A federal judge said that a 2013 Wisconsin law prevening people from collecting unemployment benefits if they are getting Social Security disability benefits violates federal laws protecting people with disabilities. (Getty Images)

Since 2013, a Wisconsin law has blocked workers who lose a job from collecting unemployment insurance if they also receive Social Security disability benefits.

A federal judge ruled in July 2024 that the exclusion violates federal law. Nine months later, however, the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development (DWD) continues to reject unemployment claims from laid-off workers who are also on disability.

The delay in implementing the judge’s ruling frustrates workers such as Judy Fintz of La Crosse. Fintz receives a monthly Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) payment of $1,400. By itself it’s not enough to live on, she says, but she’s able to work part-time at a college dining hall to help make ends meet.

When the dining hall is closed between semesters and during breaks, her income drops — but unlike other employees, she can’t file for unemployment insurance (UI) to tide her over during those periods.

“I work very hard on my job,” Fintz said in a telephone interview. “I shouldn’t have to have all this problem going on.”

The 2013 Wisconsin law that blocks SSDI recipients from collecting unemployment insurance passed the state Legislature with only Republican support and was signed into law by then-Gov. Scott Walker.

It was enacted to “prevent the payment of duplicative government benefits for the replacement of lost earnings or income, regardless of an individual’s ability to work,” in the words of the statute. A proposal in 2012 from the Walker administration claimed that most SSDI recipients didn’t work and therefore, if they collected unemployment pay, they were “double-dipping” and probably committing “fraud.”

The federal Social Security Administration program allows disability insurance recipients to work part-time if they are able to, however. The program  encourages them to do so under procedures structured to ensure they do not lose their disability payments or their medical coverage under Medicaid.

Victor Forberger, a Madison lawyer who represents people making unemployment insurance claims, says Wisconsin has thousands of SSDI recipients who also work part-time.

Forberger is one of a team of lawyers who sued DWD on behalf of eight plaintiffs in 2021, charging that the state ban on jobless pay for SSDI recipients violated federal laws that protect people with disabilities. Lawyers from Gingras, Thomsen & Wachs and Axley Brynelson were also part of the case.

On July 17, 2024, Judge William Conley ruled on summary judgment that the 2013 law violated two federal laws: the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act. In his decision Conley stated that while Wisconsin law didn’t intentionally discriminate against people with disabilities, it “applies only to individuals with disabilities, meaning that it necessarily has a disparate impact on those with disabilities.”

Conley’s ruling put off a remedy for the plaintiffs. The lawsuit was filed as a class action, and lawyers for the plaintiffs and DWD have conflicting views about who should be included in the class action as well what remedies are appropriate. A hearing is scheduled for later this year to decide what groups of people would qualify for a remedy and what the remedies should be.

Those questions relate to people who made claims in the past however — SSDI recipients whose UI claims were denied, or whose claims were initially accepted, then reversed, and who were required to repay their unemployment compensation.

DWD has not indicated any plans to appeal the judge’s summary judgment finding.

Since the July ruling, however, DWD has continued to reject UI claims from laid-off workers who are  also on SSDI, Forberger said — ignoring Conley’s conclusion that doing so violates federal law.

“There’s no logic that I’m aware of that would indicate why a disabled worker today filing for unemployment benefits should be denied unemployment benefits,” Forberger said.

In response to an inquiry from the Wisconsin Examiner, Lee Sensenbrenner, communications director for DWD, said in an email message, “Due to the ongoing litigation here, we won’t be able to comment.”

Judy Fintz is one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the SSDI restriction. She said she thought after the judge’s ruling was issued that she and other SSDI recipients would now qualify for unemployment benefits.

“If it’s discrimination — and that’s what the judge said — that’s what they should go on,” she said.

Forberger, who participated with Fintz in her telephone interview, pointed out that based on her work history and wage rate, Fintz would have a weekly unemployment insurance payment of $81.

“They’re refusing to pay her $81 a week under this eligibility ban,” he said. “Judy’s not getting rich off anything.”

Another plaintiff in the lawsuit, Cliff Neuman, combines his disability payment from SSDI with part-time work he is able to take on.

Until the beginning of this year, Neuman was working part time at a grocery store. One day, he said, the store stopped scheduling him for shifts. He said he never got an explanation why.

With Forberger’s help he filed unemployment insurance claims each week for the five or six weeks he was out of work before finding a new job as a restaurant dishwasher. “A couple of times we called and people refused to help him because they said he gets SSDI and is not eligible,” Forberger said.

One requirement for UI applicants is to regularly search for new work and to document those searches. Neuman followed through on that requirement, but his UI applications got mired in rejections and appeals.

An administrative law judge found in February that Neuman was eligible, a consequence of the Conley decision in July. After a DWD lawyer asked for reconsideration, however, the administrative law judge set aside his earlier finding.

DWD’s lawyer argued that the July federal court ruling is not final and that since Conley had not issued an injunction against following the 2013 law, Conley’s decision could not be used to overrule the decision to deny Neuman’s UI claim.

Forberger submitted a response arguing that where new claims are concerned, the Conley decision should be treated as final.

The administrative law judge responded by setting aside his own earlier ruling and asking both DWD and Forberger to address additional questions.

Neuman was disappointed by that outcome and his inability to collect UI despite the Conley ruling in July.

Getting jobless pay “shouldn’t matter if I had SSDI or not,” Neuman said. “Once you’re working you should get that.”

The denial of his claims is “not right and fair,” he said. “To me that’s picking on people that have disabilities.”

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE

Children at The Playing Field, a Madison child care center that participates in the federal Head Start program. (Courtesy of The Playing Field)

Federal payments to Wisconsin’s Head Start programs in the first three and a half months of 2025 are half what they were a year ago, exacerbating worries about the future of the program that provides child care and early education to low-income families.

The Office of Head Start’s payments to Wisconsin program operators from Jan. 1 through April 15 of this year were down by $35 million from the same period in 2024, Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin) said this week.

Nationwide, Head Start program operators have received $943 million less during that period this year compared with the period a year ago, according to Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington), who published a table of calculations comparing disbursements for every state in a press release. The table shows Wisconsin disbursements of $34.5 million as of April 15, compared with $69.5 million in the 2024 period.

Baldwin contrasted the potential impact with the pledge by the White House and the Republican majority in Congress to extend tax cuts enacted in 2017 during Trump’s first term.

“The idea that the president is actively working to give the biggest corporations and wealthiest Wall Street guys a new tax break while taking away preschool and child care from Wisconsinites is beyond the pale,” said Baldwin, vowing to fight actions of President Donald Trump she described as “defunding Head Start.”

The calculations in Murray’s table are based on Head Start disbursement data that Senate Democrats pulled from the Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) website at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

While most states in Murray’s table had lower disbursements compared with a year ago, Alabama, Delaware, New Jersey, Rhode Island and the District of Columbia all showed increases.

The calculations put the big-picture numbers on funding disruptions that Head Start providers have been experiencing in the last three months, said Jennie Mauer, executive director of the Wisconsin Head Start Association.

Those disruptions first surfaced after Trump took office, with delays of up to two weeks in late January and early February for Head Start programs seeking authorized payment for their expenses.

More recently, the disruptions have continued as providers who have submitted the required documents for payment have been confronted with unexpected demands for “more information” Mauer said Friday.

“The [federal] administration is really messing around, pulling out the foundational blocks of grant operation,” Mauer said.

In order to get approved for a grant, recipients must provide a detailed accounting of how it will be spent, she said. To get payment, providers must submit detailed documentation that the expense it covers has already been incurred. 

“This is a highly regulated system,” Mauer said. “There’s a very rigorous initial grant application process, and then on an ongoing basis grantees are demonstrating, ‘We told you what we’re going to spend the money on. Now based on what I told you, I’m asking for that money.’”

The disclosure of the drop in Head Start funding comes a week after a published report raised the possibility that Head Start will be zeroed out of the next federal budget.

It also comes as some providers wait for information about their upcoming grant replenishments, Mauer said.

Head Start grants are provided under multi-year contracts signed with providers. The money itself, however, does not come to providers in large lump sums but in smaller amounts paid upon the submission of documented expenses, Mauer said.

Every six months, an allotment from the provider’s grant is made available, she said. Those funds are not paid directly to the provider, however. The money is set aside for the provider to draw on after submitting expense documents through the federal online payment system.

Providers’ grant cycles start on the first of the month. In Wisconsin, providers whose grant cycle started Nov. 1 have now received confirmation of their next grant allotment for the six months starting May 1, Mauer said Friday.

But with the previous funding access problems and then the sudden closing three weeks ago of half of Head Start’s national offices, including the Chicago Region 5 office that served Wisconsin and five other states, providers were apprehensive.

“The level of uncertainty and chaos is so dramatic,” Mauer said — in contrast not only to the Biden administration, but also the previous Trump administration. Until this year, “these kinds of questions and uncertainties didn’t exist.”

Three providers whose grant cycle started Dec. 1 are waiting to learn whether their next allotment will become available starting June 1 as scheduled.

Mauer said the Senate Democrats’ calculations appear to be “showing the cumulative effect” of the access to HHS funding streams by the team working for DOGE, an agency directed by billionaire and Trump ally Elon Musk.

DOGE is the acronym for the Department of Government Efficiency, although the office is not a cabinet department, and many of its claims of government savings have been questioned.

The hold-up on information is having “a tremendous negative effect on our programs and it’s alarming,” Mauer said. “When we think of what are the impacts of Region 5 closing and that we continue to have very, very minimal and slow communication from the Office of Head Start — they need to start communicating with grantees in a much more substantive way.”

The Wisconsin Examiner contacted the federal Department of Health and Human Services using the HHS website for journalists’ inquiries and has not yet received a response. This report will be updated when a response is received.

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE

Mural depicting workers painted on windows of the Madison-Kipp Corp. by Goodman Community Center students and Madison-Kipp employees with Dane Arts Mural Arts. (Photo by Erik Gunn /Wisconsin Examiner)

The economic uncertainty that has sent the stock market and consumer confidence plummeting in the last month hasn’t yet affected employment in Wisconsin, according to the state’s chief economist.

Wisconsin’s job numbers reached another record high in March, and unemployment, although up slightly, is still close to an all-time low, the Department of Workforce Development (DWD) reported Thursday.

Uncertainty over the impact of tariffs imposed by the Trump administration has contributed to falling consumer confidence as well as business confidence, said Dennis Winters, DWD’s chief economist. So far that hasn’t affected the state’s job market, however, he said.

Based on a monthly federal survey of employers, DWD projected Wisconsin had 3.055 million nonfarm jobs in March — an increase of 10,000 from February and 15,000 from a year ago.

