The majority of U.S. states will soon have to pay 5% to 15% of federal nutrition assistance benefits in their state, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s release Wednesday of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program payment error rates. 

House Resolution 1, commonly known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that was enacted in 2025, stipulated that states with SNAP payment error rates greater than 6% would be required to foot 5%, 10% or 15% of SNAP benefits costs in their state. 

Wisconsin’s error rate was 5.72% in 2025, USDA reported, making it one of nine states with an error rate below 6%. The nine will not have to match a portion of the SNAP benefits they pay out starting in October 2027.

The finding means that Wisconsin will avoid federal penalties of up to $205 million in the 2027-28 fiscal year in the state’s FoodShare program, which is part of SNAP, Gov. Tony Evers said Thursday.

Evers wrote members of Wisconsin’s congressional delegation earlier in June, urging them to eliminate or delay implementing the federal penalty fees imposed in HR 1.

According to USDA, SNAP payment error rates measure the accuracy of states in determining who is eligible for SNAP and how much they receive. The rate is calculated via a series of reviews from state and federal agencies where instances of overpayments and underpayments are identified. 

USDA’s SNAP quality control page says errors are “largely unintentional” and might be the fault of a state agency or a SNAP household. 

Earlier this year Evers signed legislation appropriating an additional $72.7 million for the Wisconsin Department of Health Services to bolster staffing and other resources for operating FoodShare and avoid errors. The appropriation was attached to a bill introduced by Republican lawmakers that authorizes the state to ask USDA to allow Wisconsin to ban using FoodShare dollars to buy soda or candy. A federal judge this week blocked such restrictions in Nebraska, Colorado, Iowa, Tennessee and West Virginia.

Eighteen states had payment error rates above the national average of 10.62%. Per the quality control process, these states will have to either pay USDA a determined amount, or invest 50% of that amount into activities that will fix the root causes of the payment errors. 

USDA said that while the 2025 average payment error rate is a “modest” decrease from the 2024 average error rate of 10.93%, it represents $10.1 billion in improper payments. 

Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said the latest payment error rates show that “state accountability is severely lacking” in SNAP. 

“USDA has taken historic action to help interested states curb SNAP waste, and I hope other states, regardless of political leadership, prioritize needy families and the American taxpayer over politics,” Rollins said in a news release. 

An analysis of H.R. 1 from the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the law, which included several changes to SNAP benefits in addition to the error rate cost share, would reduce federal spending on the SNAP benefits by $255 billion between 2025 and 2034. CBO also estimated that state spending on SNAP benefits would increase during the same period by $85 billion. 

Critics of the bill said the cost shift to states would endanger the SNAP program and stress state budgets. 

According to the 2025 error rates from USDA, 41 states had payment error rates above the 6% threshold set by the 2025 law. South Dakota had the lowest error rate at 2.47%. Idaho and Wyoming had error rates below 4%, and Iowa, Kentucky, Nebraska, Utah, and Vermont were the other states with rates below 6%. Alaska had the highest error rate of 23.15%. 

The higher the error rate, the greater the share, up to 15%, the state will have to pay of its SNAP benefits, which are otherwise 100% footed by the federal government. 

In addition to the cost share, states with a payment error rate in excess of 6% are required to submit a corrective action plan to the Food and Nutrition Administration, formerly known as the Food and Nutrition Service, to explain the root cause of the payment errors and how the state plans to correct the errors. 

A delayed union organizing campaign at a Madison-based nonprofit healthcare cooperative has sparked dissent in the co-op about how the organization is governed.

When Group Health Cooperative of South Central Wisconsin holds its annual meeting for members Thursday evening, a group of patients who are co-op members will seek a vote to undo a recent change in the co-op’s bylaws.

The conflict at Group Health follows a stalled union organizing drive at the co-op — GHC for short — that began in 2024.

After Group Health employees filed their petition for a union, Group Health’s board and management distributed messages criticizing the union. GHC lawyers also told federal officials they would not accept the union’s proposal that specified which groups of employees would be represented by the union.

Patients who sign up with Group Health for their healthcare become members of the cooperative. Some long-time members contend the co-op management’s response to the union campaign is at odds with the co-op’s founding principles and its progressive heritage.

“It just seems like the cooperative seems to be drifting away from wellness and more and more into making money and growing,” said Ruth Brill, a Group Health member since 1979 who supports the unionizing campaign. Healthcare providers “wanted to serve us better” by seeking a union, she said. “I don’t see what the problem is.”

Co-op members have formed the GHC Members Union Support Team — GHC-MUST for short.

At Thursday’s meeting the group is recommending that members vote against accepting the minutes from the co-op’s 2025 membership meeting — usually a formality — to demonstrate their opposition to how the meeting was conducted, said Amihan Huesmann, one of the co-op patients and members.

The group has also endorsed three non-incumbents for the co-op board, in an election that was held partly online through Tuesday, June 23, and will also take votes in person at the meeting.

Members oppose GHC’s union stance

 In October 2025 at a special meeting, co-op members proposed and voted for a series of resolutions directed at the co-op board.  

One resolution called for the co-op to voluntarily recognize the Service Employees International Union in the departments and jobs where employees had originally asked for union representation.

Other resolutions directed the board, co-op management or both to report how much money co-op management had spent on legal or consulting fees in response to the union campaign and to issue a report on all emails, communications, meeting minutes and other documents relating to the co-op’s handling of the union drive.

Another resolution demanded the board and co-op management “faithfully follow the democratically expressed will” of co-op members, who, the resolution charged, have “been denied an opportunity to duly and fully exercise [their] role” in leading the co-op. A fifth resolution called for the board to hold a meeting by mid-January 2026 “on the democratization of GHC governance.”

In December 2025, the board declined all five resolutions as written.

By the end of 2025, SEIU Wisconsin and Group Health were at an impasse in a tangled legal dispute over who would be included in the union.

SEIU filed a long list of unfair labor practice charges stating that Group Health had illegally retaliated against union supporters. The union obtained a National Labor Relations Board order to block a planned representation election until the charges were resolved.

GHC and the union negotiated a confidential settlement to resolve the unfair labor practice charges that put the union organizing drive on hold.

Seeking stronger governance role

Since January, the GHC-MUST group has been pursuing changes to the organization’s bylaws that they contend would restore a stronger role for members in the co-op’s governance. The group also circulated a petition to recall the chair of the co-op board.

Under the bylaws in place when the group was circulating their proposals, bylaws proposals and recall petitions required 100 signatures. When the group delivered their bylaws proposals and the recall petition, however, their submission was rejected, with GHC’s board citing a change to the bylaws that the board had just enacted.

The board in March made “some wholesale changes without member input, without an explanation of why they were needed, without talking about the serious ramifications for members,” said Steve Rankin, a Group Health member who has been active in GHC-MUST.

The board increased the threshold for nominating people to the board who weren’t selected by the co-op’s nominating committee. Previously 100 members could nominate a board member that way. Those nominees now must garner 3% of Group Health’s 54,693 Class A voting members, according to GHC — about 1,640 people.

Another key change involved bylaws amendments. The co-op’s previous bylaws allowed members to approve amendments by a majority vote at the annual meeting or a special meeting with a quorum present, so long as a statement about the proposed changes is included with the original meeting notice.

Under the revised bylaws, members proposing a change must first garner a 75% majority vote at a co-op members meeting. The proposal would then go to a follow-up referendum of all co-op members, where the change would pass with a simple majority, but only if at least 10% of the members take part in that vote. That same two-step procedure would also be required to remove a board member.

“They changed the bylaws without informing members that it was happening and without including members,” said Huesmann, a Group Health member for two decades who had worked on the members’ proposals.

Marty Anderson, chief strategy and business development officer for GHC, said  that “the bylaws do not require an announcement to the membership prior to the bylaws change being considered by the board of directors.”

Group Health increased the bylaws change threshold “such that a small minority of people can’t change how the cooperative operates for the other 69,900 people who are part of the cooperative,” Anderson said.

While Huesmann and Rankin contend the board’s changes were aimed at thwarting their petitions, Anderson said the board’s changes “were happening outside of the knowledge of those petitions happening.”

Huesmann said the petitions were widely circulated and publicized in the weeks before they were submitted, however. The campaign “wasn’t secret,” Huesmann said. “It’s not like we were hiding that we were circulating petitions.”

Rankin said the changes amount to a power grab.

“It doesn’t ensure broader member participation, it ensures members are no longer able to do that,” Rankin said. “They just made it an inaccessible framework instead of one that would be accessible.”

Correction: This report has been updated to correct the procedure in the new GHC bylaws for bylaws amendments. 

This report has been updated. 

Missy Hughes suspended her campaign for Wisconsin governor Monday and endorsed Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez in the August Democratic primary.

Hughes, the former Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. CEO, called Rodriguez “the best candidate we can put forward to win in November, and to build an enduring coalition to address our state’s most pressing challenges.”

In her announcement, Hughes complimented all of the  Democrats in the race for governor. “Each of the candidates seeks to serve the state, and the nobility of that willingness is without comparison,” she said. But she called Rodriguez, one of three Democrats who have pulled ahead in recent weeks, the “best positioned” of the field.

Hughes said her choice was based on her assessment of Rodriguez’s experience along with what she said was a shared belief in the need for a Democratic candidate who can appeal to a large cross section of voters. Rodriguez, she said, “is the best candidate we can put forward to win in November, and to build an enduring coalition to address our state’s most pressing challenges.”

At a press conference Monday afternoon with Rodriguez, Hughes said she agreed “100%” in response to a reporter’s question whether other Democratic hopefuls should drop out and coalesce behind Rodriguez.

“The bottom line was that we have a great, great responsibility at this moment when we’re looking for a whole transition for the Wisconsin government, and we’re in very, very difficult times,” Hughes said. Acknowledging her own stauts as a first-time candidate, she said, “I saw the opportunity to coalesce behind a candidate who I know will win in November.”

Having been in conferences with Gov. Tony Evers during her years at the WEDC, Hughes said she believes Rodriguez displays “the qualities that we need in the governor, and someone who is willing to listen, someone who has good ideas, but is willing to be challenged.”

Rodriguez, Hughes told reporters, shares her optimism about Wisconsin as well as her concerns about what voters are seeking.

“What I always wanted to come from this race was for Wisconsinites to understand that we have something incredibly valuable that we have created in this state, in our communities, in our schools, in our universities, our tech colleges, our tribal partners,” Hughes said. “We have so much to invest in and so much to think about for the future. We have an incredibly strong foundation. We do not need to tear everything down. We need to build on our foundation.”

Rodriguez complimented Hughes for how she exited the contest.

“She didn’t have to endorse anyone, she could have walked away and let this race play out, but instead she made a choice,” Rodriguez said of Hughes. “It’s a hard one because she believes leadership involves making choices. I respect that enormously, and I do not take that lightly.”

Hughes said Rodriguez will “create a coalition that allows us to create deep policy and enable the large changes that we need to make in the state,” including funding public schools and addressing healthcare costs. “We need someone who brings a lot of people together, so that we can make those changes.”

