Gov. Tony Evers celebrates "historic" tax cuts in the last state budget. Schools are still facing austerity. Photo via Gov. Evers' Facebook page

As Republicans in Congress struggle to deliver President Donald Trump’s massive cuts to Medicaid, food assistance, education, health research and just about every other social good you can think of, in order to clear the way for trillions of dollars in tax cuts to the richest people in the U.S., here in Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers and state lawmakers are working on the next state budget.

The one thing our Democratic governor and Republican legislative leaders seem to agree on is that we need a tax cut.

After throwing away more than 600 items in Evers’ budget proposal, GOP leggies now say they can’t move forward with their own budget plan until  Evers makes good on his promise to meet with them and negotiate the terms for the tax-cutting that both sides agree they want to do. Evers has expressed optimism that the budget will be done on time this summer, and said the tax cuts need to be part of the budget, not a separate, stand-alone bill. Evers wants a more progressive tax system, with cuts targeted to lower-income people. In the last budget, he opposed expanding the second-lowest tax bracket, which would have offered the same benefits to higher earners as the lower middle class.

But what if we don’t need a tax cut at all?

It has long been an article of faith in the Republican Party that tax cuts are a miracle cure for everything. Trickle-down economics is  a proven failure:  The wealthy and corporations tend to bank their tax cuts rather than injecting the extra money into the economy, as tax-cutters say they will. The benefits of the 2017 tax cuts that Congress is struggling to extend went exclusively to corporations and the very wealthy and failed to trickle down on the rest of us. 

 In the second Trump administration, we are in new territory when it comes to tax cutting. The administration and its enablers are hell-bent on destroying everything from the Department of Education to critical health research to food stamps and Medicaid in order to finance massive tax breaks for the very rich. 

If ever there were a good time to reexamine the tax-cutting reflex, it’s now.

Evers has said he is not willing to consider the Republicans’ stand-alone tax-cut legislation, and that, instead, tax cuts should be part of the state budget. That makes sense, since new projections show lower-than-expected tax revenue even without a cut, and state budget-writers have a lot to consider as we brace for the dire effects of federal budget cuts. The least our leaders can do is not blindly give away cash without even assessing future liabilities.

But beyond that, we need to reconsider the knee-jerk idea that we are burdened with excessive taxes and regulations, that our state would be better off if we cut investments in our schools and universities, our roads and bridges, our clean environment, museums, libraries and other shared spaces and stopped keeping a floor under poor kids by providing basic food and health care assistance. 

Wisconsin Republicans like to tout the list of states produced annually by the Tax Foundation promoting “business friendly” environments that reduce corporate taxes, including Wyoming, South Dakota, Alaska and Florida. They also like to bring up ALEC’s “Rich States, Poor States” report that gave top billing last year to Utah, Idaho and Arizona for low taxes and deregulation. 

What they don’t track when they lift up those states are pollution, low wages and bankrupt public school systems. 

I’m old enough to remember when it was headline news that whole families in the U.S. were living in their cars, when homelessness was a new term, coined during the administration of Ronald Reagan, the father of bogus trickle-down economics and massive cuts to services for the poor. 

Somehow, we got used to the idea that urban parts of the richest nation on Earth resemble the poorest developing countries, with human misery and massive wealth existing side by side in our live-and-let-die economy.

Wisconsin, thanks to its progressive history, managed to remain a less unequal state, with top public schools and a great university system, as well as a clean, beautiful environment and well-maintained infrastructure. But here, too, we have been getting used to our slide to the bottom of the list of states, thanks in large part to the damage done by former Republican Gov. Scott Walker. 

We now rank 44th in the nation for investment in our once-great universities, and the austerity that’s been imposed on higher education is taking a toll across the state. Our consistently highly rated public schools have suffered from a decade and a half of budget cuts that don’t allow districts to keep pace with inflation, and recent state budgets have not made up the gap. 

Now threats to Medicaid, Head Start, AmeriCorps, our excellent library system, UW-Madison research and environmental protections do not bode well for Wisconsin’s future.