From a separate household survey, the department projected Wisconsin’s March unemployment rate at 3.2%. That’s even with February, but a slight increase from the 2.9% calculated for March of 2024.

The job growth was greatest in service industries, which added more than 21,000 jobs over the last 12 months.

Manufacturing jobs have fallen by 7,000 since March 2024 — all of that in durable goods. Winters said that reflects longstanding challenges in the sector more than specific recent developments. 

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE

Child care providers, parents and advocates arrive at the state Capitol Wednesday, April 16, 2025, for a rally in support of child care funding. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Hundreds of child care providers and parents rallied outside the state Capitol Wednesday, then headed inside to buttonhole lawmakers of both parties, urging support for a $480 million provision in the next state budget for Wisconsin’s child care providers.

“Child care is not a luxury, it’s not a nice-to-have,” said Claire Lindstrom, an Eau Claire parent who addressed the rally. “It is infrastructure.”

“We’re here today because the people who are doing this very important work can no longer afford to hold up a broken system,” said Toshiba Adams, an instructor and instructional chair in early childhood education at Milwaukee Area Technical College.

The rally and afternoon visit with legislators followed a morning gathering of the participants at the nearby Concourse Hotel that included talks by lawmakers, parents and providers. At noon 350 or more people — the largest action by child care advocates in recent memory — marched from the hotel to the rally, with chants of “Kids first, families first, invest in child care now.”

The crowd massed on the Capitol building’s west steps for a half hour of speeches.

Lindstrom broke down the average cost for child care. A single parent paid the minimum wage, $7.25 an hour, “would have to work 43 full-time weeks just to cover one year of infant care,” she said. A family making the median income in Wisconsin — about $75,000 a year — will probably spend 20% of their earnings on care for a single child.

“If they have two kids, an infant and a 4-year-old, they’re spending over a third of their income just to go to work,” Lindstrom said. “This is not a personal budgeting issue. That’s a broken system.”

Gov. Tony Evers has proposed $480 million in the state’s 2025-27 budget that would go to licensed child care providers, replenishing the state’s Child Care Counts program funded from federal pandemic relief. Without that, Child Care Counts will expire for good in June.

At its height between 2021 and 2023, Child Care Counts was credited with stabilizing Wisconsin’s providers, who shared in payments totaling $20 million a month. Providers reported that with the money they were able to raise wages for child care workers while holding down increases in the fees that parents paid.

“Our early childhood educators are trained in how to support brain development, emotional regulation, and school readiness,” Lindstrom said. “We expect them to do this important work and yet we pay them less than workers at Kwik Trip and Culver’s.”

Evers, a Democrat, was unable to persuade the Legislature’s Republican majority to extend the program in the state’s 2023-25 budget. He repurposed other federal funds, and the total payment was reduced to $10 million a month. That will run out in June.

Providers, advocates and early childhood education experts have argued that only with an ongoing investment like Child Care Counts can providers pay child care workers adequately without pricing care out of reach for the average family.

“We need child care for our communities to function,” Lindstrom said. “We can no longer afford to treat this like a personal problem. It’s a public domain. And the solution is clear. We need to fund child care.”

A survey report released April 10 found that up to 25% of Wisconsin providers said they might close without continued support along the lines of Child Care Counts. More than one-third said they might have to reduce the number of children then could serve for lack of staff.

Large majorities said they might have to cut pay and that they expect to have more difficulty recruiting workers. More than half said they expect some employees to quit and that providing high quality care would become more difficult.

“We will see dramatically less care available in virtually every single county in the state,” Ruth Schmidt, executive director of the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association, told the crowd. “Is that acceptable?”

“No!” the crowd roared back in reply.

“Is it acceptable that moms will have to consider leaving the workforce in record numbers because you cannot work if you cannot afford or find child care? Is it acceptable that stressed out parents doing the best they can will have no support from the state to ensure that they can work and contribute to our tax base?”

With each question the rallygoers responded with resounding shouts of “No!”

Sachin Shivaram, CEO of Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry in Manitowoc, told the crowd that businesses should support state funding for child care.

His company pays employees with young children $400 a month toward their child care costs, he said. When the crowd applauded, he thanked them, then added, “but I also feel very embarrassed. … That’s so little, and the cost of child care is, you know, several thousand dollars a month, and this is just barely scratching the surface.”

Shivaram pointed out the state manufacturing tax credit that his company receives, along with all Wisconsin manufacturers.

“And guess what? We have to do absolutely nothing to get that tax credit,” he said. “We don’t have to invest in any capital equipment, we don’t have to train any workers, we don’t have to give back to the community, nothing. You know, how about we make that tax credit contingent on helping the child care situation?”

In an interview after the legislative visits Schmidt of WECA said the hundreds who took part went to almost every state Senate office and about 90% of the Assembly members’ offices as well. WECA organized the event along with Wisconsin Head Start Association and Raising Wisconsin — an advocacy campaign that WECA and allied groups launched in 2022.

“We really wanted this to be nonpartisan,” Schmidt said — “just an opportunity to tell stories and share, from a real perspective, from the heart what’s going on with this industry.”

Some of those conversations — with leaders in the Legislature who advocates have already spoken to about the budget request — were “not necessarily a surprise,” she acknowledged.  

With other lawmakers, she added, including some of the 30 first-term Assembly members elected in November as well as others who have not served on committees where child care has been an agenda item, “there was a lot of interest in just learning,”

The visits were an opportunity for personal testimony to reach lawmakers and their staff, Schmidt said. “The power of having parents tell their stories, and the power of having educators tell their stories about how they’ve been using the public funding when it’s available — it was very compelling.”

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE

Democratic U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan speaks with reporters Wednesday in his Madison office. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

House Democrats think their most likely strategy to prevent major cuts to Medicaid or other popular federal programs in the current budget reconciliation process will be to win over a few House Republicans.

“We just need three Republicans, basically nationwide, to say no to something,” said U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Black Earth) at a Q-and-A session with reporters Wednesday in his Madison office.

The Republican majorities in both houses of Congress are using the complicated budget reconciliation process to pass a spending plan that will allow them to extend tax cuts enacted in 2017 during President Donald Trump’s first term.

As part of that, House Republicans passed a blueprint calling for $880 billion in cuts to programs overseen by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Medicaid represents the largest expense item in the committee’s purview, and analysts have said Congress could only hit that target by making Medicaid cuts.

Pocan said estimates of the cost of preserving the tax cuts have risen in Washington, from $4.5 trillion in the original House proposal to “more like $7 trillion in tax cuts” in the current proposal combined from House and Senate alternatives.

The objective for House Democrats currently is to make cuts to Medicaid harder for GOP members to go along with, Pocan said. In Wisconsin, about 1.3 million residents are enrolled in Medicaid, including one third of the children in the state and 55% of seniors in nursing homes.

“You know, the more they hear that, at some point they may listen,” Pocan said of Republican members who won swing districts by narrow margins — and, he argues, they could push back against those sorts of cuts.

“I don’t expect them to maybe say it publicly and maybe to hold a town hall and say it, but if they say it privately in their caucus, that’s good enough, as long as three people won’t support something,” Pocan said. “That’s enough to kill something, right? So that’s kind of my goal is to keep facilitating that.”

The focus, though, is not on stopping the tax cuts, but stopping the cuts to Medicaid, SNAP and other federal programs.

“If we could stop that, and we could stop, maybe, some of the education cuts that might otherwise come … funds for low-income [districts], funds for special ed, I think they’re still going to move forward with their tax cut bill,” Pocan said.

He speculated that under those circumstances, the GOP majority would pay for the tax cut with a deficit increase. 

“Is that a good answer? No,” Pocan said. “But is it better than seeing people lose their health care right now or their food assistance through Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program? Yeah. So you know my job is to wake up in the morning and get excited about bad choices rather than the worst choices.”

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE

Sandra Lomeli testifies at a public hearing April 10, 2025, against a bill imposing new restrictions on the process for confirming eligibility for Medicaid. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)

Legislation that would add new restrictions to the process of qualifying for Medicaid is on hold in the Wisconsin Capitol after meeting with resounding opposition at an Assembly hearing less than a week ago.

At a meeting Tuesday to vote on two other bills, State Rep. Dan Knodl (R-Germantown) told the Assembly Committee on Public Benefit Reform that he chairs that the Medicaid measure “has some work to be done yet.”

The bill’s author, Rep. William Penterman (R-Columbus), told the Wisconsin Examiner in an email message Tuesday that the legislation “is still in the Assembly Committee on Public Benefit Reform. The conversation on how to improve the bill is ongoing.”

An opponent of the measure, however, suggested that opposition testimony had prevailed in keeping it from moving forward.

“I think you all realized how terrible and harmful that legislation was,” said committee member Rep. Ryan Clancy (D-Milwaukee), directing his comment at his four Republican colleagues. “We heard two and a half hours of testimony overwhelmingly against that [bill].”

Clancy spoke before voting against two other bills that the committee passed 4-2 along party lines — one making sweeping revisions to Wisconsin’s unemployment insurance (UI) system, and the other barring local governments from instituting guaranteed basic income programs using tax dollars. 

Recipients marshal opposition to Medicaid measure

Medicaid covers acute and long-term medical care for low-income people as well as people with disabilities. It’s funded jointly with federal and state money and managed by the state under federal rules and guidelines.

With some exceptions, recipients must have incomes at or below the federal poverty guideline. Most Medicaid recipients must be reviewed once a year to confirm they are still eligible for the program.

AB 163 would direct the Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS) to conduct eligibility reviews every six months.

It also would add restrictions on the verification process — forbidding the state from automatically renewing Medicaid beneficiaries, forbidding the state from automatically filling in electronic forms with the recipient’s information except for their name and address, and cutting off a person’s ability to enroll in Medicaid for six months for failing to report a change that might make them ineligible.

Penterman, the only witness who testified at the bill’s April 10 public hearing, highlighted the statistic that 20% of Wisconsin residents are on Medicaid. 

He described the legislation as an effort to “reassess and restore integrity to the system by ensuring that only those who are truly needy and truly qualified for this coverage receive benefits.”

But the recurring message from a stream of hearing witnesses — the vast majority of them people with disabilities who rely on Medicaid for long-term health care in their homes or in the community or their family caregivers — was that the current eligibility requirements are already burdensome, and strict enough to keep out people who aren’t eligible.

“We heard from so many people who do a tremendous amount of work to prove to the state that they have low enough income, low enough assets, that they are who they say they are, that they meet the functional screen and all of the other requirements that the department has [for them] to be able to get in or stay in the program,” said Tamara Jackson, legislative policy representative for the Wisconsin Board of People with Developmental Disabilities, in an interview Tuesday.

