WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump asked the U.S. Supreme Court Thursday to intervene in a lower court decision that halts his $400 million White House ballroom construction unless he receives authorization from Congress.

The administration requested the justices grant an immediate stay to a 2-1 federal appeals court decision that sided with historic preservationists who argued Trump doesn’t have the authority to build a 90,000-square-foot ballroom where the White House East Wing stood until Trump ordered its demolition in October 2025.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued the decision on Aug. 7 but delayed the ruling for two weeks to allow the administration time to appeal.

U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer, who previously defended Trump before the high court as his personal defense attorney, argued the project was needed to enhance security at the White House.

The “updated East Wing complex is absolutely required and should not be enjoined,” he said, citing assassination attempts on the president. 

Sauer also wrote that Congress has “twice over” already authorized the current project, through a 1916 law governing the National Park Service and a 1978 statute, by empowering the Department of the Interior to embark on major construction projects and delegating powers to the president to use appropriated funds to alter the White House.

“Following this tradition, President Trump determined that many factors urgently required modernizing the old East Wing — most critically, that it no longer performed vital security functions,” according to the appeal.

“Compounding those problems were structural defects, such as a degraded foundation, crumbling roof, pervasive mold and mildew, water-related deterioration, obsolete electrical infrastructure, toxic asbestos, and lead paint.”

In a written statement to States Newsroom Friday, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the group that initially sued to stop construction, described the administration’s application to the Supreme Court as “audacious.”

The “transparent efforts to evade the rule of law, frustrate judicial review, and limit the availability of meaningful relief in the courts must stop here,” the statement, attributed to the group as a whole, said.

‘Military complex’

The Trump administration has asserted publicly the project would serve as a security upgrade. Sauer again made that argument in his 45-page appeal. 

The ballroom, which is expected to seat 1,000 people, will be incorporated into a “highly integrated military complex” descending several stories underground, he told the court, and would include security features such as drone-proof ceilings, bomb shelters, sniper nests, “military-grade venting,” and “state-of-the-art hospital and medical facilities.”

The trust noted that courts had already rejected the security arguments.

“Each court reviewing this case has ruled that construction of the Ballroom is unlawful,” the statement said. “Each court has seriously and carefully considered the administration’s asserted national security concerns. And each court has ruled that while underground bunker construction can continue, Ballroom construction must stop.”

According to Thursday’s appeal, the project is already 65% complete, with a concrete-and-steel “superstructure” reaching five stories underground and 70-feet high, occupying nearly 50,000 square feet. 

The construction has accelerated over the past four months, with workers on a 250-person crew operating 20 hours a day, seven days a week, “to keep the Project ahead of schedule and under budget,” Sauer wrote, adding that $200 million has been spent or committed to date, and has been “shouldered by private donations.”

The National Trust for Historic Preservation accused the administration of taking advantage of the court delay to speed construction.

“The administration has not only refused to listen, but is now actively attempting to outrun the courts by accelerating construction of the Ballroom,” the group said.

“The administration’s audacious Supreme Court filing today announced it would be installing another 1 million pounds of rebar and pouring another 3,000 cubic yards of concrete in just the next week alone, before the Appeals Court’s stay of the injunction expires next Friday,” the group said.

Court battle

In mid-April, a judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia blocked any above-ground construction on the ballroom, allowing underground construction on security facilities to continue. 

A day later, April 17, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia stayed the lower court ruling and put the case on a fast track. 

The National Trust for Historic Preservation hailed the split appeals court decision earlier this month as a “great day for our country and for the American people’s right to voice their opinions about the historic places they cherish, including the White House.”

“From the beginning, our position has been clear and consistent: the law states that only Congress can authorize the construction of a ballroom at the White House,” the trust’s president and CEO Brent Leggs said in a statement Aug. 7.

The East Wing was originally built in 1902 as a receiving area for visitors, according to the White House Historical Association. A 1942 renovation added a bomb shelter and a second story. From the late 1970s onward, beginning with first lady Rosalynn Carter, the wing housed the office of first ladies and their staff.

While consultants have recommended reforms to how Wisconsin addresses mental health in prison, the Wisconsin Department of Corrections reports obstacles in the way of many of the reforms, according to a document obtained by the Examiner. In Wisconsin’s adult prisons, nearly half of incarcerated people have a mental health diagnosis. 

“We are seeing that more and more individuals that come into our facilities are sicker than many of their peers in the community,” Jared Hoy, secretary of the Department of Corrections, said at a webinar in March. 

Hoy said he believes this is the result of a lack of affordable healthcare and mental health resources in the community. He said that people coming into the system may not have had consistent mental healthcare, meaning that clinicians are often trying to solve more advanced problems. 

“And we kind of become this safety net, to meet those needs that maybe have not been met in the community,” Hoy said. 

In November, the DOC released a report with recommendations for change to the prison system as part of its partnership with the consulting firm Falcon Correctional and Community Services, Inc. One recommendation involves keeping incarcerated people with a serious mental illness from ending up in restrictive housing — also known as solitary confinement — by instead sending them to alternative units if they commit a violation. 

The DOC reports that it is facing hurdles to implementing this proposal and some of the other recommendations for change to the prison system’s response to mental illness, according to a slideshow document received by the Examiner. 

Mental Health Director Kevin Kallas and Psychology Director Marlena Larson of the DOC presented the slideshow to a committee of the Wisconsin Mental Health Action Partnership, according to a member of MHAP who shared the document with the Examiner. The Department of Corrections did not respond to an inquiry about whether the agency produced the document. 

For some of the recommendations, the department indicated in the slideshow that it would need at least one of the following: additional staffing, material resources, new construction or remodeling, technology upgrades or significant changes to current policies or operations. Among the recommendations DOC said it needs more resources to address is sending people with a serious mental illness to a mental health unit instead of restrictive housing.

Falcon’s 137-page report stated that the majority of its recommendations will require funding, and often budget approval. 

It’s unclear whether the DOC’s understanding of what’s needed to implement the report’s recommendations has changed since agency officials presented the slideshow in March. A department spokesperson said Kallas was not available for an interview and did not respond to further requests for comment. 

It’s also unclear how much progress the DOC has made so far on putting Falcon’s ideas into action. In November, DOC communications director Beth Hardtke told the Examiner that after receiving the recommendations in the report, the DOC immediately began implementing many of the changes.

The Examiner reported last month on the process of implementing reforms laid out in the contract between the DOC and Falcon, which the Examiner obtained in mid-May. 

Susan Franzen of the prison reform advocacy group Ladies of SCI questioned the DOC slideshow’s representation that it does not have the resources to implement a proposal about providing meaningful out-of-cell time and programming to people on clinical observation. Franzen argued the agency can make change with the resources it has. Incarcerated people can be placed on clinical observation for a deteriorating mental illness or a risk of physical harm to self or others. 

“Because that seems to be a go-to all the time — of, if we have to get them out of their cell, we need more staff, we need more ‘this,’” Franzen said. “No, you need to be more creative in your scheduling and think outside the box.”

The Wisconsin DOC and many other corrections departments use  suicide-resistant cells for at-risk patients without regard for the specific causes of the individual patient’s problems, the Falcon report says. The report says that these cells are designed to minimize self-harm, but they don’t guarantee safety or provide what’s needed to reduce the patient’s risk of self-harm and help them become more resilient. 

The report promotes providing these incarcerated people with meaningful time out of their cells, as well as personalized re-assessment, treatment and programming.

Focusing on the most severe needs

Nearly half of people incarcerated in adult prisons are identified as needing mental health services, as of May 2025 — a “much higher” rate than other state correctional departments, according to the Falcon report. 

In the slideshow, DOC indicated its intent to focus more on patients with “acute needs or recurrent problematic behavior.”

An “unsustainable” number of incarcerated people have to be seen by psychological services every six months, and this interferes with the more intensive care needed for patients with higher needs, according to discussions with prison staff about mental health that were cited in the Falcon report. The report advises that the agency remove people who no longer need the infrequent appointments from the caseload.

While the report doesn’t delve into the impact of unfilled psychologist positions in the prison system,, the DOC is facing a vacancy rate of about 30% for psychological services staff.

Tom Denk was released from prison in 2022 and is now co-president of 

ESTHER, an advocacy group in northeast Wisconsin that works on criminal justice issues. He said there are more people with mental and physical illnesses in prison than outside it, and that most people in prison need some sort of care. 

“And out here, there’s a shortage of providers, so we can imagine how much more of a shortage there is when basically almost everyone really needs that kind of thing,” Denk said. 

Suicide watch 

The Falcon report includes recommendations for protocols when an incarcerated person is under observation due to a deteriorating mental illness or a risk of physical harm to self or others. In the slideshow, the DOC indicated the agency could implement a proposal to replace small sleeping mats with suicide-resistant mattresses.

The agency labeled the following recommendations in red, indicating there are obstacles to implementing them:  

• Moving clinical observation rooms out of restrictive housing and into more appropriate environments 
• Providing meaningful out-of-cell time and programming
• Reducing restraint use through increased use of one-on-one observation by staff
• Analyzing why someone ends up in suicide observation and developing targeted interventions 

At one of Wisconsin’s oldest prisons, Green Bay Correctional Institution, almost three quarters of incarcerated people have a mental illness diagnosis, as of a fiscal year 2025 report. 

Former GBCI officer Jeff Hoffman told the Examiner that he was the assigned sergeant in the restrictive housing unit, and saw these issues “up close and personal.”

“Staff working on these units aren’t properly trained to understand and deal with these individuals,” said Hoffman, who left the prison in early 2023 after almost 23 years. “We were trained in the security aspect. Not mental health.” 

Hoffman added that staffing levels are a concern, with staff either being too few in number or too tired from extra hours of work, and that mental health is an issue for staff and healthcare workers as well as incarcerated people. 

DOC policy states that adult prisons must provide at least six hours of mental health training to security staff at the start of their employment, including for suicide prevention, symptoms of mental illness and proper response to incarcerated people with mental health problems. Adult prisons are required to provide training to new employees on preventing staff suicide.

Adult prison staff who have contact with incarcerated people take an annual update training in suicide prevention, and prisons are required to conduct quarterly drills simulating staff members’ response to a suicide attempt by an incarcerated person. 

Green Bay Correctional saw “a large number” of episodes of self-harming and/or disruptive behavior, according to GBCI’s annual report for fiscal year 2025. The report attributes this to the “unique features” of the incarcerated population there, which reportedly includes a high number of young men, many of whom have “poor coping skills with lengthy prison sentences.” 

Suicide attempts, self-harm behaviors and threats of self harm have historically led to a high number of placements of incarcerated people on observation at the prison, the GBCI report said. There was a “drastic upward trend” in these placements in fiscal year 2025, with 900 observation placements to date, the GBCI report said. 

Hoffman said that staff frequently have to move incarcerated people to suicide observation for making false claims that they are going to commit suicide. According to psychologist and jail suicide expert Lisa Boesky, incarcerated people might resort to this as an attempt to be moved out of a chaotic housing unit or away from a cellmate, for example. Meanwhile, the rise in suicide threats within the prison puts additional pressure on the system. 

Solitary confinement 

In the slideshow, a few proposals for reform of restrictive housing — also called solitary confinement — were labeled green, meaning that the department could significantly implement those ideas. 

The Examiner reported last year on how the Department of Corrections employs incarcerated peer specialists to mentor their fellow prisoners. The department said it could review how certified peer specialists are used in restrictive housing units and expand their role. The agency also indicated it could continue efforts to limit the amount of time incarcerated people spend in solitary.

Denk said he didn’t hear about peer support when he was in prison, but that it’s a great help to staff and incarcerated people.

“I wish there was even more of that, because when it comes to clinical staff, there’s only so many of them,” Denk said. 

