Corrine Hendrickson addresses a gathering of parents and child care providers outside the state Capitol on Friday, May 16, 2025. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

For 18 years Corrine Hendrickson has been taking care of young children in her New Glarus home.

At the end of August she’ll send the last of those children home, shut the doors of “Corrine’s Little Explorers” and clean up for a final time. She hadn’t planned for it to be this way.

“It’s really difficult,” Hendrickson says. “I’m not closing on my terms. I’m not closing because I was ready to close. I’m closing because it’s the decision that I need to make for myself and my family.”

It’s a decision, she says, forced by what the 2025-27 state budget didn’t do for child care.

“It will affect our community as a whole,” says Devon Kammerud, whose children were among the first that Hendrickson had in child care when she began the business. “I knew a few of my friends who were having babies they were hoping to go there. Now they won’t have that.”

Hendrickson says that even with provisions that were hailed as an unprecedented state investment in care, the budget fell short of what would have been required for her to afford to stay in business.

In the months leading up to the budget’s passage, Hendrickson was one of the leading voices for a substantial state investment in child care. As a co-founder of Wisconsin Early Childhood Action Needed (WECAN), she helped lead rallies and round tables to call on lawmakers to set aside nearly half-a-billion dollars to send  directly to child care providers across Wisconsin.

Ongoing state investment

Providers and advocates have been seeking an ongoing state budget line item for child care for years. Without that continuing outside support, they argue, it  will either be impossible to pay child care teachers adequately or impossible for anyone beside affluent families to afford quality child care.

Child care wages have been historically low. A 2023 report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum found that in Milwaukee, lead teachers’ pay averaged between $12 and less than $15 per hour — less than retail employees at big box stores or warehouse workers.

Parents, the policy forum report found, were paying in Milwaukee County more than $16,000 a year for infant care and more than $12,000 a year for a 4-year-old. Providers, teachers and families are all “struggling at the same time,” according to the report.

Elliot Haspel, a fellow at Capita, a family policy think tank, contends that child care should be considered a public good. He compares it to public schools, libraries, fire departments and park systems, because “the benefits are so widespread they go beyond the users of the service.”

In addition to providing children with early education opportunities, the availability of child care has benefits “for the overall health of families and the ability of families to stay in communities,” Haspel told the Wisconsin Examiner in an interview in May.

Pandemic relief and financial stability

The COVID-19 pandemic gave Wisconsin an opportunity for proof of concept for a state investment. Federal pandemic relief funds “gave us the most financial security we’ve ever had,” Hendrickson says.

She and Brooke Legler, who owns a group child care center in New Glarus, started WECAN about the same time. They had been traveling Wisconsin, hosting showings of the documentary “No Small Matter” about the importance of early childhood education. They started WECAN to bring activist muscle to advocating on behalf of providers and parents and increase respect and funding for child care.

Congress enacted the first COVID-19 pandemic relief funding programs in 2020. They culminated with the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), enacted in March 2021, shortly after President Joe Biden took office. ARPA made it possible for Wisconsin to send $20 million a month to child care providers across the state for two years under the Child Care Counts program instituted by the Department of Children and Families under Gov. Tony Evers.

“We really pushed hard to get that funding to come to our state,” Hendrickson says. “And then we also pushed hard to make sure that our state did allocate it directly to all of us [providers] that were regulated.”

The monthly payments made it possible for providers to raise wages for child care teachers without having to further increase the fees parents were already paying.

After failing to persuade the Republican majority in the Wisconsin Legislature to extend Child Care Counts with state funds in 2023, the Evers administration extended the program with repurposed federal money for another two years, reducing the monthly payout to $10 million. The money ran out early this month.

When Evers introduced the 2025-27 budget in February, he once again proposed extending Child Care Counts, asking for $480 million over two years. A survey of providers found that as many as 25% said they could close without continued support.

The only way to stabilize the child care sector, providers and their allies argued, was to provide a sustained, substantial state investment. Hendrickson and countless other advocates — the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association, Democratic lawmakers, innumerable providers and some business leaders as well — spent most of the first half of this year advancing that message.

Weighing the odds

The odds looked steep from the start. The Republican majority on the Legislature’s budget-writing Joint Finance Committee pulled Gov. Tony Evers’ $480 million line item for child care along with more than 600 provisions from the draft budget at the committee’s first budget meeting in the spring.

As the budget debates dragged on, advocates kept up their demands. During that time, Hendrickson was weighing her own future. She asked herself, she says, “what were the odds of us getting what we needed in this budget, and what I would need to get put in the budget in order for me to be able to operate and not outprice my parents?”

Hendrickson almost closed her child care service in the fall of 2024, when three of the eight openings for kids were unfilled until the end of September. “And I didn’t want to have to go through that again this next year — and the prices were only going to be higher,” she says.

By June, it wasn’t looking good. Initially Hendrickson expected her program to have no openings in the fall. Then three families told her they would be dropping out.

One was a mom who qualified for the Wisconsin Shares subsidy program for low-income families. The subsidy is supposed to cover 75% of the cost of care, but as child care fees have increased Wisconsin Shares has not been able to keep up. The mother said she could no longer afford her part of the bill.

The woman moved with her child to another county, and Hendrickson said she’s heard from her that she’s “trying to work from home with her 2-year-old also there at all times, because she just can’t afford her child care anymore.”

Another family was moving out of state at the end of the summer — but then changed their plans and left in June.

Weeks before the budget negotiations concluded, Hendrickson had gotten word that a direct funding program was still possible, but that insiders thought it would get only about $100 million, less than one-fourth of what providers and Evers had been seeking.

With that in mind, Hendrickson calculated a rate increase and gave that estimate to a third family. They had been driving every day from Madison to New Glarus because her center was a good fit for their child and because her rates were lower.

The new rates were closer to what they would expect to pay in Madison, the family told her, and they decided to look closer to home.

The tipping point

Subsequent inquiries for care came from families who were expecting a child or who had a child under 2 years old. But Hendrickson was already at her limit for that age group under the terms of her family child care license and couldn’t add more.

On July 1, Evers announced a budget deal with funding for child care, including $110 million that would be distributed to providers along the same lines as Child Care Counts — not as a long-term program, but as a bridge to an undefined future. “A bridge to nowhere,” says Sarah Kazell, a child care teacher and advocate who has worked with Hendrickson.

Kazell says the failure of lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle to follow through on the message throughout the last six months for child care funding has left her “deeply disappointed and angry.”

It’s not just the absence of funding, she says, but also the last minute addition of a pilot program to increase the ratio of children to providers, but only in the low-income subsidized part of the child care system. “It just seems specifically harmful to the kids that are most vulnerable,” Kazell says.

Hendrickson had already privately calculated that she could get by if the lawmakers approved about $240 million — half what Evers had sought originally. But with a single year at a still smaller amount, increasing her rates by $60 a week  “just wasn’t going to work,” she says.

Taking into account the cost for property taxes, liability insurance, homeowner’s insurance and utility rate increases, “I just couldn’t continue to justify keeping my business open while struggling and hurting my own family,” Hendrickson says.

And she knew she would need to decide sooner rather than later, so families would have time to find a new provider.

“I didn’t want the families in my care to have to worry about where their kids would go if I continued to try and struggle — and then what would happen to those kids, and where would they go?” Hendrickson says. “And I didn’t want to feel guilty and have to stay open while also bankrupting myself.”

Corrine’s Little Explorers will remain open through the end of August. Working with Legler, Hendrickson arranged for the children to be able to transfer to Legler’s center, The Growing Tree, starting in September if their parents want that.

From provider to advocate

Hendrickson graduated from University of Wisconsin-Whitewater in 2001 with a degree in early childhood education, but in the recession after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks there were no jobs, especially in early education, she says.

She went to work at a Bath & Body Works store, working her way up to store manager. After her oldest son was born in 2006, “I had three very pregnant friends who were talking about how they couldn’t find care and how they were trying to figure out who would have to quit their job,” Hendrickson says.

Chatting during a weekly get-together, she brought up her college degree. “I said, ‘What if I quit my job and I opened up a child care?’” she recalls.

“That was a way I could meet the needs of my community, use my teaching degree, and start a small business,” Hendrickson says. “How hard could it be? This can’t be that bad, right? Yeah, I was naive.”

She had been paying for child care herself and “saw how much I was paying,” she says — not understanding the costs that providers have to bear.

She started with the infants of two friends and her own son, 10 months old at the time. Three months later another infant joined the group. Wisconsin allows child care providers who are caring for three children unrelated to them to operate without a license.

In the midst of the Great Recession of 2008, her husband, Kevin got laid off from his job at a landscape contracting company. “We were trying to figure out how do I stay open,” Hendrickson recalls. “We went on food stamps. We went on BadgerCare … We did everything we could to keep my business floating and him trying to find a part-time job.”

A volunteer firefighter for New Glarus, her husband was able to take a part-time firefighting job in Verona and has since risen first to a full-time position and more recently to fire chief.

Within a couple of years, Hendrickson got licensed from the state as a family child care provider. “We weren’t really making a lot, but it was what I loved,” she says.

The couple renovated their home, adding a lower level that opens to the outdoors and serves as the child care space. Hendrickson qualified for the state’s highest quality rating, five stars, in 2012 and has maintained that since. 

When she encountered a child with special needs, Hendrickson asked about help from state officials in the administration of then-Gov. Scott Walker. She recalls one who told her that she could turn away the child. “I didn’t think that was right,” Hendrickson says.

‘We need people … that actually care’

All three of Bekah Stauffacher’s children have spent time in care at Corrine’s Little Explorers. “She’s had such a positive impact on all three of them,” Stauffacher says. “We feel so lucky that we got to know her and have our children with her.”

Stauffacher’s middle child, who’s now 12, has severe developmental delays due to a genetic disorder. Hendrickson threw herself into finding some additional support for the girl during her years in child care.

“It was impressive,” Stauffacher says of Hendrickson’s advocacy on behalf of her daughter. “It was more than we could have handled ourselves — we were grateful that she took it on.”

For a special needs child covered under the Wisconsin Shares subsidy program, a care provider can get additional funding for an aide, special materials or training. She got to know Democratic state Sen. Jon Erpenbach, who later introduced legislation that would have expanded that additional funding for all special needs children in child care, whether they were part of Wisconsin Shares or not.

Although the bill died in committee, “going through that process really empowered me, and helped me understand what your representatives are supposed to do,” Hendrickson says.

Kazell has spent the last few years subbing for Hendrickson in the child care program when Hendrickson has gone on the road to press the case for child care support or lead workshops on advocacy. She’s also been active in WECAN’s advocacy and organizing work.

“She’s a mentor to me, and I think the most meaningful and most important mentor in my life,” Kazell says — both in early childhood teaching and in the work of organizing for change.

“She definitely was that person that helped me gain such a deep appreciation for the need for actual activism and organizing,” Kazell says — critical, she adds, to bring about the cultural change to elevate society’s value for child care and the political change to translate that value into concrete policy.

“She can talk a mile a minute and she knows a lot of stuff, but she’s also the type of person who’s keyed into where the other person is coming from,” Kazell says.

As she considers what she’ll do next, Hendrickson expects to stay involved in advocacy work, providing training in grass-roots organizing. It’s something she’s been doing already for several years.

She’s also contemplating whether to run for the state Legislature.

“We need people in there that actually care and understand the consequences of their inaction or their action,” Hendrickson said. “Taxes aren’t necessarily bad. It’s just we need to use them in ways that the people paying them feel that they’re getting something back for it.”

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Emma Widmar, shown with her dog Zander, has relied on Medicaid while managing complex health problems that she has had since she was 12. (Photo courtesy of Emma Widmar)

At the age of 26, Emma Widmar has been chronically ill for more than half her lifetime.

Widmar was 12 when her symptoms first showed up — severe allergies to food, hormones and her environment. At the age of 18 she qualified for Social Security disability payments as well as for Medicaid. The combined federal-state health insurance program pays for her ongoing medical care, frequent emergency room visits and necessary home care.

“I equate Medicaid to a lifeline,” Widmar says. “Some people might think that’s an exaggeration, but it isn’t. It ensures all my needs are met.”

With the enactment on July 4 of the mega-bill extending the tax cuts passed during President Donald Trump’s first term along with deep cuts in Medicaid and other safety net programs, Widmar is uncertain how her life might change.

After she graduated from Gateway Technical College, Widmar worked for four years for the Racine County Eye, an online journalism outlet. A case of respiratory syncytial virus — RSV — in January 2024 brought on severe neuropathy and hampered her breathing, forcing her to give up a job she had loved.

“I lost my ability to walk,” Widmar says. “It really wreaked havoc on my body and I couldn’t keep up.”

As complex as her health problems are, they’ve also become deeply familiar to her. 

 “It has been my life, and I simply can’t ignore it,” Widmar says. “It’s just the way that it is.”