The hearing came just two days after the bill was introduced April 8. Its fast track prompted an overnight opposition campaign by Medicaid recipients.

“We heard from people across the state who had said that they had contacted their state lawmakers about this particular bill and had really used it as an opportunity to tell them what they do to be allowed in the Medicaid program,” Jackson said.

Federal Medicaid debate draws attention

Recent Congressional action on federal legislation to extend tax cuts enacted in 2017 has included spending targets that would appear to make Medicaid reductions inevitable. Medicaid recipients have been following those debates and making public appeals to oppose cuts in the program — priming them to oppose the state proposal as well.

“I think that people are paying attention, and the reason there were so many contacts is because Medicaid is so important to folks and they’re willing to show up and talk about it,” Jackson said.

At the very start of the April 10 hearing, Penterman alluded to communications he had already received from advocates and said he planned an amendment to exempt people with developmental disabilities from some of the bill’s restrictions. He introduced the amendment later that day.

Several witnesses, however, criticized limiting the amendment to people with developmental disabilities, arguing that the bill’s requirements would be needlessly onerous for many other people.

Sandra Lomeli of Pewaukee was one of the hearing witnesses against the Medicaid bill. She is the mother of two adult children with severe disabilities who are able to get long-term care through Medicaid. One requires 24-hour care as a sexual assault survivor, she said.

Lomeli is also covered by BadgerCare Plus, the Wisconsin Medicaid plan for primary and specialty health care and hospitalization, because being her children’s family caregiver limits her working hours to a part-time nonprofit position.

She told the committee that she fills both sides of a ream’s worth of forms each year to confirm her children’s Medicaid eligibility. She said she spends 54 hours completing those forms and 10 hours confirming her own eligibility each year.

In her testimony Lomeli challenged lawmakers to enlist Medicaid participants and advocates if they wanted to write legislation to improve the program.

It appeared to Lomeli that her suggestion “took people by surprise that we would even be at the table,” she said in an interview Tuesday. “I don’t think they valued that we could add value — because if they did, somebody would have reached out.”

She said she doesn’t consider the legislation dead, however, which concerns her.

“The issue is not off the table yet,” Lomeli said. “They’re just going to reword it. We have won the battle now. We haven’t won the war.

UI change, basic-income ban, both pass on party lines

While setting the Medicaid bill aside Tuesday, the Committee on Public Benefit Reform advanced two others with only Republican votes.

AB 164 would rename Wisconsin’s unemployment insurance system as a “re-employment assistance” program with new requirements for workers and for the state agency that administers it.

Those include requiring recipients, who must currently make four work searches a week, to make two of those in the form of direct contacts with prospective employers. It also adds a variety of additional counseling procedures and requirements for people who receive unemployment benefits.

Department of Workforce Development Secretary-designee Amy Pechacek submitted written testimony expressing “concerns about this proposal due to the anticipated reporting burden for employers, potential costs, bureaucratic requirements, and lack of sustainable funding.”

Gov. Tony Evers vetoed similar legislation in 2023, citing similar complaints as well as the fact that it did not go through the state’s joint labor-management unemployment advisory council.

AB 165 would bar local governments from using tax dollars to create guaranteed income programs without a work or training requirement. Evers vetoed a similar bill to that one in 2023 as well, on the grounds it usurped local control. 

Rep. Christian Phelps (D-Eau Claire) made the same argument against the current legislation.

Knodl defended the both bills as helping to “protect the integrity of these systems, and that’s important if we want them to be sustainable in the future.”

Clancy argued that both should have been put on pause along with the Medicaid bill.

“But all three of those . . . bills are fundamentally the same,” Clancy said. “They are kicking people when they are down. They are hitting people at their most vulnerable, and frankly, in 2025, when national and state Republican policies have meant that people have more needs. We should not be attacking those social safety nets.”

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE

Children outside with a child care teacher at The Playing Field, a Madison child care center that participates in the federal Head Start program. (Courtesy of The Playing Field)

A news report that the Trump administration is considering ending the federal government’s Head Start program has alarmed providers and parents who rely on the child care and early education program.

“It would be absolutely devastating,” said Jen Bailey, executive director of Reach Dane, which operates 14 Head Start centers in Dane and Green counties. “The children and families we work with are some of the most vulnerable folks in our communities. The parents in those communities rely on the care we provide to stay employed.”

USA Today reported Friday that the Trump administration “is considering a budget proposal that would zero out funding for Head Start.” The news report quoted an anonymous administration official who said the White House funding blueprint for the 2026 fiscal year doesn’t allocate money for Head Start.

The president’s budget is a wish list, and Congress decides how to appropriate federal funds. An Office of Management and Budget spokesperson told USA Today that “no final funding decisions have been made.”

Project 2025, the agenda drafted by Russell Vought prior to his confirmation as OMB director, calls for eliminating Head Start.

Responding to the report Monday, Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) tied the proposal to President Donald Trump’s goal of extending the 2017 tax cuts enacted in his first term.

“Shutting down Head Start — taking care away from kids, firing teachers, and making child care even more expensive for parents — all so President Trump can hand out new tax breaks for the wealthy and well-connected is flat out wrong and you can be sure I will fight this proposal at every turn,” Baldwin said.

Head Start was founded in 1966, part of the War on Poverty undertaken by President Lyndon Johnson. It provides child care and preschool for families with incomes up to the federal poverty guideline. Children living in foster homes are also eligible for Head Start.

In Wisconsin more than 15,000 children are enrolled in more than 300 Head Start child care centers across the state, according to the Wisconsin Head Start Association. With more than 4,300 employees, Head Start ranks in the top 100 employers in Wisconsin, said Jennie Mauer, the association’s executive director.

“At least 70% of our families have a parent who is either working or in school full time,” Mauer said Monday. The remaining families include grandparents who are retired but full-time caregivers for their grandchildren as well as families unable to work due to disabilities or who “are working through some very, very significant challenges.”

She predicted that the impact from ending the program wouldn’t stop with the families who rely on Head Start.

“If Head Start isn’t there, if this program were to shut down, surely there’ll be tremendous cascading economic impacts in our communities,”  Mauer said. “I think for most of the families, it would create a huge labor disruption. With no safe place to have your kids while you’re at work, it’ll create a disaster.

Child care already a crisis

Fears for the survival of Head Start are escalating as the state’s overall child care sector is increasingly under strain. As many as 25% of child care centers in a survey released April 10 said they could close without continuing support in the next state budget.

April Mullins-Datko is Head Start director for ADVOCAP, a social service agency serving Fond du Lac, Winnebago and Green Lake counties. She said that the agency’s four Head Start centers would likely not survive the loss of federal support.

“We would lose services for the 202 children we serve,” Mullins-Datko said. “It would exacerbate the child care crisis we have in our communities, which then has negative impacts on our available workforce.”

ADVOCAP’s centers include three in Fond du Lac County and one in Green Lake County, with 193 families relying on the program for the care and early education of their children.

“Ninety-three percent of my families are working or going to school full time,” Mullins-Datko said.

The agency’s Head Start federal contract is supposed to be good through Dec. 31, 2028, Mullins-Datko said, but with reports of defunding she fears that won’t be honored: “There just doesn’t seem to be any kind of adherence to law and contracts.”

Western Dairyland Economic Opportunity Council provides social services in Buffalo, Jackson, Trempealeau and Eau Claire counties in West Central Wisconsin. The agency’s programs include nine Head Start centers enrolling 442 children. Of those, 382 children are in preschool and 60 are in Early Head Start, for children from birth to age 3, said Thanh Bui-Duquette, Western Dairyland’s Head Start director.

Three centers are in cities — two in Eau Claire and one in Altoona — but the rest are in rural communities.

“We meet the needs of each individual community,” Bui-Duquette said. “The needs of the urban Eau Claire area look very different from rural Trempealeau County.”

Even with jobs, 96% of the families with children in Western Dairyland’s program have incomes below the federal poverty guideline. For children from those families, she said, Head Start has been demonstrated to improve long-term outcomes — increasing the chances of graduating from high school and going on to higher education, and reducing the chances of ending up in the criminal justice system.

“It’s important to have that solid foundation early on, especially for children from disadvantaged families,” Bui-Duquette said.

Payments delayed, offices closed

The news that Head Start is in the crosshairs of budget-writers in the Trump administration follows other jolts to the program in the last two months.

In late January and early February, Head Start operators reported widespread problems in their efforts to collect standard payments from the federal government. Under Head Start contracts, programs incur an expense then submit documentation through a federal online portal to get reimbursed. Head Start programs reported that payments stalled, for nearly two weeks in some cases, without explanation.

Payments have since resumed, but Mauer said directors are reporting demands for more information holding up payments.

“They’re getting substantial delays for things that are accepted expenses, which is concerning,” she said.

On April 1, Head Start operators learned that the program’s five regional offices across the country were closed without any advance notice, including the Chicago office that serves Wisconsin and five other states in the Upper Midwest.

Those events and the report that the program could be defunded have rattled Head Start employees and the parents who have counted on the program, operators say.

“Families and staff are both really scared and concerned,” said Bailey, the Reach Dane director. “Families are reaching out, worried the program is going to close, asking, ‘Is my child still going to be able to go to school?’”

Reach Dane’s human resources staff has been interviewing applicants for teaching jobs in the coming school year, and applicants are nervous about whether the job will exist, she added.

Bailey said the program is trying to be transparent with employees and families about the uncertainty and fight for the program’s survival, all without sparking panic.

“Trying to figure out how to navigate and inform folks when there’s no communication is a hard place to be,” she said.

This report has been updated.

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE

In a new survey of Wisconsin child care providers, 25% said they could close without renewed state support. Corrine Hendrickson, shown here at a 2023 event to support the child care sector, said her New Glarus family care will likely have to raise fees. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

One in four Wisconsin child care providers could close their doors if the state’s ongoing support isn’t replaced after it ends in June, according to a state-commissioned report released Thursday.

More than one in three providers expect to reduce their capacity for children or the hours they operate, or both, according to the report, based on a survey of most of the state’s licensed child care providers.

The report was commissioned by the state Department of Children and Families (DCF) and produced by the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

It was released by the office of Gov. Tony Evers to support $480 million for child care providers in his 2025-27 proposed budget — a successor to the state’s Child Care Counts program that was funded with federal pandemic relief money. 

“It underscores what those of us in the field have known for a long time — that is, the need for public investment in order to stave off closures and rate increases,” said Ruth Schmidt, executive director of the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association.