The following solitary confinement proposals were labeled red, meaning there are obstacles to implementing them:

• Providing each incarcerated person with at least two hours of time outside their cell each day. 
• Tracking how much time incarcerated people spend outside their cells in real time, and tracking their participation in programming. 
• Staff from different disciplines reviewing the “status, programming and needs” of people in solitary each week, instead of every 30 days. Under current policy, if a person has a solitary sentence of 60 days or more and a serious mental illness — such as schizophrenia or clinical depression — reviews must take place at least every other week.

Under another proposal marked red, the department would have a method to understand the root causes behind why an incarcerated person is repeatedly being placed in solitary confinement. Prison staff would develop individualized plans for these people to try to break the cycle. 

For example, if a person keeps ending up in solitary because they have received threats and fear the area of the prison where the general population of incarcerated people live, staff could work with the person to identify specific areas where they would feel safe, the Falcon report suggests.

Over two-thirds of people sent to restrictive housing for over 120 days were on the department’s lists of people identified to be receiving mental health services, the report found; 17% of people sent for over 120 days met the definition of having a “serious mental illness,” such as schizophrenia or clinical depression.

Incarcerated people can be placed in solitary due to safety concerns about them staying in the general population, but most placements are punishment for a violation. 

A report earlier this week of a couple of measles cases in Southwest Wisconsin has turned into an outbreak, with 13 more confirmed cases and six probable cases of the viral illness, the state health department reported Thursday.

The outbreak, in Iowa and Lafayette counties, highlights the importance of getting vaccinated for measles, considered the safest and most effective way to prevent the spread of the virus, said Dr. Ryan Westergaard, the chief medical officer in the communicable disease bureau of the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.

The new group of measles patients who have been diagnosed are in Iowa County, Westergaard told reporters at a DHS briefing on the findings. Most of them were not vaccinated for measles, he said.

DHS announced two measles cases Tuesday, one in Iowa County and one in Lafayette County, that were confirmed through tests at the Wisconsin State Lab of Hygiene. 

Those were the third and fourth measles cases in Wisconsin in 2026, and were not related to the first two this year, which were linked to out-of-state travel.

Subsequent investigation by the local public health departments in the two counties turned up the 13 confirmed and six suspected cases that DHS announced Thursday. None of the current cases have been tied to travel. 

“The rapid emergence of these cases, particularly among people who have not traveled outside of Wisconsin, indicates that there is active local transmission, and it’s very likely that additional cases exist in the community that have not yet been identified or reported to public health,” Westergaard said.

State tracks 23 cases so far

Westergaard said DHS would not release the ages or age range for any of the people with confirmed measles cases in the current outbreak in order to protect their privacy.

The department maintains a state registry for all measles cases that includes age ranges and vaccination status. Thursday evening, that record showed that of the 23 confirmed or suspected cases identified in Wisconsin in 2026, three were in children age 4 or younger, 11 were in children ages 5 to 17, and nine were in adults ages 18 or older.

Westergaard said that it’s likely that there are more people with measles whose cases haven’t been identified and therefore aren’t on the state’s dashboard.

With one exception, the patients identified in 2026 were not vaccinated for the measles virus, according to DHS. One has been hospitalized.

Vaccine is ‘single best tool’ to stop outbreaks

DHS is asking people to verify whether they’ve had the MMR vaccine — the shot that includes protection against measles, mumps and rubella. That information is probably available from a person’s regular health provider, if they have one, or from the Wisconsin immunization registry.

The MMR vaccine is usually given in a two-shot sequence: the first dose when a child is 12 to 15 months old, and the second when the child is 4 to 6 years old.

“Having received two doses of MMR vaccine provides exceptional, long-lasting protection, and this vaccine remains our single best tool to stop this and future outbreaks,” Westergaard said.

For an adult without a record of the shot or who is uncertain about having had it, it is safe to get an additional shot, he said.  

DHS is also asking people to be familiar with measles symptoms. Westergaard said those include a high fever, a red rash that starts at the head and spreads down and covers the whole body, a cough, a runny nose and red or bloodshot eyes.

A person who develops those symptoms, or whose family member experiences them, should call their regular healthcare provider, Westergaard said.

People with the symptoms should call ahead before visiting a clinic, urgent care or the emergency room, he said, so that medical personnel can take precautions to prevent airborne spread of the virus before a patient arrives to protect other patients in the facility’s waiting room.

Easily spread virus

“Measles is known to be one of the most contagious viruses,” Westergaard said, “and we treat every case very seriously, because our goal is to completely stop measles transmission in the community anytime we have a case or a cluster of cases.”

Measles can cause serious health problems, according to DHS — pneumonia, deafness, and brain damage as a result of swelling from the disease.

Local public health agencies in the two counties haven’t identified specific public places where the virus might have spread, Westergaard said.

One of the jobs of local public health departments is to track contagious illnesses such as measles in their communities or counties, he said. DHS supports local agencies as they work to trace who else has been exposed to the virus.

Trump urges shift in childhood vaccine recommendations, calls for splitting up MMR vaccine

When a person who’s been exposed has been identified, they’re monitored for symptoms “to make sure that if any new cases pop up, we can get them isolated right away,” Westergaard said.

While the current outbreak is still small, “it’s a dynamic situation,” he added. With help from DHS, local health departments are tracing the spread of the virus and watching for more people who develop symptoms, “because that would be a sign that it’s getting larger.”

New Trump order ‘contradicts the best available science’

Thursday’s announcement follows an order Monday from President Donald Trump. Wisconsin’s top health official said Thursday that Trump’s order goes against the best scientific recommendations for measles prevention.

Trump’s order calls for separating the MMR vaccine into separate shots for each illness.

“There is no new scientific evidence that justifies changing recommendations that have, and continue to, protect children across the United States,” said Kirsten Johnson, secretary-designee of Wisconsin DHS, in a statement released Thursday.

“The executive order does not square at all with our recommendations on how to prevent measles or other vaccine-preventable diseases,” Westergaard said. “It was not science-based. It actually contradicts the best available science about how to prevent disease and keep kids healthy.”

DHS early this year turned from the Trump administration’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine recommendations after the agency cast aside previous longstanding vaccine guidance.

DHS instead has endorsed the childhood vaccine recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Family Physicians.  

Westergaard said vaccinations in Wisconsin have fallen below the 95% rate that helps ensure widespread protection from illnesses that vaccines can prevent, and are even below 90%. That has happened for many complex reasons, he said — including misinformation, sometimes spread deliberately.

Wisconsin has so far avoided the “massive outbreaks” of measles that have occurred in states such as Utah, Texas and North Carolina, Westergaard said. Public health officials can contain the illness if they learn early of cases and are able to move quickly to identify and quarantine patients. But that’s more challenging because the state’s vaccination rate is lower than it should be, he said.

In addition to encouraging more vaccination, cooperation with public health measures is “a second layer of defense,” Westergaard said. “Let’s work together as a community, as a team, when an outbreak happens — be willing to share information, be willing to stay home when any symptoms happen, and allow us to identify the extent of an outbreak and to stop it.”

As a new school year begins, some classrooms may use artificial intelligence tools to flag a student struggling with classwork, track attendance or try to raise reading scores.

But as school districts make decisions on which tools are safe and worth spending thousands or millions of dollars on, some officials feel overwhelmed by the array of choices. Some states and districts have begun offering guidance for vetting AI purchases, but educators and experts say districts are still carrying much of the burden on their own.

While school districts have long wrestled with education technology purchases, AI is different because the industry is moving faster than districts and states can keep up with, said Mark Schneider, a nonresident senior fellow at the conservative-leaning think tank the American Enterprise Institute. 

“There’s always an asymmetry between what the providers know and what the districts know,” Schneider told Stateline. “And the question is, can we set up mechanisms for helping the districts understand what’s going on and choosing better.”

Billions of dollars are at stake. The overall U.S. education technology market, which includes computers, software and digital content, generated almost $48 billion in revenue in 2024 and is expected to reach more than $90 billion by 2030, according to Grand View Research. The AI in education market in the United States generated about $2.5 billion in revenue last year and is expected to exceed $15 billion by 2033, the group said.

Scott Langford, superintendent of Sumner County Schools in Tennessee, said his district decided to test AI to address plateauing middle school reading scores. Langford said the district wanted to know whether AI could give students immediate feedback and help teachers see, in real time, where students struggled during regular classroom instruction.

“You have to identify what you need,” Langford said. “The (AI edtech) market is so overwhelming for districts and for vendors. … Most of them don’t really do much that drives any kind of change for students.” 

Sumner first tried Coursemojo — an AI-powered literacy tool used to support classroom instruction and provide real-time feedback to students and teachers — in a five-day micro-pilot in a sixth grade classroom, then piloted the tool in half of its sixth grade classrooms. Langford said the strongest tools are not the ones that replace teachers, but the ones that “help them see student understanding more quickly.”

Sumner has continued using Coursemojo after the pilot, Langford said.

The Allentown School District, a large, urban district in Pennsylvania, uses a two-phase review process for AI programs that Superintendent Carol Birks said includes non-negotiables such as student safety and data security. Vendors must ensure that all user-generated data and chat logs remain the exclusive property of the district, and vendors must explicitly state that student data will not be sold or used to train AI models.

Birks said that while districts are making these decisions on AI tools, state and federal guidance would be helpful. In addition to Coursemojo, the district also uses other AI platforms like Google’s Gemini.

“A significant challenge is that the onus of making these decisions is placed entirely back on the individual school district,” said Birks. “Although Allentown has built strong internal capacity to handle these responsibilities, guidance from the state level on artificial intelligence vetting or protections would greatly assist school districts.”

What vetting looks like

In most cases, vendors must sign a data processing agreement, complete a security questionnaire and pass legal, privacy and security reviews before a tool can be approved for use in schools. And some states already have laws governing traditional education technology purchases and student data protections. But many districts haven’t laid out best practices or recommendations for how school districts enter contracts with vendors or even bidding processes for certain tools. 

And some AI use in classrooms has drawn criticism and legal action. Students and parents in Arizona and Kansas have filed federal lawsuits challenging school districts’ use of Gaggle — a student-safety monitoring platform that scans activity on school-issued accounts and devices — saying it violated their constitutional rights. In Los Angeles, the superintendent of public schools resigned after the district paid $3 million for an AI chatbot from a company called AllHere, which later filed for bankruptcy and whose founder was charged with fraud.

State education boards and agencies, which already regulate contracts for textbooks, transportation and student data systems, have filled in some gaps with vetting and procurement guidance for districts.

The Pennsylvania Department of Education instructs schools to understand who controls the data entered into any AI tool, examine third-party data-sharing practices, limit data collection to what is necessary, keep a human “in the loop” if the tool is being used for grading and discipline, and assess whether it improves student performance. 

New York City Public Schools updated its privacy and security review process to include standards for AI, require vendors to disclose what their AI tools are capable of, prohibit the use of student data to train AI models and meet transparency requirements so tools can be explained to families and students. 

Chicago Public Schools released an AI Guidebook governing the use of AI software and models and in December began blocking unapproved third-party AI products from its network.

“Chicago Public Schools welcomes the promising innovation of artificial intelligence in teaching and learning, while safeguarding the development of students’ foundational skills and critical thinking,” a Chicago Public Schools spokesperson wrote to Stateline. 

The U.S. Department of Education has provided little guidance to districts about AI purchases.

The Southern Regional Education Board — a consortium of 16 Southern states that provides guidance on school issues — published an AI procurement and evaluation checklist last year for K-12 schools. 

Leslie Eaves, program director of project-based learning at the board who co-led the AI commission, said districts should first let adults test AI tools before placing them in front of students. She cautions that teachers should review AI-generated material before using it in the classroom and they need to trust their experience and expertise. 

“Anything with AI is a risky click,” she said. “There’s a lot of tool makers out there that are going to sell you their product and they’re going to say it’s the biggest and best in everything … At the end of the day, humans are the ones who will know what’s best for their schools and students.”’

Janice Mak, an associate director of curriculum and pedagogy at Arizona State University’s Learning Engineering Institute, says districts should evaluate whether an edtech tool is accessible, explainable, grounded in learning science and solving a real educational need.