While she and her family along with many others hope that science will one day unlock treatments for intractable illnesses such as hers, “these are chronic, lifelong conditions that right now there’s no cure for,” she says. For now, “it’s about finding the best quality of life for myself.”

Widmar lives with her parents in Mount Pleasant. Her mother is a primary caregiver.

Wisconsin’s home- and community-based care Medicaid waiver covers the cost of medications “that allow me to function,” she says.

 It also makes it possible for her to have additional home and personal caregivers. With Medicaid “those caretakers can be compensated,” Widmar says. “It ensures that I always have eyes on me and that I’m getting what I need.”

Her chronic food allergies require a special diet, with food that is more expensive than the typical grocery store purchase. Widmar’s disability has qualified her for benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — SNAP, known as FoodShare in Wisconsin.

“Health care and food assistance are not just line items in a budget — they are a matter of life and death for American families,” said Sondra Goldschein, executive director of Family Friendly Economy, which campaigned against the mega-bill and shared the stories of people affected by it, including Widmar.

The bill passed despite widespread popular opposition. Widmar says she wants to encourage people “to continue voicing their opinions to policymakers, lawmakers and politicians,” not give up in resignation. “We are the ones that employ the government,” she says. “They work for us and we have to remind them of that.”

Widmar suspects most people wouldn’t consider her a typical Medicaid recipient — younger, coming from a middle-class upbringing and with a family that is able to support her. But that’s really the point: Medicaid, she observes, has helped people from all different backgrounds, regardless of class, race, ethnicity or education.

She also expects the spending cuts will ripple far beyond the Medicaid population.

“We’re altering health care as a whole, which will have an impact on everyone,” Widmar says.

For several years, the Affordable Care Act has helped drive down the number of people without health insurance. The mega-bill’s changes not just to Medicaid but also the ACA have been forecast to reverse that trend, increasing the uninsured population by 17 million over the next decade.

One Medicaid change, scheduled to take effect in 2027, will be the imposition of work requirements for some recipients. Nationally, two-thirds of Medicaid recipients already work full- or part-time, according to KFF, a nonprofit health policy research, polling and news organization, and researchers have found that some people who qualify are excluded due to paperwork problems.

Widmar has already experienced a work requirement as part of her SNAP enrollment. When her illness made work impossible, the requirement was waived.

With the extent of her current disabilities, she hopes that she would qualify for an exemption from the coming Medicaid work requirement.

She might not know for sure until late 2026, however. Wisconsin won’t be able to draw up the details of how it implements the work requirement until the publication of the federal rules, which aren’t due until next June.

In her previous experience with SNAP, Widmar said work requirements didn’t always match the realities for people with disabilities.

“Unfortunately we don’t make it easier for people who are disabled to have a job and contribute,” she says. “It’s not a system that says, ‘We have a work requirement — do what you’re able to do…’”

When she was able to work, “I loved my job,” Widmar says. Her employer was understanding and accommodated her disabilities.

That was no small matter. Because of her condition, Widmar says, she can’t be alone: Her low blood pressure can cause her to faint unpredictably. Her hours also had to be flexible to match her erratic energy levels.

“It’s difficult to work and have a disability and be on these programs,” Widmar says. “It’s like an agility course you have to go through.”

While Widmar is concerned about what lies ahead for her when the changes to Medicaid take effect, her foremost worry is for people whose lives are more difficult.

“I have a support system to help me get through it. But there’s people that don’t know where to turn for help. And it’s really unfortunate for them,” she says.

For people living at or near poverty, she sees life on the verge of becoming more harsh.

“We’re already at bare bones,” Widmar says, “and now we’re taking away more from the most vulnerable populations.”

 

Michael Haas, Madison city attorney and acting city clerk, addresses the Wisconsin Elections Commission on Thursday. (Screenshot/WisEye)

The city of Madison has three weeks to review an order on how to prevent election officials from repeating a mistake they made in the November 2024 election, when they failed to count nearly 200 ballots.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission voted Thursday to hold off on the order after the Madison city attorney and acting city clerk, Michael Haas, urged the commissioners to first give the city a chance to negotiate its details.

“We have concerns about the approach that would require Madison and Madison alone to implement specific new procedures without the opportunity for our staff to consider their impact and practicality and to provide feedback” to the elections commission, Haas told the commissioners during the public comment period at the start of the meeting.

The city alerted the commission on Dec. 20, 2024, that 193 absentee ballots from three wards were never processed — 68 from two wards that were found on Nov. 12 and 125 from another ward found on Dec. 3.

“The failure to count the 193 ballots in Madison was a result of a confluence of errors,” wrote commission members Ann Jacobs and Don Millis, in their report on their joint investigation. Jacobs, a Democrat, is the current commission chair; Millis, a Republican, is the former chair.

The report found “a complete lack of leadership” by Madison’s city clerk at the time, Maribeth Witzel-Behl, after the uncounted ballots were discovered. Witzel-Behl resigned in April.

“These ballots were treated as unimportant and a reconciliation nuisance, rather than as the essential part of our democracy they represent,” Jacobs and Millis wrote.

“The buck didn’t stop anywhere,” Jacobs told the commissioners.

While the report found violations of state election law, it stipulated that those weren’t crimes and that there was no recommendation for criminal referrals.

“This is not a criminal investigation,” Jacobs said. “The focus of this investigation has been discovering what happened and making sure it doesn’t ever happen again in Madison and throughout the state.”

The report’s proposed order requires the Madison city clerk to produce a plan for which employees handle each task in running an election; to print pollbooks that record absentee ballots no earlier than the Thursday before the election; and to watermark ballots that arrive after that date.

Pollbooks printed three weeks before the Nov. 5 election and ballots that were marked with a highlighter, but not watermarked, when they arrived after the books were printed were among the anomalies the report found in the Madison case. 

The proposed order also includes requirements for the city clerk’s office and election officials who handle and process absentee ballots on Election Day.

Haas said “wholesale personnel management changes” in the order could be costly and that it didn’t account for changes the city has already made in its procedures.

Commission member Mark Thomsen urged the body to separate the report from the order, postponing the order so the city clerk’s office could respond.

“We have oversight but clerks run the elections, and it seems to me that we should at least defer to the city and the clerk on the specifics of an order,” said Thomsen, a Democrat.

Republican commissioner Bob Spindell agreed. “I’d like to see this cool off a bit and give Mike [Haas] the chance to come back as he’s requested,” he said.

The commission approved the report, minus the order, on a 5-1 vote, with Spindell the lone dissenter, saying that the former clerk “should not be crucified” over the incident.

A motion to approve the order failed on a tie vote. Commissioners then voted unanimously to defer it, giving the city until Aug. 7 to offer comments and setting a follow-up meeting for Aug. 15.

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Birth control pills. A nonprofit group's new scorecard assesses how state policies affect access and availability for contraception. (Getty Images)

For Wisconsinites who care about access to birth control, a new scorecard published Wednesday offers a mix of good and bad news.

On the plus side, Wisconsin’s Medicaid program covers the cost of contraception for people with incomes up to just over 300% of the federal poverty line, according to the Population Reference Bureau. State law also requires insurers to cover the cost of prescription contraceptives.

On the down side, Wisconsin law allows health insurance plans to require a patient co-payment, the Population Reference Bureau reports. And the state also hasn’t enacted legislation that allows more health care professionals to issue birth control prescriptions.

The Population Reference Bureau is a nonprofit, nonpartisan policy and research organization that describes its mission as improving people’s health and well-being through policies and practices rooted in scientific evidence.

Wednesday the bureau published its first-ever scorecard assessing contraceptive access for all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Reviewing a collection of policies that address affordability,  availability and the environment of health care, the scorecard rates each state as protective, restrictive or mixed on contraception access. 

“Nearly 35% of Americans or 121 million people currently live in a state that actively restricts access to contraception through their policies,” said Cathryn Streifel, senior program director for the organization, in a briefing for reporters Tuesday. “This patchwork of policies creates a system where reproductive health care access depends on where you live.”

Broad access to contraception “is essential to helping people live with more freedom, health and possibility,” Streifel said — allowing people to have reproductive autonomy, making it possible for them to complete education and join the workforce, and contributing to economic stability. Contraception also reduces the risks for maternal and infant mortality and helps reduce public health costs, she added.

“We are at a moment where understanding state policy landscapes matters more than ever, because state policies are really shaping the reality of contraceptive access on the ground — especially because the federal protections are crumbling,” Streifel said.

Christine Power, a senior policy advisor with the organization, said the scorecard can help policymakers, advocates and the general public understand where each state stands.

The goal is “to ensure that this contraceptive policy is more transparent and actionable and to highlight both progress and gaps in access across the country,” Power said.

The scorecard rates 16 states and D.C. as protective for contraception access and 16 as restrictive. Wisconsin is one of 18 states with a mixed scorecard.

Wisconsin’s protective policies include the Medicaid coverage for family planning services. In addition, the state requires that hospital emergency rooms provide access to emergency contraception.

Wisconsin’s laws on sex education get a mixed rating. Positive points include  requiring medically accurate curricula, not requiring parental consent and not limiting sex ed to abstinence only. On the negative side, school districts are not required to offer sex ed.

The scorecard rates the state’s failure to fully expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act as restrictive, along with the failure to expand contraceptive prescription authority to more health providers. A bill that would allow pharmacists to prescribe birth control pills has passed the Wisconsin Assembly and is awaiting a vote in the state Senate.

On several other issues that the scorecard includes, Wisconsin has no policy.

The state doesn’t require insurers to cover an extended supply of contraceptives beyond three months, which increases a state’s score for being protective. Wisconsin also has no policies explicitly allowing minors to independently access contraceptive services or restricting them from doing so.

“Ten states restrict most minors from independently accessing contraceptive services,” said Power. “This policy creates additional hurdles for young people seeking to make informed decisions about their reproductive health, potentially leading to delayed care, unintended pregnancies, and negative long-term health outcomes.”

Wisconsin law is silent on whether health care providers or facilities can refuse to provide contraceptive services on religious or moral grounds. In other states, laws permitting that refusal are rated as restrictive.

The scorecard doesn’t rank the 50 states, but it does single out those with the highest scores for protection as well as those with the most restrictive policy framework.

Washington and California are the two states with the most protective contraception policies, Power said, while Kansas had the lowest score, with a mix of restrictive policies and the absence of any policy.

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A Wisconsin Fair Maps Coalition yard sign posted in 2020. The coalition has begun a new round of work advocating for an independent, nonpartisan system of drawing Wisconsin's legislative maps. (Photo by Tony Webster/Wisconsin Fair Maps Coalition)

With court-ordered maps that have made more Wisconsin legislative races competitive for both political parties, pro-democracy advocates are turning back to a longstanding objective: a permanent change in how the maps are drawn.

Instead of state lawmakers who are currently in charge, political reform groups are organizing to move the task to a new, independent commission that would draw Assembly and Senate districts every 10 years, following the new U.S. census, in ways that reflect Wisconsin’s close political divide.

“Our goal is to have a more accountable legislative body,” says Iuscely Flores, organizing director for the Wisconsin Fair Maps Coalition.

A change will require an amendment to the Wisconsin Constitution, which currently assigns the task of drawing legislative districts to the Wisconsin Legislature.

Until 2011, the state’s redistricting process generally went well for nearly half a century, according to Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause Wisconsin. The Legislature was closely divided between Republicans and Democrats. Regardless of the governor’s party, the other party usually had a slim majority in either the Senate or the Assembly.

“It was split control,” says Heck. “Redistricting was usually incumbent protection, but it wasn’t particularly partisan.”

The 2010 election in Wisconsin changed that, with Republicans for the first time in a half-century getting control of the governor’s mansion and both houses of the Legislature.

In 2011 the lawmakers drew what became widely recognized as one of the most gerrymandered legislative maps in the country. “They picked the most partisan maps they could,” says Heck.

The 2012 election showed the impact: Wisconsin voters reelected Democratic President Barack Obama to a second term and sent another Democrat, Tammy Baldwin, to the U.S. Senate. And 51% of the votes for the Wisconsin Assembly were for Democratic candidates. Yet Republicans won 60 of the 99 seats in the lower house.

In the years that followed, Common Cause, the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign and the League of Women Voters all took up the cause of putting redistricting in the hands of an independent body, arguing that a group of citizens drawn from across the political spectrum could more accurately reflect the state’s true political makeup.

While the idea gained public support, it got the cold shoulder from the Legislature’s majority.

Then came the maps drawn after the 2020 census, approved in 2022 following a legal battle that was settled by the conservative majority in the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Those maps further solidified a lopsided balance between the parties in the Legislature.

In 2023, voters flipped the Court’s balance from conservative and aligned with the Republican party (although the justices are officially nonpartisan) to a majority elected with the support of the Democratic Party. For reform advocates, the switch presented a new opportunity, and the focus turned to a lawsuit challenging how the 2022 maps were drawn.