The association supports Evers’ $480 million budget proposal and is holding an advocacy day at the state Capitol on April 16, with plans to meet lawmakers.

In a statement announcing the survey findings, Evers underscored his proposal.

“The cost of child care is too darn high, wait lists are too long, and providers are already struggling to keep the lights on, their doors open, and meet demand for child care across our state,” Evers said.

“The results of this survey are crystal clear: if we don’t make needed investments to support our child care providers and industry, programs will close, wait lists will get even longer, providers will be forced to raise prices, and parents and loved ones who can’t afford for [their] costs to get any higher may have to leave our workforce.”

Child Care Counts has provided monthly payments to state child care providers since 2021. From November 2021 to January 2024, it was funded from Wisconsin’s share of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), the federal pandemic relief legislation enacted in 2021. The program paid out more than $479 million to providers. After that money ran out, Evers directed another $170 million additional pandemic relief funds to carry the program through June 2025.

Child Care Counts paid out $20 million a month until mid-2023, when it was cut to $10 million a month, with providers getting half of what they had previously received.

The Republican majority in the state Legislature rejected Evers’ proposal to put up to $360 million in the 2023-25 budget to continue the subsidy program at its earlier monthly amount.

Providers have credited the Child Care Counts program with making it possible for them to increase pay for child care workers in the face of competition from other employers without being forced to raise the fees they charge parents.  

About 80% of the state’s more than 4,500 child care providers received and took part in the survey, which was included in providers’ November application for Child Care Counts payments.

The survey included questions about providers’ experiences before and after the Child Care Counts reduction. It also asked about their expectations after the program ends in June, as well as the potential impact of a continued program.

Two-thirds of providers surveyed reported that after the payments were reduced, they raised fees.

Responding to questions about the impact of state support ending in June, 25% or more of providers in the survey said they would be somewhat or more likely to close. Fully 10% of providers said closing their program “was very or extremely likely,” the report found.

“That’s an incredibly concerning statistic,” said Schmidt. “That’s a lot of child care programs that could be pulling up stakes. It’s going to hit rural communities super hard, but across the state we’re going to see significant closures.”

More than one-third of providers — 37% — said they were “at least somewhat likely” to close some of their classrooms or reduce the number of children they serve. Almost that many, 36%, said they were likely to reduce the number of hours they provide care.

By 59%, providers also expect their waiting lists to grow without continued state support.

Providers also expect to have a harder time hiring and keeping employees, with 66% saying that it was “at least somewhat likely” they will have to cut compensation, including their own. Fully half of providers “said this was very or extremely likely,” the report states.

More than half of providers — 56% — said it was at least somewhat likely that more employees would quit, and 46% said staff cuts were somewhat or more likely.

Of providers in the survey, 69% said “that it was at least somewhat likely” they would have a harder time hiring qualified employees.

About half of providers surveyed — 51% — said they thought it would be “at least somewhat likely” that they would find it harder to provide high quality care.

Between one-fourth and nearly half of providers said they expected to have more trouble being able to meet some parents’ specific needs. Those include providing care earlier or later in the day, serving families in the state’s Wisconsin Shares subsidy child care program for low-income families, caring for infants and toddlers or caring for children with special needs.

“With families already struggling to afford child care, respondents repeatedly described how continued funding — whether at the original or at current levels—would help prevent further tuition rate increases,” the survey report notes. Some providers said it would allow them to hold rates at their current level or reduce them, while others said it would keep the rate of tuition increases down.

Corrine Hendrickson, a New Glarus child care provider and organizer of an advocacy group for providers and families, Wisconsin Early Childhood Action Needed (WECAN), said the survey points out “the disastrous results for children and families after the initial [Child Care Counts] funding wasn’t replaced in the state budget.”

Rural areas, where families are younger and have lower incomes, may be hit the most dramatically if the child care sector contracts, Hendrickson said.

Hendrickson said she is likely to have to raise the rates she charges for her family child care center, which has a capacity of eight children. A $30 increase “will put me out of reach for too many families,” Hendrickson said. “If I lose two children and can’t replace them within a month or two, I will have to close.”

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE

Chad Sobieck testifies in opposition to a bill introduced in the Wisconsin Assembly that would place new limitations on the process to establish if a person is eligible for Medicaid. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)

State legislation that would require the Wisconsin health department to verify that all Medicaid recipients are eligible twice a year was met with resounding opposition at a public hearing Thursday.

The bill, AB 163, also would add restrictions on the verification process. With a few differences, the legislation echoed a bill that failed to pass two years ago.

Only one witness testified in favor of the measure: its Assembly author, state Rep. William Penterman (R-Columbus).  

“It will create a balance, an important balance, in preserving a strong safety net for our most vulnerable residents while curbing inappropriate long-term reliance on public assistance,” Penterman said.

The legislation would prohibit the Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS) from renewing Medicaid recipients automatically and require DHS to reconsider a person’s eligibility every six months instead of annually, the federal standard.

It would cut off eligibility for six months for Medicaid recipients who don’t report a change, such as higher income, that would make them ineligible for the program. It also prescribes additional requirements for checking databases of other agencies to confirm information about a Medicaid recipient’s qualifications.

Over the course of a 2-1/2-hour hearing, witnesses said the bill would impose significant administrative burdens on Medicaid recipients and likely lead some to be kicked off the rolls, not because they were not eligible but because of mistakes, whether made by the recipient in the process of trying to requalify or by state officials processing their paperwork.

“Its reason seems to be purposely causing difficulty for people whose lives are already a monumental struggle in an attempt to make it too difficult for them to access the services they are entitled to,” said Karel Oliveras, who has two grandchildren with Angelman syndrome, a genetic disorder that causes developmental delays and other problems.

Referring to Oliveras’ comments about the process of establishing eligibility for the program, Rep. Ryan Clancy (D-Milwaukee) asked, “Would you characterize it as too easy?”

“It’s my daughter and her husband who do that,” Oliveras said. “But the stress of that [on them] was very, very obvious.”

Both Clancy and Rep. Christian Phelps (D-Eau Claire), the committee’s two Democrats, were skeptical about the idea that there were people in Wisconsin who were on Medicaid but didn’t qualify.

In response to lawmakers who had implied that Wisconsin’s Medicaid enrollment — about 20% of the state population — was excessive, Tamara Jackson, the legislative policy representative for the Wisconsin Board for People with Developmental Disabilities, said the percentage is similar in most states.   

According to Jackson, Wisconsin’s Medicaid staff already monitors people’s eligibility rigorously. “They are really checking every application and every renewal to make sure that people meet the income, asset, and other eligibility requirements,” she said.  

Chad Sobieck, who uses a wheelchair, said he has been on Medicaid for his entire life and it has enabled him to live in the community with the help of caregivers covered by the program. When completing paperwork, he has to enlist the help of others because he cannot write due to his physical disability, he said. 

A provision in the bill banning DHS from prepopulating forms for the renewal applicant would make that even more difficult.

If he has to qualify every six months and there’s an error that kicks him off  Medicaid for six months, “that would mean that I don’t have caregivers,” Sobiek said. “If there is a gap in those services, I will not be able to remain independent and it will become a safety and health issue for me.”

Almost all the opposition testimony focused on people with disabilities. Several Wisconsin Medicaid programs enable people with disabilities to live at home or in the community, rather than in an institution, with the program covering their needs for health care and home and personal care that they cannot manage on their own.

Wisconsin patients, families are wary as Congress prepares for Medicaid surgery

Penterman said that after “conversation and collaborating with the stakeholders” he was planning to offer an amendment that would exempt people with developmental disabilities from the legislation.

Critics of the bill, however — including those speaking on behalf of people with developmental disabilities — were largely skeptical about that announcement.

“I am a little offended about the fact that the amendment offered only covers the developmentally disabled,” said Jason Glozier, executive director of the Wisconsin Coalition of Independent Living Centers, arguing that the proposal’s limits would be onerous for people with physical disabilities, too.

“To say that doubling the administrative burden would decrease waste or decrease fraud doesn’t seem to make sense when we have a system that is overburdened and unable to meet its need effectively,” Glozier said.

“Why should somebody who’s been disabled from birth, who’s been paralyzed or acquired a disability, have to consistently re-insist that they have a disability?” he added. “It’s not going to get better.”

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE

Some of the 40 residents of New London who came out Wednesday morning to support migrants, many of whom work at Tyson Foods across the street from where they held a rally. (Photo by Jason Kerzinkski for the Wisconsin Examiner)

In 2023 a group of Haitian immigrants began arriving in the central Wisconsin community of New London.

The Haitians were admitted to the U.S. through a humanitarian parole program in response to lawlessness and deadly violence in their homeland. The newcomers became part of the community, said immigration attorney Marc Chistopher, a New London resident whose law offices are in Appleton and Milwaukee.

“Their children go to school with our children,” Christopher told the Wisconsin Examiner Wednesday morning. “They worship in the same churches. They eat at the same restaurants. They join the same civic organizations. They’re in the gyms. They’re our friends, more importantly, and they’re our co-workers. So they’re a part of our community and part of our fabric and we welcome them.”

The legal refugee program through which they were admitted includes a work authorization. More than 100 of the new immigrants  ended up working at a Tyson Foods plant in New London, processing and packaging chicken. Others went to work at stores in the community or in other jobs.

In late March, however, the Trump administration told more than a half-million people from Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela that they were no longer welcome. The order from the Department of Homeland Security, terminating humanitarian parole for about 532,000 refugees from the four nations, is one of a flurry of orders targeting millions of immigrants in the U.S. since President Donald Trump took office.

Haitians in New London were among those covered by the March 25 order. They were notified through an online account assigned to every  humanitarian parole refugee, Christopher said.

 “Your parole will terminate upon the earlier of (1) your original parole expiration date or (2) April 24, 2025,” states a Homeland Security message to one of Christopher’s clients, shared with the Wisconsin Examiner. “You should depart the United States now, but no later than the date of the termination of your parole. Failure to timely depart may have adverse immigration consequences.”

Since the notices arrived, Christopher has been scrambling, trying to help a handful of people who hope they might qualify to stay in the U.S. Other New London residents have been organizing on behalf of their new Haitian neighbors. 

On Wednesday morning Christopher and his wife, Eloise DeLeon, also an immigration attorney,  joined about 40 residents of New London gathered across the street from the local Tyson plant, carrying signs advertising their support for the Haitian workers there and hoping to send a message to the community.

“The message is intended for everyone,” said one participant, Sue Krejcarek. “There are people who maybe were Republicans, voted Republican, but don’t agree with this. It’s OK to protest against things you don’t agree with, whether you voted Republican, Democrat. When something is wrong, you stand up for it.”