“State level policy or guidance only goes so far, and there’s also a research gap and there’s also a policy gap,” Mak told Stateline.

Mak said she heard from a middle school teacher piloting an AI tool who noticed English learners were being unfairly penalized or misread by the system. The students noticed the bias, she said, and the teacher used it to teach them about algorithmic bias and how AI systems are trained.

‘A tall order for districts’

Still, districts are being asked to do too much on their own, said Sue Thotz, director of outreach for Common Sense Education at Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that researches and evaluates media and technology used by children and schools.

Thotz points to a California data privacy agreement, which districts can use to ensure vendors comply with the state’s student data privacy laws, as a way to take some burden off districts by creating a blanket agreement vendors sign onto. The California Student Privacy Alliance, which developed the agreement, gives school systems a searchable database of vendors that have signed, reducing the need for each district to negotiate privacy terms from scratch. 

“Placing the burden upon a district to make sure that every single vendor they’re working with is in full compliance with their state and federal laws when it comes to privacy,” she said. “That’s a tall order for districts that are already stretched very, very thin.” 

Districts may also be sorting an accumulation of a decade’s worth of technology purchases, said Tracy Weeks, senior director of education policy and strategy at Instructure, the education technology company that makes the Canvas learning management system. 

An Instructure report found districts had access to an average of 3,001 digital tools, while students and educators used only four of those tools on average. The report, based on Canvas launch data from more than 12.6 million K-12 users, said the volume of available tools has teachers navigating too many platforms and districts overseeing student data across vendors.

“What I think has happened is that I think we did a lot of digital hoarding,” Weeks said. Now, she said, districts are asking, “What are the things we should actually keep? What do we need to use? What can actually move the needle?”

Shrinking budgets and the expiration of federal pandemic-era funding has also forced districts to scrutinize purchases. 

Dacia Toll, co-founder of Coursemojo, the software used by Sumner County and Allentown, said districts should first ask whether an AI product aligns with what is known about cognitive science and strong teaching methods. 

“Education has had a long-standing issue with vetting edtech for safety, usability and efficacy, and I just think AI is making that more pronounced,” she told Stateline. “There are a handful of additional risks, and there’s so much hype right now that I think some districts are feeling like they’re behind if they’re not actively implementing AI.” 

Stateline reporter Robbie Sequeira can be reached at rsequeira@stateline.org. 

The Wisconsin Judicial Commission has again filed a complaint with the Wisconsin Supreme Court against Winnebago County Circuit Court Judge Scott Woldt, alleging the judge “engaged in misconduct,” by making degrading comments during his 2023 campaign and subsequently threatening lawyers who practiced in his court, as well as by making  condescending comments to a psychiatrist of Filipino descent offering expert testimony.

In a statement to the media, Judge Woldt’s legal counsel has disputed the allegations against him.

This is the second time Judge Woldt has had a complaint lodged by the judicial commission to the state’s highest court. In 2021, he was suspended for one week without pay due to a series of incidents from 2009 to 2016 involving “undignified” language he used in court and an incident where he revealed to visiting high school students a gun that he had in his possession.

The latest complaint filed on Aug. 3 cites three different issues.

On March 9, 2023, Woldt was interviewed on the “Eye on Oshkosh” YouTube platform, responding to questions during his campaign for another term as judge. During the interview, he was asked about tattoos on his body, and he explained the tattoos helped him avoid being recognizable as a judge, and he also noted that several death threats had been made against him.

Woldt said when asked in public whether he is a judge, his response would be, “I’m a sanitational (sic) engineer. I deal with society’s garbage.”

The WCF found Woldt’s language clashed with Supreme Court rules that compel judges to “promote public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary” and “observe high standards of conduct so that the integrity and independence of the judiciary will be preserved.”

The complaint also alleges that after Woldt won his April 2023 reelection, three attorneys say Judge Woldt was resentful of them for not supporting his campaign and implied there would be retribution in his court.

Some of the allegations stem from an April 25, 2023 after-work social event at the Ruby Owl Tap Room near the courtroom. The complaint said the judge told a public defender, “Your office [the Public Defender’s office] has made some grave mistakes, and you made the worst [by not endorsing his campaign].”

The complaint says another attorney tried to shake Judge Woldt’s hand, but Woldt said the attorney had a campaign sign for Woldt’s opponent in his yard and reportedly said there would be consequences for supporting the opponent, reportedly adding, “You’re dead to me,” and advising the attorney to inform his clients of this position between the attorney and the judge.

The complaint states that the attorney asked Woldt how the situation could be made right, and the Judge reportedly responded: “This election personally cost me $28,000; write out a check and we are all good.”

According to  a May 1, 2024 story in the Oshkosh Herald by Bethanie Gengler, “the state judicial ethics panel has rarely acted on complaints,” notes an attorney by the name of Mathew Goldin from Oshkosh had filed a formal request for investigation to the judicial commission over a request for funds from Woldt. The investigation request became public when it was filed as an exhibit to a motion to have Woldt substituted as the presiding judge in a case involving Goldin.

The August 3 complaint cites another attorney who said he had declined a request by Judge Woldt for a campaign contribution, and later, when the attorney visited the judge in his chambers, Woldt reportedly told him “the free passes” for being late to court were no longer going to be offered.

The third situation involves a civil commitment case where the complaint describes an “experienced and local psychiatrist” of Filipino descent, acting as an expert witness, who was questioned by Woldt whether the doctor understood English or had hearing difficulties because Judge Woldt perceived she hadn’t stood up when Woldt entered the court.

The complaint cites Judge Woldt as saying, “From now on, when you come into a court of law and the bailiff says all rise, you better get off your butt. Do you understand me?”

The complaint cites probable cause with five Supreme Court rules that require judges to the following:

* 60.02: “to personally observe high standards of conduct so that the integrity and independence of the judiciary will be preserved.”

* 60.03 (1): “to act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary.”

* 60.04 (1) (d): “to treat those with whom they deal in an official capacity with patience, dignity, and courtesy.”

* 60.04 (1) (e): “to perform judicial duties without bias or prejudice.”

*60.05 (1): “to conduct all of their extra-judicial activities so that they do not cast reasonable doubt on the judge’s capacity to act impartially as a judge or demean the judicial office.” 

The complaint said Judge Woldt was given notice of the allegations and had an opportunity in writing and a formal appearance before the judicial commission to present his side before the complaint was filed.

In response to media requests for a statement, Judge Woldt’s attorney provided the following statement:

“Judge Woldt has vigorously contested these charges since they were first raised and denies any wrongdoing of any kind. He has fully and properly performed his duties as a judge and, in his statements as a private citizen, has done nothing that any private citizen would not have done in exercising his constitutional right of free speech. He looks forward to complete exoneration consistent with the earlier determination by the bipartisan Election Commission, which rejected the similar complaints filed with it.”

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Justice has sued New York, Connecticut and Vermont over laws that allow immigrants in the country without permanent legal status to pay in-state college tuition in the states where they live.

The suits, filed Aug. 10, are part of a larger push from the Trump administration to go after states with such policies, as the administration seeks to curb any benefits that could be extended to people without permanent legal status.  

Since President Donald Trump re-took office, the DOJ has sued 17 states over laws that allow noncitizen students who meet certain requirements access to in-state tuition at public colleges and universities, regardless of their immigration status. 

In five of those lawsuits the DOJ filed — targeting Texas, Kentucky, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Illinois — courts have already struck down the laws. All of those states, except for Illinois, had joined with the federal government rather than defend their laws. 

Beyond New York, Connecticut and Vermont, lawsuits are also pending in California, Colorado, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Virginia.

The lawsuits argue that the policies allow students without permanent legal status to pay drastically lower tuition for public education than U.S. citizens from other states.

“This is a simple matter of federal law: colleges cannot provide benefits to illegal aliens that they do not provide to U.S. citizens,” Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate of the DOJ’s Civil Division said in a statement regarding the New York, Connecticut and Vermont lawsuits. 

“This Department of Justice will not tolerate American students being treated like second-class citizens in their own country,” Shumate said.  

Landscape of state laws

At least 20 states and Washington, D.C., offer in-state tuition to “the states’ undocumented students,” according to the Higher Ed Immigration Portal, a project of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization. 

Roughly 525,000 “undocumented students” are enrolled in colleges and universities across the U.S., according to the Portal. An estimated 129,900 “undocumented students” are eligible for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. 

DACA is intended to help people brought into the country without legal documentation as children. The program, created by the Obama administration in 2012, protects participants from deportation and allows them to receive work permits and obtain driver’s licenses. 

Five states, Arkansas, Idaho, Maine, Ohio and Texas, limit in-state tuition access to DACA recipients, according to the Portal.

Ongoing court battles threaten DACA recipients in Texas with the possibility of losing their ability to obtain a work permit. 

‘Unprecedented’

Diego Sánchez, vice president of policy and strategy at the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, said the DOJ’s efforts to pursue states that offer in-state tuition benefits to students without permanent legal status is “unprecedented.”

“It’s a coordinated federal effort to dismantle state tuition equity policies that have existed for decades,” Sánchez told States Newsroom.

Sánchez added that the policies “do not provide free college or special tuition discounts — they generally allow students who attended and graduated from high school in the state and meet additional state requirements to pay the same in-state tuition rate as the classmates they grew up with.” 

The students “still have to apply, they still have to be admitted, pay tuition and meet the same academic requirements as everyone else,” he said. “The state has already invested in these students … these are benefits that don’t only apply (to) undocumented students.” 

DOJ goes after Texas first

The DOJ’s lawsuits came after Trump signed an executive order in April 2025 that calls on the U.S. attorney general to stop the enforcement of state laws and policies “favoring aliens over any groups of American citizens that are unlawful, preempted by Federal law, or otherwise unenforceable, including State laws that provide in-State higher education tuition to aliens but not to out-of-State American citizens.” 

Texas was the first state the DOJ pursued over such policies. 

The Justice Department challenged in June 2025 the Lone Star State’s 2001 law — the first of its kind in the country — signed by former Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican. 

Rather than defend the law, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Trump-aligned Republican, sided with the DOJ to try to permanently block the state law and signed an agreement the same day the DOJ filed suit. A federal judge then blocked the Texas law.  

A federal appeals court in July rejected an attempt from two advocacy groups, a Texas community college and a student to intervene in the case and defend the Texas law. The appeals effort came after the federal judge had earlier rejected the groups’ attempt to intervene. 

“It’s not the end of the road yet, but it’s been an uphill battle,” said Efrén Olivares, vice president of litigation and legal strategy at the National Immigration Law Center, one of several public interest groups that sought to intervene on behalf of one of the advocacy groups, the Texas community college and the student. 

“It’s a shame because for the last year, thousands of kids who, all they’re doing is trying to get a college education to better themselves and their families, are now prevented from doing so by exorbitant tuition.” 

On June 11,  ICE agents trailed a car into the parking lot of Commodore John Rodgers Elementary/Middle School in Baltimore. For the family riding in that car, an everyday school drop off quickly devolved into chaos.

ICE agents pulled Jesus Acevedo Sanchez from the vehicle, pinned him to the ground and arrested him for being in the country illegally. They also handcuffed and detained his wife, Adriana Gavilan Sanchez, as the couple’s two daughters watched from the back seat and school staff whisked other students away from the scene.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson later told CNN that Acevedo Sanchez “refused lawful commands, violently resisted arrest, and used his vehicle to evade law enforcement, dragging an ICE offer in the process.”

But two weeks ago, a federal judge ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement to release him, ruling that agents did not have probable cause to make the arrest. In the courtroom, Judge Julie Rubin rebuked the ICE officers for failing to follow due process and described the incident outside the school as a “stomach churner.”

Since President Donald Trump began his second term with a vow to crack down on illegal immigration, more than a dozen states have enacted laws designed to keep ICE away from schools. But the incident in Baltimore was a stark illustration of the limits of state and local authority when it comes to immigration enforcement.