The outcome of that lawsuit in 2024 produced maps that more closely reflected the narrow partisan divide in the states. In the 2024 elections, Democrats picked up four state Senate seats, erasing a GOP supermajority, and added 14 seats in the Assembly.

While those maps were closer to fair, however, a larger problem remains, reform groups argue: the Wisconsin Constitution gives the lawmakers the ultimate power to draw their districts in ways that preserve their political advantage.

The process for amending the state constitution requires lawmakers to vote on a proposal in two successive legislative sessions, then for voters to endorse the amendment in a statewide referendum. That means a little more than four years must pass before the change could be instituted.

Flores says the coalition is keeping an eye on that timeline, with plans to engage lawmakers from both parties next year in order to get legislation introduced and passed.

“We have to fix this permanently — that is what we are now focused on,” says Penny Bernard Schaber, leader for the Fair Maps Coalition’s team in the 8th Congressional District. “We want to put both parties on notice that we need to fix what we are doing.”

Even as the maps lawsuit was underway, advocates for bigger change were continuing to meet and organize, Flores says. And after the Court ruling and the adoption of the new, fairer maps, the work for an independent redistricting body kicked into higher gear.

An ad hoc committee on redistricting reform met monthly and later more often over the last year, with participants drilling down into alternatives for structuring independent redistricting bodies.

“We were able to really study how independent redistricting commissions in other states really worked,” Flores says.

“We looked at every single state that has an independent commission,” says Debra Cronmiller, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin. There were conversations with academics and other groups that draw legislative maps.

“We tried to glean from all of that information what would work best for Wisconsin,” Cronmiller said.

The Wisconsin Fair Maps Coalition has drawn up a draft for how a Wisconsin commission might work, but Flores emphasizes that it’s still a work in progress.

The coalition has begun a series of community hearings to engage the public, explain the concept and refine the details. Hearings were held in the Milwaukee North Shore suburbs in June and in Dodgeville on July 12.

On Wednesday evening, there will be a hearing in Green Bay at the Brown County Central Library starting at 5:30 p.m. On Thursday one is scheduled for Wausau, and more meetings are planned through the summer and into the fall.

“We’re trying to get community input,” Flores says. “There are questions we still don’t know the answers to, and we’re learning so much  — it’s been an amazing, citizen-led process that I don’t think I’ve seen before.”

The groups and individuals working on the project are considering “how to make sure that the commission accurately reflects and represents the people of Wisconsin — how to make sure that we incorporate people from different political backgrounds, different ethnicities,” Flores adds. “We’re trying to be what Wisconsin looks like.”

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Donald Trump signs the tax- and spending-cut meg-abill on July 4. A new Democratic Party website uses key talking points from Donald Trump's 2024 campaign against the president and his policies. (Photo by Alex Brandon - Pool/Getty Images)

Aiming to use President Donald Trump’s signature policies against him, Democrats unveiled a website Wednesday that depicts their purported costs to taxpayers in each state.

The TrumpTax.com website draws on projections from the Congressional Budget Office and other sources as it advances the argument that the mega-bill passed by Republicans in the U.S. House and Senate and signed into law by Trump on July 4 “takes money out of working people’s pockets to give handouts to the rich.”

The campaign combines the impact of Trump’s on-again, off-again tariff declarations with the mega-bill to derive a so-called “Trump Tax,” generating state-by-state calculations for the data.

“The Trump Tax will explode the deficit by $3.3 trillion — leading to higher inflation, higher energy bills, and higher grocery and prescription drug costs,” the website states — pinpointing specific messages about consumer pocketbook issues that were key talking points during Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.

The site lists all 50 U.S. states with a drop-down list of bullet points for each.

In Wisconsin, the campaign projects 276,000 people will lose health insurance over the next decade. The number is calculated from changes to the Medicaid program that have been projected to cut some recipients off from the state-federal health insurance plan for the poor, along with the end of premium subsidies for low or moderate income households that purchase health insurance from the Affordable Care Act online marketplace.

It projects 49,000 Wisconsinites could lose food assistance through SNAP, the federal nutrition program and pegs the cost to Wisconsin businesses to date of Trump administration tariff policies at more than $900 million, citing calculations published in Axios.

“The Trump Tax is the largest redistribution of wealth and the largest cut to health care in Wisconsin history,” Democratic National Committee Chair Kenneth Martin said in a statement with the unveiling of the website.

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A federal judge has ordered Wisconsin to stop denying unemployment insurance to applicants who are also on Social Security Disability Insurance. (Getty Images creative)

Updated Wednesday, 7/16/2025, 2 p.m.

Wisconsin residents who receive federal disability benefits and also work will no longer be denied unemployment compensation if they get laid off under a federal court order issued this week.

The order effectively ends enforcement of a 12-year-old state law that disqualifies people from unemployment insurance coverage if they collect Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) payments.

The order, released late Monday, comes a year after U.S. District Judge William Conley found that the Wisconsin law barring unemployment insurance for SSDI recipients unlawfully discriminates against people with disabilities.

The Department of Workforce Development (DWD) issued a comment Wednesday, after this report was initially published, stating, “The Department of Workforce Development did not oppose a prospective preliminary injunction in this case from the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin but cannot provide additional comment at this time due to ongoing litigation.”

The law blocking unemployment compensation for SSDI recipients was passed in 2013 with only Republican support in the Legislature and signed by then-Gov. Scott Walker. It was based on the premise that most SSDI recipients didn’t work and that when they filed UI claims they were “double-dipping” and probably committing “fraud.”

That impression is false, according to Victor Forberger, whose legal practice is almost exclusively focused on unemployment insurance claims.

Many people with disabilities who qualify for SSDI are still able to do some kinds of work, and they often want and need to, Forberger said Tuesday.

“They need to do this work to support themselves,” Forberger said. The typical monthly SSDI benefit “is a bare minimum, and in some cases not even that.”

Forberger, working with two other law firms, filed a lawsuit in 2021 against Amy Pechacek, secretary-designee at the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development (DWD). The suit charged that banning SSDI recipients from filing for unemployment compensation when they lose work violates the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

In a ruling July 17, 2024, Conley sided with the plaintiffs. Despite that ruling, DWD continued to reject unemployment insurance claims made by people receiving SSDI payments.

Conley’s new order, filed late Monday, instructs Pechacek and DWD to stop enforcing the UI ban for people on SSDI.

The lawsuit was filed as a class action. In an order June 11, Conley certified two classes of people with claims under the litigation: Those who applied for unemployment benefits in Wisconsin after Sept. 7, 2015 and were denied because they received SSDI benefits; and those who had received UI benefits after that date, but then were ordered to pay them back because they also were on SSDI.

The plaintiffs and DWD still differ on how to handle remedies for the two classes of people.

DWD wants to reprocess their claims from the start, and argues in a court brief that some of them might still not qualify for unemployment insurance for other reasons. The plaintiffs want the order to include a provision for supplemental filings and hearings.

Conley’s order requires both sides to work out a remedy agreement by Aug. 18, and if they can’t, to each submit a proposed order and identify their differences.

The judge rejected two other proposed classes: UI claimants who were penalized after failing to report their SSDI income, and SSDI recipients who never filed for unemployment insurance after losing a job.

The penalties in the law were not part of the lawsuit, Conley wrote. Identifying who might have applied for UI and did not was “unknown and unknowable,” he added.

Forberger said Tuesday that there may be several thousand people who were on SSDI and were denied unemployment compensation as a result. Once the remedy details are resolved, he expects that notifying everyone who qualifies for payment will be a complicated and time-consuming task.

“We’ve got to do a lot of outreach and a lot of explanation,” Forberger said.

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A Social Security Administration field office in San Jose, California. An email message from the agency about the tax cut bill that President Donald Trump signed July 4 has drawn sharp criticism. (Photo by Michael Vi/Getty Images)

Updated 2 p.m. Tuesday, 7/15/2025

Retired professor Larry White says the email message he got on July 4 from the Social Security Administration was unlike any he’s ever seen from the agency.

“The Social Security Administration (SSA) is celebrating the passage of the One Big, Beautiful Bill,” the email message began — using the official name of the massive legislation signed by President Donald Trump that cuts taxes and also slashes spending on Medicaid and SNAP, along with making numerous other policy changes.

White, 71, who lives in Madison, has been getting Social Security Administration email since he retired from the Beloit College psychology faculty in 2019. But until the July 4 message, he said, every single one has been straightforward, factual — and nonpolitical.

The message included a misleading description of one provision in the new law. The Social Security Administration later published a correction.

That alone angered White. But that the message was sent at all was just as irritating, he told the Wisconsin Examiner.

The email, including a quote from Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano, “appeared to value currying favor with the president over telling Americans the truth,” White said. “I want our federal agencies to be independent, nonpartisan offices that act with integrity and serve the public, not the president.”

The Social Security message claims that the legislation “ensures that nearly 90% of Social Security beneficiaries will no longer pay federal income taxes on their benefits…”

“This is a historic step forward for America’s seniors,” Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano stated.

As was soon widely reported, however, the message itself was off the mark.

“I was surprised to see SSA send this out as an email to such a large list since this seems more about politics than anything specific to the program,” said J. Michael Collins, a household economics expert at the University of Wisconsin. Collins directed a Social Security research center at the UW until the Trump administration shut it down earlier this year.

The actual change that the message refers to is to income taxes paid by all people 65 or older with incomes $75,000 a year or less for single filers and $150,000 a year or less for couples — regardless of whether they’re collecting Social Security or not, Collins explained.

While the message appears to single out Social Security income, “there is no new exemption of SSA income from federal income taxes, just a new deduction for all people 65+ regardless of income source,” Collins told the Wisconsin Examiner in an email message.

For people who are 64 or younger and who get income from Social Security, there’s no comparable tax cut, he added.

To be sure, the reduction does give some help to taxpayers 65 or older who collect Social Security.

 A 2022 IRS tax tip explains that half of Social Security income is taxable for  a single person whose income is $25,000 to $34,000 and for a married couple filing jointly whose income is $32,000 to $44,000.

For a single person with income over $34,000 or a married couple with income over $44,000, 85% of their Social Security income is taxable.

Social Security beneficiaries with incomes below the $75,000 or $150,000 ceiling will get relief from those tax bills — along with everyone else 65 or older whose income also falls below those limits.

The tax break also lasts just a few years, ending in 2028 — stretching the claim that qualifying beneficiaries “will no longer” pay income taxes.

The email message produced a sharp blowback.

“I was appalled — it was really unprecedented,” Nancy Altman, president of the advocacy group Social Security Works, told the Wisconsin Examiner in a phone interview. “They’ve taken an agency that’s supposed to be above politics and made it an arm of propaganda.”

Altman recalled that when Social Security checks were mailed in October 1972, President Richard Nixon suggested including an insert in which he could take credit for a benefit increase — even though he had initially opposed it. The commissioner at the time, Robert Ball, threatened to resign if Nixon followed through, and Nixon backed off, Altman said.

As originally worded, the email message appeared to suggest two separate tax cut provisions — one for Social Security recipients 65 and older and one for others:

“The new law includes a provision that eliminates federal income taxes on Social Security benefits for most beneficiaries, providing relief to individuals and couples. Additionally, it provides an enhanced deduction for taxpayers aged 65 and older, ensuring that retirees can keep more of what they have earned.”

On July 7, the Social Security Administration added a correction and changed the second sentence in that paragraph to, “It does so by providing an enhanced deduction for taxpayers aged 65 and older…”

The correction was previously reported by HuffPost reporter Arthur Delaney.

The morning that he received the Social Security message, White, the retired Beloit professor, wrote back to Bisignano directly — guessing at a direct email address for the Trump-appointed Social Security Commissioner.

“Commissioner Bisignano, When did the Social Security Administration become so blatantly political? I thought government agencies like the USPS were supposed to just go about their business from one administration to the next, but clearly that’s not the case with the SSA. You have become an unabashed mouthpiece for Trump. Shame on you!”

“I was upset that the head of a major federal agency would act in a way that undermines the public’s trust,” White told the Wisconsin Examiner.

“For years, Trump has expressed contempt for America’s once-revered institutions — courts, universities, the press, medical experts, climate scientists, long-time allies abroad … the list is a long one,” White added. “Trump wants to diminish any group or individual who questions his aims or methods.”

The email message appears to play directly to that characteristic of the president, he said, and White fears that will diminish the agency in the public eye.

“What upsets me is that the commissioner of the SSA foolishly wrote a letter that will prompt millions of Americans to question the integrity of the SSA,” White said. “It takes years for an organization to build up a good reputation, but it can be fatally damaged almost overnight.”

This report has been updated with a statement Tuesday from Sen. Tammy Baldwin.

