Chris Taylor, an appeals court judge and former Democratic lawmaker, was elected to an open seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court Tuesday, securing a 5-2 majority for the Court’s liberal wing and ensuring that control remains intact until at least 2030. 

With nearly 80% of the vote counted shortly before 10 p.m., Taylor had a massive 20 point lead over Appeals Court Judge Maria Lazar, marking a four-election winning streak for the liberal candidates running for Wisconsin’s highest court. It also gives an early signal on the mood of the state’s voters ahead of this year’s midterm elections, when the governor’s office, majority control of the Legislature and a few competitive congressional seats will be up for grabs. 

With ideological control of the body not at stake, the 2026 Supreme Court race was markedly lower energy this year. After the more than $100 million spent on last year’s race set national fundraising records for a judicial campaign, Taylor was able to win the race with $8 million in spending from her campaign and outside advocacy groups. 

Turnout on Tuesday fell far short of the mark set last year, when the election’s stakes, its spot on the calendar shortly after President Donald Trump’s inauguration and Elon Musk’s effort to sway the race with millions of dollars of spending supercharged turnout among the state’s liberals. 

Throughout the race, Crawford polled several points ahead of Lazar, however a large portion of the electorate, about 50%, continued to tell pollsters they remained undecided. 

At an election night watch party at Madison’s Concourse Hotel, Taylor was surrounded by her family and introduced by Chief Justice Jill Karofsky. 

In her victory speech, Taylor said she would help move Wisconsin forward.” 

“We live in an incredible state, and people are hungry for a government that works for them,” she said. “People are hungry for a judiciary that prioritizes them, that protects our rights, that affords all Wisconsinites equal justice under the law. That is exactly what I will do as your next state Supreme Court justice.”

Throughout the campaign, Taylor sought to define herself as a careful judge who despite her history as policy director of Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin and a Democratic state lawmaker would act as an independent voice on the bench. She often sought to position herself as a potential bulwark on the Court against efforts from Republicans and President Donald Trump to interfere with Wisconsin’s election system during the 2028 presidential race. 

Taylor will now join Justices Jill Karofsky and Susan Crawford to be the third former Dane County Circuit Court judge to sit on the state Supreme Court. Under its current liberal majority, the Court overturned Wisconsin’s 1849 criminal abortion ban and declared the state’s gerrymandered legislative maps unconstitutional. 

At the watch party, Ana Wilson, an early education major at Mount Mary University, told the Wisconsin Examiner she believed Taylor was going to care for Wisconsin people from the bench.

“As much as there’s chaos with the Trump administration, I want what’s best for Wisconsinites,” Wilson said. “Health care, abortion access, human rights that people deserve. I’ll take these small wins at the state level.” 

Lazar’s campaign, while endorsed by the state Republican Party, received less financial support from the state GOP and its allied donors than recent conservative candidates for the Court Dan Kelly and Brad Schimel had received — both lost by double digits. But Lazar’s campaign message that she was the true independent in the race while her opponent would act as a partisan on the bench was similar to the conservative message in 2025 and 2023. 

Taylor’s win also continues the success that Democratic and liberal candidates have had in off-cycle and non-presidential elections in recent years — particularly since Trump took office last year. 

After the race was called, Democrats said the win represented the first steps in the effort to win up and down the ballot in November. 

“The victory Wisconsinites delivered tonight is an indictment of Trump and Tom Tiffany, who are using the federal government to bully and intimidate people into submission,” Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chair Devin Remiker said in a statement. “Our state Supreme Court has repeatedly shown it is the last line of defense against the federal government’s unconstitutional overreach, and with tonight’s election, we have secured a pro-freedom, pro-democracy majority on the Court through 2030. This victory is only the beginning of the fight ahead to win a Democratic trifecta in November and deliver real, lasting change for the working people of Wisconsin.”

The University of Wisconsin Board of Regents voted unanimously to fire UW President Jay Rothman on Tuesday, ending his tenure as the leader of UW system campuses and launching the process of finding a new leader. 

The regents’ decision to oust Rothman became public last week after the Associated Press obtained letters from Rothman to regents telling them that he would not be resigning from his position after  the regents told him to resign or be fired. 

The regents convened in a virtual meeting at 5 p.m. Tuesday and immediately entered closed session for about 25 minutes. Once they returned to open session, Regent President Amy Bogost read the statement she released Monday about the action.

Bogost said that over the last several months while conducting the annual review of Rothman in accordance with her responsibilities as regent president, she met with UW stakeholders including regents, chancellors and other members of UW communities. She said the results were shared with Rothman. 

“President Rothman was not without notice, nor was this process sudden. The Board has engaged with President Rothman in good-faith discussions over the past several months,” Bogost said, adding that the decision doesn’t “diminish the President’s many contributions.” 

“At a time of profound change in higher education, this decision is about the future,” Bogost said. “The Universities of Wisconsin must be led with a clear vision that both protects and strengthens our flagship, supports our comprehensive universities and ensures we are meeting the evolving needs of our students, workforce and communities across all 72 counties.”

No other regents spoke about the decision before voting for Rothman’s termination. Regent Joan Prince was not present at the meeting.

In a statement, the Board of Regents said that Rothman had “worked hard to bring the best to the campuses, students, faculty and staff” and those efforts are appreciated, but “despite these accomplishments, based on the annual performance review and subsequent discussions, the Board has lost confidence in President Rothman’s ability to lead the UWs moving forward.” 

The Board is also “immediately” moving forward in its work to identify the successor with more details about the process to be shared in the coming weeks. Chris Patton, UW’s vice president for university relations, will serve as acting executive-in-charge prior to the appointment of interim president.

In a statement released ahead of the Board of Regents’ meeting, Rothman said that regents have “repeatedly declined to cite a specific reason for finding no confidence in my leadership” and told him they “would have to meet as a full board to discuss the issue.”

“It is disappointing that the first I heard any sort of defense of their position was when they communicated with the media. I am left to conclude that, at best, this reflects an after-the-fact rationalization of a decision that was previously made,” Rothman said. “At no point in the last six months was it ever indicated to me that an evaluation could lead to termination and, in fact, the most recent evaluation delivered to me by Regent President Bogost was noted by her as being ‘overwhelmingly positive.’”

Rothman also noted some of his accomplishments from his tenure. Rothman was an attorney in Milwaukee and CEO of the law firm Foley and Lardner before being selected by the UW Board of Regents in January 2022 to be president. He was chosen after the UW system did not have a permanent leader for two years. In the position, he is responsible for overseeing the vice presidents and chancellors who run the systems campuses, including flagship UW-Madison. 

“While the board’s apparent decision to move to terminate me is disappointing, I am incredibly proud of our bold, transformative accomplishments during my time as president,” Rothman said. “We secured the largest revenue increase from the state in two decades, eliminated structural deficits at our universities, maintained affordability, increased student enrollment for three consecutive years, secured funding for student mental health services, focused on the First Amendment rights of our students, expanded continuing education programs to meet workforce needs, and more. If those achievements do not reflect strong leadership and a vision for the future, I really don’t know what would.” 

While the specifics of what prompted regents to seek his resignation are not public, Rothman once floated the idea of resigning in 2023 while working on a deal with Republican lawmakers in which he agreed to cuts to the UW’s diversity programs in exchange for releasing previously allocated funds for building projects and staff cost-of-living adjustments. Under the terms of the deal, the UW system schools changed their approach to diversity, equity and inclusion programs (DEI). Regents initially rejected the deal, then reversed their decision.

Republicans may seek consequences for regents

After the news broke that the regents were seeking to remove Rothman, Republican lawmakers  came to the defense of the president, and it appears they may seek to remove unconfirmed regents who voted to oust Rothman. 

On Monday, Sen. Patick Testin (R-Stevens Point) suggested that lawmakers consider firing regents for voting  to fire Rothman. 

There are 18 members on the Board of Regents with 16 appointed by the governor and subject to Senate approval, along with the state school superintendent and the president or a designee of the Wisconsin Technical College System Board. Only five of Gov. Tony Evers’ appointees have been confirmed. The other 10, including Bogost, have not received a confirmation hearing.

“If the Board of Regents remove President Rothman without just cause, the Senate should reject every one of their nominations,” Testin wrote in a post on X on Monday evening. “Their actions should have consequences.”

This is not the first time a Republican state senator has threatened consequences against regents making choices they don’t agree with.

In 2024, the Republican-led Senate fired two of Evers’ appointees to the Board who had voted against the deal between lawmakers and Rothman: John Miller and Dana Wachs. Ahead of the floor session, Sen. Chris Kapenga (R-Delafield) posted on X that a vote against the DEI deal could cost the regents their confirmation.

The Senate Universities and Technical Colleges committee noticed a public hearing and executive session on Tuesday ahead of the meeting to consider the appointments of 10 regents on Thursday. 

Rep. Rob Hutton (R-Brookfield), who chairs the committee, said in a statement reacting to the vote that the Board of Regents “once again appears to be distracted by politics and unable to concentrate on addressing the big picture challenges the UW System faces.”

“Instead of focusing on major structural and curriculum reforms throughout the entire system, the Regents seem determined to stray into backroom maneuvering that further diminishes the reputation of the UW brand and undermines its long-term mission of preparing our students for an ever-changing marketplace,” Hutton wrote. “The Regents owe the Wisconsin citizens, employers, and students who rely on a strong, stable UW system an explanation for why they chose to throw the system into turmoil.”

Rep. Dave Murphy (R-Hortonville), who chairs the Assembly Colleges and Universities committee, said ahead of the meeting that he plans to hold a hearing on the action. He said the regents “owes Wisconsin taxpayers, students and families a full explanation.” 

“I am troubled by the lack of transparency surrounding these reports,” Murphy said in a statement. “President Rothman deserves to know exactly why the Board has lost confidence in his leadership. At the hearing, members of the Board of Regents will be called to testify and explain their reasons for pursuing his removal.”

A date and time for the hearing will be announced in coming days, according to Murphy.

Ahead of the regents’ vote, the Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the state’s largest business lobby, also issued a statement expressing support of Rothman and urging the regents to reconsider, saying the effort appeared to be “capricious, unfair and possibly partisan.” 

WMC said Rothman has helped to enhance the UW’s reputation and “that reputation will be severely tarnished by the Board of Regents if it votes to remove Jay from his position without justification.”

Evers, who previously sat on the Board when he served as state schools superintendent, did not take a position on whether Rothman should be ousted. 

“[Rothman] works for the board and if the board is dissatisfied, they have the right to do this,” he told reporters on Monday morning. “It’s their call.”

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Ten Democratic state legislators  wrote Republican U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil Tuesday urging him and the GOP majority in Congress to take control of the war in Iran in reaction to President Donald Trump’s social media threats against the country.

The lawmakers sent the letter after Trump posted on his social media platform Tuesday morning that “a whole civilization will die” if Iran doesn’t meet his deadline to open the Strait of Hormuz. The post followed Trump’s threat on social media Sunday to bomb bridges and power plants if Iranian leaders don’t open the waterway to ship traffic.

“We are writing to you with an urgent request and to express our grave concerns for the safety of our country and civilians around the world,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter to Steil (R-Janesville), led by Assembly Minority Leader Rep. Greta Neubauer (D-Racine).

“Earlier today, President Donald Trump warned the world through a social media post that ‘a whole civilization will die tonight’ if Iran fails to meet his deadline,” the letter states. “This appears to be an explicit threat to commit unimaginable atrocities against civilians. Congress must act and stop the president’s actions.”

The letter continues: “We are calling on you and the Congress of the United States to assert your authority and enforce congressional war powers as laid out in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution. The president and his administration are letting this conflict spin out of control. It’s time for Congress to step in.”

The president’s threats target non-combatants, the letter notes.

“Threatening millions of civilian lives is fundamentally un-American and violates the core values that both Democrats and Republicans share. Whether President Trump intends to follow through on his threat or not, his statement demonstrates he is not fit to be commander-in-chief,” the letter states.

“It’s time for you to summon your courage, recognize the gravity of this moment, and do the right thing for our shared future. We must rise above partisanship and call out the president’s recklessness immediately.

“Reassert congressional control over the conflict in Iran and put an end to the president’s erratic and dangerous actions before it is too late.”

In addition to Neubauer, the letter was signed by Democratic state Reps. Christine Sinicki, Brienne Brown, Ann Roe, Clint Anderson, Angelina Cruz, Tip McGuire and Ben Desmidt, and Democratic Sens. Mark Spreitzer and Robert Wirch.

Trump agreed Tuesday evening to a two-week ceasefire with Iran and said the countries were near a long-term peace agreement.

Letter to U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil re_ Congressional War Powers

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A federal judge on Monday denied the appeal of former Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan, who was seeking to overturn a jury’s guilty verdict against her. 

Dugan was convicted last year of obstructing federal immigration enforcement efforts for helping an undocumented man who was appearing in her courtroom go out a side door to evade immediate detection by federal agents. After a trial in December, she was found guilty of felony obstruction of justice and not guilty of a misdemeanor charge alleging she concealed an undocumented person from arrest. 

On Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Lynn Adelman ruled against Dugan’s appeal in a 39-page order. He also again rejected a claim that she was immune from prosecution because her actions were taken while she served as a judge. 

Dugan’s legal team indicated in a statement that they plan to appeal Adelman’s ruling. That appeal will take that case to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. 

“We continue to maintain that Hannah Dugan acted lawfully and within her independent authority as a judge,” Dugan’s attorneys stated. “The inconsistent jury verdicts demonstrate that the trial proceedings were flawed, and we plan to appeal.”

A date for sentencing Dugan has not yet been set.

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WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump agreed Tuesday evening to a two-week ceasefire with Iran, at least delaying his threat of a catastrophic attack on the country’s civilian population as he said the countries were near a long-term peace agreement.

The ceasefire was negotiated with Pakistani leaders as intermediaries, Trump said in a post to his social media site, Truth Social. The deal was conditional on Iran agreeing to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a key shipping lane for the global supply of oil, Trump wrote.

“Based on conversations with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir, of Pakistan, and wherein they requested that I hold off the destructive force being sent tonight to Iran, and subject to the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz, I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks,” he wrote. 

Trump added that he had received “a 10-point proposal from Iran” that would form the basis of a long-term agreement. 