Emily Tseffos helped organize  the demonstration along with a group of New London activists.

“These folks have established life here because they were expecting to be able to stay here,” Tseffos said. “They came here through legal means. And they are working and paying taxes and they are going to schools and they are dreaming of starting businesses.”

School officials have been working closely with the Haitian families, Tseffos said, and teachers who have the children of Haitian parents in their  classrooms participated in the Wednesday morning rally. Community volunteers have been offering financial help with bills and groceries as the immigrant families grapple with the sudden command to go or face deportation.

“They were not planning on having 30 days notice to leave,” Tseffos said. “And so it’s really sad to see that these folks that are doing everything right and everything they’re supposed to be doing are now facing deportation in a couple weeks here.”

In addition to the notification from the federal government, Tyson plant employees who were permitted to work under the humanitarian parole program have received letters from the company telling them that their employment authorization will expire April 23 — the day before their deadline to leave the U.S.

Christopher said that he has sought to put together applications for a small number of people for whom he could make a case for asylum.

“An asylum claim is one of the more difficult and time-consuming things I do as an attorney,” he said. Asylum claims are decided on a case-by-case basis and require extensive factual details. Claims perceived as frivolous can meet with severe penalties.

An asylum applicant cannot get a work authorization for six months, however, Christopher said. That means even if the application is granted, “if they lose their work on April 24, those families have no means for supporting themselves,” he said.

Both DeLeon and Christopher are former prosecutors, and DeLeon is a former municipal judge. “So I understand the rule of law, following rules, right?” DeLeon said. “But this [following rules] is what our clients did.”

Christopher remains outraged at the way his neighbors’ lives have been overturned. “They’ve been promised they could stay here,” he said. “They came through legally, and they’ve been vetted.”

To be suddenly ejected “is not good for them,” Christopher said. “And it’s not good for our community, either.”

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE

State Rep. Jerry O'Connor gives testimony in favor of a bill that would require state agencies to report on various metrics for training and workforce development programs they supervise. (Screenshot/WisEye)

Republicans in the state Legislature are taking another run at changes to unemployment insurance and workforce programs in Wisconsin that Gov. Tony Evers vetoed in August 2023.

While sponsors of the bills cited a couple of modifications in some measures, they are for the most part unchanged, they said during public hearings Wednesday for four bills in the Assembly’s labor committee.

One, AB 162, would require state agencies to compile a series of metrics on training and workforce development programs under their supervision, including the unemployment rates and median earnings of participants six months after they graduate from a program.

“We want to make certain our money’s being spent in a way that generates a positive beneficial return both for taxpayers and for the individuals participating in the programs,” said state Rep. Jerry O’Connor (R-Fond du Lac), testifying in favor of the bill. “We’d look at the percent of individuals enrolled in training programs who obtained a measurable skill gain.”

O’Connor said the bill draws its performance measures from the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), a federal workforce training law updated in 2014.

In vetoing the version of the bill that passed the last session of the Legislature, Evers said that many state programs it covered didn’t fit with WIOA’s reporting structure and “have separate requirements under current state law.”

Three other bills would impose tighter restrictions on the unemployment insurance (UI) system.

AB 167 would expand the definition of employee misconduct that would be grounds for denying an unemployment insurance claim as well as for a worker’s compensation claim. The bill would also require DWD to conduct random audits of 50% of all work searches reported by people claiming UI.

AB 168 would extend the statute of limitations for prosecuting felony fraudulent UI claims to eight years. It would also require the state Department of Workforce Development (DWD) to produce more training materials for employers and UI claimants, operate a call center and expand its hours in times of higher volume, check various state and national databases to verify that UI applicants qualify, and implement “identity-proofing” measures.

AB 169 would penalize UI recipients who do not show up for a job interview they have been granted or a job they’ve been offered — “commonly referred to as ghosting,” said state Rep. Dan Knodl (R-Germantown), the bill’s author.

A UI recipient who fails to respond to an interview request or job offer, fails to report for a scheduled job interview or who is not available to return to work at their previous job would lose unemployment benefits for the week in which that occurred. The bill does not impose the penalty for the first offense.

State Rep. Joan Fitzgerald (D-Fort Atkinson) asked Knodl whether the bill had gone through the state’s Unemployment Insurance Advisory Council. The joint labor-management body revises the state’s UI law every two years. In the past Evers has vetoed UI proposals for not going through the council. 

“This is one of those that they’re not going to visit,” Knodl said. “So that’s why we’re here as a stand-alone bill.”

Nobody testified against the bills Wednesday, but Victor Forberger, a Madison attorney who represents people with UI claims, sent the committee a four-page memo opposing them. He wrote that DWD already does most of what AB 168 would require, and that it would “hamstring” the department “when new practices and resources emerge.”

The measures “will do nothing to make unemployment more useful and efficient for Wisconsin workers and employers,” Forberger wrote.

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE

A sign at an SEIU Wisconsin rally for nurses in contract talks at UnityPoint Health-Meriter hospital. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)

Union nurses at UnityPoint Health-Meriter hospital in Madison rallied Tuesday, warning that they would strike if they can’t reach a satisfactory labor agreement in their current contract talks.

The rally was held in advance of a bargaining session scheduled for Wednesday between the hospital and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which represents about 800 nurses at the hospital.

The nurses are currently working without a contract after their previous agreement expired March 16 and was extended to March 23.

The union is highlighting its demands for written language addressing safety issues, said Pat Raes, SEIU Wisconsin president and a nurse for 35 years at Meriter.

“We are fighting for the safety of every last person there. And part of that in today’s society when rules are being turned upside down, inside out, and backwards, means that we have to find ways to make sure that our safety is codified,” Raes said at the Tuesday afternoon rally. “And one of those ways to do that is with having a contract that talks about safety.”

Sherry Casali, chief nursing executive and vice president of patient care at the hospital, said in a statement Tuesday that the hospital management is “committed to working with SEIU WI to address their concerns through a fair contract that both parties can support.”

The statement said the hospital has implemented a number of safety and security measures and has competitive salaries for nurses.

 Raes said the hospital has safety plans, but that nurses want those plans to go farther, including being enshrined in the labor agreement. She said the union wants to see guaranteed staffing ratios in the name of patient safety as well.

“We are preparing if needed to move forward to a strike,” Raes said. “These nurses are ready to strike. Let me tell you — they are not afraid. But we do not want to strike if we don’t have to.”

To date, the union has not issued a formal strike notice.

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE

A federal judge said that a 2013 Wisconsin law prevening people from collecting unemployment benefits if they are getting Social Security disability benefits violates federal laws protecting people with disabilities. (Getty Images)

Since 2013, a Wisconsin law has blocked workers who lose a job from collecting unemployment insurance if they also receive Social Security disability benefits.

A federal judge ruled in July 2024 that the exclusion violates federal law. Nine months later, however, the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development (DWD) continues to reject unemployment claims from laid-off workers who are also on disability.

The delay in implementing the judge’s ruling frustrates workers such as Judy Fintz of La Crosse. Fintz receives a monthly Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) payment of $1,400. By itself it’s not enough to live on, she says, but she’s able to work part-time at a college dining hall to help make ends meet.

When the dining hall is closed between semesters and during breaks, her income drops — but unlike other employees, she can’t file for unemployment insurance (UI) to tide her over during those periods.

“I work very hard on my job,” Fintz said in a telephone interview. “I shouldn’t have to have all this problem going on.”

The 2013 Wisconsin law that blocks SSDI recipients from collecting unemployment insurance passed the state Legislature with only Republican support and was signed into law by then-Gov. Scott Walker.

It was enacted to “prevent the payment of duplicative government benefits for the replacement of lost earnings or income, regardless of an individual’s ability to work,” in the words of the statute. A proposal in 2012 from the Walker administration claimed that most SSDI recipients didn’t work and therefore, if they collected unemployment pay, they were “double-dipping” and probably committing “fraud.”

The federal Social Security Administration program allows disability insurance recipients to work part-time if they are able to, however. The program  encourages them to do so under procedures structured to ensure they do not lose their disability payments or their medical coverage under Medicaid.

Victor Forberger, a Madison lawyer who represents people making unemployment insurance claims, says Wisconsin has thousands of SSDI recipients who also work part-time.

Forberger is one of a team of lawyers who sued DWD on behalf of eight plaintiffs in 2021, charging that the state ban on jobless pay for SSDI recipients violated federal laws that protect people with disabilities. Lawyers from Gingras, Thomsen & Wachs and Axley Brynelson were also part of the case.

On July 17, 2024, Judge William Conley ruled on summary judgment that the 2013 law violated two federal laws: the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act. In his decision Conley stated that while Wisconsin law didn’t intentionally discriminate against people with disabilities, it “applies only to individuals with disabilities, meaning that it necessarily has a disparate impact on those with disabilities.”

Conley’s ruling put off a remedy for the plaintiffs. The lawsuit was filed as a class action, and lawyers for the plaintiffs and DWD have conflicting views about who should be included in the class action as well what remedies are appropriate. A hearing is scheduled for later this year to decide what groups of people would qualify for a remedy and what the remedies should be.

Those questions relate to people who made claims in the past however — SSDI recipients whose UI claims were denied, or whose claims were initially accepted, then reversed, and who were required to repay their unemployment compensation.

DWD has not indicated any plans to appeal the judge’s summary judgment finding.

Since the July ruling, however, DWD has continued to reject UI claims from laid-off workers who are  also on SSDI, Forberger said — ignoring Conley’s conclusion that doing so violates federal law.

“There’s no logic that I’m aware of that would indicate why a disabled worker today filing for unemployment benefits should be denied unemployment benefits,” Forberger said.

In response to an inquiry from the Wisconsin Examiner, Lee Sensenbrenner, communications director for DWD, said in an email message, “Due to the ongoing litigation here, we won’t be able to comment.”

Judy Fintz is one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the SSDI restriction. She said she thought after the judge’s ruling was issued that she and other SSDI recipients would now qualify for unemployment benefits.

“If it’s discrimination — and that’s what the judge said — that’s what they should go on,” she said.

Forberger, who participated with Fintz in her telephone interview, pointed out that based on her work history and wage rate, Fintz would have a weekly unemployment insurance payment of $81.

“They’re refusing to pay her $81 a week under this eligibility ban,” he said. “Judy’s not getting rich off anything.”

Another plaintiff in the lawsuit, Cliff Neuman, combines his disability payment from SSDI with part-time work he is able to take on.