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Children enrolled in the Head Start early education program operated by Western Dairyland Economic Opportunity Council. (Photo courtesy of Western Dairyland EOC)

A new Trump administration federal rule would bar immigrants without legal status from a range of public programs, canceling a policy that was implemented nearly three decades ago.

The change bars the children of those immigrants from the Head Start child care program. It also closes the door to immigrants lacking legal status for various programs that provide mental health and substance abuse treatment, job training and other assistance.

Head Start, which provides early education and child care for low-income families, has never been required to ascertain the immigration status of its families, said Jennie Mauer, executive director of the Wisconsin Head Start Association.

Families enrolling in the program have to provide a variety of pieces of information to verify they are eligible, Mauer told the Wisconsin Examiner Monday, and the programs are “very compliance oriented” and collect “exactly what they have to collect.”

Mauer said a trusting relationship between Head Start programs and the families they serve is important.

“We’re serving some of the neediest families in our community,” she said. Some have had “challenging relationships” in the past with schools and other government agencies — making nurturing that trust even more critical, she added.

The federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a notice July 10 that declared Head Start and a list of other federally funded programs would now be considered “public benefits” that exclude immigrants without legal status under a law enacted in 1996. The notice revokes a policy enacted in 1998 that had exempted the affected programs from the 1996 law.

The federal announcement said that the policy change was instituted to “ensure that taxpayer-funded program benefits intended for the American people are not diverted to subsidize illegal aliens.”

Mauer said there has been no implementation guidance from HHS since the notice.

The Wisconsin Head Start Association is among the plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed in April by the American Civil Liberties Union opposing Trump administration actions against Head Start. The other plaintiffs include parent groups in Oregon and in Oakland, California, along with state Head Start associations in Washington, Illinois and Pennsylvania.

In a statement Friday the plaintiffs said they will amend the lawsuit if the administration follows through with the limits in the July 10 announcement.

Mauer said that the Wisconsin association is advising Head Start providers to “refrain from making any immediate changes to enrollment policy until they have an opportunity to fully evaluate their legal obligations.”

She said the notice has heightened concern about the safety of children whose families might be targeted by the new federal stance. But it will affect the entire program, she said.

Mauer said a second concern is that the policy could lead some families to take their children out of the program despite their need for it. If enrollment falls below the federally prescribed level of 97% of capacity, she’s concerned that the federal government might then take back grant money — creating “a negative feedback loop,” she said.  

“I am so afraid for our families,” Mauer said. “This is fracturing the safety of all of our children. This will hurt all of the children in Head Start.”

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Child care provider Corrine Hendrickson addresses a rally in front of the state Capitol Friday demanding a re-do on the state budget to increase child care funding. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

While Gov. Tony Evers has touted the new state budget’s child care funds as a compromise victory, some providers say they’re deeply disappointed. 

“This was not a win,” said Bloomer child care provider Caitlin Mitchell at a rally outside the Capitol Friday morning organized by Wisconsin Early Childhood Action Needed (WECAN). “It was a temporary fix with long-term consequences.”

A press release from Evers’ office after he signed the budget early on July 3 said the document contains “Over $360 million to support Wisconsin’s child care industry and help lower child care costs for working families, a third of which is in direct payments to providers.”

A majority of Democratic lawmakers voted against the budget, citing shortcomings in funding for public schools as well as for child care. Assembly and Senate Democrats who voted in favor of the plan described it as a compromise. 

“I really really wish that the governor and the Democrats had just admitted that this was the best that they could do and that it’s still not good,” Corrine Hendrickson, a child care provider and WECAN co-founder, told reporters at the Friday morning rally.

“Everything we’re being told about the budget absolutely does not help children in our state at all,” said WECAN’s other co-founder, Brooke Legler. “The only compromise was the children’s safety. And this isn’t OK.”

WECAN members say that the budget’s child care funding is well short of what they need, and that regulatory changes are bad for providers, families and children. 

A pilot program increases Wisconsin Shares payments by up to $200 a month if providers agree to higher ratios of four children to one teacher for children 18 months or younger, and seven children to one teacher for children 18 months to 2½ years old. Wisconsin Shares subsidizes child care for low-income families.

According to Hendrickson, the ratio increase lowers the quality of care, and tying it to the subsidy program treats the poorer children differently than the rest of the children in care.

“Those children deserve to have more time and attention,” she said in her address to the rally. “Their parents are loving, their parents are caring, but their parents are stressed because they’re in poverty and that affects those kids.”

Child care providers should refuse to participate in that pilot, she said. 

Another provision lowers the minimum age for an assistant child care teacher to 16 from 18, while retaining the education requirements for the position.

“Sixteen-year-olds are wonderful human beings but they are not teachers of young children,” said Hendrickson.

“Those exact same policies were presented two years ago through the normal process of creating a bill. And we as a state overwhelmingly said no,” said Legler. “It did not even make it out of committee.”

In addition to $110 million in direct payments to providers, the child care total’s other big ticket items include $123 million to increase reimbursements that providers get for children in the Wisconsin Shares subsidy program and $65 million for providers who participate in a new “school readiness” program similar to 4-year-old kindergarten.

The $110 million direct payments, which would end after the budget’s first year, amount to about one-fourth of the $480 million that Evers originally sought. His budget proposal aimed to continue the state’s Child Care Counts program, funded by federal pandemic relief money.

At its height, Child Care Counts paid out $20 million a month and was credited with helping providers boost wages for child care teachers without raising tuition for parents. Two years ago the Evers administration dialed the program back to $10 million a month to stretch out its payments. The federal funds have now run out.

In a survey of child care providers earlier this year the University of Wisconsin Institute for Research on Poverty reported that about one in four said they could close without continued payments. Evers cited the survey during the spring while campaigning for his original $480 million child care proposal.

WECAN leaders sent Evers a statement Friday, calling on him to order a special session of the Legislature and seek the full amount of child care support that he originally submitted for the 2025-27 state budget.

“We’re asking Gov. Evers to finish what’s been started,” Mitchell said in her rally speech. “Temporary funding and weakened standards are not enough. We need a comprehensive long-term investment in child care.”

After the 2023-25 budget was enacted without the child care investment that Evers sought, the governor called a special session and introduced a bill that included funding for child care, education and other priorities. The Legislature’s Republican majority rewrote the bill, replacing his provisions with tax cut measures that Evers vetoed. 

Hendrickson acknowledged the outcome of the special session call two years ago, but said in an interview that Evers should pursue  effort anyway. 

“This is the only thing that we can do to keep this in front of everybody, to keep it top of mind,” she said. 

“The $110 million over the next 11 months is around 20% less than we are currently receiving,” WECAN’s letter to the governor states. “So, no, tuition prices will not be lowering; in fact, they will be going up next month to cover this loss, or providers will be closing their doors, especially in rural areas.”

The WECAN statement tells Evers that his public assertion that the child care provisions will lower costs “creates confusion and parents will blame us; disrupting our important relationship due to the distrust your words have sown.”

Legler told the Wisconsin Examiner later Friday that when the WECAN group delivered the letter and spoke with Evers’ communications director, Britt Cudaback, the conversation didn’t go well from her perspective.

“We felt very minimized, unheard and condescended to,” Legler said.

Evers’ office has not responded to requests for comment.

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Nichole Robarge, right, describes the challenges faced by people with disabilities she assists when enrolling in Medicaid. With her is Kathleen Cummings, who provides similar assistance to people 60 and older. Both said impending changes to the program are likely to increase those challenges. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

With the Congressional mega-bill that cuts $1 trillion from Medicaid now law, people who have relied for their health care on the state-federal insurance plan and their advocates are scrambling to figure out  how and when it will hit home.

The timing of many of the law’s changes is still uncertain.

“This bill was written very hastily,” said Tami Jackson, policy analyst for the Wisconsin Board for People with Development Disabilities (BPDD), at a discussion of the law Thursday morning in the Wisconsin Capitol.

“There are implementation dates for various pieces of Medicaid that are not all in alignment,” Jackson said. “So, you’re going to get this in waves.”

Janet Zander of the Greater Wisconsin Agency on Aging Resources paraphrased promises from members of Congress who publicly defended the bill.

“It’s really easy to listen to what we’re hearing about — ‘This isn’t going to harm us here in Wisconsin. We’re not doing anything that’s going to hurt older adults, people with disabilities, low-income families,’” Zander said. “Those of us who are working in these programs know that’s not the case at all.”

The new law imposes requirements for Medicaid participants to work or be preparing for work — although a majority already are working — or else be approved as exempt from having to meet the requirement.

That provision’s implementation date of Jan. 1, 2027 is less than 18 months away, Jackson said. And it could be up to a year before the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) produces an administrative rule to direct states on how they manage the requirement.

That doesn’t allow for much time to work out “20 or 30 unanswered questions” about how to require people to demonstrate they’re working, qualify for an exemption or prove that they’re exempt, Jackson said.

The added requirements will also impose new demands on agencies in charge of implementing the Medicaid changes in each state, as well as county agencies that help people navigate the program.

“If you are ramping up the workload and how much people have to do, and ramping up the staffing it takes to do that, that’s a lot more that counties are going to be doing locally, or will have to do,” Jackson said. “That’s going to exacerbate how many people lose coverage.”

Other items have no implementation date — which is usually interpreted as taking effect with the bill’s signing, said William Parke-Sutherland, government affairs director at Kids Forward.

“This bill, which is being kind of talked about as a tax and spending bill, is really a health care redesign bill, and it makes the most substantive changes to the health care system that we’ve seen since the Affordable Care Act,” Parke-Sutherland said.

That national health care law had four years to be implemented. With the new Medicaid changes, “we have no time in comparison.”

But the probable long-term impact remains dire, advocates said — making it harder for people to get coverage and keep coverage.

Taking together the projected loss of Medicaid coverage as well as the projected loss of Affordable Care Act coverage for low-income people who lose subsidies for their premiums that expire at the end of this year, as many as 17 million people in the U.S. could lose health care and long-term care coverage, Zander said.

The state Department of Health Services estimated in April that at least 52,000 Wisconsin residents could lose Medicaid coverage. Changes the Senate made in the bill will likely increase those estimates, however, according to advocates.

Safety-net barriers, old and new

As ultimately passed by the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives and signed into law by President Donald Trump, the legislation has thrown new barriers in front of the nation’s safety-net programs, including Medicaid as well as the federal food aid program, SNAP.

Existing barriers were already very high, advocates said.

Kathleen Cummings works for the Columbia County Aging and Disability Resource Center assisting people who are 60 or older applying for Medicaid and other benefit programs. Based on their annual income and total assets, some people on Medicare also qualify for Medicaid to cover their out-of-pocket Medicare costs.

Cummings recounted the experience of a woman who had qualified for Medicaid but recently contacted her because she was getting bills for her health care. The woman accidentally failed to renew her Medicaid coverage when the renewal form she received got buried in a flurry of other Medicaid-related mail, Cummings said.

Under current law the client can get coverage retroactively for bills incurred in the last three months. But with the new law, “that will be changing to 30 days, so we will not, in the future, be able to request that backdated coverage for bills under the situation that she is in,” Cummings said.

Another client has had extensive treatment for lung cancer, she said. The man “is just barely, barely over the federal poverty level” — about $1,300 a month.

“A lot of my clients are very proud and do what they can with what they have,” Cummings said. “But when something like lung cancer comes along, he’s suddenly faced with all these bills that he only had limited coverage [for].”

She’s helping the man apply for Medicaid coverage backdated three months to cover those bills, she said. “Once he shows proof that he qualified, which he will, [he can] get some of these bills paid.”

Nichole Robarge also works for the Columbia County ARDC, helping people from ages 16 to 59 who qualify for federal Supplemental Security Income (SSI) disability benefits and other programs.

Robarge said that currently the disability application takes 12 to 18 months for a decision. As many as 85% of applications are denied at first, she said, and about 20% get overturned on appeal, which takes another 18 to 24 months. A second appeal, with a hearing before an administrative law judge, can take another two years.

In Wisconsin, approval for SSI automatically qualifies a person for Medicaid coverage. Until the SSI decision is resolved, however, the applicant has to apply for Medicaid separately, Robarge said — something that a disability can make much more difficult.

She pulled out the Medicaid application, which currently must be completed annually — a 41-page document that is a half-inch thick.

“Can you imagine getting one of these in the mail and having a cognitive disability or a physical disability, or maybe you had a stroke?…Or maybe you can’t read at all,” Robarge said.

“I bought a house and had less paperwork. I’ve bought a car and I’ve had less paperwork than what it takes to fill one of these out,” she added. “It’s tedious and it’s treacherous … This first barrier is huge, and this is even without getting the documents that you need to provide the proof that they’re asking for.”

Unintended consequences

The new law is poised to make those delays worse, advocates argue — blocking people from Medicaid coverage even though they meet the program’s qualifications.