“Almost all of the various points of past contention have been agreed to between the United States and Iran, but a two week period will allow the Agreement to be finalized and consummated,” he said.

A day of global outrage

Earlier Tuesday, Trump had escalated his rhetoric against Iran, even as some Republicans in Congress began to back away from his declarations, threatening that “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

“I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” he wrote. 

He ended the 85-word message with “God Bless the Great People of Iran!”

The threat drew intense opposition throughout the day, including from Pope Leo XIV.

Trump posted the early-morning message roughly 12 hours before his self-imposed deadline for Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz or otherwise face U.S. strikes on the country’s bridges and power plants, he wrote Sunday in an expletive-laden Truth Social post. 

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y, denounced Trump as “an extremely sick person.” 

“Each Republican who refuses to join us in voting against this wanton war of choice owns every consequence of whatever the hell this is,” he wrote on X Tuesday morning.

Some Democrats in Congress said it’s time to invoke the 25th Amendment to the Constitution and remove Trump from office.

Threats followed rescue operations

Trump’s flurry of fresh threats followed Iran’s downing of two U.S. military aircraft. U.S. forces and intelligence officers launched a major operation to rescue one of the plane’s weapons system officers, which proved successful Sunday, according to the president and U.S. officials. Two pilots had already been rescued.

As of Tuesday, the United States struck Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil export terminal, according to The Associated Press, and Israeli forces struck eight bridges, according to a post on X by Israel’s military. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday forces had also struck railways. “Yesterday, we destroyed transport planes and dozens of helicopters. Today, we attacked the train tracks and bridges used by the Revolutionary Guards,” he wrote on social media.

Speaking in Hungary, Vice President JD Vance said he hopes Iran chooses “the right response” by Trump’s evening deadline. 

“We’ve got tools in our toolkit that we so far haven’t decided to use. The president of the United States can decide to use them, and he will decide to use them if the Iranians don’t change their course of conduct,” Vance said.

Sharif n a statement prior to Trump’s post announcing the ceasefir urged all parties to continue negotiations, and for Trump to abandon his Tuesday night deadline.

“To allow diplomacy to run its course, I earnestly request President Trump to extend the deadline for two weeks. Pakistan, in all sincerity, requests the Iranian brothers to open Strait of Hormuz for a corresponding period of two weeks as a goodwill gesture,” Sharif wrote on social media.

Trump repeated the threat to bomb Iran’s civilian infrastructure Monday during a lengthy White House press conference. Targeting civilian infrastructure violates international humanitarian law, including the Geneva Conventions that were updated following World War II.

U.S. cybersecurity officials alerted critical infrastructure operators to “urgently review” cybersecurity protocols and take measures to disconnect certain components from the internet after indications that Iranian hackers have begun exploiting water and energy systems. 

The advisory Tuesday from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, and a host of other federal agencies including the FBI and Department of Energy, did not provide details on locations.

Sens. Ron Johnson, John Curtis express objections

Republicans on Capitol Hill, with the exception of Kentucky’s Sen. Rand Paul and Rep. Thomas Massie, have blocked efforts to rein in Trump’s war on Iran, but three more GOP voices against the conflict emerged in recent days. 

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told conservative commentator John Solomon Monday that he is against Trump’s threats to bomb civilian targets in Iran.

“I hope and pray that President Trump is just using this as bluster,” he said on the “John Solomon Reports” podcast, produced by Just the News. “… We are not at war with the Iranian people. We are trying to liberate them.”

Sen. John Curtis, R-Utah, declared opposition Friday to funding the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran. 

“I stand by the President’s actions taken in defense of our national security interests in the Middle East. But we must be clear-eyed about history and the Constitution. While I support maintaining our readiness and replenishing stockpiles, I cannot support funding for further military operations without a formal declaration of war from Congress,” he wrote on X.

On Tuesday afternoon, Rep. Nathaniel Moore, R-Texas, joined the opposition, posting on X that “what sets America apart is not only our strength, but how we use it.”

“I do not support the destruction of a ‘whole civilization.’ That is not who we are, and it is not consistent with the principles that have long guided America,” Moore wrote in a statement on X.

The U.S. and Israel began a joint bombing campaign on Iran on Feb. 28, killing  Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and numerous other senior officials of the Islamic state. 

In response, Iran has targeted global oil trade by effectively choking off the Strait of Hormuz, a major maritime passage for one-fifth of the world’s petroleum and liquid natural gas. 

The conflict has killed thousands of civilians across the Middle East and injured thousands more. Thirteen U.S. service members have died, and 372 have been injured since the start of fighting, according to the Pentagon’s Defense Casualty Analysis System.

25th Amendment

Trump’s rash threat to wipe out Iran’s “whole civilization” sparked numerous calls to remove the president from office.

Former U.S. House GOP lawmaker and Trump loyalist, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, swiftly denounced Trump’s latest threat.

“25TH AMENDMENT!!! Not a single bomb has dropped on America. We cannot kill an entire civilization. This is evil and madness,” she posted on X.

Nearly two dozen Democratic lawmakers, including several progressive members, also turned to social media to appeal for the 25th Amendment, which authorizes the vice president and a majority of Cabinet members or Congress to deem the president unfit for office. The amendment has never been invoked.

Rep. Yassamin Ansari, D-Ariz., accused Trump of threatening “massive war crimes” and also implicated Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

“In the last 48 hours alone, the rhetoric has crossed every line. Pete Hegseth is complicit. I’ve called for the 25th Amendment and am introducing Articles of Impeachment against Hegseth,” said Ansari, an Iranian-American.

Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., said “removal is the top priority.”

In a video message posted on X, Markey urged the House to “immediately” come back into session and pass articles of impeachment against Trump, and for the Senate to remove him from office.

“He is completely unstable and dangerous,” Markey said.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., countered the calls, saying, “The president is facing serious mental decline; I’m with you on that.”

“But unfortunately, invoking the 25th is not realistic right now, given his oddball cabinet of sycophants and eccentrics, and Republican ‘spines of foam.’ We’re going to have to buckle down and win this the old-fashioned way.”

Rep. Marcy Kaptur, whose seat in red northwest Ohio is under threat, stopped short of mentioning the 25th Amendment, but urged GOP congressional leadership to act as Trump is “recklessly threatening to commit atrocities and war crimes.”

“This is unhinged saber rattling that follows consistent threats over the past week to violate international law. The President is using the might of the United States military to wage war without constitutionally mandated approval from Congress. Until Congress reasserts itself as a co-equal branch of government, he will remain unchecked and the security of our nation will continue to be at risk,” she said in a statement.

Illegal orders

Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., reminded American service members in a statement Tuesday that attacking civilians en masse “puts them in very real legal jeopardy,” as the action is not only in violation of the Geneva Conventions, but also the Pentagon’s Law of War Manual.

Slotkin, a former CIA analyst, and five other congressional Democrats who served in the military or national security roles, published a video in November stating that members of the armed services are not obligated to follow illegal orders. The video came during the height of the administration’s strikes on small alleged drug-running boats in the Caribbean.

“It’s moments like these that are why we made the video to service members last year. And I hope and believe our troops — especially those in command — will have the moral clarity to push back if they are given clearly illegal orders,” Slotkin said in a statement Tuesday.

Rep. Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat who appeared in the video with Slotkin, said House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., must bring the House back into session and vote to end the war.

“Members of our Armed Forces must remember their oaths to the Constitution. As I have said before, if servicemembers are asked to carry out illegal orders, they have a solemn duty to follow the law,” said Crow, a former paratrooper and Army Ranger.

Pope Leo XIV, during a press gaggle outside his summer residence near Rome, appealed to Americans to contact Congress and express opposition to the Iran war.

“I would invite the citizens of all countries involved to contact the authorities, political leaders, congressmen, to ask them, tell them to work for peace and to reject war always,” he said.

The offices of Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., and Johnson did not respond for comment on Trump’s latest statements.

A general social media account for the Senate Republican Conference posted mid-day Tuesday: “Iran would be wise to take President Trump at his word. They can choose the easy way or the hard way.”

Wisconsin’s non-partisan spring elections are Tuesday. The race for an open seat on the state Supreme Court between Court of Appeals Judges Maria Lazar and Chris Taylor is at the top of the ticket, but Wisconsin voters will also decide a handful of races for circuit court seats, hundreds of school board races, school referendum questions and other local contests. 

Polls open on Tuesday at 7 a.m. and remain open until 8 p.m. Voters who are still in line when polls close should remain in line and will still be able to cast their ballots. Absententee ballots that have not yet been returned need to be received by local election officials by the time polls close. It’s too late to drop a ballot in the mail, but voters can bring their absentee ballots to their designated polling place, their municipal clerk’s office or, in communities that use them, to a municipal absentee ballot drop box. Details on how and where to vote as well as same-day voter registration at the polls can be found at MyVote.WI.gov.

As of Monday, 424,651 absentee ballots had been requested and 324,396 ballots had been returned, according to Wisconsin Elections Commission data. The absentee numbers show a steep drop from last year’s spring election when the state Supreme Court race drew massive national attention with the ideological balance of the Court at stake. Last year, 750,240 absentee ballots were requested and 693,981 were returned. 

Wisconsin voters head to the polls amid a flurry of national headlines about efforts from President Donald Trump and Republicans to change the rules around voter registration and absentee ballot eligibility. 

Trump signed an executive order last week that seeks to severely limit access to voting by mail. He is also pushing  for congressional Republicans to pass the SAVE Act, a bill that would change the rules guiding how people register to vote in an effort to make it harder for non-citizens to vote. Non-citizen voting has become a major focus for Republican election skeptics, however there is no evidence non-citizen voting happens in statistically significant numbers. 

Trump’s executive order curtailing mail-in ballots is being challenged in court and the SAVE Act has not yet been signed into law. At an online news conference Monday, WEC Administrator Meagan Wolfe said there have been zero changes to federal law that will affect Wisconsinites trying to cast a ballot Tuesday. 

“As it pertains to the April 7, 2026 election, there are no changes,” she said. “Any federal bills that are being proposed or other measures that might be proposed at the federal level — none of those are in place. And so when voters head to the polls on April 7, they should know that nothing has changed. The same processes that you’ve used to vote in the last number of years are still in place. There have been no changes. So the photo ID requirements remain unchanged. The process where you state your name and address and you show your ID and you’re given a ballot at the polls and you sign the poll book, all of those things are still in place.” 

On Monday, the Republican Party of Wisconsin announced it had filed a complaint with WEC against the city of Green Bay after 152 people were mistakenly sent two absentee ballots. Green Bay City Clerk Celestine Jeffries said a “system glitch” caused the error. 

Since 2020, the Wisconsin Republican Party has regularly encouraged conspiracy theories about the state’s election systems. In a statement, party chair Brian Schimming called for WEC to investigate and make sure people aren’t able to cast two votes.

“Wisconsin law is clear: one voter, one ballot,” said Schimming, who was involved in the effort to cast false Electoral College ballots on behalf of Trump after the 2020 election. “This reckless failure by the Green Bay Clerk has created serious risks of double voting and fraud. The Elections Commission must immediately investigate and order a concrete plan to secure Tuesday’s election.”

Wolfe said at the news conference that state law prevents her from commenting on the specifics of any complaints made to WEC, but that Wisconsin’s system has a “very, very established process” for how clerks handle duplicate ballots. 

The system for logging returned ballots would never allow the same voter to return two ballots, Wolfe said. 

“If two ballots come back, one of them is rejected, because only one ballot can be checked in and actually sent to be tabulated per voter,” she said. “And all that’s going to happen as part of a public process. So the actual rejection and then sending one of the ballots tabulated, all that’s going to occur at the polling place or where ballots are tabulated in that jurisdiction, and observers and the public will be made aware of exactly what’s happening and why one ballot’s being rejected and one’s being sent on to be counted. And so we always, in this situation, encourage our clerks to be very transparent in exactly how these are handled and the many, many safeguards that are in place to ensure that only one ballot can be counted.”

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Gov. Tony Evers signed a pair of bills Monday that will release more than $133 million for communities to fight water contamination from per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in Wisconsin. 

The bill signing is the culmination of about three years of debate over the money. The state initially set $125 million aside in the 2023-25 state budget, but the total dedicated to fighting PFAS has grown to $133.5 million as interest accrued on the funds while it sat unused, according to a Legislative Fiscal Bureau memo. The Town of Campbell, Marinette, the town of Stella near Rhinelander and French Island near La Crosse are just some of the communities in Wisconsin that have been managing PFAS pollution in local drinking water for years.

Evers called it a “historic” day for the state. 

“Today the people of Wisconsin can begin to have PFAS-free water,” Evers said. 

PFAS — also known as “forever chemicals” — are a large group of cancer-causing  chemicals that do not break down easily and have been used to make products including nonstick cookware, firefighting foam and fast food wrappers that are resistant to heat, grease, stains and water.

Under the laws, about $80 million will go to a community grant program to assist local governments in combating and remediating PFAS contamination in their communities, a little over $5 million will go to a grant programs for public airports and $35 million will go to expanding the Well Compensation Grant Program to assist homeowners and businesses with private wells to ensure their drinking water is safe from PFAS. The Well Compensation Grant Program will also be expanded to allow non-community water supplies, schools and child care facilities to receive funding. 

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources will get 10 new positions and $1.3 million to help with managing conservation, fishery resources and trapper education, protecting the state’s water resources and for other agency responsibilities including communications, customer services, aids administration, watershed management and environmental analysis.

The laws also amend the state’s Spills Law to protect farmers, landowners, certain business owners and fire departments from being held responsible for PFAS contamination if it is discovered on their land and they did not cause it.

AB 130, now 2025 Wisconsin Act 200, includes the funding and AB 131, now 2025 Wisconsin Act 201, creates the new programs and requirements related to PFAS. 

“This will provide real relief to families and communities tackling the pressing threat of PFAS in local wells, municipal water systems and more,” Evers said, adding that the day has not come without challenges. “It’s been a long road, but this will make a real difference for families living with the challenges of people every day, so today, we’re here to chart a new path forward— one where folks can trust that the water coming from their tap is safe to drink.” 

Evers was joined by advocates, Department of Natural Resources Secretary Karen Hyun as well as a bipartisan group of state lawmakers including Sen. Eric Wimberger (R-Gillett), Jeff Mursau (R-Crivitz) and Rep. Renuka Mayadev (D-Madison). He thanked all of them for their work on the issue and emphasized the importance of working together to get it done. 