State Rep. Christine Sinicki (D-Milwaukee), an early Rodriguez backer, told the Wisconsin Examiner Tuesday morning that she wasn’t in on the “behind the scenes” action that preceded Hughes’ decision to end her campaign and endorse Rodriguez. But she said she believes the Wisconsin Democratic Convention helped set the stage for the decision.

Rodriguez finished at the top of a WisPolitics straw poll and Hughes finished with just a handful of votes,  but Sinicki said that struck her as less significant.

“It’s not so much the straw poll,” Sinicki said. “The excitement around campaign was not there.”

While she considers Rodriguez a friend, Sinicki said she made her decision to endorse the lieutenant governor on the basis of her experience.

“When you look at her credentials and history, she has the most executive experience of any of other candidates,” having held private sector positions as a nurse in healthcare as well as serving in Wisconsin’s executive branch, Sinicki said. “She’s very good on all the issues that I support,” she added. “Her background on healthcare is essential right now.”

Hughes entered the Democratic primary contest about two months after Gov. Tony Evers announced he would not seek a third term.

She had hoped to gain an edge in a field of seven top-tier Democratic hopefuls in the governor’s race through her experience both in government and in the private sector, but not as a previously elected politician. She campaigned on the idea of building Wisconsin’s economy in order to strengthen the state’s support of public education and other state services.

In her six years as WEDC CEO and secretary, Hughes helped reshape the agency to emphasize small business and community economic development along with its mission of supporting larger companies relocating to or expanding in Wisconsin.

She was the face of Wisconsin’s economic response to the COVID-19 pandemic and led the state’s renegotiation of tax incentives that under former Gov. Scott Walker had been promised to Foxconn for a factory that never fulfilled its promise  to build high-tech flatscreens in Racine County.

Prior to the WEDC, Hughes served as general counsel at Organic Valley, a national cooperative owned by organic dairy farmers.

The Trump administration U.S. Justice Department has no authority at all to demand Wisconsin voter records that it has sought in federal court, the Wisconsin Justice Department said in federal court papers filed Thursday.

In addition, Attorney General Josh Kaul and assistant AG Charlotte Gibson wrote, the federal government has shown no evidence to justify assertions that a flood of ineligible voters could receive absentee ballots to vote in the coming August primary election and November general election.

Representing officials with the Wisconsin Elections Commission, the Wisconsin DOJ filed a five-page response Thursday with the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, opposing the U.S. DOJ demand for Wisconsin’s unredacted voter list.

U.S. District Judge James Peterson dismissed the Trump administration’s lawsuit seeking the list May 21. The U.S. DOJ appealed the dismissal more than three weeks later with the 7 th Circuit on June 12, and the appeals court directed Wisconsin to file its response by Thursday.

In his dismissal ruling, Peterson declared that the unredacted voter list the DOJ has demanded isn’t a record the federal justice department can demand under the Civil Rights Act of 1960. The list contains voters’ personal information including birthdays, Social Security numbers and driver’s license details.

The Trump administration filing  asked for “an expedited appeal” in order “to investigate Wisconsin’s compliance with federal law regarding voter registration under the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and the Help America Vote Act (HAVA).”

Wisconsin’s reply Thursday said Congress hasn’t granted the U.S. DOJ the power to “regulate Wisconsin’s voter list” under either the NVRA or HAVA. The feds have no regulatory authority under those two laws, the Wisconsin reply states.

Moreover, where Wisconsin is concerned, “US DOJ has even less to say: Wisconsin is exempt from NVRA’s list maintenance provisions because Wisconsin has offered same-day voter registration since 1994,” the Wisconsin response states.

In its appeal, the U.S. DOJ declared that among the hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots that will be sent to voters for the Nov. 3 elections, “many of those ballots” would go “potentially … to ineligible voters, fraudulent registrants, or other individuals who should not have been registered. Wisconsin voters need to know that their election is secure and that non-citizens, deceased individuals, former residents, non-residents, and voters with multiple records are not registered to vote in that election.”

Wisconsin dismissed that claim as unsubstantiated.

“US DOJ has presented no evidence that Wisconsin is rife with ineligible voters. Its motion asserts that ‘potentially’ ineligible people may vote.” Such “an unsupported, potential harm” doesn’t justify an emergency action such as the feds are seeking, the Wisconsin response declared.

The response said that with only a few months before the election, the U.S. Supreme Court has warned against “modifying election procedures this close to elections” to avoid voter confusion and to avoid discouraging voters from going to the polls.

Groups intervening in the cases responded as well on Thursday.

Law Forward, the Wisconsin democracy-focused nonprofit law firm, said in its response that the U.S. DOJ failed to show “good cause” for its demand.

“And despite the Appellant’s fact-free innuendo,” the U.S. DOJ “does not allege — let alone provide any actual proof of — any supposed ‘ineligible voters remaining on [Wisconsin’s] voter rolls,’” stated Law Forward’s response, representing the nonpartisan voting rights group Common Cause.

A response for the Wisconsin Alliance for Retired Americans and Forward Latino argued that the U.S. “DOJ’s lackadaisical pace in this litigation belies any need to expedite” the case. The groups are represented by Elias Law Group in Washington, D.C., an election- and voting rights-focused firm that works with progressive organizations.

The U.S. DOJ has made “baseless insinuations that upcoming elections will not be ‘secure’ if it does not get unprecedented access to personal voter information,” the response stated. “That unsubstantiated allegation is absurd.”

The federal lawsuit against Wisconsin “is one of 31 similar lawsuits commenced by [U.S.] DOJ as part of its unprecedented campaign to amass personally identifying information about every registered voter in the country,” the interveners’ response stated. “All eight federal courts to address DOJ’s claims to date have dismissed them,” with the dismissals now under appeal.

Wisconsin must stop awarding small-dollar grants to help deter students from dropping out of college under a program available only to specific racial and ethnic groups, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

Although unanimous in part, the opinion also included concurrences by three of the Court’s liberal justices. They sharply critiqued a U.S. Supreme Court opinion that set the stage for the ruling, while acknowledging that its precedent required them to follow its contours.

At issue is the Minority Undergraduate Retention Grant Program operated by the state Higher Educational Aids Board. The program, established in 1985, provides grants from $250 to $2,500 for students who are Black, Hispanic, Native American and for immigrants or descendants of immigrants from Laos, Vietnam or Cambodia following the end of the Vietnam War in 1975.

Eligible recipients are students at Wisconsin’s technical colleges, private universities and tribal colleges. The program and a companion program for University of Wisconsin students were both created “to reduce the financial burden which causes many minority students to leave school,” then-Gov. Tony Earl wrote in the 1985 budget proposal that led to their creation.

A 2023 Wisconsin Examiner analysis found that the money in the program largely went to Black students at Milwaukee Area Technical College who got training and jobs in building and construction and other trades.

In a February 2025 ruling the Wisconsin 2nd District Court of Appeals sided with the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, overturning a lower court and ruling that the retention grant program violates the Equal Protection Clause in the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment. WILL filed the lawsuit with a group of families.

The appeals judges cited a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, issued in June 2023. That opinion, referred to as SFFA for short, held that the consideration of race in college admission policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina “cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause” in the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Thursday’s opinion, written by Justice Annette Ziegler, affirmed the appeals court decision and cited the SFFA U.S. Supreme Court opinion.

The Higher Educational Aids Board argued that the retention grants were needed to help maintain student diversity.

Ziegler wrote, however, that when trying to ensure a diverse student body, race cannot be a defining factor. Rather, it can be one of  many factors in a flexible process that evaluates each applicant as individuals, she wrote.

“Under the Grant Program, race is not but one factor in a ‘highly individualized, holistic review.’ Race is the only factor,” Ziegler wrote. “Either a student is, or is not, a member of the preferred racial group.”

When the Wisconsin law that established the grant program was enacted 41 years ago, “the record does not reflect that Wisconsin’s technical or private colleges needed the legislature to enact a race-, national origin-, ancestry-, or alienage-based remedy in the 1980s,” Ziegler wrote. Lacking such evidence, “we cannot assume that the legislature enacted [the program] to address an unidentified retention and graduation problem at private and technical colleges.”

Ziegler was joined in the main opinion by Justices Rebecca Bradley, Brian Hagedorn and Janet Protasiewicz.

In a concurrence, Chief Justice Jill Karofsky acknowledged that “I am bound” by the 2023 SFFA opinion and that the grant program cannot survive as a consequence. But Karofsky described the SFFA opinion as part of a broader trend that was turning the 14th Amendment in the opposite direction from its original intent.

“Rather than turn a blind-eye to the scourge of racism and slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause faces it head-on by demanding change and requiring equal protection of the laws for all people. Inherent in its language is a recognition of the wrongs of prejudice, discrimination, and injustice,” Karofsky wrote.

“Why, instead of wielding the Equal Protection Clause as a sword against racism, do we employ it to shield against the promise of equality for all?” Karofsky asked rhetorically. “The answer appears to be that we have failed to fully recognize how societal and governmental practices have long continued to enforce a preference for White Americans and to burden Black Americans and those of other disadvantaged races or backgrounds.”

She was joined in the concurrence by Justice Susan Crawford.

Citing arguments made by dissenting justices in the 2023 SFFA opinion, Karofsky wrote that in Wisconsin, disparities between students of color and white students when they enter college “[are] about a reality where past state-sponsored racism continues to affect educational opportunities, and systemic racism continues to rob non-White people of equal educational opportunities. And as difficult and uncomfortable as that may be for some to acknowledge, it is the truth, and it cannot and should not be ignored.”

In the second concurrence, Justice Rebecca Dallet wrote that under current U.S. Supreme Court rulings that the Wisconsin Court must follow, the 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause now imposes “substantial barriers to the adoption of race-conscious laws — even ones that seek to remedy the deep, structural inequalities in our society.” Karofsky and Crawford joined her concurrence.

The Higher Educational Aids Board’s defense of the grant program failed because there was “no evidence in the record establishing a problem with retention at Wisconsin’s private and technical colleges, or that race cannot be separated from that problem,” Dallet wrote.

Nevertheless, she suggested that it might yet be possible to redirect the Court with the production of “greater factual support” in the future.

State lawmakers react

Thursday’s ruling drew contrasting reactions from Wisconsin lawmakers.

Sen. Dora Drake (D-Milwaukee), chair of the Wisconsin Legislative Black Caucus, criticized the decision for applying the U.S. Supreme Court ruling to a different set of circumstances.

“That federal case was based on admissions while this program is about a student retention enacted by the state legislature and funded since 1985,” Drake said in a statement. The state Supreme Court justices “are setting a dangerous precedent by applying this federal ruling to distinctly different programs.”

Drake said she was a recipient of the grant when she attended Marquette University as a first-generation college graduate. She said she would introduce new legislation in the next two-year legislative session to replace the program with one that would support students based on income and zip code. “Disadvantaged communities need more resources, not fewer,” she said. “We can’t continue to make the same mistakes like our nation did post reconstruction and Jim Crow if we do we will never achieve true equity in our democracy.”