“Medicaid is a wildly complicated program,” said Lisa Hassenstab, public policy manager for Disability Rights Wisconsin. “What we’ve seen in this bill is that all of these little changes [and] the unintended consequences, because people don’t understand what the program is. They don’t understand what it is, and so they don’t understand what the impact of these changes is really going to be.”

One thing the law won’t do, advocates said, is protect taxpayers.

“It won’t protect me,” said Tyler Engel, whose Medicaid coverage enables him to live more independently in the community with coverage for his caregivers.

“This bill saves money by making it so that, for somebody who is now currently eligible for health care, the provider who provides that care is not going to get paid,” Parke-Sutherland said. “This saves money by people who are currently eligible for health insurance” with federal help “not getting health insurance or having to pay more for it. That’s the only way that this bill saves money.”

Two-thirds of Medicaid participants are working, and therefore they are taxpayers, too, Jackson said.

“It’s a cost shift to the taxpayers,” said Jackson, because when people aren’t covered by Medicaid, “somebody else picks that up — whether it’s uncompensated care, whether it’s a medical bankruptcy, whether it’s your private insurance or your group premium going up.”

“If you stop paying for care, people’s care needs don’t go away,” Parke-Sutherland said. “You still pay. So this isn’t a boon to the taxpayers.”

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Advocates for LGBTQ people and for the environment praised a Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling Tuesday that bars the Legislature's Joint Committee for the Review of Administrative Rules from blocking a rule that bans therapists from trying to "convert" a person's sexual orientation or gender identity. (Getty Images)

Gov. Tony Evers along with advocates for the environment and for LGBTQ people as well as Democratic Party lawmakers hailed Tuesday’s state Supreme Court ruling that strips a Wisconsin legislative committee’s power to block state regulations.

Republican leaders in the Legislature — who’ve deployed that power successfully against the Evers administration for the last six years — condemned the Court’s action as consolidating power in the executive branch.

Tuesday’s ruling, written by Chief Justice Jill Karofsky for the Court’s four-member liberal majority, found that state laws giving the Joint Committee for the Review of Administrative Rules (JCRAR) the power to block state regulations were unconstitutional.

The ruling said that in doing so, the committee was rewriting state laws that affected the rights and duties authorized for executive branch officials.

JCRAR has repeatedly thwarted Evers administration rules since the governor first took office in 2019. Tuesday’s ruling was the result of a lawsuit Evers filed in 2023 challenging the committee’s actions in suspending a rule that bans conversion therapy and indefinitely blocking an update to the state building code.

“The people of Wisconsin expect state government to work — and work better — for them,” Evers said in a statement Tuesday applauding the ruling.

“For years, a small group of Republican lawmakers overstepped their power, holding rules hostage without explanation or action and causing gridlock across state government,” Evers said.

“Today’s Wisconsin Supreme Court decision ensures that no small group of lawmakers has the sole power to stymie the work of state government and go unchecked,” the governor said. “This is an incredibly important decision that will ensure state government can do our important work efficiently and effectively to serve Wisconsinites across our state.”

Conversion therapy ban maintained

The ruling ensured that a rule will continue barring therapists treating LGBTQ people from using conversion therapy to try to change sexual orientation or gender identity.

JCRAR suspended the rule in early 2023 after it was last promulgated. The professional board that had enacted the rule reinstated it in April 2024 after the Legislature concluded its 2023-24 session. Tuesday’s ruling will prevent JCRAR from blocking the rule again.

“The continuous suspensions of the rule represented legislative overreach in the rule-making process and threatened the ability of professions in Wisconsin to create their standards,” said the National Association of Social Workers Wisconsin Chapter (NASW-Wisconsin) in a statement welcoming the Court’s ruling.

The association has sought the conversion therapy ban since 2018.

“After seven and a half years of trying to ban the harmful, discredited and unethical practice of conversion therapy and having the rule repeatedly blocked by the Joint Committee on the Review of Administrative Rules, I am thrilled by this ruling,” said Marc Herstand, the social worker association’s executive director. “Professions have the right to establish their own conduct code, and no social worker should ever engage in the practice of conversion therapy.”

Republicans attack ruling

Sen. Steve Nass (R-Whitewater), chair of the committee, criticized the Court’s ruling.

“Today the liberal majority of the Wisconsin Supreme Court ended nearly 7 decades of shared governance between the legislature and executive branch agencies aimed at protecting the rights of individuals, families and businesses from the excessive actions of bureaucrats,” Nass said in a statement.

“The liberal junta on the state supreme court has in essence given Evers the powers of a King,” he said.

Nass also attacked Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, charging that in the budget that lawmakers passed on the evening of July 2 and Evers signed shortly after midnight, Vos “gave away the power-of-the-purse-string for the next two years, so our options of defunding bureaucrats are now off the table.”

Vos also released a statement attacking the ruling.

“For decades, case law has upheld the constitutionality of the legislative rules committee to serve as a legitimate check on the powers of the Governor and the overreach of the bureaucracy,” Vos said. “The absence of oversight from elected representatives grows government and allows unelected bureaucrats to increase red-tape behind closed doors.”

Praise for the decision

Democrats, LGBTQ allies and environmental advocates said it was JCRAR’s practices, often shrouded in secrecy — not the rule-making process — that interfered with democracy.

“Today’s court decision is a victory for Wisconsinites, who deserve the freedom to have a government responsive to everyday people, not special interests and right-wing extremists,” said Sen. Kelda Roys (D-Madison). “This decision sends a clear message: We are working toward making Wisconsin a place where everyone can build a better life.”

State Supreme Court curtails legislative committee’s right to stop regulations

Abigail Swetz, executive director of the LGBTQ+ advocacy group Fair Wisconsin,  called the outcome “a powerful step in the right direction towards ending the harmful practice of conversion therapy,” and credited the advocacy of NASW-Wisconsin and other community members and partner groups.

Swetz also urged lawmakers and the governor to take “an even more powerful step” by passing SB 324, legislation banning conversion therapy in all licensed professions.

In a joint statement the Legislature’s LGBTQ+ caucus called the ruling “a victory against the abusive and discredited practice of ‘conversion therapy’ and a victory for LGBTQ+ people who want to live as their authentic selves.”

Environmental impact

Environmental rules were not at the heart of the Court’s ruling Tuesday, but environmental groups said the outcome would strengthen efforts to enact stronger environmental protections.

“The bottom line is that good environmental rules now face a much easier path to getting to the finish line and becoming law—which is good for the environment and public health,” said Evan Feinauer, an attorney for Clean Wisconsin, in a statement the organization issued.

Clean Wisconsin said JCRAR has  blocked regulations on PFAS contamination, nitrates, surface water pollution and remediating contaminated lands.         

“Far too often in recent years JCRAR’s ability to object to any proposed rule, for almost any reason, or no stated reason at all, prevented agencies like DNR from doing their jobs,” Feinauer said. “That political gridlock prevented our government from being responsive to environmental and public health challenges.”

In a statement from Midwest Environmental Advocates, executive director Tony Wilkins Gibart said that through JCRAR’s control of the rulemaking process, “small groups of legislators have been able to block the implementation of popular environmental protections passed by the full legislature and signed by the governor.”

MEA filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of Wisconsin Conservation Voters and Save Our Water, a group of residents affected by PFAS contamination in and around Marinette and Peshtigo.

When JCRAR blocked a rule in December 2020 that regulated firefighting foam containing PFAS, it perpetuated the discharge of PFAS-contaminated wastewater in the Marinette wastewater treatment plant, MEA said Tuesday.

“Committee vetoes were anti-democratic because they allowed a handful of legislators to make decisions that affect the entire state,” said Jennifer Giegerich, government affairs director of Wisconsin Conservation Voters, said in the MEA statement. “We’re pleased this ruling restores constitutional balance and strengthens accountability for environmental decisions that impact all Wisconsinites.”

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Chief Justice Jill Karofsky, shown here during oral arguments in January, wrote for four justices that laws empowering the Legislature's Joint Committee for the Review of Administrative rules violate the Wisconsin Constitution. (Screenshot/WisEye)

State laws that let a 10-member committee of the Legislature override regulations are unconstitutional, a majority of the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled Tuesday.

The ruling hands the administration of Democratic Gov. Tony Evers a victory in an ongoing battle with the Legislature’s Republican leaders.

It also affirms that the state Legislature cannot renew its attempt to block regulations against conversion therapy for LGBTQ people, and appears to clear the way for an update of Wisconsin’s building code that was suspended nearly two years ago.

The ruling finds five statutes, granting power to the Legislature’s committee that reviews and periodically suspends administrative rules, violate the Wisconsin Constitution.

Taken together, wrote Chief Justice Jill Karofsky for the four justices making up the Court’s liberal wing, the statutes give the Joint Committee for the Review of Administrative Rules the power to effectively change state laws without going through the full legislative process.

“The ability of a ten-person committee to halt or interrupt the passage of a rule, which would ordinarily be required to be presented to the governor as a bill [to block the rule], is simply incompatible with Articles IV and V of the Wisconsin Constitution,” Karofsky wrote.

The Court’s three conservative justices took issue with the majority opinion, asserting that rulemaking itself involves legislative power and that Tuesday’s ruling improperly constrains the Legislature as the elected representatives of the people.

‘Legislative veto’ lawsuit 

The decision is the second to come from a lawsuit Evers filed in the fall of 2023, Evers v. Marklein, accusing the Republican leaders of the Legislature of exercising an unconstitutional “legislative veto” hampering the lawful powers of the executive branch to make administrative rules.

The Evers administration argued that five statutes granting JCRAR the power to review, object to and block rules before or after they are promulgated violate the state Constitution. Those include a law enacted in December 2018, after Evers was elected governor but before he took office, that allows the committee to lodge “indefinite” objections blocking a rule.

The Court majority agreed with the administration’s argument.

The Wisconsin Constitution requires that for a law to be enacted, it must pass both the Assembly and the Senate and then be presented to the governor to be signed or vetoed.

“By permitting JCRAR to exercise discretion over which approved rules may be promulgated and which may not, the statute empowers JCRAR to take action that alters the legal rights and duties of persons outside of the legislative branch” without going through the lawmaking process, Karofsky wrote.

The indefinite objection “prevents the agency from promulgating a rule unless the Legislature passes a bill enacting the rule,” she wrote. “Said another way, legislative inertia after an indefinite objection could permanently stop the promulgation of a rule.”

Evers, lawmakers, advocates praise Court’s ruling on regulations

The law allowing the committee to pause a rule for 30 days before it is promulgated “essentially allows JCRAR to capture control of agency rulemaking authority from the executive branch during the 30-day pause period,” Karofksy wrote.

The pause, which can be extended to 30 days “operates as a ‘pocket veto,’” she wrote. “Even if such an interruption is relatively brief, the constitution does not contemplate temporary violations of its provisions.”

Similarly, after the rule has been promulgated, JCRAR’s power to suspend it multiple times “means that even after promulgation, JCRAR could suspend a rule repeatedly in perpetuity with no other checks in place,” the chief justice wrote.

Clearing way for conversion therapy ban, new building code

In overturning the five statutes, the Court majority also revoked two earlier rulings that had affirmed some of JCRAR’s powers — one from 1992, upholding the committee’s temporary suspension of a rule, and the other from 2020, endorsing the power to suspend a rule multiple times.

Evers’ suit focused on two rules that JCRAR blocked, both produced under the umbrella of the state Department of Safety and Professional Services (DSPS).

One rule prohibited therapists from using discredited conversion therapy to try to change the sexual orientation or gender identity of LGBTQ people. It was adopted by the Wisconsin Marriage and Family Therapy, Professional Counseling, and Social Work Examining Board.

“When the Board created new professional conduct rules banning conversion therapy, it exercised its statutory authority,” Karofksy wrote. “But when JCRAR objected to the rule it effectively blocked the Board’s authority” under Wisconsin law “to govern the professional conduct of its licensees.”

The conversion therapy rule was suspended in January 2023, but reinstated after the Legislature concluded its work for the 2023-24 session.

With “the multiple suspension provision,” however, Karofsky wrote, “JCRAR has the authority to suspend this rule again, in perpetuity.”

Another rule updated the state commercial building code to international standards set in 2021.

“The goal of these chapters is to protect the health, safety, and welfare of the public,” Karofsky wrote. JCRAR’s indefinite suspension of the code in 2023  “prevented DSPS from completing its statutory rulemaking duties,” she wrote.

Conservative justices object

Justice Brian Hagedorn, one of three members of the Court’s conservative wing, wrote an opinion that concurred with the majority on narrow grounds but dissented on finding the five laws at issue unconstitutional.

The JCRAR indefinite objection to the building code rule is unconstitutional under a 1992 Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling, Hagedorn wrote.

He argued that the conversion therapy rule is now outside the Court’s purview, however.