Evers said that it is always “worth the effort” to find a bipartisan way to get work done. Once the money was set aside in 2023, lawmakers and Evers disagreed on the framework for getting the money to communities. Evers vetoed a 2024 Republican bill, saying it limited the enforcement power of the DNR and wouldn’t do enough to combat the PFAS contamination challenges that Wisconsin faces.

Over the last year, lawmakers and Evers worked to get to a compromise that passed the Assembly and Senate unanimously. 

“This was a really important two bills, and the only way we were going to do it is that people compromise, give, take and win,” Evers said.

According to a DNR release, it will take time for the agency’s staff to get the programs going, and DNR will be prioritizing grants for sampling of private wells, schools, child care facilities and biosolids. The grants are expected to be available starting in the summer or fall of 2026.

Lee Donahue, the health, education and welfare supervisor for the Town of Campbell, said the laws were critical for the “healing and health” of people in affected communities. 

“Sadly, today I can quickly and easily say that per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances are toxic,” Donahue said. “I’ve seen how people’s exposure can devastate a community with kidney, testicular, ovarian, thyroid cancer, Parkinson’s disease, endocrine disruptions like polycystic ovarian syndrome, impacting women’s fertility, and the impacts on child development.” 

Donahue said the change in the law represents progress. 

“It lays the foundation for future PFAS legislation that will continue to protect Wisconsinites,” Donahue said. “For the 4,500 neighbors of mine and the town of Campbell and all those in Peshtigo, Stella Rib Mountain, and sadly, the list goes on and on, may this legislation accelerate your access to safe water.”

Wimberger, who alongside other Republicans fought for the provision absolving parties they termed “innocent landowners” from responsibility for contamination, celebrated the signing of the bills in a statement.

“At the heart of our reforms is an idea: the state should not treat landowners who discover PFAS contamination on their property like polluters. Through meetings and negotiations, that idea transformed into real policy that will protect innocent victims of PFAS across Wisconsin from unfair state action,” Wimberger said. “From French Island to Marinette and Madison to Stella, we’ll soon begin the important work of identifying and fighting PFAS contamination in lands and waters across our state.”

Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify the amount of money that is available. 

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CINCINNATI — For four years, Kimberly Dudley has worked on the front line of the Affordable Care Act as a navigator, helping Ohioans solve the puzzle of buying private insurance on the federal HealthCare.gov marketplace.

But the job is harder now, the answers scarcer. In one of its first acts, the second Trump administration cut annual funding for navigators by 90%, from $100 million to $10 million, arguing the program was wasteful. Under the ACA, better known as Obamacare, navigators help educate and enroll people — especially those living in hard-to-reach communities. They were paid through a user fee on monthly premiums.

In January 2025, 50 navigators served Ohio’s 88 counties, toting their laptops to meet Ohioans at rural libraries and suburban food courts to help them search for a health care plan on the marketplace. But by the Nov. 1 start of open enrollment, the busiest time of year, only five navigators remained. Dudley, of Cincinnati, is one of them.

Married with a child, she was hired in 2022 at Cincinnati’s Freestore Foodbank and found “such a joy from helping people, although it’s been hard this year.” The hotline, for example, is in Dudley’s hands now. The other navigators who worked calls were laid off.

The administration did not respond to requests last week to discuss the navigator program cut. But in announcing the cuts last year, an administration statement said: “Navigators are not enrolling nearly enough people to justify the substantial amount of federal dollars previously spent on the program. This reduction will ensure funding is focused on meeting the statutory goals of the program more efficiently and effectively.”

Dudley’s task got even tougher at the end of last year, when the Trump administration and Congress allowed certain pandemic-era subsidies to expire, and policy premiums rose sharply, often to more than many Ohioans can pay.

She hears the stories every day on her own phone, which doubles as Ohio’s ACA hotline. People call when they are ruled ineligible for Medicaid, usually because their incomes are too high. In early March, Dudley heard from Tonya Horn, 59, of Cleveland Heights, who needed help.

All her working life, said Horn, she felt lucky to have employer-paid health benefits up to her most recent job, working remotely for Empower, a Colorado financial services company, as a talent acquisition diversity program manager. But last year, her job at Empower felt less secure. Her pink slip came in January.

Helping Horn, Dudley spotted a plan on HealthCare.gov that with an income-based subsidy would cost $450 a month with no deductible. But then Dudley discovered that Horn’s doctor does not accept that insurance plan.

“I don’t know if this works for you,” Dudley said, “but getting insurance could involve switching doctors.”

Horn sighed. “Can we keep looking?”

Drop in enrollment

This year, Ohio’s enrollment in the HealthCare.gov marketplace fell by 20%, the second-largest decline among the 50 states. The overall national enrollment slid 5%.

Experts in Ohio said a few factors depressed enrollment. Some people aged into Medicare. Others found jobs with health benefits. But one certain force was the Dec. 31 expiration of the pandemic-era subsidies on most marketplace plans.

The ACA does provide premium subsidies based on income, but the federal government began offering additional help in 2021 as temporary pandemic relief. The “enhanced” subsidies cut many people’s monthly premiums by hundreds of dollars.

They also helped boost the number of people buying health coverage from the insurance marketplaces, from 11.4 million people in 2020 to 24.3 million last year.

Americans who had the enhanced subsidies got warnings from their insurers about the Dec. 31 expiration. As of March 26, the number of Americans with marketplace coverage dropped by about 1.2 million compared with 2025, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

Last week, a spokesperson for U.S. Sen. Jon Husted, an Ohio Republican, said that Husted proposed to extend the subsidies two more years, with new restrictions to prevent fraud in marketplace plans. Democrats rejected the idea, said Joshua Eck, Husted’s deputy chief of staff. “But had they supported the bill, or been willing to discuss it, it’s likely this problem would have been solved in December.”

In Ohio, the Columbus nonprofit research group Health Policy Institute of Ohio found that of the more than 580,000 Ohioans with 2025 HealthCare.gov plans, nearly 90% used the temporary subsidies.

California and at least nine other states that run their own health insurance marketplaces have used state money to help residents absorb the expiration price shock, though only New Mexico is completely filling the gap. Ohio could not dip into its budget that way because it uses the federal marketplace.

In January, the Health Policy Institute of Ohio estimated that 2026 premiums for Ohio marketplace plans would surge by 114% on average. Said institute analyst Brian O’Rourke: “It’s reasonable to expect that (the enrollment drop is) because of the expiration of the subsidies.”

On the statewide ACA hotline call with Horn, Kimberly Dudley said her own mother got a notice from her insurance company that her $40-a-month premium would increase to $400. “I was able to help her figure out a plan, but her premium still went up some,” Dudley said. “We’re going to find a way forward for you.”

“I hope so,” Horn said.

Ohio expands the ACA

Ohio’s industrial base collapsed in the 1990s, and hundreds of thousands of workers lost employer-paid coverage. Young people left Ohio for work, and the insurance pool shrank as it rapidly aged. Numerous studies found Ohio’s health declining, in no small part because nearly 1.5 million Ohioans, more than 10% of the population, had zero health insurance.

The ACA also allowed states to expand Medicaid to adults with incomes up to 138% of the poverty level, although some Republican-led states have refused the expansion. In Ohio, GOP Gov. John Kasich pushed the Republican-led state legislature to approve the expansion in 2013; 40 states and the District of Columbia have expanded their programs. Ohio’s participation in the federal marketplace grew until 2025, when enrollment hit a record high.

The speed of the retreat in Ohio of the ACA brought swift consequences. The Columbus nonprofit group UHCAN Ohio “has been helping people since the law’s inception,” said Executive Director Charlotte Rudolph. Then last fall, “If we saw five people, maybe one enrolled. They’re making that tough decision to say, ‘I hope I don’t get sick.’”

“We are now going through our archives, asking ourselves, how did we help people back in the day when they didn’t have coverage?”

Further complicating Ohio’s health care horizon are Trump administration cuts to Medicaid. More than 3 million Ohioans use the health program for low-income residents. But under the broad tax and spending measure President Donald Trump signed last summer, as many as 1 in 10 of those Ohioans could be found ineligible through new work requirements and other hurdles.

Horn, on the hotline phone call, said her weekly $624 unemployment payments had put her over the Medicaid threshold. Dudley nodded as she tapped on her keyboard. “I hear that a lot,” she said.

What the future holds

While the immediate problems are stressing the system, experts say they are anxious for what is to come in Ohio’s health care.

Uninsured people often use emergency departments for primary care, straining hospitals still under pandemic duress and understaffed. Many Ohioans on Medicaid live in its rural spaces, where the safety net has long been fraying. The trade group the Ohio Hospital Association told the state legislature last year that more than 70% of the state’s rural hospitals have been running in the red for years.

“My fears,” said Grace Wagner of the Ohio Association of Foodbanks, “are that as these changes continue to come, decision-makers aren’t aware or prepared to respond.”

Dudley and Horn spent another 30 minutes on the ACA hotline, but none of the HealthCare.gov options clicked. Finally, Horn said she would call back.

“Sure, it’s a lot to think about,” Dudley said, and ended the call. Then she sat looking at her laptop screen full of HealthCare.gov. She doesn’t like to leave a puzzle unsolved for someone who came to her for help.

“I love what I do. Being able to do this work is fantastic, even in the midst of all this stuff happening,” she said. “But there are times when I feel a little overwhelmed.”

WASHINGTON — New Hampshire’s Republican governor, frustrated with little information about the Department of Homeland Security’s plan to put a new detention facility in her state, joined local Democrats to oppose the move and disclosed DHS plans to retrofit warehouses across the nation to expand immigrant detention.

Two Republican members of the U.S. Senate, one who chairs the Armed Services Committee and another running for governor, personally lobbied DHS to find other locations for planned large-scale detention centers in rural Byhalia, Mississippi, and Lebanon, Tennessee. 

And a city manager for a small town in Georgia that overwhelmingly voted to put President Donald Trump back in the White House placed a lock on a meter to prevent water access to a newly purchased warehouse for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

At every turn, DHS has faced pushback from Republicans in its drive to quickly scale up immigrant detention to 92,600 people by September, a pillar of the president’s mass deportation plan as Trump aims to remove 1 million immigrants without legal status each year. Republicans warn that the move to convert warehouses into hulking detention sites in rural areas will strain local communities’ water, sewage, electricity, heat and health care. 

Yet Republicans also cheered Trump’s 2024 campaign rhetoric on deportation, voted to return him to the White House and in Congress last year, GOP lawmakers spearheaded $45 billion for ICE detention. 

Experts on detention say the growing burden on communities and the subsequent uproar should be no surprise to members of the GOP. 

“You cannot have a successful deportation agenda, which is the president’s obsession of wanting to have 1 million a year … unless you scale up detention,” said Muzaffar Chishti, Migration Policy Institute senior fellow and director of the MPI office at New York University School of Law. 

Billions for detention

Last year, congressional Republicans provided a separate funding pool of $175 billion for immigration enforcement through the massive tax cuts and spending package, with $45 billion set aside specifically for the detention of immigrants. 

Of that sum, the Trump administration plans to use $39 billion to overhaul its current detention model of using existing jails and prisons and instead consolidate 34 facilities owned by the federal government for detention. 

That would include eight mega-sites of refurbished warehouses to hold as many as 10,000 people each; 16 processing centers, also refurbished warehouses, to each hold 1,000 to 1,500 people; and 10 “turnkey” facilities, which would be the preexisting jails and prisons with ICE contracts. 

Those plans for DHS to expand immigrant detention became public after New Hampshire’s GOP Gov. Kelly Ayotte released documents about a now-canceled site planned for Merrimack, as well as sites across the rest of the country.

The eight large-scale sites would hold more people than the largest federal prison in the United States, which houses roughly 4,000 inmates.

“I think for a lot of people, it sounds and looks a lot like we’re building an infrastructure for concentration camps,” said Elliott Young, a professor of history at Lewis & Clark College.

The Trump administration’s rapid expansion of detention — as many as 68,000 immigrants, as of February — has proven deadly. In 2025, there were 31 known detainee deaths, the highest in 20 years. This year alone, more than a dozen immigrants already have died in detention, and advocates are concerned the plans to detain up to 10,000 immigrants in mega-sites will only lead to more deaths. 

This is not the kind of economic development many rural communities may have envisioned.

“Having such a big amount of people detained in one place comes with its own issues, but the second thing is that industrial warehouses are just not equipped, and they will never be equipped, to be able to detain that many folks,” said Luis Suarez, the senior field advocacy manager at Detention Watch Network.

“With the current facilities that ICE is managing, we have seen an unprecedented amount of inhumane conditions and deaths, and we feel that with this large-scale expansion that we’re going to continue to see it on a larger scale,” Suarez continued.

Public opinion on detention centers

The GOP pushback on warehouses in communities grew after two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were killed by federal immigration agents in Minnesota, and public opinion ratings on ICE and the president’s agenda took a dive. 

“This is just coming off the heels of what happened in Minneapolis,” Suarez said. “I feel like for people it’s sending a signal that if these facilities open up, there might be increased enforcement, and they don’t want to continue to see the violence that DHS and ICE has been inflicting on communities.”

How the DHS push to acquire warehouses develops over the coming months could also be affected by the newly confirmed Homeland Security secretary, former Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin, who replaced Kristi Noem.

While NBC reported on March 31 that Homeland Security is pausing plans to buy more warehouses, quoting two senior DHS officials, the officials “stressed the decision may only be temporary.” 

During Mullin’s confirmation hearing, he agreed to work with local communities concerned with large detention centers after New Jersey Sen. Andy Kim raised the issue. 

Kim said in the town of Roxbury, New Jersey, which has a volunteer fire department and 42 police officers, DHS purchased a warehouse as a processing center to detain up to 1,500 people. 

Roxbury is in western Morris County, where Trump gained 50% of the presidential vote in 2024. City officials filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration to prevent the conversion of the warehouse. 

“Does that sound like the kind of town that has the resources to take on a warehouse of this magnitude?” Kim asked Mullin during his confirmation hearing.

Mullin pledged to personally visit the facility himself, if confirmed. 

Out west, red states object

In Mullin’s own Republican-led state, officials in Oklahoma City met with the owners of a warehouse that DHS was looking to purchase, and the owners eventually backed out of talks with the federal government.