Sen. Eric Wimberger (R-Gillett) praised the ruling in a statement. Wimberger authored a bill that would have changed the retention grant and several other programs, redefining them to apply to students who were identified as “disadvantaged” while excluding race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, sexual orientation or religion, or to “a student’s identity as a member of a group without regard to individual qualities.” The measure passed the Legislature on party-line votes and was vetoed by Gov. Tony Evers.

“Today, the state Supreme Court unanimously affirmed the policy outcome of my bill,” Wimberger said. “Giving benefits based solely on race presumes someone has individual personal characteristics simply because they belong to a race category. That is stereotyping and racism at their plainest and simplest.”

Wimberger said that there are “other state programs that give benefits based on race” and that he would “continue to fight against those policies and pursue equality under the law.”

This report has been updated with statements from Wisconsin lawmakers. 

The owner of Minocqua Brewing Co.  said Friday that thousands of dollars worth of beer has been taken from his Madison and Minocqua outlets in a dispute with state officials about paying appropriate taxes to sell beer in Wisconsin that he imported from Illinois.

Minocqua Brewing owner Kirk Bangstad first drew attention to the investigation in a Substack post and a Facebook message he published on Friday after state authorities Thursday seized the beer from the two locations. Bangstad wrote that the value of the beer seized exceeded $25,000.

Bangstad has had a high profile for at least a half-dozen years for his online discourse, political fundraising and selling beer tied to a variety of Democratic political figures. He recently announced he was seeking the Democratic nomination for governor, but the paperwork he filed for his campaign last week was rejected as inadequate by the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

The Wisconsin Department of Revenue confirmed Friday that it had conducted an inspection of Minocqua Brewing premises this week, but called the matter “an active law enforcement action” and declined to discuss the specifics “due to the ongoing nature of this investigation.”

In his Substack post, just shy of 2,000 words, Bangstad recounted a lengthy chain of events revolving around his decision to brew beer under contract with a brewery in Illinois, his interaction with the Department of Revenue over the payment of Wisconsin excise taxes for the out-of-state product and a department delay in inspecting or issuing a permit for a refrigerated warehouse in Madison to store his Illinois-brewed beer.

The Department of Revenue said it inspected the Minocqua Brewing locations  “pursuant to an application” with the agency. The statement said that, after an unspecified 2025 complaint, the department “has been discussing concerns with the Minocqua Brewing Company and its legal counsel for several months toward reaching a path toward compliance.”

The department also stated, “This inspection was planned and coordinated with Minocqua Brewing Company’s legal counsel well in advance.”

While not specifying the allegations involving Bangstad and Minocqua Brewing, the DOR statement highlighted as an example of Wisconsin alcohol regulations “laws that protect the state’s brewers and brewing industry by preventing out-of-state alcohol beverages brewed in Illinois or other states to be sold in Wisconsin without the appropriate permit or license.”

Bangstad wrote that his attempts to pay required fees were rejected by the agency.

“We told them that we had complied with all of their demands since the beginning of the year, and had TRIED to pay the measly $500 in Wisconsin excise taxes, but they hadn’t let us,” Bangstad wrote.

Bangstad once honored Gov. Tony Evers with a beer brand. 

But after lobbing a charge that the Republican-party-aligned Tavern League could be inspiring enforcement action against him, Bangstad wondered in his post whether his criticism of Evers over the last year “for not being proactive in stopping Trump’s regime from abusing Wisconsinites” had made himself the object of “a lesson” from the administration.

Nurses at St. Mary’s Hospital in Madison voted Thursday for a union in the largest representation election in Wisconsin in at least a quarter century.

According to a vote tally from SEIU Wisconsin, 511 St. Mary’s nurses voted for the union while 63 voted no — an 89% majority in favor of unionizing. SEIU Wisconsin is part of the Service Employees International Union. The vote Thursday was conducted by the National Labor Relations Board.

A total of 754 nurses were eligible to vote, according to the union.

St. Mary’s, part of the St. Louis-based nonprofit chain SSM Health, had campaigned against unionization.

Union supporters said in interviews in the last month that concerns nurses had raised about procedures, staffing and compensation had not received an adequate response from SSM Health management.  

“The landslide election is part of a growing national trend of healthcare professionals — including nurses, doctors and others — organizing unions to have a strong voice in improving patient care, staffing and retention,” SEIU Wisconsin stated in a press release issued after the election.

“With our union, we now have a strong voice to negotiate a contract with the policies, staffing, and retention we need,” St. Mary’s labor and delivery nurse Emily Berceau said in the union press release.

In a statement distributed by Lisa Adams, communications manager in the SSM Health Wisconsin regional office, the organization acknowledged that management would have preferred to see the union lose, which it characterized as “an outcome that allowed for continued direct engagement with our nurses.”

“Regardless, we remain committed to continuing to collaborate with our entire team to maintain a compassionate, high-quality, healing environment where we all can do our best work in living out our Mission to provide exceptional care for our patients,” the statement said. “It’s been our Mission for more than 100 years and one we hope SEIU Wisconsin will continue to respect.”

In addition to the nurses whose votes were counted, the union and the hospital management disputed whether 82 charge nurses were eligible to vote. While SEIU contends charge nurses are part of the group to be covered by the union, the hospital argues that they are supervisors and therefore not eligible.

The NLRB election order said the charge nurses’ eligibility would be decided later. The ballots of 66 charge nurses who voted were set aside as challenged and not counted Thursday. In its post-election press release, the union called on SSM Health to drop its objection to union coverage for the charge nurses.

In a field consisting mostly of current or former elected officials, Missy Hughes says her background — private sector experience in an agricultural co-op, then serving as the top economic advisor to Gov. Tony Evers — gives her a distinctive edge in the contest to be the Democratic nominee for governor.

For six years Hughes served as the secretary and CEO of the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., a state agency tasked with helping Wisconsin’s economy grow and expand employment. Before that she was chief legal counsel at Organic Valley, a farmer-owned cooperative specializing in dairy products.

Hughes announced her campaign to seek the governor’s office in September, about two months after Evers announced he wouldn’t seek a third term.

“When Gov. Evers decided not to run and we were a few months into the Trump administration, I realized that my skills could really help the state during this really unpredictable time,” Hughes told a small gathering of Columbia County Democrats at the local party headquarters in Portage in mid-May.

As she has elsewhere, Hughes on that day cast herself as “a Democrat who understands the economy, who understands how to build the economy, who understands how Wisconsin’s economy works — whether it’s dairy or agriculture or manufacturing.”

She’s led with the economic argument at each of nearly a half-dozen forums over the last six months, using it not just as a big-picture case for her campaign but as the frame through which to address specific topics.

At a June 2 event organized by a coalition of unions, Hughes concurred with the rest of the Democrats on the stage in supporting an increase in the state government’s share of the cost of public schools to  two-thirds, taking the burden off local property taxpayers. Then came the moderator’s follow-up question about top education priorities and how the forum participants would navigate lobbies supporting the state’s private school voucher system and “an adversarial Legislature” to achieve their goals.

“The concern I have about the conversations we’ve had about public school funding, about healthcare — all of this costs a tremendous amount of money,” Hughes replied. “And we have to grow our economy. Communities are struggling because they don’t have economic opportunity.”

With manufacturing jobs declining and farmers struggling, “We have to recognize that the reality is we need more resources in this state. We have to grow,” Hughes observed.

“That’s what I want to bring back to this state,” she said. “Manufacturing and strong agriculture, those are the keys to our economy. They make up our economy. You all work in that economy. We all do and we have to build that. That’s how we pay for our public schools. And that’s how we make our public schools again the No. 1 place — the only place where Wisconsin parents want to send their children.”

Art, law and organic farming

Born Melissa Larkin, Hughes grew up in New York City’s northern suburbs. Her parents were doctors and her brother is a cardiologist. She graduated from Georgetown University in 1990 with a double major in political science and fine art. Drawing and sewing were her media, “but really drawing,” she says, and she still practices today.

Hughes got a law degree from the University of Wyoming in 1997. She wasn’t sure what kind of law she was going to practice — only that she wanted to be in the courtroom.

“I was going to be a courtroom litigator,” Hughes says. “And when I went to court the very first time in Gillette, Wyoming, I left saying, ‘I’m never doing that again.’”

Hughes didn’t like the combative nature of the work. “I’ve since said, ‘nothing ever good happens in court,’” she says. “I’d rather work outside to try to find solutions and move things forward than being in a court room.”

Hughes came to Wisconsin in 2002 and joined Organic Valley. The cooperative, headquartered in the Vernon County village of La Farge, was started in 1988 by a group of organic dairy farmers seeking alternative channels of distribution for their products. When Hughes arrived, about 500 farmers belonged and the co-op had “a couple of hundred employees, but it was on a rocket ship of growth,” Hughes told the Portage Democrats.

“I would sit at the table with farmers who were faced with losing their farms” in the face of unstable milk prices and rising costs. “They really had no stability and no future for how they can manage their farm and make a living and pass it on to the next generation,” she said.

Hughes’ job included handling government relations in Washington for the co-op and leading the Organic Food Association. By the time she left to join the Evers administration in 2019, she was general counsel and had the title of “Chief Mission Officer.” The co-op had grown to represent more than 1,500 farmers in states across the country and have 900 employees.

“It was incredibly fulfilling work,” Hughes says, “but it wasn’t easy, because we were fighting Big Ag, we were teaching consumers about good food.”

In her tenure at WEDC, Hughes became the face of Wisconsin’s economic response to the COVID-19 pandemic. And in the years that followed, she and the agency were at the forefront of a series of Evers administration gains, including corporate expansions and a federal grant to strengthen Wisconsin’s biohealth sector.

Cleaning up Foxconn

When Evers named her to the post, she says, he told her that he wanted her for her knowledge of rural communities and agriculture.

On her first day, she told the Portage audience, “they sat me down and said, ‘Great. Now you have to clean up Foxconn.’”

WEDC was created after former Gov. Scott Walker took office in 2011, replacing the Wisconsin Department of Commerce. The new public-private corporation included a board with business executives as well as lawmakers and had been created to deliver on Walker’s claim he would foster the creation of 250,000 new jobs — a goal his administration never reached.

Both the agency and its most prominent Walker-era project — a promised flatscreen manufacturing plant in Racine County that would be built by the Taiwan tech giant Foxconn in return for up to $2.85 billion in tax credits for the creation of 13,000 jobs — had become politically polarizing.

Scornful of the Foxconn deal that had been touted by Walker and President Donald Trump, then in his first term, Evers during his 2018 campaign talked of abolishing WEDC or at least rewriting the agreement with the company. Just before leaving office at the end of that year, Walker signed Republican lame-duck legislation curtailing the incoming Democratic governor’s powers, including a bill that blocked Evers from changing WEDC’s leadership until eight months into his term. Hughes took office when the restriction expired.