“This ethical rule is already in effect; it is no longer suspended,” Hagedorn wrote. “Since a ruling on JCRAR’s actions with respect to this rule would have no legal effect, this claim is moot, and we have nothing further to decide.”

Hagedorn criticized the decision’s far-reaching findings that whole statutes were unconstitutional, however. He said it also failed to grapple with arguments about the constitutional status of regulation by executive branch agencies.

“The effect of the majority’s decision is to greenlight executive alteration of legal rights and duties outside the lawmaking process while prohibiting legislative alteration of legal rights and duties outside the lawmaking process,” Hagedorn wrote.

Former Chief Justice Annette Ziegler and Justice Rebecca Bradley published separate sharply worded dissents.

Ziegler wrote that the majority ruling was the outcome of “this court’s misguided quest to restructure and unbalance our state government, culminating in even more power and control being allocated to the executive branch.”

“The legislature has delegated executive branch agencies broad rulemaking authority with the understanding that it will be able to oversee administrative rulemaking through JCRAR,” Ziegler wrote. “The majority now pulls the rug out from under the legislature…”

Bradley, invoking lyrics from Bruce Springsteen’s song “Badlands” in which the singer says “a king ain’t satisfied ‘til he rules everything,” charged that the majority “lets the executive branch exercise lawmaking power unfettered and unchecked.”

Her dissent offered a full-throated attack on the administrative state and executive branch regulatory authority.

“The majority invokes the Wisconsin Constitution to take power from the People’s elected representatives in the legislature and bestow it on the executive branch, empowering unelected bureaucrats to rule over the People,” Bradley wrote.

2025-07-08_SCOWI_Evers v Marklein – JCRAR

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The roof of the Hotel Verdant in Downtown Racine received federal tax credits for installing solar panels. Labor and environmental advocates are attacking the Congressional Republicans' tax cut megabill for rolling back clean energy programs enacted in the Biden administration. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

The tax cut megabill in Congress with a historic rollback on Medicaid also includes provisions reversing U.S. clean energy policies, advocates warned Wednesday, harming not only the environment but the economy.

“This legislation will kill economic growth and jobs, raise energy prices, and cede clean energy technology manufacturing to other countries,” said Carly Ebben Eaton, Wisconsin Policy Manager for the Blue Green Alliance, a coalition of labor unions and environmental groups.

Eaton took part in two online news conferences Wednesday to draw attention to the federal budget reconciliation bill and its repeal of key portions of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.

The budget bill has been the top priority of the Republican majority in Congress as well as the administration of President Donald Trump. It was drawn up to extend tax cuts enacted in 2017 during Trump’s first term that will expire at the end of 2025.

The package returned to the U.S. House for final action after a tied vote in the U.S. Senate that required Vice President JD Vance to pass the measure on Tuesday.

Steep cuts to Medicaid and federal nutrition programs have drawn the most attention during debate on the bill, along with the Congressional Budget Office finding that the wealthiest taxpayers will benefit most from its tax cuts.

The bill also includes measures that would undo several provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), one of the signature pieces of legislation enacted during President Joe Biden’s four years in office. After its passage the act was lauded by environmental advocates for provisions to address climate change by encouraging clean energy through tax credits as well as federal investments.

The House version of the GOP bill “already dealt a serious blow to clean energy tax credits and investments,” Eaton said Wednesday, “but the Senate took it even further, doubling down on cuts that will cost jobs, stall progress and raise energy costs.”

Consumer, business renewable energy incentives

The IRA’s tax breaks were designed to encourage consumers to move to energy-efficient and clean energy appliances and vehicles and encourage utilities and other businesses to increase their use of renewable resources such as solar energy and wind power.

Eaton said Wednesday that clean energy tax credits are supporting more than $8.6 billion in private investments in Wisconsin.

Garrik Harwick, assistant business manager of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union Local 890 in Janesville, said that over the past three years more than 300 members have worked on solar projects in Southern Wisconsin. He spoke at a news conference with Eaton and several other union leaders.

The IRA tax breaks have encouraged those developments, Harwick said, and the investments have included increased apprenticeship slots, bringing in new trainees.

“These investments don’t just deliver clean energy,” Harwick added. “They create good paying union jobs that strengthen our local communities.”

He warned that repealing the tax credit will likely reduce the use of clean energy technologies and increase energy costs by 6% for homeowners and more than 9% for business customers.

The IRA’s provisions that encouraged apprenticeships helped “open doors that many didn’t even know existed,” said Andy Buck, government affairs director for the Wisconsin and Upper Michigan district of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades.

He said the union has added a number of jobs, including apprentices, installing energy-efficient glass in buildings on projects that were facilitated by the Inflation Reduction Act.

“When someone enters a registered apprenticeship program, they aren’t just learning a trade,” Buck said. “They’re building a career, gaining self-respect, and finding a path to a better life.”

Another provision of the 2022 law opened up tax credits for renewable energy to nonprofit organizations and government agencies, allowing them to receive direct payments to the federal government comparable to the value they’d receive from the tax credit if they paid taxes.

A new middle school being built in Menasha will include solar panels and energy storage, said Matt VanderPuy, a business agent for the Sheet Metal workers union in Sheboygan. The direct pay program will reimburse the district $3 million, he said, while the energy savings is projected at $190,000 per year.

“This is money that they can reinvest into the students, the teachers and the school district,” while saving on property taxes, VanderPuy said.

‘Very ugly impacts,’ says advocate

At another news conference, former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes observed that more than 90% of the jobs that IRA incentives helped create are in Republican congressional districts — although no Republicans in the state delegation voted for the bill. Barnes leads Forward Wisconsin, a nonprofit established during Biden’s term in the White House to inform people about the Biden administration’s infrastructure and climate investments and to defend them.

But business uncertainty this year, which Barnes blamed on GOP positions including Trump’s tariff executive orders, has led nationally to the cancellation of projects worth $15.5 billion, he said.

“The so-called big beautiful bill is going to have some very ugly impacts in Wisconsin, ripping away tax incentives for wind and solar farms, for rooftop solar, for farm sustainability programs, for clean cars and school buses,” said Amy Barrilleaux, communications director for Clean Wisconsin, at the event with Barnes. “And giving more tax breaks to big oil and gas companies does absolutely nothing to create jobs here or any opportunities here — it’s a gift to big oil at the expense of Wisconsin families and at the expense of our environment.”

Heather Allen, policy director for Elevate, an energy efficiency nonprofit, said as many as 11,000 clean energy and manufacturing jobs in Wisconsin could be at risk.

Plans for a $2.5 billion network of electric vehicle charging stations in the state have stalled, Allen said, and Wisconsin manufacturers that would have supplied components “are going to lose that opportunity now.”

“This legislation is going to strangle our solar businesses with red tape,” Allen said. “What you have here is an attack on small businesses that are delivering clean energy solutions to help families save money on their energy bills. And that includes solar installers, but it also includes other home energy contractors, other construction jobs.”

In four recent polls, a majority of those surveyed disapproved of the Republicans’  megabill — making it “more unpopular than any piece of major legislation that’s been passed since at least 1990,” Barnes said.

At the labor news conference, Emily Pritzkow, the Wisconsin Building Trades Council executive director, said advocates are urging people to contact their members of Congress.

“The polling on this is abysmal, and as long as people continue to call and deliver that message , that is what we need to do right now,” Pritzkow said. “Now is the time to weigh in, not once it’s coming to your front door, impacting you, your community, and people you care about.”

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Child care providers and parents attend a Wisconsin State Capitol rally on Wednesday, April 16, 2025. Advocates have mixed opinions about child care provisions in the new state budget released Tuesday. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

The proposed Wisconsin state budget announced Tuesday offers child care advocates less than what they sought, and while some reacted with limited optimism, for others it adds up to little better than nothing.

The final deal will spend $110 million to extend direct payments to providers for another year. Starting in mid-2026 It will direct $65 million to providers who join a proposed “School Readiness Program” — similar to 4-year-old kindergarten (4K) but distinct from current 4K programs.

The deal also will add $123 million to increase the reimbursement for child care costs for low-income families under the Wisconsin Shares program. 

The agreement was reached Monday in negotiations involving Gov. Tony Evers, Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu (R-Oostburg), Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) and Senate Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein (D-Middleton).

Kids Forward labeled the child care provisions “significant, but not sufficient, wins for Wisconsin’s working families.” Kids Forward is a policy and advocacy organization for low-income families and families of color.

“This deal doesn’t address the long-term needs of families and providers, but we look forward to working with legislators and the Governor to ensure sustained investment,” said Daithi Wolfe, senior policy analyst for Kids Forward, in a statement Tuesday.

‘Bridge’ payment program

The $110 million in direct payments to providers over the next 12 months will serve as a “bridge” after the end of Child Care Counts, the subsidy program funded with federal pandemic relief money that runs out this month.

Originally paying out $20 million a month, Child Care Counts helped stabilize the child care sector according to research reviewing the program, helping providers increase wages without having to charge parents more.

The money was cut in half two years ago, and since then providers have reported having to raise fees and, in some cases, reduce their capacity because they lacked enough child care workers. A survey report earlier this year found that 25% of providers said they might close if state payments stop.

The new payment program is intended to enable providers to plan and budget between now and July 2026 for the loss of Child Care Counts. It will be funded with interest income on the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds the Evers administration received starting in early 2021.

“The disappointing part is it’s not permanent,” said Ruth Schmidt, executive director of the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association (WECA). WECA has campaigned all year for Gov. Tony Evers’ original proposal, which sought $480 million including for continuing monthly provider subsidies.

“This is not going to be the sort of panacea for child care,” Schmidt said. “We will still see child care programs needing to raise rates. We will likely still see closures throughout the year. But I think we will see them at much lower rates, and I think that’s a really good thing for child care.”

Schmidt praised Evers as a “champion for children” and also credited GOP leaders for being “willing to sit down” and negotiate. “I think bipartisanship has been at play in this,” she said.

A 4K-style program

The new Early School Readiness Program for 4-year-olds is a response to the impact that 4K expansion has had on child care providers. As 4K programs expanded in Wisconsin elementary schools, “that pulled a lot of 4-year-olds out of child care,” Schmidt said.

The new School Readiness Program will set curriculum standards and require child care workers who teach in it to have at least an associate degree. Schmidt said that for child care providers who participate, it will “ensure that child care has more opportunities to continue to serve 4-year-olds.”

Child care providers who take part will for the first time receive direct payments from state funds.

“Child care as an industry has long been very interested in finding out how to continue to do the services that they know are so important for 4-year-olds in their programs, and I think this is a mechanism that will allow for that,” Schmidt said.  “This is a net gain of $65 million in state general purpose revenue into child care. That’s a big thing.”

Providers view deal skeptically 

For some child care providers, however, the details of the budget deal fall short of what they contend their sector needs.

The $110 million bridge program “is less than we’re getting right now, and we can’t keep teachers and we can’t keep prices down the way it is,” said Corrine Hendrickson, a New Glarus child care provider. She doesn’t expect it to achieve its stated goal of increasing the number of teachers along with accessibility and affordability in child care.

Brooke Legler, another New Glarus provider, said the $480 million that Evers had originally sought translated to keeping child care workers’ wages at $13 an hour on average. “This doesn’t even do that,” she said of the bridge program.

Hendrickson and Legler are cofounders of Wisconsin Early Childhood Action Needed (WECAN), a coalition of parents and providers that also campaigned actively for the original Evers proposal.

Hendrickson said she’s concerned that the School Readiness Program will be perceived by parents as “less academic, less school, less quality than the free option at the public school.”

Legler questions whether the new program as structured will succeed in drawing more families of 4-year-olds who would otherwise send their children to 4K. School districts have expanded their 4K programs to all day schedules in part because of a lack of child care, she said.

“I think that’s such a disservice that we have … closed door negotiations and that we’re not including the people at the table that need to be at the table, especially if we want to have effective and efficient policies that work for Wisconsin,” Legler said.

Both Legler and Hendrickson said they’re also concerned about a provision creating a “large family center” category with up to 12 children. Currently there are family centers with up to eight children and group centers with nine or more children.

Another provision would lower the minimum age for entry-level child care workers to 16. Both the age change and the large family provision were in bills that Republicans introduced in the 2023-24 legislative session and that providers mostly opposed.

“That’s not an answer. That doesn’t do anything financially” to help providers, Legler said.

“We have people making life-altering decisions for many people in Wisconsin, yet they have no experience or expertise on the matter,” she said. “This method does not work.”

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American Family Children's Hospital, part of the UW Health complex on Madison's west side. Nurses in the UW Health system have been seeking to restore union representation since 2019. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

This report has been updated with reactions from UW Health and SEIU.

Five and a half years after nurses launched a campaign to restore union representation at UW Health, the state’s highest court ruled Friday that the Madison-based hospital system has no obligation to collectively bargain with employees.