Oklahomans were only made aware of the potential warehouse because of a local law requiring a mandatory disclosure that any property purchased will not impact the historic preservation of certain buildings. 

But not all officials have received warning. 

Utah’s Republican Gov. Spencer Cox, along with congressional lawmakers from both parties, were blindsided by the sale of a warehouse in Salt Lake City to the federal government.

“When the sale went through, we were not given any notice,” Cox told reporters during a press conference. “No members of our congressional delegation were given any notice. No locals were given any notice. That’s, I think, a little frustrating for everyone. We want to work closely together to get things right.”

In response, Salt Lake City officials have placed restrictions on how much water ICE can use.

So far, DHS has purchased 10 warehouses among the 34 planned. 

But communities and lawmakers have been able to end the bids of another 13 proposed detention centers, according to Project Salt Box, which is tracking the purchases of warehouses by the federal government.

In Social Circle, Georgia, and Schuylkill, Pennsylvania, located in counties that gave Trump more than 70% of the vote in the 2024 presidential election, local leaders are opposed to the government’s purchase of two large-scale warehouses.

Social Circle City Manager Eric Taylor said a lock would remain on the water meter at a recently purchased facility until ICE officials can demonstrate that the warehouse can operate without overburdening water and sewer services. DHS plans to use the warehouse as one of its mega-facilities to detain up to 10,000 immigrants, which is double the entire population of Social Circle.

The GOP lawmaker who represents that area, U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, also raised concerns about the huge detention center in Social Circle. He voted for the tax cuts and spending package that added billions for detention. 

“I’m all for helping DHS, and I’m behind that to make sure we get rid of these illegal criminals that have been throughout our country, but I also understand Social Circle’s concerns, from not just the infrastructure but the resources that may be needed,” Collins said in an interview with a local TV station. 

Collins also shepherded a bill through the House, now law, that requires mandatory detainment by DHS of immigrants charged with local theft, burglary or shoplifting. The bill was named after Georgia college student Laken Riley, whose murder by a Venezuelan immigrant conservatives blamed on the immigration policies of the Biden administration.

In Pennsylvania, Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro said he’s opposed to the detention center in Schuylkill and another proposed facility, and noted the pushback did not come from Democrats alone. 

“I’m going to do everything in my legal power and my regulatory power to see to it that these facilities are not sited here in Pennsylvania,” Shapiro said at a press conference. “After concluding this meeting here today, I’m even more determined … To hear from Republicans and Democrats alike expressing opposition to this, I think speaks volumes about how unwanted these facilities are in our communities.”

Rural America as a home for detention centers

It’s no surprise to Young, a professor of history at Lewis & Clark College, that the federal government is aiming to place detention centers in rural areas, which often lean Republican. 

“I think there’s a number of reasons for that,” he said. “One, these rural areas tend to be poorer areas where space is available cheaply, but it’s also areas where the local community might be lobbying for jobs that would come as a result of it. I think the other reason why they put them in these remote areas is it makes it very difficult for lawyers and advocates to access immigrants.”

Two Republican senators, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Roger Wicker of Mississippi, petitioned DHS to halt its plans to acquire warehouses for the purpose of detaining thousands of immigrants. 

Wicker wrote a letter to then-Homeland Security Secretary Noem, asking that ICE look elsewhere for its proposed 8,500 bed-space detention center other than the rural town of Byhalia, which has a population of under 1,500.

“Existing medical and human services infrastructure in Byhalia is insufficient to support such a large detainee population,” Wicker said. “Establishing a detention center at this site would place significant strain on local resources.”

Blackburn also worked with DHS to end plans to build a mega-detention center to hold up to 16,000 immigrants. She told her residents that the planned facilities for detention in Lebanon “will not move forward.”

Additionally, Young said “there is some sort of early version of” the federal government trying to retrofit warehouses to detain immigrants.

“If you go back to the origins of immigrant detention, late 19th century, under Chinese exclusion, there was absolutely no infrastructure for detaining immigrants,” Young said. “And so the first immigrant, Chinese immigrants, were detained and jailed in dock warehouses in San Francisco.”

The most recent example of the federal government turning to quickly constructed detention facilities to detain thousands of immigrants is the mass deportation campaign of 1954.

Most recently was the 1980s, when Mariel Cubans were held on military bases. One of the bases in Arkansas held up to 20,000 Cubans, and a riot erupted. It was a disaster that nearly ended then Arkansas Democratic Gov. Bill Clinon’s political career, and the blunder continued to follow him to the White House.

Detention centers and communities

Deirdre Conlon, an associate professor of geography at the University of Leeds, and Nancy Hiemstra co-wrote a book about the web of financial relationships that detention centers have with local communities and private corporations.

“The people who are detained become commodities out of which revenue is generated, that not only the private provider makes money off, but then the county government becomes dependent on,” Conlon said.

When the federal government disinvests in some communities, filling in budget gaps tends to come from detention centers owned and operated by private companies, Hiemstra added. 

“But the warehouse model just axes that relationship,” she said.

Hiemstra, an associate professor at Stony Brook University in New York, points out that even though DHS is trying to pitch to these communities that the operation of a warehouse will create jobs, those skills needed to run a facility are unlikely to come from the local community. A majority of the daily operations of the facility comes from the migrants detained, who typically earn up to $1 a day in cleaning and cooking.

“For the size of some of these facilities and the skills that are required … they will have to pull people from the outside (of the community) in,” she said. “That is not going to benefit the existing community at all.”

Hiemstra said it’s no surprise that DHS is facing opposition to operate  large-scale detention facilities in communities. 

“It removes the economic benefit to local communities that is present with the existing model,” she said. “Not that we want that to continue, but this will just pull it out of local communities even more and make it a total corporate money grab.”

But the main concern, she added, is using a warehouse to detain thousands of people.

“If these come to pass and it seems normal to throw humans in warehouses that will further normalize the deaths that are occurring and this dehumanization of people,” Hiemstra said. 

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Monday declined to rule out bombing certain types of civilian infrastructure in Iran, including schools and hospitals, and said that any agreement to end the war must include free navigation through the Strait of Hormuz.

“We have to have a deal that’s acceptable to me,” he said during a 90-minute press conference. “And part of that deal is going to be, we want free traffic of oil and everything else.”

Trump said he hopes he doesn’t need to bomb non-military targets, like power plants and bridges, but that even if he did, he doesn’t believe it would constitute a war crime. International law, including the Geneva Conventions ban on destroying “objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population,” generally considers the targeting of civilian infrastructure a war crime.

Trump also reiterated a Tuesday evening deadline for Iranian leaders to make a deal to end the war.

“We’re giving them until tomorrow, eight o’clock Eastern time,” he said. “And after that, they’re going to have no bridges. They’re going to have no power plants. Stone ages, yeah. Stone ages.”

Negotiations to end the war that Trump and the Israeli government began in late February, have been slow going, in part, due to the destruction of Iran’s communications infrastructure.  

“We’re communicating like they used to communicate 2,000 years ago with children bringing a note back and forth,” Trump said. “They have no communication.”

Trump contended during the press conference that many Iranians have welcomed their country being bombed and that they get upset when the destruction halts. 

“They would be willing to suffer that in order to have freedom,” he said. “We’ve had numerous intercepts. ‘Please keep bombing.’ Bombs that are dropping near their homes. ‘Please keep bombing. Do it.’ And these are people that are living where the bombs are exploding. And when we leave and we’re not hitting those areas, they’re saying, ‘Please come back. Come back. Come back.'” 

Trump said that after the war ends, his administration “may even get involved with helping them rebuild their nation.”

“Right now, if we left today, it would take them 20 years to rebuild their country, and it would never be as good as it was,” he said. “And the only way they’re going to be able to rebuild their country is to utilize the genius of the United States of America.”

Prosecuting leak

Trump said a search had begun for whichever official or officials released information last week about a U.S. aircraft being shot down over Iran, leading to rescue operations for two servicemen. 

“So whoever that was, we think we’ll be able to find it out, because we’re going to go to the media company that released it, and we’re going to say, ‘National security, give it up or go to jail,’ he said. “And we know who, and you know who we’re talking about.” 

Numerous news organizations published the information on Friday and it wasn’t immediately clear which one Trump planned to pursue. 

Update: This story has been updated with new information. 

The University of Wisconsin system Board of Regents is planning to meet on Tuesday to consider terminating UW President Jay Rothman, who has refused to resign under pressure from regents.

In a statement on Monday provided by a UW spokesperson, Regent President Amy Bogost said the decision is “about the future.” She noted that the regent president is responsible for an annual performance review of the system president and over the last several months she met with UW stakeholders including, regents, chancellors and other members of UW communities. She said the results were shared with Rothman. 

“President Rothman was not without notice, nor was this process sudden. The Board has engaged with President Rothman in good-faith discussions over the past several months,” Bogost said. “At a time of profound change in higher education, this decision is about the future. The Universities of Wisconsin must be led with a clear vision that both protects and strengthens our flagship, supports our comprehensive universities and ensures we are meeting the evolving needs of our students, workforce and communities across all 72 counties.”

The Board of Regents plans to meet on April 7 at 5 p.m. to consider terminating Rothman, according to a meeting notice. The regents will first meet in closed session and may then reconvene in open session regarding matters taken up in closed session, including voting where applicable.

Bogost said they would be meeting “to consider next steps with that responsibility firmly in mind.”

Rothman wrote in letters, first reported by the Associated Press last week, that the regents had lost confidence in his leadership and were telling him he needed to resign or be fired. He said he hasn’t been given any clear reasons for why they are pushing him out, but just that “each Regent has his or her own perspective on the matter.”

The Board last met in closed session on April 1 to discuss “ongoing personnel matters.” In a statement, Bogost said the Board “is responsible for the leadership of the Universities of Wisconsin and is having discussions about its future” and that they “don’t comment on personnel matters.”

State leaders have responded to the news that the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents is seeking to oust Rothman. 

Gov. Tony Evers, who previously sat on the Board when he served as state schools superintendent, did not take a position Monday morning on whether Rothman should be ousted.

“[Rothman] works for the board and if the board is dissatisfied, they have the right to do this,” he told reporters. “It’s their call.” 

Republican lawmakers, meanwhile, have been critical of the lack of clarity around the effort.

Rep. Dave Murphy (R-Hortonville), who chairs the Assembly Colleges and Universities Committee, said in a statement on April 2 that he was troubled by the reports, saying that the “lack of transparency is unacceptable.”

“President Rothman deserves to know exactly why the Board has lost confidence in his leadership,” Murphy said. “I am concerned that the push to oust him may actually stem from his strong support for free speech and open inquiry on our campuses — core principles that must be defended in higher education. The Board owes Wisconsin taxpayers, students and families a full explanation. They should provide specific reasons or stand down from this effort.”

Sen. Rob Hutton (R-Brookfield) and Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevera (R-Fox Crossing), who lead the Senate Universities and Technical Colleges committee, said in a statement on April 3 they were concerned the regents were trying to avoid public scrutiny and noted the news broke heading into the holiday weekend.

“If the Regents will not tell the public why they are making such a significant move, the public will be left to assume this is the latest example of backroom politics dictating how the Board of Regents is overseeing the UW System,” Hutton said. “Instead of secretive maneuvering, they should be focusing on reducing their bureaucracy, consolidating more of the struggling two-year campuses, instituting reforms that align with the needs of Wisconsin employers, and making higher education more affordable for all Wisconsin students.”

Rothman, who was an attorney in Milwaukee and CEO of the law firm Foley and Lardner, was selected by the UW Board of Regents in January 2022 to be president. He was chosen after the UW system did not have a permanent leader for two years. In the position, he is responsible for overseeing the vice presidents and chancellors who run the systems campuses, including flagship UW-Madison. 

While it’s unclear what prompted the push to pressure Rothman to resign, he has once floated the idea of resigning in 2023 while working on a deal with Republican lawmakers. 

Rothman agreed to an anti-diversity deal lawmakers demanded in exchange for releasing previously allocated funds for building projects and staff cost-of-living adjustments. Under the terms of the deal, the UW system schools changed their approach to diversity, equity and inclusion programs (DEI). Regents initially rejected the deal, then reversed their decision. 

During his tenure, Rothman has worked to secure funding from the state Legislature, which has often been hostile to the UW system, worked to bring pro-Palestinian protests on campuses to an end, implemented a direct admissions program for eligible in-state high school students and has overseen the closure of campuses and brought in third-party advisors to address financial pressures facing campuses as well as rebranding the system from the UW System to the Universities of Wisconsin.

Rothman argued in his letter that there are also to-do list items that make it a bad time for him to leave, including finding new chancellors for UW-Madison and UW-Eau Claire as well as establishing priorities for the next state budget.

“I understand that, as you indicated on Saturday, the Board may act to terminate my employment, which the Board is empowered to do,” Rothman wrote. “If, however, the full Board would like to discuss this matter with me in either an open or closed session, I would welcome the opportunity to participate in such a meeting.”

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As the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments last week about the constitutionality of President Donald Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship, Justice Sonia Sotomayor seemed skeptical.

The order as written applies only to babies born in the future, and the Trump administration has asked the court to exclude current citizens from any decision. Still, the court’s senior liberal justice wasn’t so sure it would work out like that.

“But the logic of your position, if accepted, is that this president or the next president or Congress or someone else could decide that it shouldn’t be prospective,” Sotomayor told U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer, the government’s top advocate at the court. “There would be nothing limiting that, according to your theory.”

The birthright citizenship case, Trump v. Barbara, is forcing the Supreme Court to confront the prospect of the United States becoming a much different kind of nation — one where Americans risk losing their citizenship and babies could be born effectively stateless. It’s also a nation that would more closely resemble its past, when broad swaths of people were excluded from the coveted title of American.

A majority of the court, including several conservative justices, appeared unpersuaded by the Trump administration’s argument that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified during Reconstruction, doesn’t guarantee citizenship to nearly everyone born on American soil. The court may very well strike down the order, which has never taken effect, later this year.

But whatever the decision, the case has prompted a high-stakes debate over who is an American — and the consequences of that definition — that’s playing out in the courtroom, in court documents and on the steps of the Supreme Court.

“Birthright citizenship is not just a legal principle,” Norman Wong said at a demonstration outside the Supreme Court last week.