The Foxconn renegotiation took “a lot of time,” Hughes told the Portage group. In April 2021 — with Foxconn’s plans repeatedly changing and its flatscreen plant long abandoned — Evers and Hughes announced a new deal. In the end the company qualified for $80 million in tax credits.

WEDC’s most prominent role in its first eight years had been to encourage major business investments, whether by outside companies or expanding companies already in the state, and to negotiate incentives such as tax credits in return.

That continued under Evers and Hughes. But the COVID-19 pandemic that landed in March 2020 and walloped small businesses — especially the hospitality industry — also demanded a pivot at the economic development corporation.

Expanding to small business assistance

Early on, WEDC took the role of offering guidance for employers and enhancing workplace safety when the primary defenses against the virus were frequent handwashing and social distancing. After the federal government began sending pandemic relief funds to Wisconsin, WEDC became the primary vehicle for distributing them.

A second, larger round of relief, enacted in 2021 at the start of President Joe Biden’s administration, helped fund more business grant programs in Wisconsin. National researchers singled out Wisconsin as the leading state for funding small business with its pandemic relief funds.

WEDC also kept its attention on big business, with high-profile expansion projects for companies including Eli Lilly, Milwaukee Tool and Kikkoman, and a Microsoft data center on the land originally developed for Foxconn.

Small business and local economic development were always in theory part of WEDC’s portfolio — but overshadowed, Hughes says.

“We were always saying we can walk and chew gum at the same time — we can help small businesses and we can help big businesses, and we need to do both,” she says. But the small business support wasn’t emphasized, she adds. “It wasn’t measured. It was kind of pushed off to the side.”

Hughes says with WEDC’s decision to invest more deeply in local economic development work, the agency began to examine local tax data. “And when we did that, we saw there is great impact from the programs, so let’s keep doing it and do more of it.”

She brings a similar focus to her policy agenda, which includes proposals for healthcare, childcare and small business. Economic growth informs those concerns “because you can’t grow the economy without those things,” she says.

Embracing ‘progressive,’ backing the budget deal

At a Madison West High School forum organized by students earlier this year, Hughes was asked what people’s biggest misconception about her was.

Her focus on business and the economy “makes people think that I’m very center and very moderate,” Hughes replied.

“I’m reasonable, there’s no doubt about that,” she said. But having worked at Organic Valley reflects “true progressive values,” she added, because a cooperative “is a very, very radical kind of a company” with a culture of long-term thinking and sustainable operation.

Even so, on several points related to education, Hughes has broken ranks with the other leading Democrats in the contest for governor.

She criticized presumed Republican gubernatorial nominee Tom Tiffany for urging his party’s lawmakers to vote against the $1.8 billion deal Evers reached with GOP leaders in the Legislature that would have sent $300 to each taxpayer and $300 million in additional special education money to Wisconsin public schools.

But she also criticized Democrats who voted against the deal, charging in a statement she posted on social media May 14 that “certain self-serving Democratic candidates for governor … would rather boost their own personal political ambitions than serve our kids and taxpayers.”

In an interview with the Examiner later that same day, she defended the deal as an example that showed “compromises are never going to be perfect and everything that everybody wants.” But she also said that its collapse was “demonstrative of a whole broken system” in Wisconsin politics.

“We couldn’t find ways to work together in public, and to me that just shows that we have a lot of work to do in Wisconsin around building the policymaking muscle, and that’s really been diminished in the last two decades,” Hughes said. “We always had that as a strength, but we’ve lost that and we have to rebuild that.”

At the union forum June 2, Hughes was one of three Democrats who said they wouldn’t favor immediately ending Wisconsin’s taxpayer-funded private school voucher programs.

“As governor, I would be really, really realistic about what we can get done and what fights we pick,” Hughes said. “I don’t want to pick the voucher fight. I want to pick the fully funding public schools fight. I want to have a singular focus on making sure that when parents are choosing schools, they absolutely are choosing Wisconsin public schools because they are the best schools for their children.”

Hughes also issued a statement last week saying she would accept a federal voucher tax credit enacted last year, although the deadline for states to accept it will pass before a new governor takes office. Evers vetoed legislation that would have enabled Wisconsin to take part in the credit. 

Navigating talk about Trump

Lingering in the background behind the race for governor has been the Trump administration’s policies and the way they’ve upended the political and social atmosphere. Over the course of the campaign, Hughes has shifted, to some extent, to her own navigation of that subject.

From the start she has targeted Trump, particularly on the subject of tariffs, for driving up the price of household goods. At the same time, earlier in the campaign she turned attention back to Wisconsin.

Asked in an interview after a forum in Milwaukee in January about navigating how much to focus on criticism of Trump, Hughes said, “The key for a governor is, you can control what you can control, and you can’t control what’s happening in Washington right now.”

In that vein, she suggested then, the role of the state, the governor — and by implication one who aspires to be governor — is to step in and help businesses hurt by economic disruption coming from the White House. “Reacting to everything that’s happening, you’ll drive yourself crazy,” Hughes said that evening.

Four months later, she’s become more outspoken in criticizing Trump as well as Tiffany, whose endorsement by Trump led other GOP candidates to cede the field to the four-term Republican congressman.

She name-checked the president several times in talking to the Portage Democrats in mid-May, including criticizing Trump’s unfounded claims of stolen elections as well as the administration’s cancellation of clean energy projects that the state had received support for under the Biden administration.

Ahead of the president’s visit to the Chippewa Valley on June 5, Hughes publicly announced her participation in a protest in Eau Claire. And this week, in a social media post that began, “Enough with Trump’s corruption already,” she attacked Trump and tied Tiffany to the president.

Asked about the shift, she points to the fatal shootings of two people in Minneapolis during the surge of immigration officers there this winter along with the invasion of Venezuela and the war with Iran.

“At some point you kind of got to call it for what it is and start to say, ‘OK, this has just gone too far,’” Hughes says. “When you start to have lives on the line, when you start to really endanger the United States, when you start to endanger soldiers, you know, now you’re really — it’s time to say something.”

Even under those circumstances, however, Hughes says she wants to be circumspect in her language.

“I don’t say things like ‘fascist’ or ‘authoritarian,’”  she says. “You can still call out this bad behavior.”

She says she wants to be able to talk to anyone who might be persuadable.

“I live on this couple-mile-long dirt road, and I have a bunch of neighbors, and I don’t know how they voted,” Hughes says — but she guesses that they’re like the rest of Wisconsin, meaning that there’s a 50% chance they voted for Trump.

“I want to be able to talk to them about why I’m running for governor. And if I call names or if I say, ‘You were wrong for voting for Donald Trump,’ they’re not going to listen to what I have to say.”

Most Wisconsin residents “want to be closer to the center and are closer to the center,” Hughes says. “I want to keep people open and having the conversation.”

Editor’s note: The Examiner is running periodic profiles of the contenders in the Aug. 11, 2026 gubernatorial primary as well as the candidates in the general election Nov. 3. 

The state health department has launched a new webpage to explain the federal work requirement for some Medicaid recipients that will take effect in 2027.

The Wisconsin Department of Health Services is still reviewing the federal rule, released on June 1, governing how states are to implement the work requirements, a spokesperson said. Medicaid is known as BadgerCare in Wisconsin.

On June 5, DHS posted a Federal Medicaid Work Requirement webpage with general information about the requirement, including when it takes effect, how participants in Medicaid might meet the requirement, and reasons people might be exempt from meeting it.

The DHS work requirement page also includes a screening tool that people can use to advise them whether they might have to meet the new requirement.

The screener is intended only as information, according to DHS. It is not an application form and the result it provides is not an official decision about coverage for the person completing the form.

A disclaimer on the first page of the screening form states, “No matter what the results of this tool say, you should still watch your mail for letters, read them, and follow all directions. If we ask you to send information or documents, it is important that you do so right away. If you don’t, you could lose your health care coverage.”

The tax and spending megabill HR 1, passed by congressional Republicans and signed on July 4, 2025, by President Donald Trump, added the work requirement for Medicaid participants who gained healthcare coverage through Medicaid expansion under the 2010 Affordable Care Act.

While Wisconsin did not adopt the full ACA expansion, the state added childless adults whose incomes are at or below the federal poverty guideline to its Medicaid program. About 190,000 childless adults in Wisconsin were covered by BadgerCare in April, according to DHS.

“If you could be affected by the federal work requirement, we’ll send you a letter in August or September to explain what you need to know and what will happen next,” the webpage states.

Under the federal requirement, childless adults ages 19 to 64 must report at least 80 hours of work or volunteer service in a month, or enrollment in education or a workplace training program, to qualify for Medicaid.

The requirement also provides for exemptions due to certain health conditions or other factors.

After the federal government issued its work requirement implementation rule June 1, advocates said it imposed stringent terms that will make it more difficult for people to remain covered by Medicaid, even if they fully qualify.

In an analysis published Tuesday at the Substack newsletter “Can We Still Govern?” Chloe East of the University of Colorado and Adrianna McIntyre of Harvard University wrote that research showed work requirements imposed in Arkansas in 2018 during the first Trump administration “had no positive effect on employment and made participants worse off.”

The paper was written in response to a new federal report from the Trump administration asserting that work requirements would “incentivize employment” and “reduce poverty.”

East and McIntyre wrote that the report’s assumptions were not supported by research literature on work requirements for Medicaid and federal nutrition aid programs (SNAP).

“One consistent finding across dozens of papers on work requirements is that they reduce program participation among vulnerable individuals and households,” East and McIntyre wrote.

In the eight years that Cindy Veeser has operated her childcare center in the Green Bay suburb of Bellevue, Forever Young, she has provided an essential service — but she has also faced almost constant challenges.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic a few years ago, things got a little easier. Federal pandemic relief funds gave childcare providers like Veeser a new safety net — support and stability that they hadn’t known previously.

In Wisconsin the money went to thousands of providers, including Veeser, through Child Care Counts, a $20 million-a-month childcare stabilization fund that paid providers a monthly stipend.

The money helped childcare centers stay open and increase pay for childcare teachers, all without increasing costs for the parents depending on childcare so they could work.

“Federal stabilization funding prevented system collapse, supporting 5,762 programs, 75,740 educators, and more than 430,000 children, while helping reverse a decade long decline in licensed child care,” the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association states in a report issued in May.

“It made everything possible,” Veeser says of Child Care Counts. “My teachers were getting paid a little bit closer to what they should have been making at that time.”

The money didn’t just go to wages. “There wasn’t one thing that it didn’t help cover,” Veeser says.

At the end of this month, however, providers will lose the last vestige of that support. One year of “bridge” funding from the 2025-27 Wisconsin state budget ends June 30, and childcare providers across Wisconsin are unsure what happens next.

“We’re holding things together the best we can now,” Veeser says. “I just see us falling behind.”

One in four centers could close

More than a year ago one out of four Wisconsin provides told researchers that without Child Care Counts funding they could close down entirely.

More than one in three said they would probably reduce the number of hours they could provide child care. And nearly three out of four said they would have to increase the fees they charge parents.