Act 10, the 2011 state law that stripped most union rights from public employees, also removed legal guarantees of union representation for University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics Authority’s employees, Justice Brian Hagedorn wrote for a unanimous Court.

“When we examine the statutory language along with the statutory history, it is clear that Act 10 ended the collective bargaining requirements formerly placed on the Authority,” Hagedorn wrote.

The Court rejected the argument from Service Employees International Union (SEIU) that with the Act 10 changes, the hospital authority as a corporation fit the definition of “employer” under the Wisconsin Employment Peace Act.

The Peace Act defines an employee as anyone working for hire other than an independent contractor and an employer as a person — including partnerships, corporations and some other legal entities — that engages the services of an employee.

The hospital authority doesn’t automatically meet that definition, however, Hagedorn wrote.

Hospital, nurses union respond

The hospital system affirmed the Court’s ruling “that the Wisconsin Peace Act does not apply to UW Health” in a statement Friday, adding, “UW Health appreciates the court’s deliberate, diligent and final review.”

In a statement, SEIU and the UW Health nurses said they would continue to seek union recognition.

“While we are disappointed by the Wisconsin Supreme Court decision, which found that UW Health nurses are not covered under the Wisconsin Employment Peace Act, we are not deterred,” SEIU and the UW Health nurses seeking union recognition said in a statement.

“Our fight to restore collective bargaining rights doesn’t end in the courtroom,” the union statement added. “We will continue to explore all possible pathways to restoring our full collective bargaining rights, including seeking voluntary recognition and passing legislation, to ensure that all of us, no matter who we are or where we work, have a seat at the table and a voice in our workplace.”

A 2022 agreement between the hospital and the union to discuss issues of concern is continuing, according to the nurses’ union statement.

Over the last three years, “hundreds of nurses have become official union members and have been meeting with top administrators to address critical issues around retention, safe staffing, and quality patient care,” the statement said. “Earlier this year, UW nurses and management mutually agreed to extend this agreement through 2027. All the while, we continue to leverage our collective voice to elect pro-worker leaders at every level of government.”

UW Health has in the past made statements declaring that Act 10 prevented the hospital system from engaging with the union.

“Based upon legal advice received from both internal and external counsel, UW Health is concerned about the lawfulness of engaging in collective bargaining, which is not authorized under any statute,” the hospital system’s press secretary, Emily Greendonner, told the Wisconsin Examiner in an email message Friday.

“While today’s decision provided final clarity that we are not required to collectively bargain, the question of whether we are legally allowed to do so has not been decided by the courts,” Greendonner said.

Ruling relates Act 10, hospital system history

The hospital system was spun off from the University of Wisconsin in 1996 into a new “public body corporate and politic,” the UW Hospital and Clinics Authority. The hospital system’s employees were state employees represented by unions and with collective bargaining rights under Wisconsin’s state employment relations law.

The hospital authority “is not defined as a corporation,” Hagadorn wrote, “it is a ‘public body corporate and politic.’” He cited the Peace Act’s definition of “employer” that states the term does not include “the state or any political subdivision thereof.”

The 1996 law creating the new hospital authority removed its employees from the state employment relations law and added language specifying that the hospital authority was an employer under the Peace Act.

Act 10 changed that, Hagedorn wrote — repealing the hospital authority’s collective bargaining duty that was in the 1996 law as well as all other references to collective bargaining.

“In sum, Act 10 purged references to the Peace Act from the Authority Statute,” Hagedorn wrote.

“When it created the Authority, the legislature added the Authority as an employer under the Peace Act and imposed numerous other collective bargaining provisions. In Act 10, the legislature eliminated the Authority as a covered employer along with other collective bargaining requirements. We therefore hold that the Authority is no longer covered by the Peace Act and is not required to collectively bargain under the Peace Act.”

Friday’s ruling was the final stop for a case that started in September 2022. In an agreement brokered to avert a planned three-day strike by nurses demanding union recognition at UW Health, the hospital system and SEIU agreed to a joint petition to the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission (WERC).

In the petition, the union argued that the hospital should be considered an employer under the Peace Act, while UW Health argued that Act 10 eliminated collective bargaining at the hospital system. WERC sided with UW Health, and Dane County Circuit Judge Jacob Frost subsequently affirmed the employment commission’s conclusion.

2025-06-27_SCOWI-SEIU v WERC

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Group Health Cooperative of South Central Wisconsin's East Side Madison clinic. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

A union organizing campaign has turned into a contentious conflict at a Madison-based health care nonprofit.

The organizing drive at Group Health Cooperative of South Central Wisconsin has gotten mired in a mountain of litigation before the National Labor Relations Board.

There have been disputes over who should be included in a union representation vote as well as dozens of unfair labor practice charges that the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has filed against Group Health management.

Most recently, the NLRB’s regional director has issued an order blocking the election after the union argued that the charges against the co-op would taint the outcome. Group Health is denying the charges, and co-op executives say they want a vote to take place as soon as possible.

The Group Health co-op was founded nearly 50 years ago as a health maintenance organization. Members, who include its employees, say the nonprofit’s focus on primary care and wellness has been central to its appeal. Those who support the union contend that the co-op’s response to the union drive is betraying its progressive roots.

“Everyone involved are gut-wrenched by the animosity that has developed,” said Susan McMurray, a former public employee union lobbyist and Group Health member for nearly 20 years. McMurray spoke at  a union rally outside Group Health’s clinic on Madison’s far East Side on June 20.

“There’s a multitude of reasons many of us chose a cooperative model over a for-profit shareholder model for our health care and insurance over the past almost 50 years,” said retired state employee Ruth Brill, a Group Health member, at a May 13 rally for the union.

“Some of our fellow GHC members have chosen to form a union. A union is like a cooperative in almost every way,” Brill said. “I’m calling on GHC to uphold the cooperative principles that it was founded on.”

In an interview, Marty Anderson, Group Health’s chief strategy and business development officer, rejected the accusation that the co-op has engaged in union-busting.

“GHC is not opposed to a union here at the cooperative,” Anderson said. “I think our position all along has been that we want our employees to have a voice — all of our employees, to have a voice in that choice.”

But Group Health co-op members who support the union see the management’s response — challenging the union’s proposal for who would vote as well as distributing messages to workers criticizing the union — more critically.

Paul Terranova, a community organizer, said he got involved in trying to persuade the co-op’s board to take a different approach earlier this year after a conversation with his Group Health doctor.

Terranova put together a group of members and asked for a board meeting in March.

“They gave us 20 minutes on the agenda to speak,” he told the Wisconsin Examiner. “It was just us making a presentation to them and them saying ‘thank you.’”

Terranova said his group asked the board and the management to “stop the anti-union messaging [and] anti-union activity” and to “get a second opinion” from other nonprofits that work cooperatively with union-represented employees.

“They refused to engage and they denied that there was any anti-union activity or messaging going on,” he said.

Terranova is also part of a member campaign that has endorsed, with the union, four candidates for the Group Health board in elections that concluded this week.

Update: All four were elected to the board. Election results were announced at the co-op’s annual meeting Thursday evening. 

Staffing struggles

The pro-union employees and SEIU filed a petition in December 2024 for a union representing Group Health clinic doctors, physician assistants, nurse practitioners and nursing staff in three departments: primary care, urgent care and dermatology. They also included physical therapists, occupational therapists and health educators.

According to union supporters, nearly 70% of the workers in those jobs and departments had signed cards asking for union representation.

Union supporters say that in those departments, issues including employee turnover and increased workloads prompted the campaign.

“We’re calling for equitable wages, safe provider-to-nurse ratios, meaningful ways to ease the crushing workloads we face and real strategies to improve retention,” said Dr. Ira Segal at the June 20 rally.

“There’s been a lot more turnover in our staffing, and that has increased over the years, which negatively impacts our ability to provide excellent care,” said Dr. Nisha Rajagopalan, a family physician. “The increasing turnover in our staff is unsustainable.”

Staffing crunches in health care have been widespread in the last five years, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“There just aren’t enough care providers and folks that assist those care providers within the [health care] system in total,” said Anderson, the Group Health executive. “We’ve had to flex with the changing health care environment.”

Julie Vander Werff, a physician assistant and union supporter, said she understands the health care workforce challenge. Despite that, she said, she’s experienced a shift in the co-op’s culture that is contributing to the problem.

“They used to be a very respectful employer, and they’ve really gotten off track in terms of how respectful they have been,” Vander Werff said in an interview. “And they’re being really punitive, and we’re losing staff as a result with high, high turnover rates.”

Who’s in, who’s out

The bargaining unit called for in the union’s original petition did not include other Group Health departments: optometry, behavioral health, radiology and pharmacy. It also did not include physical therapist techs, lab techs and interpreters, social workers, receptionists and maintenance staff.

Addressing the June 20 rally, Vander Werff explained that “other departments who are not under primary care leadership are happy with their jobs” and not interested in unionizing. “But primary care is not.”

From the start, Group Health challenged the bargaining unit described in the petition, according to a letter that employees leading the union drive sent to the Group Health board of directors on Feb. 10.

“Federal labor law says that to form a union, workers need petition only for ‘an’ appropriate bargaining unit — not ‘the’ most appropriate bargaining unit (however that would be determined), and certainly not the unit their employers would most prefer,” the employees wrote. “Rather than accepting a unit of GHC workers’ rightful choice, however, administration and counsel have chosen to contest our bargaining unit.”

Still at an impasse after two days of hearings before an NLRB hearing officer, the union amended its election petition to focus on a single Group Health facility, the Capitol Clinic on Madison’s near West Side. The employees wrote in the Feb. 10 letter that the change was made at the NLRB official’s suggestion.

Group Health challenged that, too. After an additional hearing, the Minneapolis-based NLRB regional director rejected the union’s petition for a single-clinic vote. The decision directed an election covering all clinical departments at Group Health — the bargaining unit that the co-op management sought.

Group Health’s position is that the bargaining unit the employees sought “didn’t include classes or employees that do go between our clinics,” Anderson said. “And because we are an integrated care delivery system, we need to make sure that all the appropriate employees are in the bargaining class.”  

While some Group Health members see the response to the union drive as a turn from the co-op’s roots, Anderson defended it. 

“We were formed by a vote of our members, our board is elected by our members, and I think this goes right along with our ethos as a cooperative to allow our employees the opportunity to vote,” he said.

Pro-democracy, or diluting support?

Employees involved in the union campaign and their allies among the co-op’s members argue that the management claim is disingenuous, however.

“While the administration claims they’re fighting us in order to give everyone a voice, this is a union-busting tactic to prevent workers from winning in a fast and fair election of our choosing,” the Group Health workers wrote. “Anti-union organizations do this to flood the unit with people that they hope will vote against our union.”

According to an NLRB report on union representation elections in 2023, 89% of employers didn’t challenge the workers’ proposed bargaining unit. 

Group Health member Paul Terranova rejected the idea that expanding the vote to include people in jobs and departments who weren’t interested in the union was “just trying to be democratic.”

 “If folks in Madison decided we wanted to put something on a referendum, and the state Legislature said ‘No, everyone in the state has to vote on it,’ everyone would know right away what they were doing,” Terranova said. “People would call BS. It’s the same thing here, right?”

“The right of workers to unionize and to decide what our union looks like . . .  doesn’t belong to administration,” Sarah Spolum, a physician assistant, said at the May union rally. “It doesn’t belong to lawyers. It belongs to us, the workers.”

Anderson said Group Health stands by its position. “We have no idea how our employees are going to vote,” he said. “That’s why we want to get to a vote — because we want that certainty and we want to know what our employees are feeling.”

Unfair labor practice charges

Throughout the campaign, the union has filed charges with the NLRB accusing Group Health management of numerous unfair labor practices. The allegations include changes in pay practices due to union organizing, surveillance of employees for union activity, prohibiting employees from displaying union-related materials, firing union supporters and a variety of other actions.

Group Health has denied all the charges.

After the co-op management’s bargaining unit petition was granted, however, the union petitioned the NLRB to block an election. The agency’s regional director granted the petition, ordering the election to be suspended until all the unfair labor practice charges are resolved.

The union, wrote regional director Jennifer Hadsall, “provided sufficient offers of proof which describe evidence that, if proven, would interfere with employee free choice in the election.”

Group Health, through its lawyer, has demanded a hearing on the allegations in the blocking charge, contending that it’s a smokescreen for diminished support.

At the union’s June 20 rally, Susan McMurray read from a letter she sent to Group Health’s CEO.

“Nothing good will come of this decision,” she said of the co-op’s stance during the union campaign. “It will in my view ruin GHC’s reputation in our community, cause irreparable harm to staff, as well as jeopardize patient care.

“And it didn’t and it doesn’t have to be like this,” she added. “In the past few weeks, I have communicated to management repeatedly that we could find a way through the strife and give everyone a graceful way out, a path going forward and something positive to announce at the annual meeting.”