Until the beginning of this year, Neuman was working part time at a grocery store. One day, he said, the store stopped scheduling him for shifts. He said he never got an explanation why.

With Forberger’s help he filed unemployment insurance claims each week for the five or six weeks he was out of work before finding a new job as a restaurant dishwasher. “A couple of times we called and people refused to help him because they said he gets SSDI and is not eligible,” Forberger said.

One requirement for UI applicants is to regularly search for new work and to document those searches. Neuman followed through on that requirement, but his UI applications got mired in rejections and appeals.

An administrative law judge found in February that Neuman was eligible, a consequence of the Conley decision in July. After a DWD lawyer asked for reconsideration, however, the administrative law judge set aside his earlier finding.

DWD’s lawyer argued that the July federal court ruling is not final and that since Conley had not issued an injunction against following the 2013 law, Conley’s decision could not be used to overrule the decision to deny Neuman’s UI claim.

Forberger submitted a response arguing that where new claims are concerned, the Conley decision should be treated as final.

The administrative law judge responded by setting aside his own earlier ruling and asking both DWD and Forberger to address additional questions.

Neuman was disappointed by that outcome and his inability to collect UI despite the Conley ruling in July.

Getting jobless pay “shouldn’t matter if I had SSDI or not,” Neuman said. “Once you’re working you should get that.”

The denial of his claims is “not right and fair,” he said. “To me that’s picking on people that have disabilities.”

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE

Children at The Playing Field, a Madison child care center that participates in the federal Head Start program. (Courtesy of The Playing Field)

Federal payments to Wisconsin’s Head Start programs in the first three and a half months of 2025 are half what they were a year ago, exacerbating worries about the future of the program that provides child care and early education to low-income families.

The Office of Head Start’s payments to Wisconsin program operators from Jan. 1 through April 15 of this year were down by $35 million from the same period in 2024, Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin) said this week.

Nationwide, Head Start program operators have received $943 million less during that period this year compared with the period a year ago, according to Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington), who published a table of calculations comparing disbursements for every state in a press release. The table shows Wisconsin disbursements of $34.5 million as of April 15, compared with $69.5 million in the 2024 period.

Baldwin contrasted the potential impact with the pledge by the White House and the Republican majority in Congress to extend tax cuts enacted in 2017 during Trump’s first term.

“The idea that the president is actively working to give the biggest corporations and wealthiest Wall Street guys a new tax break while taking away preschool and child care from Wisconsinites is beyond the pale,” said Baldwin, vowing to fight actions of President Donald Trump she described as “defunding Head Start.”

The calculations in Murray’s table are based on Head Start disbursement data that Senate Democrats pulled from the Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) website at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

While most states in Murray’s table had lower disbursements compared with a year ago, Alabama, Delaware, New Jersey, Rhode Island and the District of Columbia all showed increases.

The calculations put the big-picture numbers on funding disruptions that Head Start providers have been experiencing in the last three months, said Jennie Mauer, executive director of the Wisconsin Head Start Association.

Those disruptions first surfaced after Trump took office, with delays of up to two weeks in late January and early February for Head Start programs seeking authorized payment for their expenses.

More recently, the disruptions have continued as providers who have submitted the required documents for payment have been confronted with unexpected demands for “more information” Mauer said Friday.

“The [federal] administration is really messing around, pulling out the foundational blocks of grant operation,” Mauer said.

In order to get approved for a grant, recipients must provide a detailed accounting of how it will be spent, she said. To get payment, providers must submit detailed documentation that the expense it covers has already been incurred. 

“This is a highly regulated system,” Mauer said. “There’s a very rigorous initial grant application process, and then on an ongoing basis grantees are demonstrating, ‘We told you what we’re going to spend the money on. Now based on what I told you, I’m asking for that money.’”

The disclosure of the drop in Head Start funding comes a week after a published report raised the possibility that Head Start will be zeroed out of the next federal budget.

It also comes as some providers wait for information about their upcoming grant replenishments, Mauer said.

Head Start grants are provided under multi-year contracts signed with providers. The money itself, however, does not come to providers in large lump sums but in smaller amounts paid upon the submission of documented expenses, Mauer said.

Every six months, an allotment from the provider’s grant is made available, she said. Those funds are not paid directly to the provider, however. The money is set aside for the provider to draw on after submitting expense documents through the federal online payment system.

Providers’ grant cycles start on the first of the month. In Wisconsin, providers whose grant cycle started Nov. 1 have now received confirmation of their next grant allotment for the six months starting May 1, Mauer said Friday.

But with the previous funding access problems and then the sudden closing three weeks ago of half of Head Start’s national offices, including the Chicago Region 5 office that served Wisconsin and five other states, providers were apprehensive.

“The level of uncertainty and chaos is so dramatic,” Mauer said — in contrast not only to the Biden administration, but also the previous Trump administration. Until this year, “these kinds of questions and uncertainties didn’t exist.”

Three providers whose grant cycle started Dec. 1 are waiting to learn whether their next allotment will become available starting June 1 as scheduled.

Mauer said the Senate Democrats’ calculations appear to be “showing the cumulative effect” of the access to HHS funding streams by the team working for DOGE, an agency directed by billionaire and Trump ally Elon Musk.

DOGE is the acronym for the Department of Government Efficiency, although the office is not a cabinet department, and many of its claims of government savings have been questioned.

The hold-up on information is having “a tremendous negative effect on our programs and it’s alarming,” Mauer said. “When we think of what are the impacts of Region 5 closing and that we continue to have very, very minimal and slow communication from the Office of Head Start — they need to start communicating with grantees in a much more substantive way.”

The Wisconsin Examiner contacted the federal Department of Health and Human Services using the HHS website for journalists’ inquiries and has not yet received a response. This report will be updated when a response is received.

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE

Mural depicting workers painted on windows of the Madison-Kipp Corp. by Goodman Community Center students and Madison-Kipp employees with Dane Arts Mural Arts. (Photo by Erik Gunn /Wisconsin Examiner)

The economic uncertainty that has sent the stock market and consumer confidence plummeting in the last month hasn’t yet affected employment in Wisconsin, according to the state’s chief economist.

Wisconsin’s job numbers reached another record high in March, and unemployment, although up slightly, is still close to an all-time low, the Department of Workforce Development (DWD) reported Thursday.

Uncertainty over the impact of tariffs imposed by the Trump administration has contributed to falling consumer confidence as well as business confidence, said Dennis Winters, DWD’s chief economist. So far that hasn’t affected the state’s job market, however, he said.

Based on a monthly federal survey of employers, DWD projected Wisconsin had 3.055 million nonfarm jobs in March — an increase of 10,000 from February and 15,000 from a year ago.

From a separate household survey, the department projected Wisconsin’s March unemployment rate at 3.2%. That’s even with February, but a slight increase from the 2.9% calculated for March of 2024.

The job growth was greatest in service industries, which added more than 21,000 jobs over the last 12 months.

Manufacturing jobs have fallen by 7,000 since March 2024 — all of that in durable goods. Winters said that reflects longstanding challenges in the sector more than specific recent developments. 

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE

Child care providers, parents and advocates arrive at the state Capitol Wednesday, April 16, 2025, for a rally in support of child care funding. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Hundreds of child care providers and parents rallied outside the state Capitol Wednesday, then headed inside to buttonhole lawmakers of both parties, urging support for a $480 million provision in the next state budget for Wisconsin’s child care providers.

“Child care is not a luxury, it’s not a nice-to-have,” said Claire Lindstrom, an Eau Claire parent who addressed the rally. “It is infrastructure.”

“We’re here today because the people who are doing this very important work can no longer afford to hold up a broken system,” said Toshiba Adams, an instructor and instructional chair in early childhood education at Milwaukee Area Technical College.

The rally and afternoon visit with legislators followed a morning gathering of the participants at the nearby Concourse Hotel that included talks by lawmakers, parents and providers. At noon 350 or more people — the largest action by child care advocates in recent memory — marched from the hotel to the rally, with chants of “Kids first, families first, invest in child care now.”

The crowd massed on the Capitol building’s west steps for a half hour of speeches.

Lindstrom broke down the average cost for child care. A single parent paid the minimum wage, $7.25 an hour, “would have to work 43 full-time weeks just to cover one year of infant care,” she said. A family making the median income in Wisconsin — about $75,000 a year — will probably spend 20% of their earnings on care for a single child.

“If they have two kids, an infant and a 4-year-old, they’re spending over a third of their income just to go to work,” Lindstrom said. “This is not a personal budgeting issue. That’s a broken system.”

Gov. Tony Evers has proposed $480 million in the state’s 2025-27 budget that would go to licensed child care providers, replenishing the state’s Child Care Counts program funded from federal pandemic relief. Without that, Child Care Counts will expire for good in June.

At its height between 2021 and 2023, Child Care Counts was credited with stabilizing Wisconsin’s providers, who shared in payments totaling $20 million a month. Providers reported that with the money they were able to raise wages for child care workers while holding down increases in the fees that parents paid.

“Our early childhood educators are trained in how to support brain development, emotional regulation, and school readiness,” Lindstrom said. “We expect them to do this important work and yet we pay them less than workers at Kwik Trip and Culver’s.”

Evers, a Democrat, was unable to persuade the Legislature’s Republican majority to extend the program in the state’s 2023-25 budget. He repurposed other federal funds, and the total payment was reduced to $10 million a month. That will run out in June.

Providers, advocates and early childhood education experts have argued that only with an ongoing investment like Child Care Counts can providers pay child care workers adequately without pricing care out of reach for the average family.

“We need child care for our communities to function,” Lindstrom said. “We can no longer afford to treat this like a personal problem. It’s a public domain. And the solution is clear. We need to fund child care.”

A survey report released April 10 found that up to 25% of Wisconsin providers said they might close without continued support along the lines of Child Care Counts. More than one-third said they might have to reduce the number of children then could serve for lack of staff.

Large majorities said they might have to cut pay and that they expect to have more difficulty recruiting workers. More than half said they expect some employees to quit and that providing high quality care would become more difficult.

“We will see dramatically less care available in virtually every single county in the state,” Ruth Schmidt, executive director of the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association, told the crowd. “Is that acceptable?”

“No!” the crowd roared back in reply.

“Is it acceptable that moms will have to consider leaving the workforce in record numbers because you cannot work if you cannot afford or find child care? Is it acceptable that stressed out parents doing the best they can will have no support from the state to ensure that they can work and contribute to our tax base?”

With each question the rallygoers responded with resounding shouts of “No!”

Sachin Shivaram, CEO of Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry in Manitowoc, told the crowd that businesses should support state funding for child care.