The survey results were reported in March 2025 by the University of Wisconsin Institute for Research on Poverty. At the time, Wisconsin child care experts were looking ahead to June 2025, when the federal funds that paid for Child Care Counts would run out.

Providers, advocates, Gov. Tony Evers and Democrats in the Legislature had hoped for $480 million in the 2025-27 state budget to continue the stabilization program. What they got was less than 25% of that: $110 million for one year of stabilization funds that ends June 30.

WECA’s May report looked to the 2025 UW survey to forecast what could follow, and solicited new comments from providers.

“I believe that the numbers we reported on, which are the most recent data we have, are going to be much higher in reality,” says Paula Drew, WECA’s director of early care and education policy and research.

“Every provider is talking about the cost of what they’re paying for everything.” in comments submitted to WECA, Drew says. “Many, many, many of them said, ‘I will price parents out and I will likely close,’ or ‘I’m planning on closing because there’s no way I can pay my teachers less.’”

Increased fees and families dropping out

As fees rise, some families drop out of childcare programs. “There’s a huge, growing trend of under-enrollment due to parents not being able to afford the increases that they already have in tuition,” Drew says.

In The Beginning Child Care and Preschool operates centers in Boscobel, Prairie du Chien and Dodgeville, each licensed for 50 children.

“Child Care Counts was a huge difference in our operations,” says director and owner Beth Markut. “We were able to give the staff a minimum of a $2-an-hour raise. We were able to afford new supplies. It was a game changer for us.”

It also helped Markut and her husband, Patrick, open the center in Dodgeville, where they live, in 2023.  “I don’t know if we would have done that if we hadn’t had Child Care Counts, but my guess is probably not,” Markut says.

When Wisconsin cut Child Care Counts payments in half in 2023, In The Beginning increased tuition by 2.5% to 3%, Markut says, and she expects a similar increase after the bridge payments end.

In The Beginning’s increases have been modest compared with those in a state survey, which reported increases for infant care ranging from 11% to 14%, according to WECA.

Nevertheless, Markut says, “I’ve had four families leave our Dodgeville center because it’s cheaper for them just to stay at home” instead of both parents working.

Markut says she’s confident that In The Beginning can keep operating, but she also hopes that lawmakers will come around to the need for ongoing childcare support.

“I don’t think they understand what our profession does through day in and day out,” she says. “If they really understood they would support us, but they don’t. It doesn’t just affect us, it affects the broader economy.”

Shelly Boelter has operated a family child care program in the community of Hager City in northwestern Wisconsin for 23 years.

The family care license is limited to eight children at a time. Boelter built her home with the lower level as childcare space designed into it from the start. “When I was 12, this was what I dreamed of doing,” she says.

Child Care Counts enabled her to take a better wage, cover expenses and put some money away for retirement. That ended when the stabilization stipend was reduced.

To keep going, “I’ll be spending less on things that we could use, to try to just keep it affordable,” Boelter says.

She says she tries to avoid raising rates for families who already have children enrolled, however, because “I don’t want money to be an issue for them to leave.”

As a result, fees vary from one family to another. In the coming months, she expects to raise her rates for new clients, however. “Probably a 25% increase would not be unrealistic,” Boelter says.

She would need even higher increases to fully cover escalating costs, “but families would not be able to afford it,” she says. “I have some families with three children here. They can’t afford that cost for themselves and actually make a living, either.”

‘It’s going to get worse’

With the bridge funding ending and a significant number of programs at risk of  shutting down, advocates say their focus now is on the 2027 state budget, which will be hammered out by  a new governor and a new  state Legislature.

And the childcare economy is likely to become even more precarious.

“The stabilization funding in Wisconsin did some really remarkable things, and it’s really, really sad that we’re just going to see those things roll back,” Drew says.

“There’s a lot of different ways to approach the next budget,” says Ruth Schmidt, WECA executive director — from a new system of direct payments like Child Care Counts to new tax policies or tapping a revenue source, such as legalizing cannabis and then taxing it as a dedicated childcare funding stream.

“The bottom line is, this all is revenue. There’s no way to fix childcare to make it affordable for families, to make it stable within an economy without paying for it,” Schmidt says.

“So, is it going to get worse? We anticipate it’s going to get worse,” she says. “We anticipate it getting significantly worse. And every possible strategy needs money. We can’t just rely on providers to continue to sort of take this on their backs, and it’s not good for them, and it’s not good for kids and families.”

Wisconsin healthcare advocates have been worrying for months that new work requirements for some people on Medicaid that will take effect next year will make it harder for people who are eligible to get on, or stay on, the health insurance program.

Those worries increased this week now that the federal government has issued its rules for states to implement the new requirements.

“More people are going to have a harder time complying with the bureaucracy, and they’re going to get caught up in that,” William Parke-Sutherland, government affairs director at Kids Forward, told the Wisconsin Examiner Tuesday. Kids Forward is a Wisconsin research and advocacy organization for children and families of color and facing barriers to opportunity.

Medicaid — known as BadgerCare in Wisconsin — provides health insurance primarily for people with incomes below the federal poverty guideline: $15,960 for one person and $33,000 for a household of four. Medicaid is regulated and partially funded by the federal government, with the states administering the program and sharing responsibility for its costs.

Work requirements were among changes to Medicaid included in HR 1, the tax and spending megabill that congressional Republicans passed a year ago and President Donald Trump signed July 4, 2025. HR 1’s cuts to Medicaid will total more than $900 billion over 10 years, according to KFF, a health policy research and news nonprofit.

The new Medicaid work requirements apply to people who were added to the program as a result of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, the federal health insurance law enacted in 2010.

Under the ACA, states were able to get additional federal funds by expanding Medicaid to cover families with incomes up to 138% of the federal poverty guideline — $45,540 for a family of four.

Wisconsin didn’t adopt the full ACA expansion, however. Instead, under former Gov. Scott Walker, the state extended Medicaid healthcare coverage to childless adults with annual incomes up to $15,960, the  federal poverty guideline.  

About 190,000 childless adults in Wisconsin were covered by BadgerCare in April, according to the state Department of Health Services. Nationally at least two-thirds of people under Medicaid expansion are already working, Parke-Sutherland said. 

Starting in 2027 those additional Medicaid recipients must show they are working or engaged in community service at least 80 hours a month, or enrolled in an education program at least part time. The 2025 tax-cut law provided exemptions for people with disabilities or in frail health, as well as for pregnant women and caregivers for other people with disabilities.

The federal rule that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services issued Monday outlines how states must implement those requirements.

“We have been preparing to implement the requirement for almost a year based on limited verbal guidance we received from CMS as well as information we learned by collaborating with other states and learning from their approaches,” Elizabeth Goodsit, spokesperson for the Department of Health Services, said Wednesday.

DHS has spent months developing policies, procedures and system changes to implement the requirement, Goodsit said. “Our goal is to reduce the administrative burden on current and future Medicaid members to meet the new federal red-tape work requirements.”

Healthcare advocates contend that stringent terms in the newly released federal rule will make it more difficult for people to remain covered by Medicaid, even if they fully qualify.

For example, the rule presents “a much more restrictive definition of ‘medically frail’ than what appears to be in the statute of HR 1, and what people had been hearing from CMS,” Parke-Sutherland said.

Advocates said the rule also makes qualifying for an exemption more complicated for people with disabilities.

“We’re looking at how many people with disabilities aren’t going to be qualifying for an exemption and are at risk for losing their healthcare,” said Tamara Jackson, public policy analyst for the Wisconsin Board for People with Developmental Disabilities.

Unpaid family caregivers are supposed to be exempt, but Jackson said the relevant language in the federal rule “is, I think, really confusing and really difficult for unpaid family caregivers [to navigate].”

Jackson said the state will face “a tremendous amount of problem-solving that has to be done in a very short amount of time.” 

It appears the federal rule doesn’t permit states to automatically declare a person exempt from the work requirement on the basis of a particular illness or diagnosis — such as Parkinson’s Disease, multiple sclerosis, HIV-AIDS or cancer.

Many of those conditions are cyclical, with patients alternating between times when symptoms seem mild and times when they’re deeply debilitating, Parke-Sutherland said.

Patients “[are] going to have to prove that they can’t work in order to qualify” for coverage, he said. “That’s a big change, and it’s going to make it harder for individuals and it’s going to make it harder and more costly for the state.”

In a statement issued earlier this week, Lisa Lacasse, president of the American Cancer Society Action Network, said the new restrictions collide with cancer patients’ essential need for health coverage.

“Knowing 1 in 3 children diagnosed with the disease and 1 in 10 people with a history of cancer currently count on Medicaid for their health insurance, this coverage is a matter of life or death for millions of people nationwide,” Lacasse said.

The restrictions in the new federal rule “link the definition of medical frailty to a person’s ability to work,” Lacasse said. The “debilitating side effects of the disease or treatment” complicate the task of fulfilling a work requirement or proving they can’t work, however.

Many cancer patients want to work between rounds of chemotherapy, she said, but instead, they “will have to choose between losing their Medicaid coverage, working the required 80 hours per month, or giving up working altogether to qualify for an exemption.”

Parke-Sutherland said the work requirements alone are expected to cut Medicaid nationwide by $326 billion over 10 years.

“That will not make people healthier and will not make people more likely to work,” he said. “The only way it reduces costs is because people who are currently eligible are not going to be eligible any more, not able to prove they’re working, not able to prove they have a condition [that makes them exempt], or they’re going to get caught up in the bureaucratic red tape of trying to prove those things.”

The Wisconsin Legislature’s budget committee authorized $7 million in state funds Tuesday so that a state agency that supports Wisconsinites with disabilities entering the workforce can draw down a waiting list of more than 7,000 people.

The Joint Finance Committee voted unanimously for the funding, but members first argued over why the panel didn’t act sooner to provide the money.

The Division of Vocational Rehabilitation in the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development reported in November that it faced a shortfall under the current state budget.

For people with disabilities who are seeking work, DVR provides career services including training as well as technical assistance for employers. The agency typically works with about 19,000 clients at a time, according to DWD. DVR receives federal funds to cover 78.7% of its annual costs, with the state required to cover the remaining 21.3% under federal law.

The 2025-27 state budget added $3.8 million for the agency, bringing state funding to $21.3 million, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau.

In November, the agency announced it was $4.6 million short of what was needed for the 2025-26 fiscal year. Because of that shortfall, the agency instituted a waiting list for people needing the DVR’s services.

“While we’ve been able to support existing program participants, all new applicants have been forced to wait for services, leaving over 7,600 Wisconsinites with disabilities currently on the waitlist to receive career services,” said DWD Secretary-designee Amy Pechacek in a statement Tuesday from the department. About 1,000 people seeking services are added to the waitlist each month, according to DWD.

DWD asked the finance committee for $4.6 million for the budget’s first 12 months, 2025-26, and another $6.4 million for the second 12 months, 2026-27.

Tuesday, the budget committee’s Republican majority on a 4-11 vote rejected a bid by the committee’s four Democrats to honor that request.