Wong is a grandchild of Wong Kim Ark, who was born in San Francisco but denied entry back into the country after visiting China more than a century ago. Officials at the time argued he wasn’t a citizen, but he took his case to the Supreme Court and, in a 1898 decision, the justices affirmed that virtually all children born in the United States were guaranteed citizenship.

“It’s a statement about who we are as a nation,” Wong said of birthright citizenship. “It affirms that America is not defined by bloodlines or exclusion, but shared values and equal rights.”

A different view

Trump and some Republicans view birthright citizenship differently. 

The 14th Amendment says “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.” 

The Trump administration, which has worked to carry out mass deportations, contends that children born to parents in the country illegally or temporarily are not subject to the country’s jurisdiction. Most historians and legal scholars repudiate that position.

The executive order, signed on Trump’s first day back in office, calls citizenship a privilege — not a right — that’s a “priceless and profound gift.” 

During a recent Oval Office event, Trump told reporters that birthright citizenship was intended to extend citizenship to formerly enslaved people and their children following the Civil War. 

“The reason was it had to do with the babies of slaves,” Trump said.

Some Republicans have embraced a conception of the U.S. as a nation bound by a distinct cultural heritage — sometimes in language that celebrates European settlers — as opposed to a people brought together by the idea of America or a set of common principles. Like Trump, they advocate for a restrictive approach to immigration.

At a conference last fall on national conservatism — the name sometimes given to this perspective — U.S. Sen. Eric Schmitt, a Missouri Republican, called America a “a way of life that is ours, and only ours, and if we disappear, then America, too, will cease to exist.”

Schmitt filed a brief with the Supreme Court in January, along with Republican Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, in support of the executive order. 

“The Citizenship Clause applies only to those who have been allowed to adopt our country as their permanent and lawful home,” the brief says.

Revoking citizenship?

At the Supreme Court last week, Sotomayor pressed Sauer on a 1923 Supreme Court decision, U.S. vs. Thind. In that case, the justices ruled that a Sikh man from India, Bhagat Singh Thind, wasn’t eligible for citizenship. 

Thind argued that he was a “free white person,” a category of person allowed to naturalize under federal law at the time. The court found that Thind didn’t meet that definition under the common understanding of the phrase. The federal government revoked the citizenship of dozens of South Asian Americans following the decision.

Sauer reiterated that the Trump administration was only asking for “prospective relief,” prompting Sotomayor to interject.

“No, what I’m saying to you (is), yeah, that’s what you’re asking for relief right now,” Sotomayor said. “I’m asking whether the logic of your theory would permit what happened after the court’s decision in Thind, that the government could move to unnaturalize people who were born here of illegal residents.”

Sauer responded no, before concluding that “we are not asking for any retroactive relief.”

The exchange spotlighted the scenario that many advocates for immigrants fear if the Supreme Court strips away birthright citizenship. 

In a court brief, the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, which uses litigation to advance racial justice, and more than 70 other nonprofit groups warned that upholding the order would invite efforts to revoke the citizenship of countless Americans.

While the order is styled as only forward-looking, the groups said it threatens much deeper harms. To uphold Trump’s order, the Supreme Court would need to conclude that birth on U.S. soil doesn’t guarantee citizenship. Once that happens, they argue, “it is all too easy” to imagine the government retroactively removing citizenship.

“In that scenario, without further intervention from Congress, the affected individuals would become undocumented, with many or most becoming stateless,” the brief says.

American Civil Liberties Union national legal director Cecillia Wang, arguing against the order at the Supreme Court, said the 14th Amendment has provided a “fixed, bright-line rule” on citizenship that has contributed to the growth and thriving of the nation. 

She cautioned that the order would render whole swaths of American laws senseless.

“Thousands of American babies will immediately lose their citizenship,” Wang said. “And if you credit the government’s theory, the citizenship of millions of Americans — past, present and future — could be called into question.”

Ariana Figueroa contributed to this report. 

WASHINGTON — Congress will look considerably different next year, after dozens of its members move on to other political offices or retire, a number that’s likely to grow as some of those hoping to stay lose their reelection bids. 

A turnover of at least 13% will be the highest in more than three decades, bringing in a wave of new lawmakers, who will be looked to as a source of solutions for some of the country’s biggest problems. 

But the loss of institutional knowledge and negotiating expertise held by committee chairmen and seasoned lawmakers will not be easily replaced. 

Experts interviewed by States Newsroom said a surge of freshmen could lead to a further concentration of power in congressional leaders and heighten the influence of lobbyists, though they added there are benefits as well. 

“Serving in Congress is like any other job. It takes you some time to figure out how to be good at it,” said Molly Reynolds, vice president and director of Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. “Even members who come in with state legislative experience, they will know some things about legislating, but they won’t know all the things about Congress.”

New lawmakers don’t often understand the more complicated procedures and practices, like budget reconciliation, which Republicans used last year to enact their “big, beautiful” law. 

“We ran the reconciliation process last year with lots of members who had never experienced a reconciliation bill before,” Reynolds said. “And one consequence of this kind of lack of experience is that that can stand to empower party leaders even more.” 

But, she added, there can be value in “having younger members, who have a different time horizon for thinking about some of the problems facing the country.” 

Generational change ahead

So far 57 House lawmakers, 21 Democrats and 36 Republicans, have opted to run for another political position or retire. In the Senate, four Democrats and seven Republicans are choosing to leave for one reason or another, according to data compiled by Ballotpedia. 

Jonathan K. Hanson, lecturer in public policy at the University of Michigan, said it can take a while for newer members to learn the policy landscape well enough to understand when to listen to outside influence and when not to. 

“A person doesn’t walk into Congress knowing how things work,” he said. “And the more that you have people who are fresh, kind of green, don’t know how to navigate the institution, the more power that special interests, lobbyists, so forth might have to influence the political process.”

Hanson also said that “some generational change is a good thing.”

Longing to be the chief executive

North Dakota Republican Sen. John Hoeven said many of his colleagues are opting to run for governor, which he believes is a superior role to the one he holds now. 

“I was governor for 10 years before I came here. It’s the best job you can have. It’s a better job than Senate,” Hoeven said. “I mean, it’s an honor to serve in the Senate, for sure. But you just can’t find a better job than being governor. So that’s totally understandable.”

More than a dozen lawmakers are running for governor, including Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville, Colorado Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet, Florida Republican Rep. Byron Donalds, Minnesota Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Tennessee Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn.

Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine said being a member of Congress can be difficult, leading some lawmakers to head for the exits and other opportunities.  

“This is not an easy job and people, you know, decide that they’ve had a good chapter and want to do something else,” Kaine said. “I can understand why people might make that call.”

South Dakota Republican Rep. Dusty Johnson, who is campaigning to be governor of his home state, said that every two years, the institution changes when more experienced members leave and newer ones are voted into Congress. 

“Every cycle, we always have plenty of retirements, certainly enough retirements to change the nature of the body,” Johnson said. “The bigger factor is, who replaces those who have left? And of course, we’re not going to know that until after the primaries and generals are wrapped up.”

Primary elections began in early March and will take place on different dates in each state through mid-September. 

Michigan Democratic Sen. Gary Peters, who is set to leave at the end of this year, said the impact of retirements will depend on which candidates Americans elect during November’s midterm elections.

“If you have people who are getting elected who are practical, common-sense problem solvers, that’ll be good,” Peters said. “If people are hyper-partisan, either left or right, that’s not going to be good.” 

Oklahoma Republican Rep. Tom Cole said the retirements from members of his own party could have an impact on the elections.

“Obviously, we’re losing some very good members. And it’s easier, as a rule, to defend an incumbent than it is to win an open seat, particularly in a challenging year,” Cole said. “But look, these things run in cycles. You just have to work your way through it.”

Travel, long hours, little satisfaction

Hanson from the University of Michigan said more Republicans have decided to retire or seek another office because their party is likely to lose at least one chamber of Congress. 

“They’re expecting to lose control of the House of Representatives, and it’s not very enticing for them to stay in the fight under those circumstances,” he said. 

The mounting challenges that come with being a member of Congress are part of the reason some lawmakers are planning to step aside from their current roles, Hanson said. 

“I do think that the job, while seeming glamorous from the outside, is not that glamorous from the inside,” he said. “There’s lots of travel. Even when you go home, you’re traveling around your district. It’s hard on family life. The hours can be very long in those late-night voting sessions. 

“And then that would be one thing if what you’re getting out of it is a positive sense of contributing to the broader good, to, you know, the idea of public service.”

But, Hanson added, there aren’t that many opportunities these days for lawmakers to pass legislation they believe is meaningful. 

“So I think it’s fair to say that while there are certain people who are attracted to being in the thick of this kind of scene, a lot of people find that it’s just not a very satisfying occupation,” he said. 

Zachary Peskowitz, a political science professor at Emory University in Georgia, said there are both pros and cons to more than 65 lawmakers leaving Congress at one time.  

“On the one hand, there are a lot of members who have a lot of seniority and have served for a long time and a lot of expertise but are in their 70s and 80s in some cases,” he said. “And there have been concerns about how engaged some of them are.”

Younger members, Peskowitz said, may “approach the job with more energy than you might get from somebody who’s been in Congress for decades.” Newer lawmakers will also likely come with different viewpoints and priorities, he said.

While the Wisconsin Supreme Court race draws most of the headlines — and, even this year with less national attention, most of the money — elections for six county circuit court seats across the state are contested. 

The Supreme Court weighs in on the state’s most hot button issues, but during its 2024-25 term issued only 22 decisions. The state’s circuit courts, on the other hand, are responsible for thousands of cases ranging from criminal prosecutions to civil lawsuits and family law disputes. 

More than 250 judges across the state are elected to six-year terms. The spring elections are Wisconsin voters’ only real chance at changing their local judges, yet the races often go uncontested. This year, 25 seats on the circuit court bench are up for election, and only six of those races are contested. 

Dane County

In Dane County’s first contested circuit court election since 2018, incumbent Ben Jones is up against immigration attorney Huma Ahsan. Jones was appointed to the court last year to fill the seat vacated by Susan Crawford’s election to the state Supreme Court. 

Before joining the bench, Jones spent almost a decade working as an attorney at the Department of Public Instruction. Jones told the Capital Times that he applied for his appointment because of his dedication to public service. 

“I bring … all of that experience, all of that training to me on the bench every day,” he said. “Not just experience with the practice of law, but the experience as a public servant and the mentality of serving the public, as opposed to my own ego.”

Ahsan works in private practice as an immigration attorney. Prior to starting her practice, she was a legislative attorney for the Ho-Chunk Nation and the deputy director of the Great Lakes Indigenous Law Center at the University of Wisconsin Law School. 

She told the Cap Times she’s running to help make Dane County welcoming for everyone. 

“That’s why I’m running, is to make sure that this community stays welcoming, open to all of us,” Ahsan, the daughter of immigrants, said. “Because it is a haven for all of us that have ever experienced something different.”

Jones has raised $126,000 for his campaign, which includes $52,000 of his own money. He’s also received $10,000 from Crawford, according to campaign finance reports filed with the Wisconsin Ethics Commission. He’s spent the largest portions of his campaign funds on mailings and consultant services. 

Ahsan has raised $93,000, nearly $19,000 of which came from her personally. She’s spent $26,000 of her funds on digital advertising. 

Florence and Forest counties 

Voters in Florence and Forest counties will be choosing someone to replace the retiring Judge Leon Stenz on their shared circuit court bench. Stenz has held the seat since 2008. 

The candidates in the race are Robert A. Kennedy Jr. and Alex Seifert.

Kennedy previously served one term as the Florence County District Attorney and one term on the Florence-Forest circuit court. He ran unsuccessfully against Stenz in 2014. 

Seifert is the Forest County district attorney. He was appointed to the role by Gov. Tony Evers in April 2024 before being elected to a full term in the 2024 November election. He ran as an independent in his one partisan race. 

Prior to his appointment to the DA’s office, Seifert worked in the Forest County Corporation Counsel’s office and for the Wisconsin State Public Defender. He also previously ran for and lost a race to be the Langlade County district attorney. 

Seifert hasn’t raised any money for the race while Kennedy has contributed $48,000 of his own money to the race — spending that largely on newspaper and radio ads and yard signs. 

Marathon County 

In Marathon County, Michael Hughes and Douglas Bauman are running to succeed Judge LaMont Jacobson. 

Hughes works in private practice in Wausau and serves as the president of the Marathon County Bar Association. Bauman is a Marathon County court commissioner and staff attorney at the circuit court. 

Bauman said in a Wisconsin Justice Initiative questionnaire that his election to the bench would allow him to play a fuller role in the county’s justice system. 

“Becoming a judge is the best way to continue and expand my service to the community,” he said. “It would also make my service more direct and comprehensive. In the position I hold now, I work on pieces of particular cases, but the ultimate decider is a judge. I want to become a judge in order to cut out the middleman. Becoming a judge would allow me to take the experience I’ve gained during my 28-year legal career, particularly the last 24 years at the circuit court, and apply it directly to the legal disputes that come before the court. It would also allow me to ensure that litigants have the opportunity to feel heard, and that they are treated with compassion and respect.” 

Hughes has touted endorsements he’s received from local officials on both sides of the political aisle, saying his broad experience as a private attorney has prepared him to work as a judge. 

“We must have a court system that is strong, fair, efficient, and which keeps our community safe,” he told WJI. “A key part of that system are judges. We need judges who are impartial and who will make decisions based on the law and the facts. We need judges who will treat everyone in the courtroom with respect. We need judges who are committed to serving with integrity.”

Bauman has raised $11,700, with $10,000 of that coming from his own money. He’s only spent $2,400 of those funds.

Hughes has raised $27,000 for his campaign, which includes $20,000 in his own money. 

Washburn County 

Washburn County District Attorney Aaron Marcoux is running to unseat incumbent Judge Angeline Winton-Roe. 

Marcoux was appointed DA by Evers in 2019 before being reelected in 2020 and 2024. He previously worked as an assistant district attorney in the county and for the state public defender’s office. 

Winton-Roe was appointed to her seat by Evers in 2019 before being elected to a full term in 2020. She was the county’s elected DA from 2017 until her appointment to the bench. 

Marcoux told WJI that his experience as both a prosecutor and public defender help him understand what is needed from a circuit court judge. 