Both Maryland and the city of Baltimore have enacted such measures, but neither one prevented ICE agents from making arrests in full view of arriving students at the Commodore John Rodgers Elementary/Middle School.

“Schools are places where children should feel safe, where parents should be able to drop off their kids without fear, and where educators should be able to focus on teaching — not where federal agents carry out immigration enforcement actions in front of children,” Maryland Democratic Gov. Wes Moore said in a statement he released on the day of the incident.

In a phone interview, Zeke Cohen, the Democratic president of the Baltimore City Council, said “the behavior of ICE has been tragic, traumatic, and in violation of all of the principles that we hold dear in Baltimore.”

“They are reckless, they are lawless, and they do whatever they please,” Cohen said. “It’s a challenging situation for cities like Baltimore that prize diversity and inclusion when you have a government that does the opposite.”

The day after its inauguration, the Trump administration announced that it would reverse guidance in place since 2011 that restricted migrant arrests at “sensitive locations,” including schools, hospitals and places of worship. Since then, there have been at least 17 ICE encounters on school grounds, according to a tracker maintained by K-12 Dive, an education news website.

Katherine Currie, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, said that ICE is not targeting schools, but that immigration enforcement “is a clear federal responsibility” under the U.S. Constitution.

“ICE is not going to schools to arrest children — we are protecting children. Criminals are no longer able to hide in America’s schools to avoid arrest,” Currie wrote in an email.

“If a dangerous illegal alien felon were to flee into a school, or a child sex offender is working as an employee, there may be a situation where an arrest is made to protect public safety.”

Warrant required

The state and city restrictions on ICE activity in schools don’t challenge the supremacy of the federal government under the Constitution. Instead, they mostly limit what state, local and school officials can do to assist ICE, often specifying that federal agents should not be granted access to school property without a judicial warrant.

Matthew Lopas, director of state advocacy at the National Immigration Law Center, a nonprofit that advocates for immigrants, said blocking ICE agents from entering school premises without a warrant “is not in conflict with federal law.”

“It is merely saying that this is not a place where immigration enforcement should be coming on fishing expeditions,” Lopas said.

Verjeana McCotter-Jacobs, executive director and CEO of the National School Boards Association, said there are very few situations in which ICE would be justified in showing up at a school.

“We don’t see a need for law enforcement to be executing any activities on school grounds, unless it’s in response to an emergency situation,” McCotter-Jacobs said. ,“It causes stress and distractions to learning, which impacts every single child and every child in the building as well as staff.”

She added that when it does happen, it’s crucial for school officials to be on the same page with state and local law enforcement.

“Some states are unfortunately aligned with the feds in executing arrests on school grounds, and so that leaves the local school district kind of perplexed as to what they’re supposed to do,” she said.

Indiana, for example, enacted a sweeping law this year that bars school districts and universities from implementing any measure that prohibits or restricts public employees from cooperating with ICE. In November, Republican state Attorney General Todd Rokita sued the Indianapolis Public Schools for violating the law.

Ohio is another Republican-led state where political leaders are largely supportive of the Trump administration’s immigration policy, and it has not enacted a law restricting ICE activities on school grounds. But Chad Springer, superintendent of the Athens City School District in Chauncey, said his district’s immigration enforcement policy does focus on whether agents have a warrant.

As soon the Trump administration reversed the “sensitive location” policy last year, Springer said, he visited each of his campuses to explain how the district wanted them to respond in case of an ICE enforcement action.

“At any given time, there’s always a central office staff that’s going to respond if immigration did show up to a campus, and then we would be the ones to deal directly with immigration officials,” Springer explained. “And our board policy dictates we ask them, unless a judicial warrant is involved, to conduct business outside of the school day, not on school grounds.”

Springer said that every school board across the country should be crystal clear about how it would handle any law enforcement activity on campus. He said he understands his own district’s policy, but he’d welcome more direction from the state.

“In the absence of clarity, you have unclear measures, and that leads to confusion,” Springer said. “I would appreciate clear, explicit guidelines from lawmakers as to when we allow or don’t allow [officers] to be there…right now, all I can lean on is board policy.”

The coming school year

In Ohio and elsewhere, the Trump administration’s announcement late last month that it will terminate Temporary Protected Status for more than 330,000 Haitians living in the U.S. will heighten the potential for ICE enforcement at schools.  In Ohio alone, there are about 30,000 Haitians who formerly had that status, which allows people from certain countries to live and work in the U.S. if returning to their home country would be dangerous.

Jeff Wensing, president of the Ohio Education Association, said educators, particularly in cities such as Springfield with large Haitian populations, are concerned about what the new year might bring.

“So we gave guidance to our members in Springfield: ‘Here are your rights,’” Wensing said. “I don’t care who you are — if you are a stranger, including ICE agents, we have a policy, we’re not letting strangers into the school.”

As far as he’s concerned the law is clear.

“They have a legal right to attend a public school, regardless of their immigration status,” Wensing said. “When you make children pawns in a bigger game, that’s never a good thing.”

This story has been updated to correct the title of Verjeana McCotter-Jacobs. Stateline reporter Shalina Chatlani can be reached at schatlani@stateline.org.

Wisconsin’s crazy rollercoaster of a Democratic primary is finally over. After staying up all night waiting to see David Crowley declared the winner by one-half of one percentage point at 2:30 Wednesday morning, a lot of voters are feeling dizzy and seasick. 

Many Francesca Hong supporters are angry. Their grassroots campaign, the best organized, most energized, with the boldest vision throughout the race, was big-footed by Gov. Tony Evers’ last-minute endorsement of Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley. Adding insult to injury, Crowley had already dropped out when Evers urged him to jump back in with a big boost from late campaign cash, apparently for the sole purpose of thwarting Hong. 

Crowley supporters are relieved. They saw Hong as an inexperienced candidate who would lose a winnable general election to Republican Tom Tiffany, a Donald Trump enabler and election denier who has plans to sell off public lands and bring back a total abortion ban. 

National media viewed the Wisconsin primary as a test of the left which, according to the New York Times, the left clearly failed with Hong’s “stunning” loss. 

But feverish punditry about the significance of Wisconsin’s primary has distorted the real meaning of the results. Polls showing Hong was on track to win by double digits were less accurate than the anecdotal experience of voters who knew their friends and neighbors were fretting about how to vote and hadn’t made up their minds right up until Election Day. Those voters moved to Crowley in big numbers at the very end of the race, as he came to seem like the safe alternative. But Hong’s near-miss is hardly a stunning defeat. On the contrary, it showed real strength for a candidate who, when she started, was counted out.  

If your main exposure to Hong was the video of her appearance on Fox News, where she talked in circles about an old tweet in which she recommended canceling Thanksgiving, refusing to either disavow or endorse the idea, the worry made sense. 

It wasn’t just old, establishment types who felt it. “A lot of our members had to be talked down off the fence, they were so worried about electability,” says Robert Kraig, executive director of Citizen Action of Wisconsin, which endorsed Hong. 

For those voters, the big struggle in the primary was a contest between hope and fear. Kraig sees this as a natural phenomenon. “People are hard-wired to be risk-averse,” he says. Especially when the stakes are high, people’s fears, and the sense that they have to protect what they have, overcome their aspirations for something better. Kraig spent time trying to persuade people that they needed to be more imaginative, to consider that many candidates who once seemed improbable, including President Barack Obama and Sen. Tammy Baldwin, changed people’s views of “electability.” 

Hong’s priorities — free childcare, a massive expansion of healthcare, a big minimum wage hike, fully funded schools paid for with a tax increase on the rich — and her assertive, take-it-to-the-hoop attacks on Tiffany, whom she called a “traitor,” resonated with a lot of Wisconsin Democrats. It was the fear that she was not ready for prime time, that she would lose regular voters by speaking the lingo of the academic left, more than her socialist policy positions, that caused them to jump ship. That doesn’t mean the Hong movement failed, or that Democrats can afford to ignore it now that Crowley pulled off his narrow win.

As Kraig points out, voters are not particularly attached to “moderate” policy positions. Progressive ideas can generate big support among a cross-section of voters. Hong’s campaign demonstrated that. 

It makes sense that people who were the most fed up, who felt they had the least to lose, supported Hong. Some were young DSA members. But also, Kraig says, some of his group’s organizers who are “standard liberals” — doctors who are deeply concerned about the systemic failures of healthcare — pushed hard for the group to endorse Hong because of her recognition of the need for radical change in the healthcare system.

The night before the election, I watched Hong fire up canvassers at her campaign office on the east side of Madison. A young, excited group of volunteers clearly felt like they were part of something historic. That movement energy has not been lost. It’s up to Crowley to tap it and to Democrats to recognize its significance. It would be a huge mistake for the Crowley campaign, having pulled off its narrow victory, not to try to connect seriously with the grassroots energy that animated Hong’s supporters. 

Kraig and Christine Neumann-Ortiz, the executive director of the immigrant rights group Voces de la Frontera, which also endorsed Hong, both hold out hope that Crowley, a former community organizer, will not just talk about “unity” with Hong voters, but will listen seriously to them and adopt some of their positions. 

Kraig suggests that Crowley take a page from President Joe Biden, who invited the Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren wing of the Democratic party to help him shape policy after he won in 2020. “It would be good to be credible. To take some positions. Not just call for unity. He could do events with Fran on some issues he wants to lean in on,” Kraig says.

Crowley could make inroads with an energized voting base by taking a stronger position against rapacious AI data centers — one of the issues that animated the Hong campaign. That could be complicated for him with his trade union endorsers. But Hong was the first to recognize what others now see: Voters are demanding a stronger stance.

“It’s going to be really important to connect to those organizer roots and to be bold, not to be timid and move to the center or the right,” says Neumann-Ortiz. 

Voces embraced Hong because she was deeply engaged in defending immigrant rights, including through the Statewide Community Defense Network. “People are coming together to support immigrant families being persecuted by ICE,” Neumann-Ortiz says. Crowley could do more to connect to that, taking a clear stand in support of measures that protect immigrant families.

 “We are in a period of growing authoritarianism — people see that, and growing economic inequality — people feel that,” says Neumann-Ortiz. “We need a movement that brings working people together and challenges the divisions of the right and Tom Tiffany. That’s what’s needed; not to lose that fighting spirit.” 

People are fed up with the lesser-evil argument that “you have no choice,” she adds. And they aren’t putting up with it. “We have seen the emergence of candidates that are much more progressive,” she says. “They come out of a community organizing culture and are willing to demand more.”

More progressives are going to continue to run for office, Neumann-Ortiz predicts. Real political power, she says, “comes from that organized community. They are doing the real democracy work, not just in elections, but the ongoing work of people coming together.” 

Crowley won with a boost from Evers, although he dismisses the idea that he is a creature of the “establishment.” Kraig thinks that’s silly – of course he got a big establishment hand up. But that doesn’t have to be how he governs. 

“Progressive Era champions put into office by the political machines turned against them and became reformers,” Kraig points out. He holds out hope that Crowley, connecting with his organizer roots, might follow in that great Wisconsin tradition. 

When college students head back to campus for the fall semester, more of them will have guaranteed access to abortion medication.

Colorado recently joined California, Illinois, Massachusetts and New York in requiring public colleges and universities to provide abortion medication to students on campus or arrange to make it available to them through an off-campus provider.

Unlike the other states, Colorado’s new law also applies to private colleges and universities. However, Colorado schools are exempt if offering the medication would be “contrary to the institution’s sincerely held religious beliefs or practices” or if doing so would jeopardize a federal grant. Federal dollars cannot be used to pay for abortions except in limited circumstances.

All five states have enacted laws to expand access to abortion in recent years, both before and after the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which cleared the way for states to fully deny abortion access for the first time in 50 years. Since that decision, more than a dozen states have enacted near-total abortion bans.