“It just stuns me that this committee wouldn’t take every opportunity to make sure that we have a zero waitlist opportunity so that people with disabilities can enter the workforce, pay taxes, and contribute to our economy,” said state Rep. Deb Andraca (D-Whitefish Bay) after the vote. “Are we really saving money by preventing people from working and not doing everything we can so that there’s no waitlist for this program?”

Instead, the majority proposed a $600,000 appropriation for the first year, which ends June 30, and the full $6.4 million sought for the second year. The Legislative Fiscal Bureau projected the appropriation would enable the waitlist to be closed by the end of June 2027. The proposal passed 15-0.

The funds were made possible in part because a $20 million appropriation for dairy farm aid that passed the Senate died in the Assembly, said Sen. Rob Stafsholt (R-New Richmond).

DWD will draw down the waitlist by first giving priority to people with the most serious disabilities, followed by people with less severe but significant disabilities and finally people whose disabilities do not seriously limit their functional capacity or require people with multiple services.

In the 2024 election, Republican messaging that marginalized transgender Americans and attacked Democrats got widespread attention.

Opinion is divided among political analysts about whether anti-trans messaging contributed to Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s narrow loss — about 29,000 votes in Wisconsin and about a 1.5% margin nationwide — or was irrelevant. 

A 2023 Marquette University Law School poll found that a majority of respondents favored protecting trans people against workplace discrimination, but 70% also believed athletes should be required to play sports on teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth. 

But whether or not the strategy helped seal Donald Trump’s victory two years ago, Republican candidates in Wisconsin have been leaning into messaging that targets transgender and nonbinary people.

Sen. Melissa Ratcliff (D-Cottage Grove), whose adult son is transgender, sees little reason to “rehash” the 2024 election. “I think it’s always important to make sure that we are advocating for our trans community and for kids and speaking out against hate,” she said. “I think the bigger concern is why a party feels the need to attack our trans kids and use that as an issue to rile up part of their base ultimately.”

Transgender individuals account for less than 1% of the adult Wisconsin population, about 36,000 people, and 3.3% of teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17, fewer than 13,000 people — or 180 per county. The Williams Institute at the University of California Los Angeles Law School calculated those estimates based on survey data the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) collected between 2021 and 2023.

The Republican majority in the state Legislature has passed bills that would bar gender-affirming care for young people and ban kids from playing on sports teams that didn’t match the gender they were assigned at birth or their biological sex. Gov. Tony Evers has repeatedly vetoed those measures.

“We’ve seen this in the Legislature, that by somehow going after children and bullying them is something that they see as a winning issue,” Ratcliff said. “It just doesn’t make any sense to me. And that grown adults think it’s OK to bully kids is just gross.”

Meanwhile, with Trump’s inauguration to a second term, federal policy has turned against transgender people and also against a more expansive understanding of gender.

During the Wisconsin Republican convention in Wisconsin Dells on May 16, speakers attacked the transgender population, particularly youth, sounding the alarm about the possibility of trans girls playing high school sports, mocking the use of inclusive language and promoting the  policing of bathrooms. 

Republican nominee for governor Tom Tiffany opened his speech by asking the delegates, “Are you ready for a governor that’s going to protect girls’ sports?”

Sen. Ron Johnson inveighed against “Biological males competing against our little girls in sports. Biological males invading their locker rooms, their showers, their bathrooms.” He as well as former Gov. Scott Walker falsely claimed that minors identified as transgender can be subjected to surgical procedures.

And a May 19 press release by Republican press secretary Zach Bannon falsely claimed that more than 90 lawmakers were “emphasizing their support of sex-change surgeries for minors” in an open letter to two leading Wisconsin hospital systems.

The false claim was repeated three times in the press release, which attacked Democrats in Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District who are running in the party’s primary to challenge Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden. 

The letter called on the healthcare providers, Children’s Wisconsin in Wauwatosa and UW Health in Madison, to resume gender-affirming care for minors, which both suspended early this year following threats to federal medical dollars from the Trump administration.

That form of care does not include surgery, however. A Children’s Wisconsin spokesperson said medical treatment prior to the suspension of care involved medication, and that Children’s still provides mental health and behavioral care. 

“UW Health does not offer gender-affirming surgery to minors,” said Sara Benzel, a spokesperson for the Madison-based system.

Abigail Swetz, executive director of Fair Wisconsin, a statewide LGBTQ+ advocacy group, said that for the youngest children who have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria — a deep-seated sense that their gender identity doesn’t match their biological sex — the first step is extensive counseling with a therapist.

Gender-affirming care “is also age-appropriate, and this is the part that I think people miss all the time,” Swetz said in a recent interview.  “There are no medical interventions until puberty for gender-affirming care.”

Interventions at puberty can involve medication but not surgery, Swetz said. Those can include hormone treatment to delay puberty and to redirect the body’s development.

“But that is all age-appropriate, and highly individualized, just like all good medical care is with the doctor,” Swetz said. “And always with full consent of parents and guardians. When we are talking about gender-affirming care for trans youth, that’s what we’re talking about. Not what the other side would like to pretend.”

Bannon did not respond to a Wisconsin Examiner email message seeking an explanation for the false statements in his press release.

A federal judge in April blocked the Trump administration from cutting off federal funds to hospitals that provide gender-affirming care. The judge’s order said the Department of Health and Human Services lacked the authority to override professional standards of care or to deny funding to healthcare providers following those standards.

Since then some health providers in other states, including Children’s Minnesota hospital, have resumed providing gender-affirming care for minors.

Both UW Health and Children’s Wisconsin said they sympathized with patients who had been undergoing that care and their families, but that they believe they would remain in legal jeopardy if they resume care involving medication.

Ratcliff said that as someone whose family has gone through the experience of addressing the needs of a transgender child, it was important to her “to make sure that all trans kids and the trans community know that there are people in the Capitol that care about our trans community, that see them, that are fighting for them, and that we can push back again and fight back against all the hateful rhetoric toward our trans community.”

She said she believes Republicans are ramping up  attacks on trans people as a deflection from the economic squeeze voters are feeling.

“We know that everyday costs are going up and they aren’t putting forward policies that actually help everyday lives of Americans or Wisconsinites,” Ratcliff said. “My child being trans is not causing these prices to go up. My child’s healthcare is not causing any difference in people’s lives except for my child’s life.”

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Five Wisconsinites have been reported infected with mpox this year, and state health officials are recommending that people who might be at risk for the illness get vaccinated.

Mpox — previously known as monkeypox — is a viral illness that produces a rash, skin lesions, and fevers, aches or chills.

The virus isn’t common but can be serious, and is spread through intimate, face-to-face contact that includes talking or breathing closely, or through sustained skin-to-skin contact, according to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services. It can also be spread through items that have been contaminated with fluids or sores from someone with mpox.

Since 2022 mpox has been circulating in the U.S. at low levels, according to DHS. For 2026, through May 26, 535 cases of mpox have been confirmed in the U.S, including the five people diagnosed in Wisconsin.  

The risk is low for the general public, DHS reported, but people who may be at higher risk for exposure to mpox should talk to healthcare providers about vaccination. DHS has recommended the mpox vaccine for higher risk people, including men who have had sex with men and who have had more than one sex partner in the last six months. 

Travel and sexual exposure elsewhere in the world are other risk factors, according to DHS. People who are in close contact with someone with mpox, including healthcare workers who are exposed, also are at higher risk.

To prevent mpox infection, DHS has recommended that people learn the symptoms of mpox, watch their own and their partners’ bodies for changes such as rashes or skin lesions, and have “open and honest conversations” with partners about mpox as well as about sexually transmitted infections and HIV, the virus responsible for Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, or AIDS.

“Anyone who thinks they were recently exposed to mpox should contact a health care provider to talk about whether they should get vaccinated,” DHS said in an announcement. “Monitor health for fever, chills, swollen lymph nodes and new, unexplained rashes and contact a health care provider if one occurs. People who become ill should avoid contact with others until receiving health care.”

More information on the virus can be found at the DHS web page for mpox or by contacting https://211wisconsin.communityos.org/.

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More than 800 nurses at a Madison hospital owned by a national nonprofit group will vote in the coming weeks on whether to join a union.

The organizing campaign at St. Mary’s Hospital is one of the largest in recent memory in Wisconsin.

In a statement earlier this month, a spokesperson said the hospital’s parent organization, SSM Health, “respects the right of its employees” to freely choose union representation. Nurses and the Service Employees International Union say the hospital’s management has responded with stiff opposition.

Union supporters are planning a rally Thursday afternoon in front of the hospital, with U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Black Earth) among the featured speakers.

“There’s a national crisis facing both our healthcare system and the nursing workforce,” Pocan said in a statement issued Tuesday announcing the event. “St. Mary’s nurses are trying to address this crisis right here in our community by having a strong voice for better staffing and retention. SSM should respect their freedom to vote in a fair union election without any pressure campaign.”

The union election, supervised by the National Labor Relations Board, will be the largest such vote in recent memory in Wisconsin. A date for the election hasn’t yet been set, but it could be announced as early as this week.

It comes amid a rising interest in unions among healthcare workers — one that coincides with the growth of increasingly concentrated multistate healthcare networks, including nonprofit organizations.

“We’re seeing more union elections, we’re seeing more petitions for recognition of unions as well,” said Dr. Ahmed Ahmed, a research fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and Harvard Medical School, in a panel discussion earlier this month conducted by Wisconsin Health News.

With mergers and consolidations, hospitals and health systems have grown larger and larger. Labor costs are their biggest expense, and in trying to trim those costs, they’re increasing caseloads and reducing the time patients have with their providers, Ahmed said. Healthcare workers are turning to unions in search of “one collective voice that is able to govern and be able to bargain for those things.”

Centralized decision-making

Supporters of the St. Mary’s union campaign say that concentration is one of the reasons they’re organizing. Centralized decision-making at the Missouri headquarters of the parent organization have felt to some like a corporate takeover.

“There have been a lot more directives from corporate headquarters in St. Louis,” said Josh Taylor, a nurse in the hospital’s inpatient behavioral health unit.

St. Mary’s was one of several hospitals and healthcare facilities established by nuns from Europe and sponsored by Roman Catholic congregations in the 19th century. The facilities were only loosely connected until 1986 when the corporate structure changed with the creation of SSM Health, according to the SSM Health website.

SSM Health had been sponsored by the Franciscan Sisters of Mary until 2013, when sponsorship shifted to a new corporate entity, SSM Health Ministries, while remaining part of the Roman Catholic church.

SSM Health is headquartered in St. Louis and operates in four states — Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri and Oklahoma — where it runs 24 hospitals and more than 540 other facilities, including doctor’s offices, outpatient services, home care and hospice programs.

According to SSM’s annual financial statements, SSM Health had $12.7 billion in revenues in 2025 and ended the year with a balance of $484 million in net revenue over expenses.

In 2014 SSM Health began applying its name to all of the healthcare facilities in its network.  It also consolidated its business operations including human resources, finance, strategy and planning and marketing and communications.