In the face of brutal federal cuts, we need to recommit to our shared interest in investing in a decent society, and figure out how to preserve what’s great about our state.

Tax cuts do not make the top of the list of priorities.

U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden tours Gilbertson's Dairy in Dunn County. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

When he was campaigning for Congress in western Wisconsin, Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden talked about growing up “in abject rural poverty,” raised by a single mom who relied on food stamps. As a result, he has said, he would never go along with cuts to food assistance. 

“He sat down in my office when he first got elected and promised me he wouldn’t ever vote against SNAP because he grew up on it, supposedly,” Democratic U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan said in a phone interview as he was on his way home to Wisconsin from Washington this week.

But as Henry Redman reported, Van Orden voted for the Republican budget blueprint, which proposes more than $200 billion in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in order to make room for tax cuts for the very wealthy.

Still, after that vote, Van Orden issued a public statement warning against reckless cuts to SNAP that place “disproportionate burdens on rural states, where food insecurity is often more widespread,” and saying it is unfair to build a budget “on the backs of some of our most vulnerable populations, including hungry children. Period.”

Van Orden sits on the House Agriculture Committee, which was tasked with drawing up a specific plan to cut $230 billion from food assistance to pay for tax cuts. Van Orden reportedly balked at a cost-sharing plan that shifted 25% of the cost of the program to states, saying it was unfair to Wisconsin.

But then, on Wednesday night, Van Orden voted yes as the committee passed an unprecedented cut in federal funding for SNAP on a 29-25 vote.

Van Orden took credit for the plan, which ties cuts to state error rates in determining eligibility and benefit amounts for food assistance. According to WisPolitics, he declared at a House Ag Committee markup that “states are going to have to accept the fact that if they are not administering this program efficiently, that they’re going to have to pay a portion of the program that is equitable, and it makes sense and it is scaled.” 

But states, including Wisconsin, don’t have money to make up the gap as the federal government, for the first time ever, withdraws hundreds of millions of dollars for nutrition assistance. Instead, they will reduce coverage, kick people off the program and hunger will increase. The ripple effects include a loss of about $30 billion for farmers who supply food for the program, Democrats on the Ag Committee report, and damage to the broader economy, since every $1 in SNAP benefits generates about $1.50 in economic activity. Grocery stores, food manufacturers rural communities will be hit particularly hard. 

Wisconsin will start out with a bill for 5% of the costs of the program in Fiscal Year 2028, according to a bill explanation from the Agriculture Committee. But as error rates vary, that number shifts sharply upward — to 15% when the error rate goes from the current 5% to 6%, to 20% if we exceed an 8% error rate, and so on.  

And there are other cuts in the bill, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) points out, including stricter eligibility limits, work requirements that cannot be waived in times of economic hardship and high unemployment, and reductions in benefits that come from eliminating deductions for utility costs. 

More than 900,000 children, adults, and seniors count on Wisconsin’s SNAP program, known as FoodShare, according to an analysis of state health department data by Kids Forward. The same analysis found that covering the costs of just 10% of SNAP benefits would cost Wisconsin $136 million. 

Alaska and Texas have higher error rates than Wisconsin, and so they — and their hungry kids — are stuck with the biggest cuts. Even if you accept that that is somehow just, the people who are going to pay for this bill in all the states, including ours, are, as Van Orden himself put it, “the most vulnerable populations, including hungry children. Period.”

“He says one thing and does another,” Pocan says of Van Orden’s flip-flopping on SNAP. “He’s gone totally Washington.”

That’s too bad for the people left behind in rural Wisconsin, who will take the brunt of these unnecessary cuts. 

As the Legislature begins working on the Wisconsin State Budget, a dangerous idea to give school vouchers their own separate line item could become a huge drain on resources. | Getty Images Creative

The top issue Wisconsinites brought to legislators’ attention at budget hearings around the state last month was the need to adequately fund public schools.

But now, as the Legislature’s powerful budget committee is beginning to work on the budget in earnest, a low-profile plan that never came up in those public hearings aims to turn school vouchers into a statewide entitlement, sucking up all the resources that might otherwise go to public schools and putting Wisconsin on a path to a full–blown budget crisis. 