“In a post-Dobbs era where patients and providers navigate a frightening national landscape, Colorado has stepped up to safeguard reproductive healthcare,” Colorado Democratic state Rep. Kenny Nguyen, who cosponsored the measure in his state, said in a statement. “While abortion is legal, it’s not always accessible, and this law makes it easier for college students to access abortion medication on campus.”

The new Colorado law states that if an institution has an on-campus pharmacy, it must make abortion medication available to enrolled students. If not, health care providers on campus are required to submit a prescription for abortion pills to a pharmacy off campus.

California’s law, which has been in effect since 2023, was the first such measure. It requires every student health clinic on a California State University or University of California campus to offer abortion medication, funded by the state.

California is now considering expanding that law to include community colleges. A proposed bill would require community colleges with health centers to offer access to medication abortion beginning in 2029, if the legislature provides funding.

California campus health center directors have cautioned that many community colleges might not have the money, staff or clinical capacity to provide the service. But the bill’s supporters say offering abortion medication on campus would make it much more accessible to lower-income students who might not have sufficient insurance coverage or a car to procure it elsewhere.

“We are closing a critical gap by ensuring that community college students, one of the most diverse and economically vulnerable populations in our state, have the same access to care as their peers at four-year institutions,” said Democratic Assemblymember Catherine Stefani, the lead author of the bill, during a health committee hearing in April.

Massachusetts, which approved its campus abortion accessibility law in 2022, this week took another step to expand abortion access when Democratic Gov. Maura Healey signed legislation making it the 10th state (plus the District of Columbia) to allow abortion at any point in pregnancy. Most abortions occur in the first trimester; beyond the second trimester, abortions are rare and sometimes related to fetal or maternal health issues.

New York enacted its law requiring public college and university access to abortion medication in 2023, and Illinois started enforcing its mandate on public schools last fall, becoming the first state in the Midwest to do so.

Stateline reporter Sofia Resnick can be reached at sresnick@stateline.org.

A largely overlooked part of the executive order President Donald Trump issued this week scaling back the schedule for childhood vaccines threatens legal action against the four states that don’t allow personal or religious exemptions to school vaccine requirements.

Those states — California, Connecticut, Maine and New York — are among the states with the highest immunization rates, and they are among those that have been most successful in controlling the worst measles outbreak in more than three decades.

All 50 states and the District of Columbia require students to have certain vaccines before attending public school. All allow exemptions for children who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons. Forty-six states plus the District of Columbia also allow exemptions for religious and/or personal beliefs.

Trump’s order, which he signed on Monday, says the attorney general will take legal action against states that do not provide “religious and medical exemptions from childhood and adolescent immunization requirements.”

Some health officials said that Trump’s order, which has questionable legal authority, is unlikely to prompt the states without nonmedical exemptions to change course. And any legal action would take years to wend its way through the courts.

But they criticized the executive order, and its legal threats, for contributing to the misinformation and skepticism that have lowered vaccination rates nationwide.

“It puts a lot of misinformation and a lot of fear and doubt in parents’ minds,” said Dr. Thomas Lew, clinical assistant professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine. “It clouds the conversation around vaccines and their importance and their safety.”

Dr. Molly O’Shea, a pediatrician who practices in suburban Detroit, warned that nonmedical exemptions “increase the number of parents who opt to forgo one or more vaccines for any list of reasons.”

“The learning environment is then more fragile because of the risk of disruption by infectious illness,” she said.

At the same time, O’Shea said, public health requires empathy with parents who are sincerely worried about their children’s well-being and may have been misinformed about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.

“Families who are opting not to vaccinate are doing it from the same place that we’re recommending vaccines. They want their children healthy and well,” O’Shea said. “Just because we come to the opposite conclusion doesn’t mean we didn’t start with the same values.”

In response to Trump’s order, political leaders and health officials in many states, including California, Connecticut,  Maine and New York, vowed to maintain their vaccination rules.

California currently has 52 measles cases, Connecticut has two, Maine has five and New York has 10. All four states have vaccination rates higher than 95%, considered critical to “herd immunity” that can protect the unvaccinated to some degree.

“Maine will continue to follow the science and the facts, and our approach to vaccines remains unchanged by yesterday’s executive order,” Maine Democratic Gov. Janet Mills said in a statement published Tuesday.

As of early August, measles cases were at their highest level since 1991. The states with the highest numbers were South Carolina (670), Utah (524), Pennsylvania (216), Texas (216) and Virginia (176). All of those states allow families to opt out of the school vaccine requirement for personal or religious reasons.

Of the five states with the most cases, only Virginia has a school vaccination rate of more than 95%.

Virginia’s statewide rate was 95.6% for 2024-25, but the measles outbreak was in two rural counties west of Richmond, where measles vaccination rates are less than 75%.

Deaths from another vaccine-preventable childhood illness, whooping cough, also are on the rise. Last year, there were 32 whooping cough deaths, the most since at least 1999. Before vaccines became available in the 1940s, as many as 200,000 children contracted whooping cough every year and 9,000 died.

Whooping cough death statistics for every state were not available, but Kentucky reported three whooping cough deaths last year, its first fatalities in five years, while Louisiana reported two deaths.

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

A new federal rule will end Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming hormone therapies and procedures for kids under age 18.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced Tuesday a rule that prohibits state Medicaid plans from covering gender-affirming procedures for minors and using federal Medicaid dollars for such care. 

The rule also prohibits Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, funds from being used for kids under 19. CMS is defining such care to include puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgical operations. The policy takes effect Oct. 13.

The Trump administration asserts that gender-affirming care is dangerous for kids, while many medical groups say it’s safe and can improve the mental health of children and adolescents. Surgical gender-affirming care operations are very rare for children.

For kids on Medicaid and CHIP who are currently on gender-affirming hormone therapy, the agency said state plans may continue to use federal money up to six months from now. Funds can still be used for mental health care for kids, the agency said.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asserted in a new release that gender-affirming procedures “carry serious risks and can cause irreversible harm.”

In response to several Trump proposals on gender-affirming care, many of the nation’s leading medical associations, including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, have affirmed the safety of care that aligns with a child or teen’s gender identity.

“These rules are a baseless intrusion into the patient-physician relationship,” Dr. Susan Kressly, then president of the academy, said in a December statement. “Patients, their families, and their physicians — not politicians or government officials — should be the ones to make decisions together about what care is best for them.”

Stateline reporter Nada Hassanein can be reached at nhassanein@stateline.org.

The Trump administration on Wednesday renewed its request to the U.S. Supreme Court to quickly decide a case over an executive order restricting voting, a day after a Massachusetts federal judge expanded an injunction on the order nationwide.

The Tuesday order from U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani that blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order from taking effect anywhere in the country makes the administration’s request to the Supreme Court more urgent, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote. 

“The district court’s new order confirms the urgent need for this Court to grant the stay of the permanent injunction and to explain its rationale for doing so,” Sauer wrote. 

Election Day is Nov. 3, less than three months away.

Decisions in two cases at district and circuit courts have reached different conclusions about whether the rulemaking could continue in the lead-up to this fall’s elections. 

That means the Supreme Court’s decision, now on its emergency docket, will likely determine whether the executive order can move forward. A decision could come any day.

The Trump executive order would limit vote-by-mail, the primary method of voting in several states, especially in the West. 

It would require states to send the federal government lists of voters who intend to vote by mail ahead of the election and restrict the U.S. Postal Service from delivering ballots to or from people not on the list, among other things.

The administration has sought to focus arguments on the narrow legal question of whether an executive order can be challenged before an agency, in this case the U.S. Postal Service and the Department of Homeland Security, issues a final rule. The government argues that the executive order only instructs the agencies to issue rules, and those rules are not yet final, and therefore cannot be challenged.

Trial court order

Talwani’s memorandum and order on Tuesday rejected that argument, and she expanded a previous injunction from just the 23 states and the District of Columbia that brought the suit to be effective nationwide. 

Talwani said — in her order published just 12 weeks before Election Day — she was only blocking the order with respect to the “fast-approaching” midterms. Further arguments over the merits of federal voting regulations could still happen, but federal law requires the status quo to be preserved this close to an election, she said. 

Because of the tight timeline and the assumption that a final rule will be similar to a June 2 notice of proposed rulemaking, Talwani said she could rule simply on the constitutionality of the executive order. It was an easy call, she said.

“The executive branch has no authority to regulate elections,” she wrote, citing the Constitution.

The administration has not shown how blocking the executive order would harm the public, as it has not documented any “illegal or fraudulent absentee voting,” while the voting rights organizations challenging the order have shown that voters with disabilities, in rural areas, who need translation help, attend college outside their home states and in other circumstances would be harmed, she said.

In fact, the organizations showed their members in states across the country are already being harmed by the uncertainty around what rules will govern the midterm elections, said Talwani.

“Where the (executive order) is presently causing confusion and threatening both increasing chaos and an erosion of trust in our democracy, the court finds that enfranchisement heavily outweighs the executive’s attempt to unconstitutionally insert itself into the domain of election regulation,” Talwani wrote. The proximity to Election Day “underscores the critical need for an injunction to prevent Defendants from changing election rules on the eve of the election.”

The Federal Voter Registration Act also prohibits states from purging voter rolls within 90 days of an election, Talwani wrote.

DOJ’s double bind

The nature of the argument puts Sauer and the U.S. Department of Justice in a seemingly difficult legal position, arguing both that the executive order cannot be challenged because it is not enforceable and that the administration must be allowed to put an enforceable rule in place before Election Day.

Sauer asked the court Wednesday to rule for the government and “make clear” that it was doing so “based on the uncertainty concerning the government’s future actions.”

But in the next paragraph, he said implementing the executive order was crucial to the public interest.

“In all events, it is critical that the Court act promptly on the pending stay,” Sauer said. “Otherwise, the district court’s erroneous orders will effectively run out the clock on the government’s ability to implement Section 3 of the Executive Order for the federal elections in November, thereby causing irreparable harm to the federal government, the public, and election integrity.”

In a show of unity following a divisive and chaotic primary, Democratic gubernatorial nominee David Crowley met for breakfast with the losing candidates in the primary along with lieutenant governor nominee Sarah Godlewski and top Wisconsin Democrats.

Democrats are competing to hold onto the governor’s office against Republicans U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany and David Varnam and hope to flip control of the state Senate and Assembly in November.

U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chair Devin Remiker, Joel Brennan, state Sen. Kelda Roys and state Rep. Francesca Hong gathered with the nominees at a cafe in Middleton. Crowley sat at the head of the table next to Godlewski and Senate Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein (D-Middleton).

The elected officials and losing primary candidates departed the breakfast while Crowley and Godlewski addressed reporters. 

Crowley, who in July restarted his campaign 10 days after he dropped out, said Gov. Tony Evers, who endorsed him, was his campaign’s “secret weapon.”

“He has a lot of trust and he’s done a lot of work. He’s one of the very few governors that we know has continued to deliver year after year,” Crowley said, adding that Evers’ message and experience helped as well. “We’re not going to win this race focusing on ideology alone. It’s about focusing on Wisconsin values. We cannot allow Washington politics to creep up into our own backyard.”

Godlewski, who won the nomination in an uncontested primary and introduced Crowley, said national politics are a “clear distinction from that guy, Tom Tiffany, who is an election denier, career politician who only cares about the wealthy and corporations.”

“That’s not who Wisconsin is, and that’s not who we are going to elect this November,” Godlewski said

Hong did not speak to reporters, but released a statement congratulating Crowley around the time of the breakfast.

“This campaign was not about getting one person into office. It is about building a movement for permanent affordability and a government that puts working people first. Our movement is strong, and the work isn’t done,” Hong said. “I fully support [Crowley] and look forward to working with him to defeat Congressman Tiffany in November.” 

Crowley also criticized Tiffany and promised to ensure that northern communities, many of which are represented by Tiffany, are not forgotten.

“We’re going to make sure they’re a part of this process and we can lend their voices to the solutions. We know no one has been listening to them across this state,” Crowley said, adding that Tiffany has not been hearing the concerns of his constituents and is only loyal to President Donald Trump. 