His company pays employees with young children $400 a month toward their child care costs, he said. When the crowd applauded, he thanked them, then added, “but I also feel very embarrassed. … That’s so little, and the cost of child care is, you know, several thousand dollars a month, and this is just barely scratching the surface.”

Shivaram pointed out the state manufacturing tax credit that his company receives, along with all Wisconsin manufacturers.

“And guess what? We have to do absolutely nothing to get that tax credit,” he said. “We don’t have to invest in any capital equipment, we don’t have to train any workers, we don’t have to give back to the community, nothing. You know, how about we make that tax credit contingent on helping the child care situation?”

In an interview after the legislative visits Schmidt of WECA said the hundreds who took part went to almost every state Senate office and about 90% of the Assembly members’ offices as well. WECA organized the event along with Wisconsin Head Start Association and Raising Wisconsin — an advocacy campaign that WECA and allied groups launched in 2022.

“We really wanted this to be nonpartisan,” Schmidt said — “just an opportunity to tell stories and share, from a real perspective, from the heart what’s going on with this industry.”

Some of those conversations — with leaders in the Legislature who advocates have already spoken to about the budget request — were “not necessarily a surprise,” she acknowledged.  

With other lawmakers, she added, including some of the 30 first-term Assembly members elected in November as well as others who have not served on committees where child care has been an agenda item, “there was a lot of interest in just learning,”

The visits were an opportunity for personal testimony to reach lawmakers and their staff, Schmidt said. “The power of having parents tell their stories, and the power of having educators tell their stories about how they’ve been using the public funding when it’s available — it was very compelling.”

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE

Democratic U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan speaks with reporters Wednesday in his Madison office. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

House Democrats think their most likely strategy to prevent major cuts to Medicaid or other popular federal programs in the current budget reconciliation process will be to win over a few House Republicans.

“We just need three Republicans, basically nationwide, to say no to something,” said U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Black Earth) at a Q-and-A session with reporters Wednesday in his Madison office.

The Republican majorities in both houses of Congress are using the complicated budget reconciliation process to pass a spending plan that will allow them to extend tax cuts enacted in 2017 during President Donald Trump’s first term.

As part of that, House Republicans passed a blueprint calling for $880 billion in cuts to programs overseen by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Medicaid represents the largest expense item in the committee’s purview, and analysts have said Congress could only hit that target by making Medicaid cuts.

Pocan said estimates of the cost of preserving the tax cuts have risen in Washington, from $4.5 trillion in the original House proposal to “more like $7 trillion in tax cuts” in the current proposal combined from House and Senate alternatives.

The objective for House Democrats currently is to make cuts to Medicaid harder for GOP members to go along with, Pocan said. In Wisconsin, about 1.3 million residents are enrolled in Medicaid, including one third of the children in the state and 55% of seniors in nursing homes.

“You know, the more they hear that, at some point they may listen,” Pocan said of Republican members who won swing districts by narrow margins — and, he argues, they could push back against those sorts of cuts.

“I don’t expect them to maybe say it publicly and maybe to hold a town hall and say it, but if they say it privately in their caucus, that’s good enough, as long as three people won’t support something,” Pocan said. “That’s enough to kill something, right? So that’s kind of my goal is to keep facilitating that.”

The focus, though, is not on stopping the tax cuts, but stopping the cuts to Medicaid, SNAP and other federal programs.

“If we could stop that, and we could stop, maybe, some of the education cuts that might otherwise come … funds for low-income [districts], funds for special ed, I think they’re still going to move forward with their tax cut bill,” Pocan said.

He speculated that under those circumstances, the GOP majority would pay for the tax cut with a deficit increase. 

“Is that a good answer? No,” Pocan said. “But is it better than seeing people lose their health care right now or their food assistance through Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program? Yeah. So you know my job is to wake up in the morning and get excited about bad choices rather than the worst choices.”

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE

Sandra Lomeli testifies at a public hearing April 10, 2025, against a bill imposing new restrictions on the process for confirming eligibility for Medicaid. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)

Legislation that would add new restrictions to the process of qualifying for Medicaid is on hold in the Wisconsin Capitol after meeting with resounding opposition at an Assembly hearing less than a week ago.

At a meeting Tuesday to vote on two other bills, State Rep. Dan Knodl (R-Germantown) told the Assembly Committee on Public Benefit Reform that he chairs that the Medicaid measure “has some work to be done yet.”

The bill’s author, Rep. William Penterman (R-Columbus), told the Wisconsin Examiner in an email message Tuesday that the legislation “is still in the Assembly Committee on Public Benefit Reform. The conversation on how to improve the bill is ongoing.”

An opponent of the measure, however, suggested that opposition testimony had prevailed in keeping it from moving forward.

“I think you all realized how terrible and harmful that legislation was,” said committee member Rep. Ryan Clancy (D-Milwaukee), directing his comment at his four Republican colleagues. “We heard two and a half hours of testimony overwhelmingly against that [bill].”

Clancy spoke before voting against two other bills that the committee passed 4-2 along party lines — one making sweeping revisions to Wisconsin’s unemployment insurance (UI) system, and the other barring local governments from instituting guaranteed basic income programs using tax dollars. 

Recipients marshal opposition to Medicaid measure

Medicaid covers acute and long-term medical care for low-income people as well as people with disabilities. It’s funded jointly with federal and state money and managed by the state under federal rules and guidelines.

With some exceptions, recipients must have incomes at or below the federal poverty guideline. Most Medicaid recipients must be reviewed once a year to confirm they are still eligible for the program.

AB 163 would direct the Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS) to conduct eligibility reviews every six months.

It also would add restrictions on the verification process — forbidding the state from automatically renewing Medicaid beneficiaries, forbidding the state from automatically filling in electronic forms with the recipient’s information except for their name and address, and cutting off a person’s ability to enroll in Medicaid for six months for failing to report a change that might make them ineligible.

Penterman, the only witness who testified at the bill’s April 10 public hearing, highlighted the statistic that 20% of Wisconsin residents are on Medicaid. 

He described the legislation as an effort to “reassess and restore integrity to the system by ensuring that only those who are truly needy and truly qualified for this coverage receive benefits.”

But the recurring message from a stream of hearing witnesses — the vast majority of them people with disabilities who rely on Medicaid for long-term health care in their homes or in the community or their family caregivers — was that the current eligibility requirements are already burdensome, and strict enough to keep out people who aren’t eligible.

“We heard from so many people who do a tremendous amount of work to prove to the state that they have low enough income, low enough assets, that they are who they say they are, that they meet the functional screen and all of the other requirements that the department has [for them] to be able to get in or stay in the program,” said Tamara Jackson, legislative policy representative for the Wisconsin Board of People with Developmental Disabilities, in an interview Tuesday.

The hearing came just two days after the bill was introduced April 8. Its fast track prompted an overnight opposition campaign by Medicaid recipients.

“We heard from people across the state who had said that they had contacted their state lawmakers about this particular bill and had really used it as an opportunity to tell them what they do to be allowed in the Medicaid program,” Jackson said.

Federal Medicaid debate draws attention

Recent Congressional action on federal legislation to extend tax cuts enacted in 2017 has included spending targets that would appear to make Medicaid reductions inevitable. Medicaid recipients have been following those debates and making public appeals to oppose cuts in the program — priming them to oppose the state proposal as well.

“I think that people are paying attention, and the reason there were so many contacts is because Medicaid is so important to folks and they’re willing to show up and talk about it,” Jackson said.

At the very start of the April 10 hearing, Penterman alluded to communications he had already received from advocates and said he planned an amendment to exempt people with developmental disabilities from some of the bill’s restrictions. He introduced the amendment later that day.

Several witnesses, however, criticized limiting the amendment to people with developmental disabilities, arguing that the bill’s requirements would be needlessly onerous for many other people.

Sandra Lomeli of Pewaukee was one of the hearing witnesses against the Medicaid bill. She is the mother of two adult children with severe disabilities who are able to get long-term care through Medicaid. One requires 24-hour care as a sexual assault survivor, she said.

Lomeli is also covered by BadgerCare Plus, the Wisconsin Medicaid plan for primary and specialty health care and hospitalization, because being her children’s family caregiver limits her working hours to a part-time nonprofit position.

She told the committee that she fills both sides of a ream’s worth of forms each year to confirm her children’s Medicaid eligibility. She said she spends 54 hours completing those forms and 10 hours confirming her own eligibility each year.

In her testimony Lomeli challenged lawmakers to enlist Medicaid participants and advocates if they wanted to write legislation to improve the program.

It appeared to Lomeli that her suggestion “took people by surprise that we would even be at the table,” she said in an interview Tuesday. “I don’t think they valued that we could add value — because if they did, somebody would have reached out.”

She said she doesn’t consider the legislation dead, however, which concerns her.

“The issue is not off the table yet,” Lomeli said. “They’re just going to reword it. We have won the battle now. We haven’t won the war.

UI change, basic-income ban, both pass on party lines

While setting the Medicaid bill aside Tuesday, the Committee on Public Benefit Reform advanced two others with only Republican votes.

AB 164 would rename Wisconsin’s unemployment insurance system as a “re-employment assistance” program with new requirements for workers and for the state agency that administers it.

Those include requiring recipients, who must currently make four work searches a week, to make two of those in the form of direct contacts with prospective employers. It also adds a variety of additional counseling procedures and requirements for people who receive unemployment benefits.

Department of Workforce Development Secretary-designee Amy Pechacek submitted written testimony expressing “concerns about this proposal due to the anticipated reporting burden for employers, potential costs, bureaucratic requirements, and lack of sustainable funding.”

Gov. Tony Evers vetoed similar legislation in 2023, citing similar complaints as well as the fact that it did not go through the state’s joint labor-management unemployment advisory council.

AB 165 would bar local governments from using tax dollars to create guaranteed income programs without a work or training requirement. Evers vetoed a similar bill to that one in 2023 as well, on the grounds it usurped local control. 

Rep. Christian Phelps (D-Eau Claire) made the same argument against the current legislation.

Knodl defended the both bills as helping to “protect the integrity of these systems, and that’s important if we want them to be sustainable in the future.”

Clancy argued that both should have been put on pause along with the Medicaid bill.

“But all three of those . . . bills are fundamentally the same,” Clancy said. “They are kicking people when they are down. They are hitting people at their most vulnerable, and frankly, in 2025, when national and state Republican policies have meant that people have more needs. We should not be attacking those social safety nets.”

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE

Children outside with a child care teacher at The Playing Field, a Madison child care center that participates in the federal Head Start program. (Courtesy of The Playing Field)

A news report that the Trump administration is considering ending the federal government’s Head Start program has alarmed providers and parents who rely on the child care and early education program.