With those changes, nurses who are supporting unionizing say that decision-making on day-to-day policies and practices has moved farther away.

“We watched our personalized policies for our hospital disappear,” said Lynette Willsey-Schmidt, a labor and delivery nurse who has worked at St. Mary’s for more than 11 years.

Employee councils called ineffective

Willsey-Schmidt said labor and delivery nurses along with the doctors in the department had developed a series of practices to reduce intervention during births where risks and complications were lower. Those practices were welcomed by patients, she said.

But as SSM Health took charge of policymaking, “we were told we can’t do that anymore,” Willsey-Schmidt said, because those policies didn’t exist elsewhere in the SSM Health system.

Taylor said that while employee councils are supposed to relay feedback from the floor to upper management, they haven’t been effective.

“I’ve been on the unit councils,” he said. “We have tried the normal routes to bring our concerns to the table. We are heard, but nothing is acted on.”

When employees have raised concerns, “We’re told, ‘This is how it is. This is how all the hospitals have to do it,’” Taylor said.

Morgan Espich, an inpatient medical and surgical nurse, said the hospital recently purchased and began requiring nurses to use a new brand of intravenous pumps, different from what they had been using. She and her coworkers had been happy with the previous models, Espich said, and no one explained the reason for the change. “We just had to get new ones that no one asked for,” she recalled.

In addition, the hospital staff has to keep some of the older IV pumps on hand, said Carrie Schrank, an intermediate care trauma nurse, to substitute for the new pumps when they malfunction.

Nurses contend staffing levels have left employees straining to cover all their responsibilities, while nurses have been told to improve productivity.

“Productivity should be about patients’ outcomes,” Willsey-Schmidt said.

Consultants who visited earlier this year recommended ways to reduce staffing, but Schrank said their recommendations didn’t address how acutely ill some patients are.

“The days we’re busy, we go home and wonder, did I do enough?” Espich said.

Hospital stance — respect or intimidation?

SSM Health released a statement earlier this month in response to the Wisconsin Examiner’s submission of specific questions about the union campaign as well as a request for an interview.

“At SSM Health, we work hard to cultivate a supportive and collaborative work environment where every employee is treated with respect and compassion,” said the statement, delivered by Kim Sveum, SSM Health regional director of communications.

“We value our high-quality patient-centered care and place of healing.  We strive to ensure that our team thrives so that they can do their best work in realizing our Mission to provide exceptional patient care.”

The statement concluded, “SSM Health respects the right of its employees to make a free and informed choice as to whether or not they wish to be represented by a union.”

Union organizers say that there have been extensive messages posted on employee bulletin boards disparaging unions and the SEIU and emphasizing employees’ right to decline to sign a union authorization card.

“They have been constantly intimidating staff,” Schrank said.

Employees typically attach their work badges to a retractable line coiled up in a holder called a badge reel that can be clipped to a lapel or pocket. When they made their campaign public, pro-union nurses began using a customized badge reel with an emblem, “St. Mary’s Nurses United.”

Supervisors have ordered employees to remove those badge reels. Espich and other nurses said they have been told that “this is soliciting” against hospital policy, and that nurses who don’t remove the badge reel would be sent home without pay for the day.

“With this union-busting, though, we’re all fired up even more,” Espich said.

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A group of more than 60 nonprofits, advocacy organizations and businesses wrote to two Wisconsin health systems Thursday, urging them to resume gender-affirming care for minors that they halted five months ago.

The hospital organizations — UW Health in Madison and Children’s Wisconsin in Wauwatosa — stopped providing hormone medication and puberty-blocking medication to minors with gender dysphoria following Trump administration actions targeting such healthcare.

Thursday’s letter, led by the LGBTQ+ rights groups Fair Wisconsin and GSAFE, cites a federal judge’s ruling in April that threw out the administration’s order blocking gender-affirming care.

“Gender-affirming care is legal in Wisconsin, but it is increasingly more and more difficult to access due to decisions made to pause the provision of this care at your institutions,” states the letter. “These decisions must be reversed and care restarted immediately.”

Thursday’s letter was the second this week to UW Health and Children’s Wisconsin. On Tuesday, more than 90 elected officials from around the state released a letter urging both hospitals to restore the suspended services, “reaffirm [their] commitment to evidence-based care, and rebuild trust with the transgender and gender diverse community.”

“The most important thing for people to understand is that the support for this care is so much broader and deeper than people realize,” Abigail Swetz, executive director of Fair Wisconsin, told the Wisconsin Examiner Thursday. “I hope the leadership of these hospitals are seeing that in this letter and the others that are coming through.”

She said local groups, Madison TRAC and Reproductive Justice Action Milwaukee, are organizing petitions in their communities as well for the general public to sign.

Both hospitals released statements Thursday that acknowledged the concerns of families and their children seeking gender-affirming healthcare, but cited legal risks of providing such care.

“We know this issue matters deeply to many in our community, especially the patients and families we serve,” Children’s Wisconsin said.

“Due to ongoing legal and regulatory uncertainty affecting organizations and providers across the country, we are not currently providing gender-affirming pharmacologic care,” it said. “We recognize the impact this has on patients and families.”

Children’s said it continued to provide related mental and behavioral healthcare.

UW Health said it paused gender-affirming medication therapy for minors “due to ongoing federal actions that threaten health systems that provide this care.”

“While we continue to believe this is evidence-based care, threats from those federal actions are not fully resolved,” UW Health said. “Therefore, the current risk is too great to resume this care. We recognize the challenges faced by impacted patients and families and remain committed to providing patient-centered care and supporting their health and well-being throughout this critical time.”

Gender-affirming care is a response to gender dysphoria, which the American Psychiatric Association has defined as  “psychological distress that results from an incongruence between one’s sex assigned at birth and one’s gender identity.”

Based on survey data collected by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention between 2021 and 2023, the Williams Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles Law School estimated in an August 2025 report that 3% of adolescents ages 13 to 17 and 1% of adults 18 or older identify as transgender or nonbinary.

Swetz said that when health professionals provide gender-affirming healthcare, they do so because it is medically necessary.

“I think it is sometimes seen as something that is not essential, but it absolutely is medically necessary, because we know that when gender dysphoria is treated then the mental health of our trans youth just drastically improves,” she said.

Gender-affirming care is also provided based on what is appropriate for the person’s age, “and always, with the full consent of parents and guardians,” Swetz said.

For a child who hasn’t yet reached puberty, it entails counseling and other forms of behavioral therapy — not medication, she said. At the start of puberty, medication may be used to pause that process, along with hormone treatment, but it’s also “highly individualized,” she added.

“We’re talking about high quality care that is respectful and meets a trans youth exactly where they’re at, in the age appropriateness of the kind of care that will help move them forward in their lives and make it possible for them to live in a body that really feels like home,” Swetz said.

The two hospitals paused their use of gender-affirming care medication after a Dec. 18, 2025 declaration from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that threatened to withhold federal health dollars, such as Medicaid reimbursement, from providers offering gender-affirming healthcare for minors.

Wisconsin was one of 21 states and the District of Columbia that sued to block the federal rule. In late March, a federal judge in Oregon ruled for the states on summary judgment, and in April issued a written order that vacated Kennedy’s declaration.

The judge ruled that the declaration violated the Administrative Procedures Act; that Kennedy and HHS officials lacked the authority to override professional standards for gender-affirming care; and lacked the authority to exclude providers from federal programs for providing gender-affirming care that meets professional standards.

The order also includes an injunction forbidding “any materially similar policy which supersedes or purports to supersede the professionally recognized standards of care for gender-affirming care that exist” in the 21 states and D.C. that filed the lawsuit.

“They’re trying to make sure that the federal government can’t go around and just, like, do something in another name,” Swetz said. “And I think it’s important for people to know that Wisconsin specifically is one of the states.”

This report was updated to correct the organizers of local petitions in Madison and Milwaukee.

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The legal group that demanded Wisconsin rescind a professional standard for therapists that bars attempts to change sexual orientation or gender identity is now suing Gov. Tony Evers and the counselors’ professional board to kill the standard.

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty filed the lawsuit Tuesday in federal court in Milwaukee on behalf of two licensed therapists, charging that the standard is unconstitutional because it prescribes “what views [the therapists] may express.”

In April 2024 the examining board for licensed counselors and therapists added to its definitions of unprofessional conduct “sexual orientation change efforts,” commonly referred to as conversion therapy.

Conversion therapy has included electric shock, physical violence and “personal degradation and humiliation,” according to a 2015 statement opposing  the practice from the American Academy of Nursing.

The Wisconsin board standard barring conversion therapy includes “any intervention or method that has the purpose of attempting to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity, including attempting to change behaviors or expressions of self or to reduce sexual or romantic attractions or feelings toward individuals of the same gender.”

The board’s guidance document calls such practices “harmful, ineffective, non-evidence based, and not in line with current standards of professional practice.”

In March, the U.S. Supreme Court sent a lawsuit against a Colorado law banning conversion therapy back to lower courts. The high court said that applying the Colorado law to talk therapy required “strict scrutiny” for impinging on the First Amendment right of free speech.

Two weeks later, WILL and Wisconsin Family Action wrote to Gov. Tony Evers, demanding that the state repeal the professional standard barring conversion therapy.

The demand letter asserted that the court “struck down the law,” a claim WILL has repeated in publicizing its lawsuit.

Evers rejected the demand and stated in his letter to WILL that the organizations were “misreading” the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the Colorado case. Rather than striking down the Colorado law, the high court sent a lawsuit back to lower courts, directing them to apply “strict scrutiny” on First Amendment grounds to how the law is applied to talk therapy.

The lawsuit WILL filed against Wisconsin’s standard names as defendants Evers; Dan Hereth, secretary of the state Department of Safety and Professional Services, which administers the licensing boards for a wide range of professional disciplines; and all the members of the Wisconsin Marriage and Family Therapy, Professional Counseling, and Social Work Examining Board.

WILL argues that the therapists it represents practice only talk therapy, conducting their counseling practice as “an exercise of their faith,” and that clients have voluntarily sought their “faith-based counseling, including obtaining advice on issues of sexual orientation and gender identity.”

The professional standard “prevents Plaintiffs from providing verbal advice in accordance with their sincerely-held religious beliefs in helping these patients specifically seeking to align their gender identity with their biological sex or to make changes relating to their sexual orientation or expression,” the lawsuit states.

A DSPS spokesperson said the agency doesn’t comment on pending litigation. A spokesperson for Evers referred to the letter Evers wrote rejecting WILL’s demand.

“I do not believe this lawsuit will succeed,” said Marc Herstand, executive director for the National Association of Social Workers Wisconsin chapter. “Wisconsin law clearly gives professions the authority to set their own Conduct Codes.”

The conversion therapy ban’s adoption in 2024 marked the third attempt by the professional board to bar the practice. Previous efforts were blocked by the Legislature’s Joint Committee for the Review of Administrative Rules. In 2025, the state Supreme Court ruled that state statutes giving the committee the power to block rules indefinitely were unconstitutional.