The plan, contained in two bills that failed in the last legislative session, would stop funding school vouchers through the same mix of state and local funding that supports regular public schools, and instead pay for school vouchers just out of the state’s general fund. 

“It’s certainly something that I personally support. … I’m sure it will be part of the discussion,” Rep. Mark Born (R-Beaver Dam), co-chair of the powerful Joint Finance Committee, told Lisa Pugh on Wisconsin Eye when she asked about “decoupling” Wisconsin voucher school funding from the rest of the school finance system.

“Decoupling” would pave the way for a big expansion in taxpayer subsidies for private school tuition. While jettisoning the caps on available funds and enrollment in the current school formula, voucher payments would become an entitlement. The state would be obligated to pay for every eligible student to attend private school. It’s worth noting that most participants in Wisconsin’s voucher programs never attended public school, so what we are talking about is setting up a massive private school system with separate funding alongside the public K-12 school system. That’s more than Wisconsin can afford.

Anne Chapman, research director for the Wisconsin Association of School Business Officials (WASBO), has followed the issue closely. “It could come up last-minute, on very short notice,” she warns. 

She worries that Wisconsin is following the same path as other states that have steadily expanded public funding for private schools without accurately assessing what the expansion would cost. In a recent WASBO paper, “The price of parallel systems,” Chapman writes that Wisconsin already ranks third among states with the highest proportion of state education dollars used in private schooling options (9%). The top two states, Florida (22%) and Arizona (12%), she writes, are “cautionary examples.” 

Florida’s universal voucher program will cost the state $3.9 billion this year. The state, which until now has been running budget surpluses, is projecting a $6.9 billion deficit by 2027-28, fueled by the voucher expansion along with tax cuts. Arizona is also facing much bigger than expected costs for its universal voucher program. After projecting it would cost $64 million in 2023-24, the state found that it underestimated the cost of vouchers by more than 650%. The real cost of universal vouchers in Arizona in 2023-24 was  $738 million. The result: a huge budget deficit and significant cuts to public schools.

Wisconsin, which launched the first school voucher program in the nation in Milwaukee 35 ago, has steadily increased both the size and per-pupil expenditures of its system of voucher schools. That’s despite a research consensus that school vouchers have not improved academic outcomes for students and, in fact, have done significant harm.

Testifying recently against a school voucher bill in Texas, University of Michigan professor and school voucher expert Josh Cowen described the “catastrophic” results of vouchers on educational outcomes across the country over the last decade.

‘Horrific’ voucher results

Cowen has been evaluating school vouchers since the 1990s, when the first pilot program in Milwaukee had a measurable, positive impact on the 400 low-income kids who used vouchers to attend traditional private schools. As school vouchers expanded to serve tens of thousands of students and “subprime” operators moved in to take advantage of taxpayer dollars, however, the results took a dramatic downturn. Cowen described the “horrific learning loss” he and other researchers have recorded over the last decade among kids who started in public school and then moved to private school using vouchers. He was used to seeing trends in education that simply didn’t work to improve outcomes, he told the Texas legislators, but “it’s very rare to see something that harmed kids academically.” The worst drops in test scores, he said, came in 2014-15 — the same year that states began taking the programs statewide. He concluded that the smaller programs that had paid close attention to students and offered them a lot of support became something entirely different when vouchers were scaled up. Yet despite the abysmal results, more and more states are moving toward universal voucher systems.

Imagine, Cowen told the Texas legislators, if “30 years ago a vaccine showed some positive effects in clinical trials for a few hundred kids.” Then, when the vaccine was approved and used on thousands of children, “the health effects became negative, even atrocious.”

“No one would say, ‘let’s just hang our hat on the pilot and focus on results from 30 years ago,” Cowen said. But that’s exactly what’s happening with school vouchers. The kids vouchers were originally supposed to help — low-income children in underresourced schools — have suffered the most. 

Studies from research teams in Louisiana, Indiana, Ohio and Washington, D.C., show learning losses for kids who left public school to attend voucher programs that surpassed the learning loss experienced by students in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina or by children across the country from the COVID-19 pandemic, Cowen said.

Instead of helping those struggling students, who often attend the “subprime” schools Cowen discussed, the voucher programs in Wisconsin and other states mostly provide a taxpayer-financed benefit to private school families — 70% of whom have never put their kids in public school.

Anti-government ideologues and school choice lobbyists are selling a faulty product with the rapid expansion of school vouchers.

Part of the scam is the effort to hide the true costs from taxpayers. That’s the part Chapman, the school business expert, is worried about. As school districts struggle with lean budgets, under the current system, at least local taxpayers can see how much they are paying to support the voucher schools in their districts. If the Legislature succeeds in moving the cost of school vouchers into the general statewide budget, that transparency will be lost. And, at the same time, the state will open the door to unlimited spending on vouchers, no matter how expensive the program becomes. 

School choice advocates in Wisconsin have long pushed for “a voucher in every backpack” — or universal eligibility for the private school voucher program.

“Eligibility” doesn’t mean the same thing as “access,” however: In Wisconsin voucher schools have a track record of kicking out students who are disabled, challenging to educate, LGBTQ or for any other reason they deem them a bad fit.

Those students go back to the public schools, whose mission is to serve all students. In contrast, private schools in the voucher system can and do discriminate. Yet, Chapman reports, we are now spending about $629 million for Wisconsin’s four voucher programs, which serve 58,623 students. That’s $54 million more than the $574.8 million we are spending on all 126,830 students with disabilities in Wisconsin, as school districts struggle with the cost of special education. 

Federal tax deduction windfall for voucher schools

As if that weren’t enough, at the federal level, the Educational Choice for Children Act of 2025 (ECCA), currently being considered by Congress, would give a 100% tax deduction on donations to nonprofits known as Scholarship Granting Organizations, which give out private K-12 school vouchers.

Normally, donors to nonprofits can expect a tax deduction of 37 cents on the dollar at most. The 100% tax deduction means financial advisers across the country will push clients, whether they are school choice advocates or not, to give money to voucher schools. Under the bill, contributors would also be allowed to give corporate stock and avoid capital gains tax. “This would allow wealthy ‘donors’ to turn a profit, at taxpayer expense, by acting as middlemen in steering federal funding into private K-12 schools,” the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy reports. ITEP estimates that the ECCA would cost the federal government $134 billion in foregone revenue over the next 10 years and would cost states an additional $2.3 billion.

The very least we can do as citizens is to demand accountability and transparency in the state budget process, before we blow all of our money on tax breaks and tuition vouchers for people who don’t need them. 

Protesters gather outside the Federal Building in Milwaukee to denounce the arrest of Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)

Smart, progressive women pose a serious threat to MAGA supremacy. Just ask Elon Musk, who wasted millions of dollars in Wisconsin trying to win a seat on the state Supreme Court for MAGA candidate Brad Schimel, only to watch Susan Crawford clean Schimel’s clock.

From his first presidential campaign against Hillary Clinton in 2016, “Lock her up!” has been Donald Trump’s battle cry. Restoring the greatness of a white, male-dominated America apparently requires menacing displays of dominance over women in positions of authority. Who can forget Trump acting like a stalker, invading Clinton’s personal space and looming behind her during a 2016 debate?

On Friday, a few weeks after MAGA lost its bid to disempower the progressive female majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, the Trump administration sent federal agents to arrest Hannah Dugan at the Milwaukee County Courthouse. Trump’s attorney general and the man he chose to lead the FBI gleefully posted pictures of Dugan’s “perp walk” in handcuffs, crowing about this unprecedented assault on the dignity and authority of a judge and the sovereignty of local courts.

On Tuesday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court suspended Dugan. “In order to uphold the public’s confidence in the courts of this state during the pendency of the criminal proceeding against Judge Dugan, we conclude, on our own motion, that it is in the public interest that she be temporarily relieved of her official duties,” the state’s highest court said in a two-page letter ordering Judge Dugan “temporarily prohibited from exercising the powers of a circuit court judge.”

It’s a perplexing decision. It didn’t arise from any complaint; the Court acted on its own. And Dugan had already been relieved of her duties while she focuses on her defense by the chief judge in Milwaukee, who assigned her calendar to other judges to cover.

Worse, the suspension gives the impression that the federal charges against Dugan are indeed serious. But that impression is not supported by the only evidence the government has produced.

The justification for Dugan’s arrest, laid out in a federal criminal complaint, is that she impeded federal law enforcement agents when she objected to ICE disrupting her court’s proceedings and ushered the man they came to arrest out a side door. The defendant, Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, who was appearing before Dugan on a misdemeanor battery charge unrelated to his immigration status, exited into the public hallway where the agents were waiting for him. Then they followed him outside and made their arrest — unimpeded.

Fox News claimed Dugan concealed Flores-Ruiz in a jury room. But that assertion is contradicted by the sworn testimony in the government’s own criminal complaint. 

The complaint features breathlessly sexist descriptions of Dugan appearing “visibly angry” and “walking quickly,” as if that were evidence of wrongdoing. But any actual wrongdoing is hard to pinpoint.

“Whatever you think of the actual conduct the complaint alleges,” says Dean Strang, a law professor at Loyola University Chicago School of Law and a long-time Wisconsin criminal defense lawyer, “there is a real question about whether there’s even arguably any federal crime here.” 

The government’s behavior, meanwhile, is “extraordinarily atypical,” for a nonviolent, nondrug charge involving someone who is not a flight risk, says Strang.

The handcuffs, the public arrest at Dugan’s workplace, the media circus — none of it was normal, or justified. Then Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel began posting pictures of Dugan in handcuffs on social media to brag about it.

“So what is it they are trying to do?” asks Strang. His conclusion: “Humiliate and terrify, not just her but every other judge in the country.”

The bigger issue here, beyond an unprecedented, public display of dominance and intimidation by the Trump administration, is that, in turning federal law enforcement into an arm of his personal, vengeance-themed reality show, Trump is running roughshod over the constitutional principle of federalism, which respects the sovereignty of the states, the integrity of the courts and public safety. Scaring defendants, witnesses and victims away from making court appearances makes it harder to administer justice and makes all of us less safe.

But you’d never know that to listen to Republican state officials, who are championing federal agents barging into courts, schools and churches, forgetting everything they ever said about local control and states’ rights. On Tuesday, Assembly Republicans led by Speaker Robin Vos sent a letter to Gov. Tony Evers, declaring “our caucus believes it is imperative that our laws reflect the need for local law enforcement to comply with these efforts.”

Republicans accuse Evers of issuing guidance to state officials that impedes federal ICE raids.

 “Unfortunately, recent events in Milwaukee have underscored the importance for our state to legislate and enforce compliance with federal immigration law,” their letter declares, citing Dugan’s arrest.

The Republicans demand that Evers rescind guidance telling state agencies that they need not answer questions, hand over files, or allow ICE to enter non-public areas without a warrant.

Capitulating to an administration that has admitted to deporting U.S. citizens and defied court orders to effect the return of a man it admits was mistakenly sent to a Salvadoran prison is a terrible idea. Big law firms that agreed to drop clients and offer free legal work to appease the Trump administration have eroded trust in the law. Authoritarian undermining of our legal system is a grave danger.

The least the most timid among us can do is insist that the federal government follow the law before caving in. That’s what Dugan did, when she asked if the agents who came to her courtroom to arrest Flores-Ruiz had a judicial warrant. They did not. Nor do they have proof that Dugan herself broke any laws.

The last thing we need right now is more capitulation to MAGA bullying. Stand strong. 

Former Social Security Administration Commissioner Martin O’Malley came to Wisconsin this week as he travels the country warning about the danger of cuts to the administration. | Photo courtesy Maryland's Executive Office of the Governor.

Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor and Social Security commissioner under President Joe Biden, was rushing around Wisconsin Thursday, conducting a flurry of local media interviews before speaking at an evening town hall in Racine.

“I’ve found myself doing a lot of town halls,” O’Malley said, speaking on his phone from the passenger seat of a car as he hurried to a local TV station.

On Wednesday, he was in Kansas City, Missouri, talking to constituents of Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver. Before that he traveled to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, at the invitation of a grassroots group to speak to a big crowd of people worried about threatened cuts to benefits for seniors.

In Racine on Thursday night he joined a town hall hosted by the progressive coalition group Opportunity Wisconsin. U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil, a Republican who represents the 1st District, was invited, but did not attend.

“Having served in the agency so recently, as its last confirmed commissioner, I just feel a responsibility to speak up,” O’Malley said of his detour from private life to travel the country criticizing President Donald Trump and Elon Musk for cutting Social Security staff and closing offices.

“The only thing that’s going to stop the driving of Social Security into system collapse is the American people rising up,” he added.

When he came into the Social Security Administration in 2023, O’Malley said, a decade of staff reductions had reduced the agency’s workforce to a 50-year low, just as the Baby Boom generation was causing a spike in the number of retirees it was serving. As a result, “every line of service was headed in the wrong direction.”

“The agency needed to turn things around, and to their credit they did it,” he said. O’Malley is full of praise for the federal workers he supervised, who reduced call wait times from 42 and a half minutes on average to 12.8 minutes, along with other improvements. “It’s one of the most highly skilled executive services I’ve ever worked with,” he said, including when he served as mayor of Baltimore and governor of Maryland. The “obsessive compulsive” culture of the agency, as O’Malley affectionately terms it, has meant that over the last 90 years, no one missed a check.

Then came Trump and Musk, who “unleashed a reign of terror on those employees” — “the same people who got us through COVID without ever missing a payment.”

Mass firings, a hostile work environment, and the huge waste of taxpayer money as employees were paid to walk out the door appalled O’Malley.

Instead of rooting out “waste fraud and abuse,” Musk’s DOGE cut the IT department in half, undoing the work O’Malley and his colleagues had done to improve service at the agency. 

As Trump and Musk drive out the people who know how the system works, intermittent IT outages have become a problem. The website for Social Security accounts has gone down. Wait times are skyrocketing. And as the problems get worse, O’Malley said, “ultimately, it will interrupt benefits.”

“I don’t know when it will happen,” he said, “but when it breaks, it will break.”

What is the point of this wanton destruction? 

“I don’t know what the end game is,” O’Malley said.  

Members of Congress in both political parties have told him they think Trump and Musk have set their sights on the $2.6 trillion in the Social Security trust fund in order to make tax cuts for the superwealthy permanent.

Then there’s Musk’s nihilistic ideology, captured in his assertion that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” 

“There’s no more empathetic program than Social Security,” says O’Malley. “It guarantees widows and orphans and people who are disabled don’t live in poverty. Maybe Musk thinks those are useless members of society who don’t help build his immense wealth. I don’t know.”

Whatever their motives, O’Malley is certain that Musk and Trump must be stopped from a campaign that will end in enormous damage to Americans. 

O’Malley’s message is the opposite of Musk’s — far from being riddled with waste, fraud and abuse, the Social Security administration is a model. Fraud affects less than one-half of 1% of Social Security funds. And far from being wasteful, the program spends 1.2% of its budget on overhead, meaning it could be seen as the most efficient insurance company in the world. Private health insurance companies have notoriously high administrative costs.

Other “Big Lies” O’Malley is out to bust include the whopper that immigrants without legal status are draining resources from the system. In fact, they pay about $26 billion in Social Security tax withholdings to fund benefits they themselves can never access, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Nor are dead people drawing Social Security benefits. “There is no zombie apocalypse,” says O’Malley. Facts and figures supporting the efficiency of Social Security are laid out in plain language on his website, winbackourcountry.com.

The good news is that people are beginning to push back on the idea that Social Security is riddled with abuse and should be made more “efficient.” 

“Congress people are getting a heck of a lot more calls now than they did two months ago,” O’Malley said, “whether it’s from people experiencing long wait times, or having trouble accessing the benefits they’ve worked their whole lives to earn, or who are just seeing what’s happening on the news.”

That pressure is absolutely necessary if we are going to prevent the raiding and destruction of a New Deal program that has served so many people so well for generations.