“I also believe strongly that the court belongs to the people it serves, not the individual sitting on the bench,” he said. “A judge’s role is not about power or position, but about responsibility. The judge must apply the law fairly, listen carefully, and treat every person who enters the courtroom with dignity and respect.” 

Winton-Roe said on the questionnaire that she hopes her court is a place where the people of Washburn County don’t get overlooked. 

“A community court must also be a place where people feel welcome, even during some of the most difficult moments in their lives,” she said. “Many who come before the court are facing uncertainty, conflict, or hardship. Some arrive feeling overwhelmed, overlooked, or even forgotten. It is essential that the courtroom remain a place where every person, regardless of their circumstances, knows they will be treated fairly and respectfully, and that their voice is heard.” 

Marcoux has raised about $13,000 for his campaign, with nearly all of it coming from his own money. Most of his funds have been spent on digital, newspaper and billboard advertising. 

Winton-Roe has raised about $16,000, with $10,000 of that coming from her own money. Most of her money has been spent on digital advertising.

Washington County 

In Washington County, incumbent Judge Gordon Leech is being challenged by Grant Scaife. 

Leech was appointed to the court by Evers last July. He previously worked as a prosecutor in Fond du Lac County and as an attorney in the U.S. Marine Corps. Scaife is an assistant district attorney in the Washington County DA’s office. 

Scaife is running explicitly as a conservative judge. He has touted his desire to “maintain a tough on crime approach” from the bench and has been endorsed by former Republican Gov. Scott Walker. 

Leech told WJI that he believes his 35 years of legal experience have prepared him for the role as a judge. 

“I have been out in the community talking to people about my judicial philosophy, which is committed to keeping politics out of the courtroom, and everyone agrees that is important,” he said. “I don’t see the same commitment from others. So I believe I have something unique and critical to offer the citizens of the county: judicial independence from political parties and special interests that would like to influence the courts.”

Leech has raised about $10,000 for his campaign, contributing about $3,000 of his own money. He’s only spent about $1,100 of the funds. 

Scaife has raised $60,000, $28,000 of which are personal funds. He’s also received a $2,000 donation from conservative Court of Appeals candidate Anthony LoCoco. 

Wood County 

Incumbent Judge Emily Nolan-Plutchak is being challenged for her seat on the Wood County Circuit Court by Elizabeth Gebert, an assistant district attorney for Monroe County and Marathon County.

Nolan-Plutchak was appointed to the seat by Evers last year and was previously an attorney manager for the state public defender’s office in Wisconsin Rapids. Gebert has worked in seven county DA offices across the state since 2008, she’s also married to current Wood County Judge Timothy Gebert. 

Nolan-Plutchak told WJI her experience as a public defender has helped her to understand how much people can be assisted just by the judge slowing down the process to explain what’s going on, and the community’s need for judges to take a more proactive role in addressing problems such as addiction and mental illness. 

“Knowing the difference this approach can make in an individual’s life inspires me to serve,” she said. 

Gebert touted her experience as a prosecutor as preparing her to be a judge. 

“I know that I have the ethical grounding necessary to issue decisions that reflect the values of the people of Wood County,” she told WJI. 

Gebert has raised about $6,000 for her campaign, with about $2,400 coming from her personal funds. She’s spent the most money on newspaper ads and billboards. 

Nolan-Plutchak has raised $27,000, with almost $14,000 coming from her own money. She’s also received $563 from the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. Her largest campaign expense has been $8,000 on brochures.

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Late last month, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced the federal government will pay a French energy company nearly $1 billion — not to build clean energy here in the U.S., but to kill it.

The developer, which was set to invest private dollars in two offshore wind projects that could have powered more than a million American homes, will be paid off by our government to simply walk away. In exchange for this extraordinary payment of taxpayer dollars, the company will use the government payoff to expand fracking and drilling operations in the U.S. 

“The era of taxpayers subsidizing unreliable, unaffordable and unsecure energy is officially over,” declared the secretary as he unveiled the deal. 

The comment is laughable in the face of skyrocketing energy prices caused by — no surprise — unsecure, unreliable oil and gas. The price of gas has risen more than a dollar per gallon in a matter of weeks as the war with Iran upends global oil markets.

Fossil fuels always come with volatility. Even American oil is sold on a global market influenced by geopolitics, supply shocks and other events outside our control. Wind and solar, on the other hand, can be paired with battery storage to offer reliable American power at the lowest cost.

That was the plan in 2022 when Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a historic investment in domestic clean energy like wind, solar, and battery storage. The idea was simple: generate more energy here, reduce dependence on global fuel markets and give families more control over their energy bills. It was a hedge against exactly the kind of volatility we’re seeing right now.

But that strategy was dismantled through the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill.” That law repealed the IRA’s clean energy tax credits, ripped away help for families to install better insulation and rooftop solar and rolled back pollution protections. Now, energy costs are on the rise as the federal government chokes the supply of wind and solar, the cheapest forms of energy. In states like Wisconsin, where more than $140 million in clean energy grants have been canceled, the ugly side of that “beautiful bill” is showing. 

Over the next decade, projections show that Wisconsin could miss out on about 17 gigawatts of generation capacity due to measures in the bill. That’s more energy than current peak demand for the entire state. Meanwhile, Wisconsin is spending about $14 billion to bring in oil, coal and gas from out of state — money that could be kept in Wisconsin if we prioritized capturing abundant and free energy resources like wind and solar. Despite this, state energy regulators have approved expensive new gas-burning power plants to power the surge of energy-hungry data centers. Wisconsinites will pay more for electricity and breathe dirtier air as a result.

As these long-term consequences take shape, utilities are moving ahead with rate hikes that will cost Wisconsinites even more. In 2025 alone, Wisconsin utilities proposed or enacted more than $2.7 billion in increases, affecting millions of customers.

So, Mr. Burgum, where is this “affordable energy” and who is benefiting from it?

There’s a deep contradiction in turning away from clean energy in this moment. At a time when electricity demand is rising dramatically from data centers, why are we choosing to build fewer of the resources that can be deployed most quickly, scaled most affordably and insulated most effectively from unstable global markets?

There is simply no path to American energy independence that relies heavily on fossil fuels. Wisconsin families and businesses could be enjoying lower bills and cleaner air instead of bracing for the next geopolitical shock. 

The good news is that none of this is set in stone. Congress could restore clean energy tax credits and invest in energy sources that are built here, priced here, and controlled here. But they need to hear from their constituents to understand how important this is. If the past few weeks have shown us anything, it’s that the most unreliable and unaffordable energy system is the one we don’t control.

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Madison West High School brought Democratic candidates seeking the governor’s office to town halls last week where they answered questions from students. 

While Jackson Thomas and Clark Schrager, members of the school’s civics club, will not be old enough to vote in the upcoming election, they said students started hosting events with candidates a few years ago, seeking to give young people a voice and a way to participate in the electoral process. In 2024, West students hosted U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin for a town hall during her reelection bid. 

Thomas said not all of their peers, especially freshmen and sophomores, are necessarily paying attention to politics unless they are already interested in it, but they hope the events can bring more awareness. Many seniors heard from the candidates, Schrager said, and some will be 18 and eligible to vote in the August primary and in the November general elections.

“There’s a lot of passion in our school about issues,” Schrager said. “I think if you ask people if they cared about politics, they may say, no, but if you ask them if they cared about education or health care or gun reform, any of those issues, they would say yes. It’s kind of a generational thing for us that there’s a lot of disillusionment with the system as it is, but there’s not a movement away from participating in the political process. There are still people that care about a lot of the issues and want their voices to be heard.”

The students asked the candidates about some of the key issues that the next governor will shape, including affordability, the state’s stewardship program, health care accessibility, abortion, and funding for K-12 schools and the University of Wisconsin system.

Thomas, who is a member of March For Our Lives, said gun violence is among the issues he cares most about, and he hopes to see candidates take a stand on it and propose solutions. 

“It’s unfortunately an issue that I have to think about every day when I go to school,” Thomas said. “That’s something that’s normalized because many people feel it, but it’s a really terrifying thing to have to think about.” He said it’s an issue he wants to see elected officials “not just take a stand on, but put legislation towards changing.” 

Schrager said many students are also thinking about democracy and freedom. 

The students also asked candidates to name one thing that they agreed with Republicans on. 

“Digging into issues has kind of always been something that’s been taught to me, and I think seeing both sides is something really important to me,” said Schrager, whose parents are both journalists. “There’s been a lot of polarization that I think has moved us away from real policies that actually help everybody, and there’s been a lot of focus on hate and bigotry that I think drive us away from making actual changes that could help people.”

The race to succeed Gov. Tony Evers, who opted not to run for a third term, has become crowded on the Democratic side. Candidates who participated in the forums included Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, state Sen. Kelda Roys (D-Madison), state Rep. Francesca Hong (D-Madison), former Wisconsin Department of Administration Secretary Joel Brennan, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, former Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation CEO Missy Hughes, former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes and former state Rep. Brett Hulsey. 

Schrager said something that gave him hope is “the fact that all these candidates came here and they seem genuinely curious about what students had to say.”

Wisconsin U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, the Trump-endorsed Republican candidate for governor, was not one of the participants last week, but the students said they hope to host him in the future. 

“We’re really committed to getting everybody’s viewpoint on all sides,” Schrager said. “We know Madison is a blue bubble. We know West High School is part of that blue bubble, but there are a lot of students here who will vote for him in the fall and will vote along Republican lines and they deserve to have their voices heard as well and hear somebody who aligns with them,” Schrager said. 

Thomas said he thinks that is especially important when they are “trying to bridge the gap between political polarization.”

Schrager agreed, adding that there are “students who will be voting for Democrats who will still fully benefit from hearing the other side.”

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States are paying contractors such as Deloitte, Accenture, and Optum millions of dollars to help them comply with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — a law that will strip safety-net health and food benefits from millions.

State governments rely on such companies to design and operate computer systems that assess whether low-income people qualify for Medicaid or food aid through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly referred to as food stamps. Those state systems have a history of errors that can cut off benefits to eligible people, a KFF Health News investigation showed.

These benefits, provided to the poorest Americans, can mean the difference between someone obtaining medical care and having enough to eat — or going without.

States are now racing to update their eligibility systems to adhere to President Donald Trump’s sweeping tax and domestic spending law. The changes will add red tape and restrictions. They are coming at a steep price — both in the cost to taxpayers and coverage losses — according to state documents obtained by KFF Health News and interviews.

The documents show government agencies will spend millions to save considerably more by removing people from health benefits. While states sign eligibility system contracts with companies and work with them to manage updates, the federal government foots most of the bill.

The law’s Medicaid policies will cause 7.5 million people to become uninsured by 2034, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Roughly 2.4 million people will lose access to monthly cash assistance for food, including those with children.

In five states alone, company estimates developed for state officials and reviewed by KFF Health News show that changes will cost at least $45.6 million combined.

“This is a pretty big payday,” said Adrianna McIntyre, an assistant professor of health policy and politics at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

The law, which grants tax breaks to the nation’s wealthiest people, requires most states to tie Medicaid coverage for some adults to having a job, and imposes other restrictions that will make it harder for people with low incomes to stay enrolled. SNAP restrictions began to take effect in 2025. Major Medicaid provisions begin later this year.

Documents prepared by consulting company Deloitte estimate that a pair of computer system changes for Medicaid work requirements in Wisconsin will cost nearly $6 million. Two other changes related to the state’s SNAP program will cost an additional $4.2 million, according to the documents, which Deloitte drafted for the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.

In Iowa, changes to its Medicaid system are expected to cost at least $20 million, according to an estimate prepared by Accenture, a consulting company that operates the state’s eligibility system.

Optum — which operates the platform Vermont residents use for Medicaid and marketplace health plans under the Affordable Care Act — estimated that it could cost roughly $1.8 million to evaluate and incorporate new health coverage restrictions.

Initial changes in Kentucky, which has had a contract with Deloitte since 2012, have cost the state $1.6 million. And in Illinois, Deloitte estimated modifications will cost at least $12 million.

A historic mandate

For six decades after President Lyndon Johnson created the government insurance program in 1965, Congress had never mandated that Medicaid enrollees have a job, volunteer, or go to school.

That will change next year. The tax and spending law enacted by Trump and congressional Republicans requires millions of Medicaid enrollees in 42 states and the District of Columbia to prove they’re working or participating in a similar activity for 80 hours a month, unless they qualify for an exemption. The CBO projected, based on an early version of the bill, that 18.5 million adults would be subject to the new rules — nearly half of those enrolled.

Vermont Medicaid officials expect it will cost $5 million in fiscal 2027 to implement changes in response to the federal law, said Adaline Strumolo, deputy commissioner of the Department of Vermont Health Access. About $1.8 million is for Optum to make eligibility system adjustments. Optum is a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act will subject nearly 55,000 Vermont Medicaid recipients to work requirements — about a third of the state’s enrollees.

The law forced the state “to essentially drop everything else we were doing,” Strumolo said in an interview. “This is a big, big lift.”

Optum’s contract with the state was worth $125.6 million as of October.

Nearly two-thirds of adult Medicaid enrollees nationally are already working, according to KFF. Advocacy groups for Medicaid recipients say work requirements will nonetheless cause significant coverage losses. Enrollees will face added red tape to prove they’re complying. And eligibility systems already prone to error will have to account for employment, job-related activities, and any exemptions.

An estimated 5.3 million enrollees will become uninsured by 2034 due to work requirements, the CBO reported.

In Wisconsin, state officials estimate roughly 63,000 adults could lose coverage after work requirements take effect. Not covering those people would save $532.6 million in Medicaid spending for one year.

Wisconsin’s eligibility system for Medicaid and SNAP — known as CARES — was implemented statewide in 1994, and initially was a transfer system from Florida, according to a 2016 state document.

Deloitte submitted its cost estimates for Medicaid and SNAP changes to the state in September and December. Elizabeth Goodsitt, a spokesperson for the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, declined to answer questions about whether additional changes will be needed, how much it will cost to make all eligibility system changes to comply with the new federal law, and whether the state negotiated prices with Deloitte.

Bobby Peterson, executive director of the public interest law firm ABC for Health, said Wisconsin has invested “very little” to help people navigate the Medicaid eligibility process, which soon will become more difficult.

“But they’re very willing to throw $6 million to their contractors to create the bells and whistles,” Peterson said. “That’s where I feel a sense of frustration.”