“It would be absolutely devastating,” said Jen Bailey, executive director of Reach Dane, which operates 14 Head Start centers in Dane and Green counties. “The children and families we work with are some of the most vulnerable folks in our communities. The parents in those communities rely on the care we provide to stay employed.”

USA Today reported Friday that the Trump administration “is considering a budget proposal that would zero out funding for Head Start.” The news report quoted an anonymous administration official who said the White House funding blueprint for the 2026 fiscal year doesn’t allocate money for Head Start.

The president’s budget is a wish list, and Congress decides how to appropriate federal funds. An Office of Management and Budget spokesperson told USA Today that “no final funding decisions have been made.”

Project 2025, the agenda drafted by Russell Vought prior to his confirmation as OMB director, calls for eliminating Head Start.

Responding to the report Monday, Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) tied the proposal to President Donald Trump’s goal of extending the 2017 tax cuts enacted in his first term.

“Shutting down Head Start — taking care away from kids, firing teachers, and making child care even more expensive for parents — all so President Trump can hand out new tax breaks for the wealthy and well-connected is flat out wrong and you can be sure I will fight this proposal at every turn,” Baldwin said.

Head Start was founded in 1966, part of the War on Poverty undertaken by President Lyndon Johnson. It provides child care and preschool for families with incomes up to the federal poverty guideline. Children living in foster homes are also eligible for Head Start.

In Wisconsin more than 15,000 children are enrolled in more than 300 Head Start child care centers across the state, according to the Wisconsin Head Start Association. With more than 4,300 employees, Head Start ranks in the top 100 employers in Wisconsin, said Jennie Mauer, the association’s executive director.

“At least 70% of our families have a parent who is either working or in school full time,” Mauer said Monday. The remaining families include grandparents who are retired but full-time caregivers for their grandchildren as well as families unable to work due to disabilities or who “are working through some very, very significant challenges.”

She predicted that the impact from ending the program wouldn’t stop with the families who rely on Head Start.

“If Head Start isn’t there, if this program were to shut down, surely there’ll be tremendous cascading economic impacts in our communities,”  Mauer said. “I think for most of the families, it would create a huge labor disruption. With no safe place to have your kids while you’re at work, it’ll create a disaster.

Child care already a crisis

Fears for the survival of Head Start are escalating as the state’s overall child care sector is increasingly under strain. As many as 25% of child care centers in a survey released April 10 said they could close without continuing support in the next state budget.

April Mullins-Datko is Head Start director for ADVOCAP, a social service agency serving Fond du Lac, Winnebago and Green Lake counties. She said that the agency’s four Head Start centers would likely not survive the loss of federal support.

“We would lose services for the 202 children we serve,” Mullins-Datko said. “It would exacerbate the child care crisis we have in our communities, which then has negative impacts on our available workforce.”

ADVOCAP’s centers include three in Fond du Lac County and one in Green Lake County, with 193 families relying on the program for the care and early education of their children.

“Ninety-three percent of my families are working or going to school full time,” Mullins-Datko said.

The agency’s Head Start federal contract is supposed to be good through Dec. 31, 2028, Mullins-Datko said, but with reports of defunding she fears that won’t be honored: “There just doesn’t seem to be any kind of adherence to law and contracts.”

Western Dairyland Economic Opportunity Council provides social services in Buffalo, Jackson, Trempealeau and Eau Claire counties in West Central Wisconsin. The agency’s programs include nine Head Start centers enrolling 442 children. Of those, 382 children are in preschool and 60 are in Early Head Start, for children from birth to age 3, said Thanh Bui-Duquette, Western Dairyland’s Head Start director.

Three centers are in cities — two in Eau Claire and one in Altoona — but the rest are in rural communities.

“We meet the needs of each individual community,” Bui-Duquette said. “The needs of the urban Eau Claire area look very different from rural Trempealeau County.”

Even with jobs, 96% of the families with children in Western Dairyland’s program have incomes below the federal poverty guideline. For children from those families, she said, Head Start has been demonstrated to improve long-term outcomes — increasing the chances of graduating from high school and going on to higher education, and reducing the chances of ending up in the criminal justice system.

“It’s important to have that solid foundation early on, especially for children from disadvantaged families,” Bui-Duquette said.

Payments delayed, offices closed

The news that Head Start is in the crosshairs of budget-writers in the Trump administration follows other jolts to the program in the last two months.

In late January and early February, Head Start operators reported widespread problems in their efforts to collect standard payments from the federal government. Under Head Start contracts, programs incur an expense then submit documentation through a federal online portal to get reimbursed. Head Start programs reported that payments stalled, for nearly two weeks in some cases, without explanation.

Payments have since resumed, but Mauer said directors are reporting demands for more information holding up payments.

“They’re getting substantial delays for things that are accepted expenses, which is concerning,” she said.

On April 1, Head Start operators learned that the program’s five regional offices across the country were closed without any advance notice, including the Chicago office that serves Wisconsin and five other states in the Upper Midwest.

Those events and the report that the program could be defunded have rattled Head Start employees and the parents who have counted on the program, operators say.

“Families and staff are both really scared and concerned,” said Bailey, the Reach Dane director. “Families are reaching out, worried the program is going to close, asking, ‘Is my child still going to be able to go to school?’”

Reach Dane’s human resources staff has been interviewing applicants for teaching jobs in the coming school year, and applicants are nervous about whether the job will exist, she added.

Bailey said the program is trying to be transparent with employees and families about the uncertainty and fight for the program’s survival, all without sparking panic.

“Trying to figure out how to navigate and inform folks when there’s no communication is a hard place to be,” she said.

This report has been updated.

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE

In a new survey of Wisconsin child care providers, 25% said they could close without renewed state support. Corrine Hendrickson, shown here at a 2023 event to support the child care sector, said her New Glarus family care will likely have to raise fees. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

One in four Wisconsin child care providers could close their doors if the state’s ongoing support isn’t replaced after it ends in June, according to a state-commissioned report released Thursday.

More than one in three providers expect to reduce their capacity for children or the hours they operate, or both, according to the report, based on a survey of most of the state’s licensed child care providers.

The report was commissioned by the state Department of Children and Families (DCF) and produced by the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

It was released by the office of Gov. Tony Evers to support $480 million for child care providers in his 2025-27 proposed budget — a successor to the state’s Child Care Counts program that was funded with federal pandemic relief money. 

“It underscores what those of us in the field have known for a long time — that is, the need for public investment in order to stave off closures and rate increases,” said Ruth Schmidt, executive director of the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association.

The association supports Evers’ $480 million budget proposal and is holding an advocacy day at the state Capitol on April 16, with plans to meet lawmakers.

In a statement announcing the survey findings, Evers underscored his proposal.

“The cost of child care is too darn high, wait lists are too long, and providers are already struggling to keep the lights on, their doors open, and meet demand for child care across our state,” Evers said.

“The results of this survey are crystal clear: if we don’t make needed investments to support our child care providers and industry, programs will close, wait lists will get even longer, providers will be forced to raise prices, and parents and loved ones who can’t afford for [their] costs to get any higher may have to leave our workforce.”

Child Care Counts has provided monthly payments to state child care providers since 2021. From November 2021 to January 2024, it was funded from Wisconsin’s share of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), the federal pandemic relief legislation enacted in 2021. The program paid out more than $479 million to providers. After that money ran out, Evers directed another $170 million additional pandemic relief funds to carry the program through June 2025.

Child Care Counts paid out $20 million a month until mid-2023, when it was cut to $10 million a month, with providers getting half of what they had previously received.

The Republican majority in the state Legislature rejected Evers’ proposal to put up to $360 million in the 2023-25 budget to continue the subsidy program at its earlier monthly amount.

Providers have credited the Child Care Counts program with making it possible for them to increase pay for child care workers in the face of competition from other employers without being forced to raise the fees they charge parents.  

About 80% of the state’s more than 4,500 child care providers received and took part in the survey, which was included in providers’ November application for Child Care Counts payments.

The survey included questions about providers’ experiences before and after the Child Care Counts reduction. It also asked about their expectations after the program ends in June, as well as the potential impact of a continued program.

Two-thirds of providers surveyed reported that after the payments were reduced, they raised fees.

Responding to questions about the impact of state support ending in June, 25% or more of providers in the survey said they would be somewhat or more likely to close. Fully 10% of providers said closing their program “was very or extremely likely,” the report found.

“That’s an incredibly concerning statistic,” said Schmidt. “That’s a lot of child care programs that could be pulling up stakes. It’s going to hit rural communities super hard, but across the state we’re going to see significant closures.”

More than one-third of providers — 37% — said they were “at least somewhat likely” to close some of their classrooms or reduce the number of children they serve. Almost that many, 36%, said they were likely to reduce the number of hours they provide care.

By 59%, providers also expect their waiting lists to grow without continued state support.

Providers also expect to have a harder time hiring and keeping employees, with 66% saying that it was “at least somewhat likely” they will have to cut compensation, including their own. Fully half of providers “said this was very or extremely likely,” the report states.

More than half of providers — 56% — said it was at least somewhat likely that more employees would quit, and 46% said staff cuts were somewhat or more likely.

Of providers in the survey, 69% said “that it was at least somewhat likely” they would have a harder time hiring qualified employees.

About half of providers surveyed — 51% — said they thought it would be “at least somewhat likely” that they would find it harder to provide high quality care.

Between one-fourth and nearly half of providers said they expected to have more trouble being able to meet some parents’ specific needs. Those include providing care earlier or later in the day, serving families in the state’s Wisconsin Shares subsidy child care program for low-income families, caring for infants and toddlers or caring for children with special needs.

“With families already struggling to afford child care, respondents repeatedly described how continued funding — whether at the original or at current levels—would help prevent further tuition rate increases,” the survey report notes. Some providers said it would allow them to hold rates at their current level or reduce them, while others said it would keep the rate of tuition increases down.

Corrine Hendrickson, a New Glarus child care provider and organizer of an advocacy group for providers and families, Wisconsin Early Childhood Action Needed (WECAN), said the survey points out “the disastrous results for children and families after the initial [Child Care Counts] funding wasn’t replaced in the state budget.”

Rural areas, where families are younger and have lower incomes, may be hit the most dramatically if the child care sector contracts, Hendrickson said.

Hendrickson said she is likely to have to raise the rates she charges for her family child care center, which has a capacity of eight children. A $30 increase “will put me out of reach for too many families,” Hendrickson said. “If I lose two children and can’t replace them within a month or two, I will have to close.”

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE