some states use other methods, only nine states rely on independent commissions, which typically limit participation by elected officials and are favored by many gerrymandering opponents.

Most states draw maps once a decade after the census, making the mid-decade maneuvers and counter-maneuvers highly unusual (six states currently have only one representative, eliminating the need to draw district lines). But just a few seats could determine who controls the U.S. House. Republicans currently hold 219 seats to Democrats’ 212, with four vacancies.

“We affirm that gerrymandering, both racial and political, disenfranchises voters,” Virginia Kase Solomón, president and CEO of Common Cause, an organization that has long advocated for changes to the redistricting process, said during a press call the day before Newsom’s announcement.

“But this is an unprecedented time of political upheaval,” she said. People don’t want to see a situation develop where maps are redrawn every two years, she added.

The new Texas map could ease the path for Republicans to win an additional five seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Texas lawmakers rapidly advanced the redraw this week once Democratic state lawmakers returned to the state. They had traveled to other states to deny Texas House leaders the quorum required to approve the map, but returned after Newsom outlined California’s response.

Gerrymandering typically involves “packing” and “cracking.” “Packing” refers to the concentration of opposition party voters in a small number of districts to reduce competition elsewhere. “Cracking” means diluting the voting power of the opposing party’s supporters across many districts.

Texas Republicans have been frank that they are pursuing the redraw for partisan advantage. But they emphasize that no prohibition exists, in Texas or nationally, against mid-decade redistricting and that a 2019 U.S. Supreme Court decision cleared the way for states to draw maps for partisan purposes, removing the power of federal courts to police political gerrymandering.

The new maps give Republicans a chance of winning additional districts but doesn’t guarantee victories, they add.

“The underlying goal of this plan is straightforward: improve Republican political performance,” Texas state Rep. Todd Hunter, a Republican who carried the bill in the Texas House, said during floor debate on Wednesday. He added a short time later: “According to the U.S. Supreme Court, you can use political performance, and that is what we’ve done.”

Tricky terrain

As Texas moves forward and California prepares to respond, Common Cause illustrates the tricky terrain anti-gerrymandering advocates are now navigating.

The group, headquartered in Washington, D.C., fought to enact the California Citizens Redistricting Commission in 2008. But earlier this month, Common Cause declined to condemn California’s retaliation, saying it will judge the effort by whether the maps are a proportional response to gerrymanders in other states, whether the process includes meaningful public participation, and whether the maps expire and are replaced after the 2030 census through the state’s regular redistricting process, among other criteria.

Newsom’s proposal, the Election Rigging Response Act, will ask California voters in November to temporarily set aside the state’s redistricting commission and approve the new map drawn by the legislature. The commission would resume drawing maps following the census.

Recent polling shows widespread public opposition to gerrymandering. A YouGov poll of 1,116 Americans conducted in early August found 69% believe it should be illegal to draw districts in a way that makes it harder for members of a particular political party to elect their preferred candidates. The poll’s margin of error was plus or minus 4 percentage points.

The number of Americans who say gerrymandering is a big problem has jumped in recent years. In the YouGov poll, 75% of respondents said it is a major problem when districts are intentionally drawn to favor one party, up from 66% in a 2022 survey.

Some California Republicans have responded to Newsom’s proposal by defending the commission system. A group of Republicans sued in state court to block the plan, but the California Supreme Court on Wednesday denied a request to temporarily halt the effort.

‘Is this bad for reform?’

While members of the public might say they favor citizen-led commissions, they may not care deeply about the issue, said David Hopkins, a political science professor at Boston College who has written on polarization in American politics. He called gerrymandering a “classic process subject” that comes off as “inside baseball” to many people.

“The legislators in states that haven’t adopted commissions clearly don’t feel any particular political pressure to do so,” Hopkins said.

Some Republicans in states weighing a mid-decade gerrymander also discount the risk of a public backlash.

In Missouri, Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe may call a special session this fall to redraw the state’s map in hopes of gaining an additional GOP seat in the U.S. House. James Harris, a Missouri Republican consultant with close ties to GOP officials in the state, said he wasn’t concerned redistricting would create momentum to change the process.

Missouri voters in recent years have approved ballot measures favored by Democrats, including one in 2018 that empowered a nonpartisan demographer to draw state legislative districts, though not congressional districts. But Republicans led a successful campaign to convince voters to repeal the changes two years later.

Harris painted any new potential map as part of a national effort to help Trump — who received 58.5% of the vote in Missouri last November.

“I think the lens is wanting to make sure the president has a majority in Congress so he can actually govern for the last two years versus two years of investigations, gridlock,” Harris said.

Advocates of less partisan maps said lawmakers aren’t likely to surrender their own role in mapmaking. While some state courts may limit redistricting excesses, federal courts stopped policing partisan gerrymandering following the Supreme Court’s 2019 decision. And the high court may soon weaken the judiciary’s power to block race-based gerrymandering.

Samuel Wang, director of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, which supports eliminating partisan gerrymandering, said the “one good thing” about the redistricting battle is that it’s prompted voters to pay attention to an arcane and technical issue. That could be a positive in the long run, he said, “if people can keep a cool head.”

Wang has written online that any response to Texas should remain measured and proportionate. California offers Democrats the only clean option to strike back, Wang wrote. Five Democratic seats could be added by redrawing the state.

“Is this bad for reform? I mean, I’m torn,” Wang told Stateline. “Because on the other hand, Democrats have been, over the last few decades, vocal in their advocacy for voting rights in various forms and now that advocacy is in question because they find a need to fight fire with fire.”

“So I guess the way I would characterize it is if they can hold it in check and not do it in every single state and just engage in whatever they’re doing where it will make a difference,” he said, “then we might not lose all the progress that’s been made.”

Stateline reporter Jonathan Shorman can be reached at jshorman@stateline.org.

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.

A member of the National Guard stands alongside a military vehicle parked in front of Union Station, near the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 18, 2025. (Photo by Jane Norman/States Newsroom)

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday directing state National Guard units to be ready to assist local, state and federal law enforcement, a potential step toward a dramatic expansion of Trump’s use of military personnel for domestic policing.

The order calls for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to ensure troops in the National Guard of every state “are resourced, trained, organized, and available to assist Federal, State, and local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances and ensuring the public safety” and directs the secretary to establish “a standing National Guard quick reaction force” for “nationwide deployment.”

Hegseth will also work with adjutant generals to decide a number of each state’s Guard “to be reasonably available for rapid mobilization for such purposes,” the order said.

State National Guard units are generally controlled by the state’s governor, except in emergencies. 

In comments in the Oval Office on Monday, Trump said the Guard deployment could rapidly “solve” crime in some major cities, but left doubt about his desire to overrule governors who do not want Guard troops in their cities.

Trump mobilized the District of Columbia National Guard, which he is able to do because the district is not a state, to assist local law enforcement this month. Guard troops from West Virginia, Louisiana, Ohio, Mississippi, Tennessee and South Carolina also have sent troops to the nation’s capital.

Free DC, a group that advocates for district self-governance, issued a lengthy statement calling the move dictatorial. 

“Trump is laying the groundwork to quell all public dissent to his agenda. If he is successful, it would spell the end of American democracy,” the group said. “We refuse to allow that to happen.”

Chicago next?

Following the deployment to Washington, D.C., Trump said “Chicago should be next.”

Democratic governors, such as Illinois’ J.B. Pritzker, should request National Guard assistance, Trump said. But if they would not, Trump said he may not send troops.

Asked if he would send troops into cities over governors’ objections, Trump complained that governors could be ungrateful for federal deployment.

“We may wait,” he continued. “We may or may not. We may just go in and do it, which is probably what we should do. The problem is it’s not nice when you go in and do it, and somebody else is standing there saying, as we give great results, say, ‘Well, we don’t want the military.’”

Pritzker slammed Trump on social media and said he would not accept Trump sending troops to his state’s largest city.

“I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again and again: We don’t have kings or wannabe dictators in America, and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one,” he posted with a link to Trump’s comments.

The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act generally prohibits federal military forces from engaging in domestic law enforcement. 

‘I’m not a dictator’

Trump dismissed criticism that deploying the military for law enforcement purposes is antidemocratic, saying that most people agree with extreme measures to crack down on urban crime.

“They say, ‘We don’t need ‘em. Freedom, freedom. He’s a dictator, he’s a dictator,’” Trump said of his critics. “A lot of people are saying, ‘Maybe we like a dictator.’ I don’t like a dictator. I’m not a dictator. I’m a man with great common sense and a smart person. And when I see what’s happening to our cities, and then you send in troops, instead of being praised, they’re saying, ‘You’re trying to take over the republic.’ These people are sick.”

Trump earlier this summer called up the California National Guard to quell protests over immigration enforcement in Los Angeles, setting the stage for his actions in the district. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, has challenged the president’s authority in a case that is still in court.

Trump over the weekend also fought with Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, also a Democrat, on social media and threatened to send in troops to Baltimore.