New hurdles for vets and homeless people

Medicaid work requirements are only one change required by Trump’s tax law that will make it harder to obtain safety-net benefits.

Starting in October, the law prohibits several immigrant populations from accessing Medicaid and ACA coverage, including people who have been granted asylum, refugees, and certain survivors of domestic violence or human trafficking. Beginning Dec. 31, states must verify eligibility twice a year for millions of adults — doubling state officials’ workload. And the law restricts SNAP benefits by requiring more adult recipients to work and by removing work exemptions for veterans, homeless people, and former foster youth.

Days after Trump signed the bill in July, Kentucky health officials raced to make changes to the state’s integrated eligibility system, which verifies eligibility for Medicaid, SNAP, and other programs. Deloitte operates the system under a five-year contract worth more than $157 million. According to documents obtained by KFF Health News, initial changes costing $1.6 million were labeled a “high priority” and approved on an “emergency” basis, with some of the changes to the nation’s largest food aid program going into effect almost immediately.

Officials with Kentucky’s Cabinet for Health and Family Services declined to answer a detailed list of questions, including how much it will cost to make all the modifications needed.

Deloitte spokesperson Karen Walsh said the company is working with states to implement new requirements but declined to answer questions about cost estimates in several states. “We are delivering the value and investments we committed to,” Walsh said.

In most states, government agencies rely on contractors to build and run the systems that determine eligibility for Medicaid. Many of those states also use such computer systems for SNAP. But the federal government — that is, taxpayers — covers 90% of state costs to develop and implement state Medicaid eligibility systems and pays 75% of ongoing maintenance and operations expenses, according to federal regulations.

“Five, 10 years ago, I’m not sure if you would hear much mention of SNAP from a Medicaid director,” Melisa Byrd, Washington, D.C.’s Medicaid director, said in November at an annual conference of Medicaid officials. “And particularly for those with integrated eligibility systems — as D.C. is —­ I’m learning more about SNAP than I ever thought.”

The federal law was the topic du jour at last year’s gathering in Maryland, held at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center, the largest hotel between New Jersey and Florida.

Consulting companies had taken notice. Gainwell, an eligibility contractor and one of the conference’s corporate sponsors, emblazoned its logo on hotel escalators. Companies set up booths with materials promoting how they could help states and handed out snacks and swag.

“Conduent helps agencies work smarter by simplifying operations, cutting costs and driving better outcomes through intelligent automation, analytics, and innovation in fraud prevention,” read one such handout from another contractor. “Together, we can better serve residents at every step of their health journeys.” Conduent holds Medicaid eligibility and enrollment contracts in Mississippi and New Jersey, their Medicaid agencies confirmed to KFF Health News.

In handouts, Deloitte touted its role in “building a new era in state health care” and as “a national leader in Medicaid program and technology transformation, building a strong track record across the federal, state, and commercial health care ecosystem.” KFF Health News found that Deloitte, a global consultancy that generated $70.5 billion in revenue in fiscal 2025, dominates this slice of government business.

“With Medicaid Community Engagement (CE) requirements, states are tasked with adding a new condition of Medicaid eligibility to support state and federal objectives,” added another brochure. “Deloitte offers strategic outreach and responsive support to help states engage communities, lower barriers, and address access to coverage.”

A $20.3 million bill in Iowa

Before Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Iowa lawmakers wanted to impose their own version of work requirements. They would have applied to 183,000 people before any exemptions. The new law would necessitate a change to Iowa’s Medicaid eligibility system, according to documents prepared by Accenture, which operates Iowa’s system through a contract worth more than $60 million.

Adding the ability to verify work status would cost up to $7 million, an Accenture estimate from March 2025 showed. By July, the cost to implement the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s work requirements and other Medicaid provisions skyrocketed to roughly $20.3 million. Accenture’s analysis said the federal law necessitated additional changes to Iowa’s system. Making employment a condition of Medicaid benefits could cause an estimated 32,000 Iowans to lose coverage, according to a 2025 state document.

Cutting 32,000 people from coverage could save $183 million in one year, a fraction of the $8.9 billion Iowa and the federal government spend on Medicaid in a given year.

In Cedar Rapids, most of Eastern Iowa Health Center’s patients rely on Medicaid, CEO Joe Lock said. He questioned the government’s logic of spending tens of millions of dollars on a policy to remove Iowans from Medicaid.

Most of the health center’s patients live at or below the federal poverty level — currently $33,000 for a family of four.

“There is no benefit to this population,” Lock said.

Danielle Sample, a spokesperson for Iowa’s Department of Health and Human Services, did not answer questions about how much it will cost to implement changes to the state’s separate SNAP eligibility system.

In Illinois, the state’s work this year is largely focused on meeting major provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The state estimates that as many as 360,000 residents could lose Medicaid, largely due to the work requirements, said Melissa Kula, a spokesperson for the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services.

Kula confirmed that most of the work detailed in one of Deloitte’s estimates — priced at $12 million — is related to Trump’s law. The estimate also mentions other work. Kula said Deloitte is charging the state a $2 million fixed fee related to work requirements.

The Trump administration has acknowledged that the work is coming at a cost. In January, top officials for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said government contractors, including Deloitte, Accenture, and Optum, have promised to offer discounts and reduced rates through 2028 to help states incorporate system changes.

“The companies were extremely excited to do this,” said Daniel Brillman, the top CMS Medicaid official. “Everyone’s really focused on getting to work.”

CMS spokesperson Catherine Howden declined to answer questions about the discounts.

Goodsitt, the Wisconsin Medicaid spokesperson, declined to answer questions about whether Deloitte has discounted its rates. Officials with Kentucky’s Cabinet for Health and Family Services did not answer a detailed list of questions, including whether Deloitte extended discounts to make these changes.

It’s unclear what discounts, if any, Deloitte and Accenture have offered to individual states. Walsh, the Deloitte spokesperson, declined to answer detailed questions about the discounts the Trump administration announced this year. Accenture did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Strumolo, the Vermont health official, said state officials discussed the announcement with Optum “in detail.”

Optum pledged to offer discounts for a specific module related to Medicaid work requirements. That product is unworkable for Vermont because it would mean “moving to a new system when we don’t have to.” When asked about whether the company offered discounts, Strumolo said “not explicitly.”

In a statement, UnitedHealth Group spokesperson Tyler Mason said Optum supports state implementation of new federal requirements “with a range of options to meet their unique cost and policy needs.”

He declined to specify whether Optum discounted Vermont’s rates and how it calculated the costs of doing its work. “Optum is helping mitigate upfront implementation expenses so states can focus on approaches that reduce duplication, accelerate implementation, and manage costs over time — supporting better outcomes for individuals covered by Medicaid,” Mason said.

Strumolo said Optum’s initial changes in Vermont cover items that take effect this year and in 2027 — Medicaid work requirements, checking eligibility every six months, and prohibiting certain immigrants from qualifying for health programs.

“There’s a lot more that could come,” she said.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. 

WASHINGTON — A federal court order last month to effectively axe a Biden-era student loan repayment plan capped years of chaos for more than 7 million student borrowers enrolled in the program.

The Saving on a Valuable Education, or SAVE, plan marked a cornerstone of the Joe Biden administration’s loan forgiveness efforts but became mired in legal challenges from several GOP-led states. 

On July 1, federal loan servicers will start sending notices to borrowers instructing them to enter into a legal repayment plan within 90 days, the department said. Borrowers who do not switch within the 90-day window outlined by their servicer will be automatically placed into a new plan.

The agency issued guidance to borrowers in late March instructing them of the timeline and urging people to switch into a new plan. 

Here’s what borrowers need to know as they navigate next steps:

How did we get here? 

The program, introduced in 2023, sought to lower monthly loan payments for borrowers and forgive remaining debt after a certain period of time.

But millions of borrowers experienced chaos and confusion as they were forced to navigate complex court rulings, interest accrual on their debt and continued uncertainty over the plan’s fate.

Borrowers were placed in an interest-free forbearance in 2024 amid legal limbo, and the department resumed charging interest on the debt of those in the program in August 2025. 

President Donald Trump’s administration in December announced a proposed agreement to end the plan. 

The agreement stemmed from a legal challenge to the plan brought by Missouri, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, North Dakota, Ohio and Oklahoma in 2024.

A federal judge dismissed that lawsuit in late February, striking down the administration’s efforts to axe the plan. 

But a federal appeals court reversed the lower court’s decision in March, effectively putting an end to the SAVE plan. 

Was the SAVE plan already slated for elimination? 

Congressional Republicans’ mega tax and spending cut bill signed into law by Trump in July 2025 includes a sweeping overhaul of the federal student loan system. 

Part of the GOP’s “big, beautiful” law phased out the SAVE plan by July 2028. 

I’m in SAVE. What are my new repayment options? 

Borrowers have several new repayment options, and can switch to a new plan prior to receiving the incoming notice from their federal loan servicer.

One option includes the Income-Based Repayment, or IBR, plan, which ties borrowers’ loan payment to their earnings. 

Borrowers also have the option to enter into two repayment plans stemming  from the GOP’s “big, beautiful” law — the Repayment Assistance Plan, or RAP, and the Tiered Standard plan — which will both launch July 1. 

Preston Cooper, senior fellow in higher education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, noted that whether IBR or RAP is a better deal for borrowers depends on their particular circumstances.

“I would recommend that if you are kind of earlier in your repayment journey, and you have a lot more interest because your balance is higher, the Repayment Assistance Plan is going to be your best bet,” Cooper said.

“If you’re later in your repayment journey, you’re closer to that 20 or 25-year mark for forgiveness, Income-Based Repayment is probably going to be your better bet,” he added.

Borrowers could also opt into a handful of other repayment options, such as the Pay as You Earn and Income-Contingent Repayment plans. 

However, those two plans will be eliminated by July 2028 under Republicans’ “big, beautiful” law, meaning borrowers would have to switch plans again in two years. 

What other steps can I take in the meantime? 

Michele Zampini, associate vice president for federal policy and advocacy at the Institute for College Access & Success, said the best thing for a borrower to do is “just be proactive.” 

“Make sure, from a very base level, you can access your account, you know all the basics of where you stand, and then do some comparisons across what plan options you’re going to have,” said Zampini, whose organization aims to advance affordability, accountability and equity in higher education.   

Zampini also pointed to Federal Student Aid’s loan simulator as a good resource for borrowers to get specific numbers to compare across plans. 

“If there’s a plan that you want to move into that’s already open and available, if it’s one of the older plans, start moving now, if you can afford it,” she said. “And then, if you want to wait for the new plan to open … know what that payment estimate is going to look like, and then set yourself a reminder for July to check back and look at the enrollment process once that plan opens.” 

Amid the “total dissonance and chaos” borrowers in SAVE have experienced, Zampini said the department “has really shirked its responsibility in at least keeping borrowers updated and giving them clear information on what’s happening, when it’s happening, and what the implications are going to be for their payments and kind of their budgets and what they have to do and when they have to do it.” 

What about the plan to eliminate the department?

Persis Yu, deputy executive director and managing counsel at the advocacy group Protect Borrowers, told States Newsroom she is “incredibly worried about borrowers not being able to figure out what to do, missing the deadline, getting put into a plan that they can’t afford, and then falling into default, which has, of course, incredibly onerous consequences.” 

The end of SAVE also comes as the Trump administration continues its efforts to dismantle the Department of Education, including through a series of interagency agreements that transfer several of its responsibilities to other departments. 

Under the most recent agreement, the Treasury Department will take over Education’s responsibility for collecting on defaulted federal student loan debt — the first step in a multiphase process toward Treasury taking on Education’s entire, roughly $1.7 trillion federal student loan portfolio.

“The specifics of the plan with Treasury right now are about debt collection, but the overarching mission of dismantling the Department of Education at this moment means that there are not the people in place to oversee the servicers,” Yu said. 

Part of the administration’s efforts to do away with the agency included a reduction in force initiated in March 2025 that hit wide swaths of the department, including Federal Student Aid, or FSA. 

Yu also highlighted a March report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office, which found that staffing reductions at FSA affected the government’s ability to determine how well student loan servicers are doing their jobs. 

Before Wyoming elections, the state’s League of Women Voters tries to get voter registration information into the hands of residents at events and gatherings. But under state law, League volunteers can’t sign up voters themselves — only local election officials can do that.

“It’s been tough,” said Linda Barton, president of the League of Women Voters of Wyoming. She added that her group does its best to offer registration information. “We provide a lot of printed literature that we hand out all over the state.”

Congress may take Wyoming’s approach nationwide.

The SAVE America Act would effectively ban voter registration drives, a mainstay of college campuses and neighborhood events. 

The U.S. Senate began debating a version of President Donald Trump’s signature elections measure last month, after the House passed it in February. The legislation would require voters to show photo identification to cast a ballot. It would also require individuals to present documents proving their citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, to government officials in person to register to vote. 

Trump and Republican members of Congress have cast the proposal as necessary to secure elections and crack down on noncitizen voters ahead of the midterms. Democrats and other critics warn it risks disenfranchising wide swaths of Americans. Studies have shown noncitizen voting is extremely rare.

In many states, civic groups have long provided applications to would-be voters that they can quickly fill out. During the 2024 election cycle, voter registration drives accounted for 3.7% of registrations, according to survey data from the federal Election Assistance Commission. While a small percentage, the figure still represents 2.1 million Americans.

Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia placed no restrictions on voter registration drives as of November 2024, according to the Movement Advancement Project, a Colorado-based think tank. An additional 24 states impose some limits, while Wyoming and New Hampshire prohibit them.

Bill would end registration drives nationwide

Every form of voter registration drive would effectively end under the SAVE America Act as currently drafted in the Senate, said Brian Miller, executive director of NonprofitVOTE, which aids nonprofit organizations in helping individuals vote and participate in the democratic process. Community-based groups, universities, food pantries and others who help register voters would all be affected.

“That’s the high school civics teacher who works with his graduating class … gone, they can’t do that anymore,” Miller said.

NonprofitVOTE, working with 120 organizations across nine states, engaged 60,000 voters during the 2022 midterm cycle, according to a report by the group. It found that individuals reached by nonprofits were 10 percentage points more likely to cast a ballot than comparable registered voters.

The effect was more pronounced among younger voters. Those ages 18 to 24 who were engaged by nonprofit groups were 12 percentage points more likely to cast a ballot than comparable registered voters.