Tom Tiffany in Deforest

Tiffany, who has Trump’s endorsement, met with supporters in the afternoon at a bar in Deforest alongside lieutenant governor nominee David Varnam and attorney general nominee Eric Toney.

“Well, it appears that Thanksgiving may be safe this year,” Tiffany said, referring to the late-in-the-race controversy over a post made by Hong about canceling the holiday. The joke got  laughs in the bar. 

Ahead of the election, Republicans spent millions on ads to help boost Hong’s campaign, hoping she would become the Democratic nominee. 

In his remarks Wednesday, Tiffany tried to tie Crowley to Hong.

“There is not a dime’s worth of difference between the candidates that ran for the Democrat,” he said. “David Crowley will do the same stuff that Francesca Hong would have. He just didn’t say it.”

Tiffany also criticized Crowley for his leadership of the state’s largest county, including a lapse in health insurance coverage for Milwaukee County employees and the projected future budget deficits that the county faces, despite  Crowley’s talking point that he has only signed balanced budgets as county executive. 

Tiffany was also asked whether Crowley’s nomination changes his approach to the race. 

“It’ll be the same stuff, the same socialism, whether it’s David Crowley or anyone else,” Tiffany said. “You know, he was in the race, then he was out of the race, and then he was asked to get back in the race. He didn’t know whether he wanted to be governor or not. I want to be the governor of the state of Wisconsin, and we’ve had a plan from the very beginning that we’ve been sharing.” 

The Republican ticket will include Jay Schroeder, who won the GOP primary for secretary of state. Schroeder wants to eliminate the Wisconsin Elections Commission and put it back under the control of the secretary of state. 

Tiffany did not disavow the idea of eliminating the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which was created under former Gov. Scott Walker. 

“We’ll assess that after I am elected,” he said. “It should be easy to vote but hard to cheat, right, and we’re counting on that happening here with this election here in November.” 

Republican Party of Wisconsin Chair Brian Schimming told reporters that it is a new race and that he wouldn’t put much stock in polling or primary results. 

“Democrats spent the last several months fighting with each other. It took them three candidates to finally get to one that they could push through the primary, and the fact is that the last four or five months has been all about stopping Francesca,” Schimming said. “So it’s a new race.” 

Schimming added that “a primary winner will get a bump, you know, so I’m not going to be surprised by anything I see in the polls in the next week or two.”

Data centers and young voters 

In the Democratic primary for governor, Hong built much of her campaign on motivating young voters and leveraging her stance on AI data centers. She supported a one-year moratorium. Both Crowley and Tiffany addressed how they would approach the issue Wednesday. 

Asked about winning over Hong voters, Crowley said young people should have a seat at the table. 

“They need to be a part of creating the strategy and making sure that you know they have opportunities as well,” Crowley said. “Young people don’t feel that they can look into their future right now. When the average home-buying age is 40 years old, when right now they’re looking at data centers and artificial intelligence taking the jobs in the future, and so we have to focus on making sure that we’re lifting up their voices and protecting what they believe needs to be protected.”

Tiffany said that his message to young voters is “we’re going to make life more affordable for you.” He said he would do that by cutting property taxes by eliminating Evers’ 400-year veto that gives school districts authority to bring in more revenue by raising taxes, and by cutting regulations on homebuilding to make it more affordable to build a home. 

“I understand the frustration. I mean, I have three daughters in their twenties, and it’s not easy to make ends meet at this point,” Tiffany said. 

Crowley, who has said he supports banning nondisclosure agreements for data center projects, did not offer his support for a moratorium on AI data centers when asked by a reporter.

“We have to focus on making sure that we have accountability with these data centers,” Crowley said. “They have to pay their own way, they need to pay for their own infrastructure and they need to bring their own new clean energy. I am committed to working with the state Legislature to make sure we have as many guardrails as possible.”

Tiffany said he would end subsidies for data centers that were signed into Wisconsin law under Evers, work to ensure that utility rates don’t go up and would ban nondisclosure agreements. 

“Well it sounds like David Crowley will give a blank check to data centers,” Tiffany said. “They do not need to be subsidized by us, the taxpayers, and we’re gonna make sure that people’s electricity rates do not go up. We’re going to make sure that we have full transparency.”

WASHINGTON — The American Civil Liberties Union has petitioned a federal court in New Hampshire to reaffirm a ruling that found President Donald Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order unconstitutional, after the president renewed his attempts to redefine American citizenship despite his loss at the Supreme Court.

“This case has always been, and remains, about the President’s effort to fashion new exceptions to birthright citizenship,” according to the ACLU’s Tuesday filing. 

Trump last week signed two executive orders. One seeks to expand the narrow exemptions to birthright citizenship for babies born on U.S. soil. Another aims to end birth tourism, which is a term for the practice of foreign nationals traveling to the United States only for the purpose of giving birth in order to obtain citizenship for the baby.  

The ACLU filing noted the Supreme Court’s ruling has settled the matter of birthright citizenship, after the justices found the president’s order violated the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

“This new Order violates the Court’s existing preliminary injunction, as it purports to strip birthright citizenship from members of the provisionally certified class despite the Supreme Court’s recent decision,” according to the ACLU brief. 

“To avoid any doubt in this regard, the Court should underscore that the government may not strip away class members’ citizenship through any executive orders or other similarly flawed assertions of Executive power over birthright citizenship.”

The White House did not respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment.  

The ACLU is asking federal Judge Joseph N. Laplante to either “clarify the preliminary injunction or, in the alternative, modify or issue a new preliminary injunction.”

Laplante was nominated by former President George W. Bush.

The groups who sued the Trump administration include: the ACLU, ACLU of New Hampshire, ACLU of Maine, ACLU of Massachusetts, Legal Defense Fund, Asian Law Caucus and Democracy Defenders Fund.

“President Trump may not like the fact that birthright citizenship is a constitutional right, and he may not like that he lost in the Supreme Court, but that is really beside the point,” Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project and lead counsel, said in a statement. “It’s well past time for these illegal and cruel attacks on children’s citizenship to end.”

Wofsy led the ACLU’s legal team in the birthright citizenship argument, from the federal courts to the Supreme Court. 

The recent executive order that Trump signed aims to deny citizenship to children born to parents who belong to groups that have been designated as terrorist organizations; children born to foreign diplomatic staff; and children born in U.S. territories where Congress has not passed a law granting citizenship, which is only American Samoa.

The children of diplomats are already exempt from birthright citizenship — one of the few carve-outs — but the executive order aims to expand that exemption to include the children of noncitizen staff who work on behalf of a foreign government, such as an embassy. 

Birthright citizenship has been a longstanding core principle in the United States, in which nearly any child — regardless of their parents’ immigration status — born on U.S. soil is automatically granted citizenship. 

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” according to the clause in the 14th Amendment.

Vote counting to pick a Democrat to run against Republican U.S. Rep. Glenn Grothman in Wisconsin’s 6th Congressional District finally reached a conclusion Wednesday, with Brad Smith called the winner by the Associated Press.

With just over 50% of the total number of votes cast in the Democratic primary, Smith had 480 votes more than Amanda Bell’s 49.6%. The AP called the race at 1:40 p.m. Wednesday, more than 17 hours after the polls closed at 8 p.m. Tuesday. 

Smith lives in the Milwaukee suburb of Mequon and works in software and web design. He owns a consulting business and served in the National Guard.

Bell is a Sheboygan County resident and is a substitute teacher and former U.S. Geological Survey scientist.

Both campaigns focused on policy issues including healthcare, affordability, the environment and human rights, including LGBTQ+ rights and reproductive rights. 

The district covers 11 east central Wisconsin counties. 

The 6th CD has been a GOP stronghold, and Grothman has never had a close election in the dozen years he’s been in the U.S. House. The November election, however, could find Grothman with not just one challenger but as many as four. Two independent candidates as well as a Green Party candidate have been certified for the general election ballot, bypassing Tuesday’s primary.

Redistricting that has made many Wisconsin Assembly and Senate districts more competitive, combined with an unusually large number of retirements at the end of the current legislative session, set the stage for what may be the largest number of primary contests in recent history for seats in the Legislature in both the Republican and Democratic parties.

In what might be the only genuine upset, Milwaukee state Rep. Sylvia Ortiz-Velez lost her seat in Tuesday’s Democratic primary race, the ultimate outcome of the conflict between the Assembly’s Democratic caucus and Ortiz-Velez.

Other internal primary challenges of incumbents in both the Democratic and Republican caucuses fell short.

Wisconsin Senate

SD 1: Republican state Sen. Andre Jacque is retiring from the district, which includes Door and Kewaunee counties. In the four-way Republican primary race to succeed Jacque, Nic Cravillion of New Franken won with 40% of the vote, outpacing the second-place finisher by 15 percentage points. Cravillion worked as the district director for Jacque for the last five years.

No Democrats are running for the seat in the red-leaning district. Mark Becker, a small business owner and former chair of the Brown County Republican Party who parted ways with the GOP after President Donald Trump’s election in 2016, will be on the November ballot as an independent.

SD 11: With Republican incumbent Sen. Steve Nass retiring at the end of this term from the district, which is centered on Walworth County and includes portions of adjacent counties, both Democrats and Republicans held primary elections to select candidates for the open seat.

Republican Ellen Schutt, a former state representative, won the GOP nomination with 44% of the vote against 36% for Sandy Wiedmeyer, Kenosha County Republican Party chair and a Moms for Liberty Activist, and just under 20% for Nick Polce, a U.S. Army veteran.

On the Democratic side, Adam Duda got 58% of the primary vote to defeat Steve Doelder with 41% and win his party’s nomination.

Duda and Schutt will compete in the November general election in the red-leaning district.

SD 17: Boosted by support from the State Senate Democratic Committee, state Rep. Jenna Jacobson won a three-way primary handily with 57% of the vote. Childcare advocate Corrine Hendrickson finished with almost 27% and small business owner Lisa White had 16%.

Jacobson will run against Republican Howard Marklein in November, whose nomination was uncontested. Marklein won reelection with 60% of the vote in 2022, but revised maps have made the district more competitive in partisan terms.

SD 23: Republican Sen. Romaine Quinn, who currently represents SD 25, is running for reelection to the Senate under new maps in the red-leaning SD 23, where the current incumbent, Republican Sen. Jesse James, is retiring at the end of this term. Quinn did not have a primary opponent Tuesday.

In the Democratic primary to challenge Quinn in November, Jeff Foster, a former social worker and dairy farmer, won with 68% of the vote, while Richard Pulcher received 32%.

SD 25: Located in far Northwest Wisconsin, the district includes Superior as well as Ashland, Bayfield, Burnett, Douglas, Iron, Polk, Sawyer and Washburn counties. The district was represented by former Senate Minority Leader Janet Bewley, a Democrat, from 2015 through 2022. Bewley decided to forgo reelection in 2022 after the maps were redrawn to the advantage of Republicans.

The district was further redrawn in the new maps adopted in 2024 by an order of the state Supreme Court. Republican Sen. Romaine Quinn currently represents the district, but the 2024 maps put his home in SD 23, and Quinn is running this year in that district instead, resulting in an open seat.

In the SD-25 Republican primary, Erik Severson, a physician and former Assembly member defeated former state Rep. Angie Sapik 54%-46% on Tuesday.

Severson will run in November against Democrat Charly Ray, who had no primary opposition.

On Wednesday, the State Senate Democratic Committee announced it was adding SD-25 to its list of Republican targets to flip in the November election. 

The committee also said it was adding SD-29 to the list — currently held by Republican incumbent Sen. Cory Tomczyk. Neither Tomczyk nor the Democratic challenger, retired Dr. Gillian Battino, had a primary opponent Tuesday.

Wisconsin Assembly

AD 8: Following allegations of a violent threat and conflict with the Legislature’s Democratic leadership, state Rep. Sylvia Ortiz-Velez, left the Democratic caucus last year, although she continued to generally vote with the Assembly Democrats on most bills. 