WILL since its founding has pursued legal actions against measures and policies respecting LGBTQ+ people, programs aimed at redressing systemic racial discrimination, and local election administration practices intended to increase voter access to the ballot box.

The organization has sued to block public health measures that were taken during the COVID-19 pandemic; argued that government efforts to encourage diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace are unconstitutional; and defended laws such as Wisconsin’s 2011 Act 10, which stripped most public employees of most union rights.

Wisconsin Family Action has opposed LGBTQ+ rights and has lobbied against the inclusion of gender identity in civil rights protections under Wisconsin law.

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With Republicans touting it as a bipartisan deal, the $1.8 billion special education funding and tax cut bill negotiated by a pair of GOP leaders and outgoing Democratic Gov. Tony Evers passed the Legislature’s budget committee on a 12-4 vote Tuesday, with no Democratic support.

The Joint Finance Committee’s Democrats charged the bill didn’t do enough for schools or taxpayers while spending down the state surplus for short-term benefits.

About 20 minutes after the committee vote, Evers’ office sent out a press release in which the governor called on the Legislature to swiftly pass the measure he’s been calling a “blockbuster” since it was unveiled Monday. The Legislature is scheduled to meet Wednesday in a special session to debate and vote on the measure.

Attached to the email was a table listing more than 50 Wisconsin school districts and the additional special education money they’ll receive from the state if the deal passes.

The legislation will add $85 million to reimburse local school districts for the cost of special education in the current school year and $230 million for the 2026-27 school year. A Legislative Fiscal Bureau memo estimates the additional funding will raise the state’s reimbursement rate this year to 42.7% and for 2026-27 to 50%, but added that the actual rate “could be higher or lower, depending on final prior year aidable costs.”

When Wisconsin’s 2025-27 budget was signed in July schools were told they would get 42% of their special education costs reimbursed for the current year and 45% in 2026-27. But in November the Department of Public Instruction announced that special ed costs and enrollment had both increased, so the first round of payments would cover 35%.

Along with the additional special ed funding, the new bill will spend $302.5 million on state aid to public schools. Because of state revenue limits on school districts, the new state aid “would provide property tax relief but not additional resources for school districts,” according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau memo.

The bill gives the state technical college system an additional $50 million in state aid starting in the 2026-27 school year, also to replace property tax revenue, not increase trade school budgets.

The legislation includes a $300 state income tax rebate for individual taxpayers whose state tax bill was at least that much in 2024.

It also would make tip income as well as overtime pay exempt from state income taxes, mirroring federal tax policies that have been enacted under President Donald Trump. While the federal exemptions expire at the end of 2028, the state exemptions don’t have a sunset.

So far, lawmakers in Evers’ own party have greeted the measure coolly. Finance committee Democrats on Tuesday welcomed the increase in special education money but said it wasn’t sufficient to meet the needs school districts have for more resources.

“I’m a no on this plan, not because I don’t appreciate education funding,” said Rep. Deb Andraca (D-Whitefish Bay), a former teacher, during the JFC’s hour-long discussion before the committee vote.

“I want our schools to get the predictable, reliable, education funding, indexed to inflation that they deserve without having to sue all of us,” Andraca said, referring to a pending lawsuit challenging the state’s school funding formula.

But State Rep. Mark Born, the JFC Assembly cochair, said the measure deserves to be enacted.

“There’s really nothing negative in the bill,” Born told the committee. “The bill gives money to special education, right? The bill gives lasting property tax relief to taxpayers of Wisconsin. The bill gives lasting income tax relief to the taxpayers of Wisconsin. And yes, the bill also gives a one-time immediate rebate check to taxpayers in Wisconsin. The bill actually helps people now.”

Rep. Tip McGuire (D-Kenosha) and Sen. Kelda Roys (D-Madison) both made  pointed references to the bill as the product of three retiring elected officials — “three lame ducks,” in McGuire’s words. Along with Evers, a Democrat, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, both Republicans, are leaving office at the end of 2026.

None of the Democrats named Evers in their criticism of the bill, while Republicans touting the legislation invoked the governor several times.

“I think what we have before us is really balanced governing,” said Rep. Shannon Zimmerman (R-River Falls). “Gov Evers, working with majority party leadership, came together. Nobody got everything they wanted, but there’s a lot of good in this bill.”

Democrats emphasized what they said were the bill’s inadequacies, such as not guaranteeing “sum-sufficient” special ed funding that would fully meet the actual cost. Instead it designates a “sum-certain” amount, meaning there is a limited pot of money available, regardless of expanding need.

“It fails our schools,” said McGuire. “Our schools aren’t going to be getting the resources fully that they need. They’ve been struggling for 15 years under legislative Republican leadership.”

Roys — who is seeking the Democratic nomination to run for governor — referred to the presumptive Republican gubernatorial nominee’s opposition to the deal, although in support of a contrasting policy agenda.

“I find myself shocked to be with Republican Tom Tiffany,” Roys said. “Shocked to be agreeing with Republican [Sen.] Steve Nass, that this is a deal that does not help us fix the significant long-term structural problems we have — namely the way that we have robbed our children of their futures in defunding public education.”

Roys and McGuire both predicted a coming economic shakeup. 

“There’s a presumption that this bill has, and that is that Donald Trump’s economy will succeed,” McGuire said. “And I think that I am among the 70% of Americans right now who do not believe that that’s true.”

Wisconsin, he argued, should prepare for a future that includes an economic downturn in the next six or nine months rather than spending too much of the state’s projected $2.37 billion surplus.

Born mocked those concerns. “We cut taxes again and you say, ‘Oh, you’re going to break us. You’re going to be bankrupt. Structural deficit. Oh my goodness. The sky is falling,’” he said. “Oh, next budget. More surplus, more Republican leadership on the budget, more partnering with our private sector partners to grow Wisconsin’s economy.”

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The Trump administration announced a series of changes in federal childcare funding Monday that Wisconsin advocates say will amount to less regulation and undermine attempts to support childcare providers and workers.

The policies announced include a rollback of Biden administration programs that supported higher wages for childcare workers and put a ceiling on childcare costs for low-income families.

The Administration for Children and Families in the federal Department of Health and Human Services said in a press release the revisions in administrative rules would “lower costs, expand access, and better serve families who rely on federally-funded child care programs.”

Two Wisconsin childcare advocates said the proposals seem unlikely to live up to those expectations.

“There’s nothing saying there’s going to be more money,” said Corrine Hendrickson, a former New Glarus home childcare provider. “They’re just allowing [states] to move the money around in different ways.”

Hendrickson, who is the cofounder of a childcare advocacy coalition that includes providers and parents, closed her childcare business in August because she said she would have been forced to increase rates more than her families were willing to pay. She is campaigning for the Democratic nomination for a state Senate seat.

Ruth Schmidt, executive director for the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association, said the proposals are reversing support for policies aimed at addressing longstanding childcare challenges.

“Instead of investing in making a robust system of care that can pay a living wage to people doing this work, the same as our public education system does,”  Schmidt said, the administration is “saying,  ‘let’s roll back the ways we’ve been funding this. Let’s make it harder to work, have your child in care and get subsidized for doing that.’”

The actions announced Monday affect the federal Child Care and Development Fund, which states use to cover the cost of subsidized childcare for low-income families, as well as the federal government’s funding for Head Start childcare and preschool programs. They include direct guidance to states as well as federal rulemaking. 

• A guidance memo encourages states to direct more funds from the federal government’s Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) to Child Care and Development Fund uses. It also states that states can use TANF money to “support needy married two-parent families in which one parent works and the other cares for a child at home.”
• A “Dear Colleague” letter highlights that under existing federal law, states are permitted to allow church childcare programs, other faith-based providers and family, friend and neighborhood caregivers to receive federal subsidies for children in their care.
• A final federal rule rescinds Biden administration policies that required states to pay providers in subsidized programs in advance for the month, limited low-income families’ copayments for subsidized care to 7% of their income, and allowed direct grants to providers
• A proposed federal rule rescinds Biden administration rules that tied wage and benefit requirements to Head Start grants.

The agency also sent governors a letter promoting the changes and calling the rescinded requirements “one-size fits all federal mandates that raise costs, limit supply, and crowd out providers.”

According to the First Five Years Fund, a nonprofit that advocates for strong federal support for quality childcare and early learning programs, 11% of children 5 or younger who are eligible receive subsidized childcare, and 35% of those eligible for the federal Head Start preschool program for low-income children are enrolled.

Hendrickson said with subsidized parents having to pay more out of pocket, some are more likely to forgo childcare and possibly leave the workforce.

“Just because you’re eligible doesn’t mean you can still afford to use the subsidy,” she said. “Unless the dollars go up significantly, this isn’t going to help any of these parents that are on a waitlist or aren’t able to access [care].”

Schmidt said the Biden administration changes guaranteed  providers would receive subsidy payments based on enrollment at the beginning of the month, which offers childcare operators greater stability. The final rule change would allow states to shift payments to the end of the month based on attendance.

She said she thought Wisconsin might not make that change, however, because the state has seen that paying ahead rather than after the fact “helps stabilize the workforce.”

With the advice to states to spend more of their TANF funds on childcare, however, “then what else is getting cut?” Schmidt asked.

Schmidt said that the changes won’t improve childcare quality and won’t help support a system that would encourage professional childcare educators to stay in the field.

The state, or the nation as a whole, could invest revenue “and have a really robust system of care, which is what states are all already working towards,” Schmidt said. “I think it’s just really unfortunate that we have a federal government that is wanting to go down a path of deregulation and loosening of standards.”

The publisher of the Cap Times said Thursday that the news organization’s management will voluntarily recognize the eight-member newsroom staff’s union. 

The employees formally announced their union campaign in a meeting with Publisher Paul Fanlund and other Cap Times managers a week ago. They have affiliated with the NewsGuild-CWA, which also represents employees at Wisconsin Watch and at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. 

“The Capital Times Co. has decided to voluntarily recognize the labor union being formed by Capital Times reporters and we hope to work towards an amicable outcome,” Fanlund said in a statement Thursday. “In the meantime, we will continue the excellent reporting and opinion journalism that the community has come to depend upon.”

The Capital Times newspaper was founded in 1917 by William T. Evjue and throughout its history has been known in Madison as a staunch voice for liberal and progressive values, including its support for labor unions.

Since 2008, what was once a daily evening newspaper has published online with a weekly print tabloid edition. While retaining its original name as a business entity, the newspaper adopted its longstanding nickname among readers as its moniker.

In making their case for a union, the employees primarily focused on the paper’s progressive heritage as well as their interest in greater involvement in its operation.

“I’m proud of all the work we put into forming a union,” said Erin Gretzinger, the K-12 reporter at the Cap Times. “Management’s decision to voluntarily recognize us aligns with the Cap Times’ longstanding values, and it is reflective of our value to the newsroom and the broader Madison community. I look forward to the next steps in this process and working collaboratively to ensure a strong future for our newsroom.”

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