Hispanic Federation, a nationwide Hispanic and Latino advocacy group, says it has registered 160,000 voters since 2016. Frederick Vélez III Burgos, the federation’s senior director for communications and community outreach, said the organization works to register voters because of language and cultural barriers, work schedules and other factors that make the process challenging.

“There’s just a group of people and communities that is just very difficult to get registered through normal means,” Burgos said.

Top Trump priority

Trump has made clear the SAVE America Act is his top legislative priority and he has urged Congress to pass the measure before moving to other business. While Republicans control both chambers of Congress, support for the proposal falls short of the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster in the Senate.

“The SAVE Act would gut tried-and-true methods of voter registration, including registration by mail and registering online,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, said earlier this year.

Still, Senate Republican leaders in March kicked off an extended, wide-ranging debate over the bill. It remains unclear when the debate will end. Congress is scheduled to be in recess until mid-April.

GOP proponents have dismissed concerns that the legislation would make registering to vote and casting a ballot difficult. Sen. Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, said on the Senate floor that the bill offers multiple ways to prove citizenship and “gives states the flexibility to create other pathways to show proof of citizenship.”

Grassley noted that his mother was one of the first women to cast a ballot after ratification of the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed women the right to vote.

“The SAVE America Act doesn’t infringe on these hard-fought voting rights. It would preserve the integrity of every vote cast in a federal election,” Grassley said.

Hard-to-reach voters

Third-party voter registration drives date back to voter education and registration efforts by the National American Woman Suffrage Association, according to Joshua Douglas, a University of Kentucky law professor who specializes in voting rights and election law. The association eventually morphed into the League of Women Voters, which helped spearhead registration efforts following the 19th Amendment.

Voter registration drives typically aid voters who may not otherwise have opportunities to register, Douglas wrote in an email to States Newsroom. They may not have a driver’s license or may not be thinking about registering.

“There is a long history of civic organizations engaged in voter registration drives and this legislation would make that work harder,” Douglas wrote.

Tom Lopach, president and CEO of the nonpartisan Voter Participation Center, an organization that works to register voters from underrepresented populations, said he fears some members of Congress haven’t fully read the bill or digested how it would affect voting. 

Since VPC was founded in 2003, it has helped register 7 million voters, Lopach said.

“And that’s just us,” he said. “When you think about the League of Women Voters, when you think about in-person voter registration drives happening in a grocery store parking lot, or knocking doors in a neighborhood, you would have tens of millions of Americans not registered and then not voting.”

States trending toward more restrictions

Even if the SAVE America Act doesn’t become law, some states have taken steps to make voter registration drives more difficult. 

The Center for Public Integrity and NPR found in 2024 that at least six states had passed legislation cracking down on voter registration drives following the 2020 election. Some of the bills imposed massive fines for violations or barred noncitizens from participating.

As recently as March, the North Carolina State Board of Elections announced it would require groups conducting voter registration drives to print their own registration forms. The board cited significant costs, after it provided nearly 1.3 million applications to organizations and government agencies in 2024 at a cost of more than $269,000.

“Nothing about this temporary tightening of our practice surrounding voter registration drives changes the fact that any North Carolina citizen who wants a voter registration application will always be able to get one simply by contacting their county board of elections or the State Board,” Sam Hayes, the board’s executive director, told NC Newsline.

Courts have blocked some state-level restrictions. A federal court prohibited Kansas from enforcing a 2021 law that barred out-of-state organizations from distributing advance mail ballot applications to voters and prohibited applications that contained personalized voter information. Kansas has appealed the decision.

The Missouri Supreme Court last week ruled against a state law that prohibited groups like the League of Women Voters from using paid workers in voter registration drives. The state’s high court also struck down requirements that individuals who solicit more than 10 registration applications must register with the state and be Missouri voters. The law had also prohibited encouraging someone to obtain an absentee ballot.

Kay Park, president of the League of Women Voters of Missouri, called the restrictions “ridiculous” and said that while they were in effect the organization did nothing with absentee ballots — such as suggesting an absentee ballot could be an option for someone with a disability, for instance.

The League of Women Voters of Missouri holds voter registration drives in high schools, Park said. While Missouri residents must be 18 to vote, they can register once they’re 17 ½ years old. The SAVE America Act would effectively end those drives.

If the legislation becomes law, Park said the Missouri league would likely focus more of its efforts on helping individuals obtain identification documents and birth certifications — something it’s already trying to do.

“It just puts another cog in the wheel,” Park said.

Wyoming model

In Wyoming, Barton and her fellow League of Women Voters members are already grappling with a state-level proof-of-citizenship voter registration law passed last year, regardless of whether Congress passes the SAVE America Act.

Residents who want to register to vote must visit a county clerk’s office and bring a valid passport or birth certificate. Wyoming also accepts REAL ID-compliant driver’s licenses and tribal IDs, as long as they do not indicate the individual is a noncitizen, and a few other documents, such as a naturalization certificate. Individuals may register by mail but must include copies of their documents along with a notarized application.

The new state requirements were championed by Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray, a Republican who is running for the state’s U.S. House seat.

“As the chief election official of Wyoming that has experience with these common sense election integrity measures, I can tell you that the SAVE America Act will be easy for states to implement,” Gray wrote in a March 17 letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a South Dakota Republican.

Gray didn’t respond to questions from States Newsroom.

Barton said without the option to hold voter registration drives, going to events and speaking to clubs and organizations like Rotary are imperative.

“I just think that the only other choice is to be out there, communicating as much as possible,” she said.

When an Alabama clinic’s only OB-GYN left the state to provide abortion care in Colorado, the head of operations thought the facility would have to close.

But Robin Marty, executive director at WAWC Healthcare in Tuscaloosa, hired a doctor in August who she called a “unicorn” — someone who’s from Alabama and, after training outside of the state, returned home to practice medicine.

Marty said Alabama’s near-total abortion ban could cause physicians to practice elsewhere after they finish their residencies.

“Doctors don’t want to worry about surveillance, potential arrests and other legal issues,” she said.

A study published in March found that applications to medical residency programs in states with abortion restrictions have declined compared to states where abortion remained mostly legal. The findings are an “early signal” that the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision nearly four years ago overturning federal abortion rights protections may exacerbate health care shortages, said lead author Dr. Anisha Ganguly.

A majority of doctors end up practicing medicine in states where they trained. Obstetrician and gynecology training programs typically take four years to complete, so the full scope of how abortion restrictions affect where physicians work after they complete their residencies remains to be seen.

Still, experts said the findings could spell trouble for the future of the reproductive health care workforce in states with abortion restrictions, some of which are already plagued with maternity care deserts.

Doctors say bans limit training, standards of care

OB-GYNs affiliated with Physicians for Reproductive Health who either trained or work in states with abortion bans told States Newsroom that restrictions after the Supreme Court decision hamstrung their ability to offer reproductive care and affected the education of medical residents.

Dr. Neha Ali grew up in Texas and trained there, too. But by the end of her OB-GYN residency’s second year, the state enacted SB 8, a six-week abortion ban that allowed residents in the state to sue providers or anyone who helped someone terminate a pregnancy. After the Dobbs decision in June 2022, a near-total abortion ban took effect in Texas.

“I knew I wanted to be an abortion provider before I started OB-GYN residency, and I chose to be in Texas for my residency training because I wanted to experience what that’s like in a state with barriers. But ultimately, the barriers became too large,” Ali said.

After she finished residency in 2024, Ali moved to Colorado, a state with strong abortion-rights protections, where she practices complex family planning.

Ali said she talks to medical students about her experience training in Texas, where she was not able to perform any dilation and evacuations — a second-trimester abortion procedure — during residency.

“I do think it’s very valuable to see what it’s like to be in a restrictive state and understand what that is like to be a provider there, but that doesn’t sell people on a residency for four years,” she said.

OB-GYN Dr. Louis Monnig trained in Kentucky before the state banned abortion.

“Making it difficult or putting up barriers to that training just limits the abilities of any doctor who provides reproductive care to have opportunities to get exposure and experience, and just get better at what they’re doing,” he said.

Monnig completed his residency in June 2023 and moved back to his home state of Louisiana because of his connections to the region and its health care disparities. “It felt like it was worth it to come back,” he said.

In October 2024, a Louisiana law classifying mifepristone and misoprostol as controlled dangerous substances took effect.

“It made me lose faith that lawmakers were doing any of these things to actually protect patients or patient safety,” he said.

The medications are used not only for abortions, but miscarriages and other conditions, too. The law has sowed confusion among health care providers and led some to practice emergency drills to access the drugs during obstetric emergencies, Louisiana Illuminator reported. Monnig said the law has “changed some of the day-to-day operational workflow for patient care,” especially for situations where misoprostol is used, such as labor induction and postpartum hemorrhaging.

Patients have faced issues when trying to get prescriptions filled: Pharmacists have called Monnig’s office to make sure a patient wasn’t having an abortion after he prescribed misoprostol for conditions such as cervical stenosis — when it’s difficult to insert a medical instrument in the cervical canal.

Drop in applications to ban states’ residency programs

Out of more than 22 million applications to 4,315 residency programs across the U.S., 67% were submitted to programs in states without abortion restrictions between 2018 and 2023, the new research showed. Thirty-three percent went to programs in states with restrictions.

Fewer women than men applied to train in states with abortion restrictions before the Supreme Court’s landmark abortion ruling, according to the study, and that disparity widened after more than a dozen states enacted abortion bans. The number of men applying to residency programs in states with abortion restrictions — mostly in the South and the Midwest — also decreased significantly.

“When there’s a decreased level of interest in these states, it suggests to us that there’s an evolving health care workforce shortage in these states,” said Ganguly, an internal medicine physician and an assistant professor at University of North Carolina’s Division of General Medicine and Epidemiology.

Many states with abortion bans — Idaho, Iowa and Georgia, for example — are also facing labor and delivery unit closures, particularly in rural areas where hospitals struggle with provider recruitment. Health officials in these states listed improvements to maternal health as a priority in their applications to the federal Rural Health Care Transformation Program, but solutions will take years to implement.

Shortages affect more than one specialty. Ganguly said OB-GYNs have historically offered the bulk of abortion-related care in the U.S., but it’s increasingly important in emergency medicine, family medicine and internal medicine. Primary care providers and emergency medicine doctors often diagnose pregnancy complications such as miscarriages, and internists help women who have chronic disease manage and plan for pregnancy.

Dr. Hector Chapa, an OB-GYN who teaches obstetrics and gynecology at Texas A&M University and is a member of the American Association of Pro–Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, took issue with the study’s approach.

“It’s essential to understand that this study is not specific to OB‑GYN residency programs, and by grouping OB‑GYN with family medicine, internal medicine and emergency medicine, the study assumes that all specialties are affected equally, despite their very different levels of involvement in abortion. This broad grouping risks introducing bias into the results,” he said in a statement.

Ganguly said her team did examine applications to OB-GYN residency programs in isolation to affirm findings of a decline among applicants in abortion-restricted states. Looking at other specialties, too, was meant to provide clarity about how bans affect the health care workforce more broadly.

OB-GYN education and the maternal health care workforce

The latest study adds to a body of research examining how the Supreme Court’s decision on abortion in 2022 affected training after medical school, particularly for those specializing in reproductive health care.

In the 2023-2024 application cycle, the number of applicants to training programs in states with abortion bans decreased by 4.2% compared to the previous cycle, while there was less than a 1% decrease in applications to residency programs in states where abortion is legal, according to the American Association of Medical Colleges.

In some states, abortion bans have definitively led to an exodus of OB-GYNs and maternal fetal medicine specialists. Idaho lost 35% of its doctors who provide obstetrics between August 2022 and December 2024, according to a study published in July.

Having reproductive health providers flee states with abortion bans is “devastating,” according to Pamela Merritt, the executive director of Medical Students for Choice.

“It’s a public health disaster that we’re going to see the consequences of decades to come,” she said.

Merritt’s organization has chapters at several medical schools in states with abortion bans. She said students are not getting adequate training, and some are even discouraged from discussing abortion.

In February, Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center canceled a Medical Students for Choice chapter’s talk with an OB-GYN who wrote a book about providing abortion care later in pregnancy. School officials told The Texas Tribune hosting the event on campus was not in the university’s best interests.

“Everybody who graduates from medical school in Texas should know that there’s this thing called third-trimester abortion, that when the life of the mother is at risk, you legally can provide this care,” Merritt said.

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed legislation last year clarifying that doctors can offer pregnant women abortions during medical emergencies. The Texas Medical Board released guidelines for the abortion law this year, nearly half a decade after the state banned most abortions and at least four Texans died after being denied prompt abortion care, ProPublica reported.

Program helps residents in restrictive states get abortion care training

“Every single physician, nurse and health care provider needs to be educated about abortion care,” said Dr. Jody Steinauer, an OB-GYN and the director of the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at the University of California in San Francisco. “This is a huge crisis in OB-GYN specifically: All OB-GYNs must have the competence and the skill to safely empty the uterus. Even if the individual is personally uncomfortable providing abortion care, they have to be able to empty the uterus to save someone’s life in an emergency.”

Steinauer leads the Ryan Residency Training Program, which works with OB-GYN residencies across the country to ensure comprehensive abortion and family planning rotations. Nearly a dozen states lack Ryan programs, and most of them have near-total abortion bans.

She said residencies in states with abortion bans are struggling to make sure their students have the skills to provide abortion: “We’re at risk of having a whole generation of OB-GYN graduates who are not skilled to provide the care they need to provide.”

To remedy this issue, the Ryan Program has helped to establish 20 partnerships with schools in abortion-restrictive states to train OB-GYN medical residents in states with reproductive rights protections.

Steinauer said the rotations are between two to four weeks and complicated to plan, but they help doctors learn procedural skills, how to manage medication abortions and counseling.

The rotations also help OB-GYNs navigate pain management during obstetric procedures, communicate effectively with abortion patients and familiarize themselves with ultrasounds, she said. These skills are important for providing the full spectrum of reproductive health care, from inserting IUDs to treating miscarriages, the doctor said.

“It’s such a refreshing experience for them to be working in a state without a ban, and they get to see abortion as normal health care,” she said.

Stateline reporter Elisha Brown can be reached at ebrown@stateline.org.