Back in her Milwaukee district, Ismael Luna mounted a primary challenge and got support from unions and the Assembly Democratic leaders. Luna, a women’s homeless shelter case manager and former intern for Sen. Tammy Baldwin, won early Tuesday night with 70% of the vote.

Luna will face Republican Angel Sanchez in the November election in the deep blue district.

AD 9: Milwaukee first-term state Rep. Priscilla Prado easily survived a primary challenge from Milwaukee School Board member Mimi Reza. Prado got 70% of the vote. She will face Republican Samuel Guerro in November.

AD 12: Milwaukee, first-term state Rep. Russell Goodwin overcame a primary challenge, getting 54% of the vote to Jordan Roman’s 46%. Roman, a community consultant, was endorsed by the LGBTQ+ advocacy group FAIR Wisconsin’s PAC after Goodwin broke with Assembly Democrats to vote for a bill barring transgender girls from sports teams matching their gender identity.

Goodwin will have no Republican opposition in the November election.

AD 13: Amy Zimmerman won with 51% Tuesday against David Sanchez, who garnered  just under 49% of the vote, in the Democratic primary election for the seat in the western part of Milwaukee County. The seat was vacated by Democratic state Rep. Robyn Vining, who is running for the state Senate. The AP called the race Wednesday afternoon at 1:25 p.m.

In November, Zimmerman will face Republican Mike Morgan, whose nomination was not contested.

AD 19: State Rep. Ryan Clancy got 54% of the vote in the Milwaukee County district, surviving a challenge by small business owner Bridget Maniaci, who finished with 45%. Clancy will face Republican Yasmine B. Outlaw in November.

AD 21: Daniel Bukiewicz, the mayor of Oak Creek and president of the Milwaukee Building & Construction Trades Council, won the Democratic primary easily with almost 57% of the vote to 43% for David Liners. The district, which represents Oak Creek and a portion of the city of Milwaukee around the Mitchell International Airport, could help determine control of the state Assembly.

The seat is open following the retirement of Rep. Jessie Rodriguez (R-Oak Creek), who was first elected to the Assembly in 2013.

In November, Bukiewicz will face Republican Dylan Pfaffenbach, who had no primary opposition.

AD 26: John Belanger, a former Sheboygan alderman, won the Republican primary with more than 63% of the vote, far ahead of James Brotz, with 23%, and Tyler Schneekloth, with almost 14%.

Belanger, who is running for the Assembly after having lost his reelection bid to the Sheboygan city council, will challenge first-term state Rep. Joe Sheehan, a Democrat, in November.

AD 33: In the Racine County district represented by Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, who is retiring this year, Steve Wicklund, an electrical contractor and Union Grove village president, won the Republican primary with 54%, defeating Walworth County Board Chair Rick Stacey, who received 45%.

Maria Bisabarros, the co-owner of a meat processing company, won the Democratic primary with just under 62% of the vote against retired teacher Rick Bailey, who received 38%.

Wicklund and Bisabarros will compete in November for the seat in the Republican-leaning district.

AD 37: Beaver Dam Republican State Rep. Mark Born, the Assembly co-chair of the powerful Joint Finance Committee, easily overcame a Republican primary challenge from Steve Rydzewski, who has been organizing against data center construction in Beaver Dam. Born won more than 65% of the primary vote to Rydzewski’s 34%.

Born will face LaToya Bates, co-chair of the Dodge County Democratic Party, in November, in a rematch of the 2024 race Born won with more than 68% of the vote.

AD 50: Bill Oemichen, president of the New Glarus school board, won a three-way primary with 50% of the votes, a lead of almost 20 points over his nearest rival. Josh Mittness received 30% of the vote and Bryna Caves just under 19%, in a race that the AP called late Wednesday morning.

Oemichen will face Republican Jon Aleckson, who was unopposed in the Republican primary, in the November election for the seat, which Democratic state Rep. Jenna Jacobson gave up to run for state Senate in the 17th SD.

AD 56: Hortonville coffee shop owner Grace Abitz won with just under 59% of the vote in the Democratic primary against Shawna Riley, a forklift operator, who finished with 41%.

Abitz will run in November against Anthony Phillips, a doctor and former state Senate candidate, for the seat being vacated with the retirement of Republican Rep. Dave Murphy.

AD 57: The impending retirement of Republican state Rep. Kevin Petersen created an open seat in this central Wisconsin district. Kevin Krentz, a local dairy farmer and former president of the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation, won the Republican four-way primary with more than 55% of the vote.

Bill Lorge, a former Assembly member seeking to return to the Capitol, finished a distant third with just under 10%.

Krentz will run against Joey Marschall, a Waushara County Democrat who had no opposition to his nomination.

AD 58: The retirement of Republican state Rep. Rick Gundrum produced an open seat in this suburban and rural district north of Milwaukee.

Bernie Newman, a landscaper and president of Common Sense Citizens of Washington County, won nearly 60% of the Republican primary vote Tuesday, while Washington County Board supervisor Chris Bossert got 40%.

Newman will face Democrat Dennis Degenhardt of West Bend, a baseball historian and retired credit union executive, in November.

AD 61: The Greendale and Hales Corners district in Milwaukee County is represented by Republican Rep. Bob Donovan, who is running for a third term in November.

Ben Brist, an army veteran endorsed by the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC), pulled ahead to win with 44% in a three-way Democratic primary against yoga instructor Lawanda Chambers, who got almost 38%, and pharmacist Brian Bock, who won 18%. The AP called the race for Brist at 1:33 a.m. Wednesday morning.

AD 74: Republican state Rep. Chanz Green, first elected in 2022, easily overcame a primary challenge, winning 63% to just under 37% for Scott Harbridge, a retired law enforcement officer. The election was a rematch between the two Republicans.

In November, Green will face Democrat Paul Johnson, also a retired law enforcement officer as well as a member of the Spooner Area School Board and the Washburn County Board.

AD 76: Dina Nina Martinez-Rutherford won a five-way Democratic primary with 29% of the vote, a 2-point margin over the second-place finisher, Juliana Bennet. AP called the race shortly after noon on Wednesday. The district has been represented since 2021 by Democratic state Rep. Francesca Hong, who decided to forgo reelection and run for governor.

If elected, Martinez-Rutherford would be the first openly transgender person to serve in the state Legislature. She won the endorsement of two Madison-area state lawmakers along with Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway and Madison Common Council President Sabrina Madison.

Martinez-Rutherford will run against Nina Chat in November, whose bid for the Republican candidate nomination was uncontested.

AD 92: Jeremiah Fredrickson, a former teacher and owner of a fish farm, won the Democratic primary against Mel Marin in the Northwest Wisconsin district represented by Republican state Rep. Clint Moses.

Fredrickson will go up against Moses in the November election.

Democratic gubernatorial nominee David Crowley called on Democrats to unite as he accepted the nomination Wednesday. 

The race was called in the early morning hours Wednesday  as Crowley defeated state Rep. Francesca Hong by a razor-thin margin. Hong  called Crowley to concede shortly after 2 a.m. . If elected in November, Crowley would be the first Black person to serve as governor of Wisconsin. Crowley was elected as Milwaukee’s first Black county executive in 2020 after serving two terms in the state Assembly.

“The job is not done. The job is not finished,” Crowley said. “My job is not to become the first, and if I do become the first, my job is to make sure that I’m not the last and provide more opportunities for young men and women all across this state.” 

Democrats have their work cut out for them as they compete against Republican  U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, a three-term congressman endorsed by President Donald Trump who currently represents the state’s largest congressional district in the northern half of the state.

Crowley started that work as he accepted the nomination at 9 a.m. Wednesday in Milwaukee. 

“Over the past few months, you’ve heard a lot of people try to define this election as a battle between the left and the center, between progressives and the establishment, between insiders and outsiders, that narrative misses the entire point of what we’re doing,” Crowley said.

Crowley’s comeback in the race was powered by an endorsement from Gov. Tony Evers, the popular, departing two-term governor. Evers and Crowley spent the last two weeks traveling around the state in a last-ditch campaign. Crowley had previously dropped out of the race  on July 8 and endorsed Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez. When Rodriguez’s campaign imploded due to a financial scandal on July 17, Evers encouraged Crowley to restart his campaign. He reintroduced himself on July 18. 

After getting back into the race, Crowley faced accusations of being the “establishment” candidate who was chosen to defeat the democratic socialist candidate, Francesca Hong. He called that accusation a “slur.”

As he accepted the nomination, Crowley thanked Evers “for his friendship, his leadership and his belief that Wisconsin works best when working people come together to solve problems.” He also sought to put to bed the narrative that had surrounded the race as he thanked his primary opponents. He said that Hong’s campaign “reminded people across Wisconsin that there are no long shots when it comes to believing in a better future and fighting to expand opportunities to every family” and said he  looks forward to earning the support of Hong voters. The narrative that the primary was ​​”a battle between the left and the center, between progressive and the establishment, between insiders and outsiders” was inaccurate, Crowley said.

“When I traveled across Wisconsin, I didn’t meet people who introduced themselves that way. I met parents wondering how they afford childcare. I met workers who want wages that keep up with the costs of living. I met farmers trying to preserve family traditions. I met small business owners trying to keep their doors open, and I met seniors who deserve security and dignity after a lifetime of work. We may not agree on every policy, we may not use the same labels, but we all want safe communities, strong schools, affordable health care, good-paying jobs, and a brighter future for all of our children.” 

Crowley said Democrats must  now unite around keeping “MAGA extremism” out of Wisconsin and called Tiffany the “real threat.”

“Tiffany stood with those who tried to overturn a free and fair presidential election instead of defending our democracy,” Crowley said. “He’s worked in lockstep with Donald Trump to slash programs that Wisconsin families depend on, including SNAP and healthcare for our children, our seniors and veterans and working families. He backed harmful, costly policies like the war in Iran, while too many families right here, right at home, are struggling to make ends meet. He spends his time fueling culture wars because sowing division is much easier than delivering results.” 

“Wisconsin, we deserve better than politicians who divide us for their own political gain,” Crowley said.

Tiffany said in a statement about Crowley’s victory that there is “not a dime’s worth of difference between these Democrat candidates.” 

“David Crowley proved my point when he admitted there aren’t many policy differences between him and a socialist,” Tiffany said. “His record in Milwaukee County shows exactly what Wisconsin would get: mismanage the government, run up the bill and raise your taxes to pay for it. Wisconsin doesn’t need more of the same failed policies.”

Democrats are meeting for a unity breakfast that will bring together Crowley, Hong, state Sen. Kelda Roys, another of the candidates in the Democratic primary, Lt. Gov. candidate Sarah Godlewski, U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin and U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan around 11 a.m. in Middleton, as they , seek to move past the divisiveness of the primary with less than three months until the general election. 

Twenty-eight states this year have reported over 3,500 cases of patients sick with the drug-resistant yeast candida auris, which can cause severe illness and is often reported in healthcare facilities.

As of Aug. 1, 3,544 clinical cases of candida auris, or C. auris, have been reported to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, compared with 4,262 the same time last year, according to the latest round of numbers from the agency’s National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System. 

Cases had risen from 2022 to 2024, and seen a slight decline since then. But experts are still concerned, as Candida auris can be difficult to treat because it’s resistant to multiple antifungal drugs. 

The first U.S. case was first reported in 2016. Between 2019 and 2021, 17 states identified their first-ever candida auris case, according to federal reports, with experts calling the yeast an emerging, urgent threat for hospitalized patients. It was first described in Japan in 2009. 

People without risk factors generally don’t get infected, the CDC says. Risk factors include severe underlying medical conditions and people undergoing complex medical care. Candida auris symptoms can vary depending on the location of the infection — such as a superficial skin infection or widespread bloodstream infection — and its severity. While there isn’t a specific set of symptoms, people can experience fever or chills. 

The infection spreads more easily in healthcare or long-term care facilities among people who are already very sick with complex health conditions. Patients with breathing or feeding tubes or catheters have a higher risk.

The CDC identifies detections via two separate reports: clinical detections in people who are ill with candida auris, and screenings — public health investigation tests that detect fungal colonizations in patients who haven’t developed illness. As of Aug. 1, the nation has seen 3,325 screening detections, compared with 3,724 last year, in addition to the 3,500 clinical cases. People who have screened for colonizations can spread the fungus to other people and surfaces.

California reported the most clinical cases of any state this year, at 887.

States across the South have seen over 1,400 clinical cases, with Texas reporting the highest number in that region at 437 diagnoses, followed by Tennessee (293) and Georgia (193).

In the Northeast, only New Jersey and Pennsylvania reported cases — 55 and 131, respectively. 

Mountain states have seen 200 clinical cases — with the majority in Arizona, which has reported 171 clinical cases.

Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin have collectively reported 751 clinical cases, according to the CDC.

Stateline reporter Nada Hassanein can be reached at nhassanein@stateline.org.

The Trump administration is increasing its efforts to turn more control of federal education money to the states as it continues working to dismantle the Education Department.

Six states have received waivers allowing them to consolidate more than $109 million in federal education funding and bypass certain requirements for local education agencies, Kirsten Baesler, assistant secretary for the department’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, told Stateline in an interview.

The consolidation of four funding streams into one means the money can be used more flexibly by the states with Returning Education to the States waivers — Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, South Dakota and Vermont. Some states chose to put that money toward statewide literacy or math improvement efforts. Indiana will run a pilot program allowing up to 15% of its districts to combine two funding streams that had been focused separately on teachers and students and to alter requirements for all schools on college and career readiness measures when calculating a high school’s performance rating. 

It’s a part of a growing push by the Trump administration to turn federal education measures to state control. Beyond the six states that received these waivers, 22 states have received Education Flexibility Partnership, or Ed-Flex authority, which allows states to waive certain federal education requirements for school districts without seeking separate permission from the Department of Education each time. 

That’s the highest number of states in the program’s 32-year history, Baesler said. 

Those states are: Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Montana, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia and Wisconsin. 

While many public school district staff welcome the waivers, some state education groups have opposed them. Some have argued that consolidating federal funding weakens guardrails that ensure money goes to the specific populations and programs they were meant to serve. In Arkansas, for example, the Arkansas Education Association warned that greater flexibility would reduce transparency and possibly shift money away from formula-based funding for high-need districts, the Arkansas Advocate reported. 

A state must request such a waiver. Baesler said department officials are working with states before they submit applications to determine whether their goals require a waiver, an amended state plan or could already be done under existing federal law.

Baesler also said state officials should take greater responsibility for identifying and pursuing their own education needs and priorities rather than waiting for direction from the feds.

“Don’t wait for the signal to come because what students in North Dakota need are going to be completely different than what Texas needs or Louisiana or Oregon or Washington,” Baesler said.

In September, the department will convene with state representatives to discuss results from a Learning Agenda Initiative which includes eight states: Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, New Hampshire, Tennessee, Utah and Wisconsin, officials told Stateline. The program paired state education agencies with federally funded research and technical-assistance centers to examine state data and develop multi-year learning agendas identifying needs and ways to measure a state’s progress on its education priorities.

The department is also giving states additional points on some competitive grant applications when they design or help lead “Returning Education to the States” projects.

The future of the Department of Education has been a hot topic since President Donald Trump signed a March 2025 executive order directing Secretary Linda McMahon to take steps to close the department and push more control of education to the states. Congress, which created the department through a 1979 federal law, retains the authority to eliminate it.

But the department has begun to hand off some administrative duties to other federal agencies. 

Carissa Moffat Miller, CEO of the Council of Chief State School Officers, said at an National Conference of State Legislatures conference earlier this month that transferring federal programs between agencies could disrupt grant payments because the Education and Labor departments, for example, use different grant management systems. Those delays could lead districts to hold back spending or pull teacher contracts even if Congress appropriated the money, she said.

Moffat Miller said that federal funding accounts for about 12% of education funding, with the remaining 88% coming from state and local sources. Analysis from Education Week estimated that at least $12 billion in previously awarded federal education funds have been disrupted by administrative actions over the past year.

This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Carissa Moffat Miller’s name. Stateline reporter Robbie Sequeira can be reached at rsequeira@stateline.org. 

Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley secured the Democratic nomination for governor in the early hours of Wednesday morning as state Rep. Francesca Hong conceded the race, ending the uncertainty of a primary characterized by unprecedented chaos over the last two months. 

An error in uploading absentee ballot data in Milwaukee caused a delay in reporting that pushed the final results off and both Hong and Crowley ended their election watch parties after midnight with no winner declared. The Associated Press called the race at 2:34 a.m. Wednesday after Hong conceded, with 98% of the ballots counted as Crowley maintained a lead of just over 3,200 votes.

Crowley will face U.S. Rep Tom Tiffany, the GOP nominee for governor, who easily defeated his Republican challenger, and his running mate David Varnam. Varnam defeated Will Martin, who had the endorsement of the state GOP and had been campaigning with Tiffany.

The Democratic primary, which started with seven candidates, all of whose names appeared on the ballot even after three dropped out, dwindled to four candidates competing for the nomination. When the race concluded, AP reported that Crowley had 39.8% of the vote and Hong had 39.4%. State Sen. Kelda Roys and former Department of Administration Secretary Joel Brennan trailed the two leaders with 7.5% and 4.7% of the vote respectively.

In a statement, Crowley campaign manager Garren Randolph thanked voters and volunteers as well as the three other Democrats who had remained in the primary contest.

“They challenged all of us to think bigger about what our state can become,” Randolph said. “From day one, this campaign has been about what comes next for Wisconsin: making life more affordable, strengthening our schools, creating good-paying jobs, and making sure opportunity reaches every corner of our state. Now, David is focused on bringing people together, earning the support of Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and anyone who believes Wisconsin is at its best when we work together and deliver results.”

Crowley launched his campaign in September 2025, dropped out in July and endorsed Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, then reentered the race when Rodriguez dropped out. Gov. Tony Evers, who had declined to express a preference in the race before the final days, encouraged Crowley to rejoin the field and campaigned for him up until Election Day.

Worried that Hong, a democratic socialist, state lawmaker and chef, could not win the general election, undecided Democratic primary voters flocked to Crowley’s resurrected campaign. Hong ran a campaign based on a cadre of grassroots volunteers and a strong  social media strategy. Polls showed her dominating the field with a double-digit lead toward the end of the campaign, a result that was not matched by vote tallies on Election Night.

Victory parties with the outcome hanging

The crowd gathered at Atwood Music Hall in Madison for Hong’s victory party started the night in a hopeful mood, singing to Pink Pony Club by Chappell Roan, Stateside by PinkPantheress and Wannabe by the Spice Girls. Supporters made signs at a table and took photos together. Loud boos rang out when President Donald Trump and Tiffany, the Republican candidate, appeared on the large screens showing CNN’s election night coverage.

In the two weeks leading up to the election, Crowley and Evers raced across the state to reintroduce Crowley to voters with Evers telling people he thought Hong would not be able to beat Tiffany. 

April Brown, a Madison resident, said the issues she is most concerned about this election year are affordability, data centers and queer and trans issues. She and her wife, who came out as trans three years ago, moved to Dane County about a year ago from Georgia. 

“The South was increasingly becoming hostile towards people like us, like her,” Brown said. “When I found out about Fran being, not only my district representative in the state Assembly, but also she was running for governor and found how passionate she was about LGBTQ rights, I knew I had to throw my support behind her.” 

Brown said she would get behind Crowley if he won, but she felt hope voting for Hong. 

“I think she really resonates with people because she gets people and she wants to help people,” Brown said. 

Crowley’s supporters gathered at the Regency Ballroom in the Hyatt Regency hotel in downtown Milwaukee Tuesday night.

Darryl Morin, national president and board chairman of Forward Latino, Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson, and other local elected officials joined the crowd.

Throughout the evening, Crowley maintained a slight lead over Hong as vote totals were reported across the state. Updates on the large TV screens in the ballroom were greeted with cheering from the crowd. 

Talk of a possible recount began as Crowley maintained his razor-thin advantage. Hong’s after-hours concession forestalled the possibility of a recount. 

Calls for unity

Just before 11:30 p.m., Hong addressed her supporters, thanking them and telling them that they have “built something that will change politics forever.”

“In 11 weeks, no matter who’s on this ballot, we are going to fight to win for one another,” Hong said. “We will win together, united. Because everyone who’s running in this race, they know that we can make better possible and we must make better possible.”

After Hong left the stage her campaign staff wished everyone a good night and the lights in Atwood Music Hall were turned up. 

Hannah Ecay, a 25-year-old who wore a Madison Area DSA shirt, said she doesn’t have kids, but wants to one day and that’s part of why she supports Hong and her affordability agenda. 

“I don’t have kids yet, but when I do childcare and public education are very important to me, and I’d like to see those things be set up now, before I have children,” Ecay said. 

Ecay said she would vote for Crowley in the general election if he wins.

“Anyone’s better than Tom Tiffany, but I won’t be as excited about it as I would be for Francesca,” she said. 

As votes were being tallied in Milwaukee, election workers announced that a mistake had been made where some of the flash drives used to record the election results were downloaded with audit data instead of information from 15,000 absentee ballots. The mistake was expected to take over an hour to fix. Congresswoman Gwen Moore addressed Crowley’s supporters, saying that she believes that “the red bird will fly,” referring to a story from Crowley’s wife of having seen a red cardinal — a significant religious symbol to her — which she interpreted as a sign that Crowley should re-enter the race. 

Jarrett English, a community organizer in Milwaukee, said that he respects both Hong and Crowley. “I’ve known David since he was an organizer, and so I know that he works hard,” English told the Examiner. “He was always going to do well in Milwaukee because he’s been an incredible county executive, arguably the most successful county executive in a generation, at least in terms of the amount of things that have gotten accomplished with housing, with mental health, with not necessarily shared revenue but getting more revenue for the metro area. All those things show that he is more than ready to be at a higher level.” 

English said he believes either Hong or Crowley would make fantastic governors. “I personally will be happy with whoever wins,” said English, saying that while he doesn’t always agree with Crowley, he’s “a bridgebuilder” and Hong “is the same.”

Donna Davis, managing partner for Vox Pop Solutions and a Crowley supporter who traveled from Florida, said that “Crowley’s candidacy, who Crowley is and what he believes in, is an idea and a moment whose time has come.” Observing Crowley’s  unexpected surge which kept him in the lead most of the night, Davis said, “I think people want something different. I think they’re unsure about the unknown. I mean this is the Midwest, and people like what they know. And he fits Wisconsin.” 

Davis said that Crowley’s performance Tuesday night is a sign that “Milwaukee is ready to move into the 21st century, Wisconsin is ready for the 21st century.” If she were asked  just three years ago whether his success would have been possible, “I would’ve told you ‘absolutely not.’ I wasn’t even really sure that this was the moment because we’re in the middle of a very divisive era in American history. But this is a democracy, and the voters have the final say.”

Moving into the general election

Crowley will be joined on the ticket by Secretary of State Sarah Godlewski, who is running in November for lieutenant governor and faced no primary opponent. She previously served as state treasurer from January 2019 to January 2023. Evers appointed her to her current position. 

Democrats have their work cut out for them as they seek to beat Tiffany, a three-term congressman who currently represents the state’s largest congressional district in the northern half of the state. Wisconsin’s statewide races are typically decided by close margins, including in 2018 when Evers defeated Gov. Scott Walker by about 30,000 votes. 

Ahead of Election Day, Democratic candidates had been discussing uniting following the primary to defeat Tiffany.

Crowley was scheduled to accept the nomination at 9 a.m. Wednesday in Milwaukee. Godlewski, U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan and Crowley are scheduled to meet for a unity breakfast later Wednesday morning in the Madison area, seeking to move past the divisiveness of the primary with less than three months until the general election.