This report was updated Friday, 6/27/2025, with the outcome of board elections at Group Health that were announced Thursday evening.

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Children watch popcorn pop at their child care program operated by the Dodge County YMCA. (Photo courtesy of the Dodge County YMCA)

For months child care providers and their allies campaigning for direct financial support from Wisconsin lawmakers have highlighted employers and the economy as central to their pitch.

Child care providers are “the workforce behind the workforce” in one of the rallying slogans of the provider-parent coalition Wisconsin Early Childhood Action Needed (WECAN).

Employers and business owners themselves, however, have largely stayed in the background — from time to time offering testimonials about their employees’ need for child care, but rarely weighing in on policy alternatives.

Last week more than 75 business leaders broke that pattern, sending a letter to members of the Wisconsin Legislature.

“Wisconsin’s lingering child care crisis … cannot go unaddressed any longer by state legislators, because Wisconsin remains at a workforce crossroads that presents significant, pressing challenges for businesses and the economic vitality of the state,” the group wrote.

“We therefore ask you to advance a significant long-term state investment in child care in the 2025-27 state budget because inaction will further shutter child care programs and continue to hamper efforts to stabilize and grow Wisconsin’s workforce.”

The letter was distributed with the help of the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association (WECA), which provides advocacy and professional services for child care providers and also conducts policy research.

Campaign continues for direct subsidy

The letter embraces what Gov. Tony Evers, child care providers and their allies have been seeking in the 2025-27 Wisconsin budget this year: A direct state subsidy for child care providers. Evers and providers have warned that without that kind of support there’s likely to be a drastic shutdown of child care centers across the state in the coming months.

“Child care programs operate on razor-thin margins with budgets balanced on parent fees, which, despite being costly for families, do not cover the full cost of programs providing high-quality care,” the letter states.

“As employers, we have explored and implemented different local initiatives to help grow access to care,” it adds. Nevertheless, “those solutions are limited and must be complemented with a long-term, significant investment of state revenue.”

Tracy Propst, the executive director of the Beaver Dam Chamber of Commerce, helped organize support for and signed the business letter.

“I really do believe child care is part of an economic strategy,” Propst told the Wisconsin Examiner. “If you don’t have access to abundant and economical child care, you are going to lose workforce.”

Mary Vogl-Rauscher, a human resources consultant in Beaver Dam, joined the letter along with businesses she works with.

Prospective fee hikes are “enough of an increase, if we don’t get the subsidies, to take people out of the workforce,” Vogl-Rauscher said. “From an employer perspective and a business perspective, if [the cost of care] goes up and we don’t continue with the state subsidies, it’s going to make an even bigger economic impact.”

Vogl-Rauscher is active in the local and state chapters of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and organized a community discussion of the issue this spring. 

Propst and Vogl-Rauscher both say they’ve sought to persuade their local Assembly member, state Rep. Mark Born (R-Beaver Dam), the Joint Finance Committee’s co-chair, that the lawmakers should add the subsidy program into the budget. 

“I’ve had conversations with Mark,” Propst said, adding that he told her that the committee was “doing something,” although not what she had asked for. “He will listen to his constituents,” she said. 

Middle-class squeeze

Both Propst and Vogl-Rauscher said their conversations with Dirk Langfoss, CEO of the Dodge County YMCA and a board member at the Beaver Dam chamber, were instrumental in clarifying the problem.

The Dodge County Y has the largest child care program in the county. Langfoss told the Wisconsin Examiner that competition for employees with other businesses has produced “upward pressures” on wages. The average weekly rate for infant and 1-year-old care is $253 — which adds up to $13,000 for all 52 weeks in the year. Rates are lower for older age groups.

“The middle-income families are the ones that are getting squeezed,” he said, with some telling him now that “they are strapped.”

If subsidies end entirely and the Y has to raise its rates, “those families are going to have to make some very hard decisions,” Langfoss added.

Propst views a direct investment now as a step toward something more comprehensive. “It’s really about child care stabilization,” she said, allowing providers to get their footing.

She also considers the immediate situation to be urgent, and fears the urgency hasn’t gotten through to many people.

“I just think this has snuck up on the businesses,” Propst said. “Like they weren’t aware this is happening, and here we are. And they don’t realize the ramifications of what’s going to happen — and that’s child care closures, child care price increases, and we’re not going to have enough providers.”

Direct investment divisions persist

While child care advocates have been arguing for a direct investment for years, the argument hasn’t fully caught on with the broader public or in the business community.

Among business leaders and the public, “there is a general recognition that child care is essential for workers, especially those that are taking care of young children,” said David Celata, vice president of policy and research for the Greater Milwaukee Foundation. But the true cost of care and why most working families can’t afford it is “an incredibly complex issue,” Celata told the Wisconsin Examiner.

“The numbers really don’t add up until we recognize that there is a social and economic good related to child care that we are failing collectively to truly maximize,” he said. “That then requires some sort of a public investment to strengthen the infrastructure of our child care sector.”

In Wisconsin the campaign for a state child care subsidy has been underway since the 2023-25 budget after monthly grants from federal COVID-19 pandemic relief funds helped child care providers raise wages without having to increase the fees families paid.

The Legislature’s Republican majority turned aside attempts to continue the subsidy program, Child Care Counts, with state money in the 2023-25 budget. Evers subsequently redirected other federal funds to extend the program at reduced rates through the middle of 2025.

The last of those funds will run out by early July. A survey that the University of Wisconsin Institute for Research on Poverty released in April found that as many as one in four child care providers said they might shut down without the continued support. Anywhere from half to two-thirds of programs forecast fee increases.

Evers put a $480 million proposal for a state-funded Child Care Counts program in his 2025-27 budget. Republicans on the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee removed it from the budget along with more than 600 other proposals Evers included before beginning work on their own version of the document.

After visiting a child care center in Waukesha County on Monday to highlight his subsidy proposal, Evers told reporters that he would not sign a budget this year without direct child care support. Evers said the provision was part of his ongoing budget negotiations with the Legislature’s GOP leaders.

Direct funding is still a sticking point, however.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) told reporters Tuesday that Republicans are open to working with Evers on child care but remain firmly opposed to “writing checks out to providers.”

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Kristen Crowell, executive director of Fair Share America, speaks Saturday in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., the first stop for Fair Share America's bus campaign to oppose the Republican budget reconciliation bill currently in the U.S. Senate. (Photo courtesy of Fair Share America)

Over the next three weeks, a band of advocates in a bright green bus is traveling across the U.S. with a message aimed at members of Congress — and at the voters who live in their districts.

To the voters, the message is that they will be hurt by the Republican mega-bill taking shape in Washington — a bill that would extend tax cuts enacted in 2017 that primarily benefit the wealthy and pay for them by slashing Medicaid and other federal programs that critics of the measure argue broadly benefit the public.

To U.S. senators and representatives, the message is: Vote against the measure, or face the wrath of voters in 2026.

The bus trip was launched by  Fair Share America, a coalition of groups focused on  beating back attempts to extend the 2017 tax cuts, one of the signature pieces of legislation from President Donald Trump’s first term. The organization is made up of unions, organizations favoring progressive taxation, and progressive social justice and policy groups.

Fair Share America’s executive director is Kristen Crowell, who lives in Cedarburg, Wisconsin. In 2022 she helped lead a campaign in Massachusetts when voters approved a constitutional amendment that created a 4% surtax on earned income over $1 million.

“That increase is now generating $3 billion annually that is dedicated for education and transportation,” Crowell told the Wisconsin Examiner.

The Boston Globe reported that the campaign to pass the Massachusetts “millionaires’ tax” raised $27 million, nearly twice as much as the $14 million raised by business-backed opponents of the measure. Crowell said the campaign succeeded by appealing to voters on the issue of fairness.

“We know that when we ask the wealthy to pay a little bit more, to pay their fair share, we can fund the investments that our neighbors and families and communities deserve — and really importantly, right now in this moment, they need in order to to get ahead,” Crowell said in an interview.

Opposition group launched in 2024

The 2017 tax cuts expire at the end of this year. With that date on the calendar, Fair Share America launched in September 2024 to oppose renewing them.

“We started organizing before we knew the outcome of the election and were handed a different reality than we might have hoped for,” Crowell said.

Since then, the organization has helped “lead the pushback at the state level to make sure that constituents and the public understand what’s happening behind closed doors in Washington, D.C., and to really bring the fight to key districts and geographies across the country where lawmakers, in particular the GOP members of Congress, have shut out their constituents,” she said.

The bus trip started on Saturday in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., stopped in Philadelphia on Sunday and will hit four more cities across Pennsylvania on Monday. Stops in Ohio, Michigan, Illinois and Iowa follow. After that, the bus will double back on its route for three Wisconsin stops, in Racine and Oshkosh on Monday, June 30, and La Crosse on July 1.

The schedule will continue through the middle of July, stopping in Minnesota, Missouri, Colorado, Arizona and Nevada before concluding in Bakersfield, California on July 14.

The tour isn’t the start of the organization’s campaign. Fair Share America and its partners with other advocacy groups have been holding town hall meetings in 33 states across the country, Crowell said — including one in Racine in April that featured former Social Security commissioner Martin O’Malley.

Crowell was at the Racine event, to which the local member of Congress, U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Janesville) was invited but didn’t show up. “Over 200 people came [from] across the political spectrum.” Crowell said.

At that town hall and other such events across the country, she’s seen energetic opposition to the new Trump administration as well as the priorities of the current Congress, she said.

“Fair Share America’s not speaking to one side of the aisle vs. the other,” Crowell said. “This is a populist moment.”

Public opposition to budget bill

A poll on behalf of three of the coalition’s member groups found that even before they were given information about details of the GOP budget reconciliation bill, the American voters surveyed had a negative opinion of it.

According to the pollsters 38% of those surveyed said they support the bill, 46% said they oppose it and 16% said they don’t know enough to have an opinion.

Fewer than one-third of voters surveyed — 30% — have heard a lot about the bill. Another 40% have heard “just some” about it, and the remaining 30% said they’ve heard little or nothing about the measure.

The more people heard, however, the less they liked it, according to the report from the polling firm, Hart Research. Opposition increased among all groups after pollsters told people about various details — its changes to Medicaid and to SNAP federal nutrition aid, for example.

“By being in the rooms and town halls and knocking on doors here in Wisconsin, that is what we are hearing and seeing,” Crowell said.

With its slogan, “Stop the billionaire giveaway,” Fair Share America’s bus tour aims to amplify the bill’s cuts to programs that benefit the public and to center the message that its tax cuts favor the wealthy.

Congressional Republicans “have not engaged with their constituents” in Wisconsin and elsewhere about the reconciliation bill, Crowell said. Fair Share America’s goal is to break down the details in terms that people will understand and respond to.

“When you tell them what’s at stake, what’s coming down, they are furious and they want to know how to get in the fight,” Crowell said. “They want to know how to organize their three or four neighbors. So it is incumbent on all of us to shed light on the horrors of this reconciliation bill and do everything it takes to get the word out.”

Funding values and priorities

In Wisconsin, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson has said he opposes the bill and has threatened to vote against it, criticizing it for not making deeper federal spending cuts. 

While that’s the opposite of Fair Share America’s agenda, “voting ‘No’ is voting ‘No’ at the end of the day,” Crowell said.

She is skeptical that Johnson will follow through on his threat, however.

“When push comes to shove, I don’t think Sen. Johnson is going to cross the White House or cross GOP leadership. I expect him to fall in line,” she said. “But we’re here to push back and say, ‘Absolutely not. We will hold you to that No vote and we do want you to understand what the stakes are for your constituents.’”

While the campaign’s goal is to stop the bill, there’s a second message regardless of the outcome, Crowell said.

“We are building a movement that is strong and durable and it crosses partisan lines,” she said. “If they in fact do go ahead and pass this, there will be hell to pay for those members who abandoned  and threw their constituents and their communities under the bus.”

Crowell said her more than two decades of activism started when, as a working mother, she opposed Milwaukee public school budget cuts. Her daughter, who was in kindergarten then, is now 29.

She went on to organize with “We Are Wisconsin,” the grass-roots coalition that sprang up in reaction to Act 10 — the 2011 law stripping most collective bargaining rights from most public employees, introduced and signed by Scott Walker in his first term as governor.

Act 10 was billed as a “budget repair bill.” Crowell said that working against it she saw clearly the connection between government budgets and policy.

“If progressives want to really win … and fund the things that we care about, we have to compete for what happens in the budget process,” Crowell said. “We have to compete for a fair and just tax code. We have to compete for the revenue that funds all of the issues that we care about, whether that’s health care or climate or education or child care.”

A budget “can be used either to fund our priorities and reflect our values or attack the things that we deeply care about,” Crowell said. With the federal budget reconciliation bill, “we’re watching the GOP members of Congress do exactly that — looking to further harm our communities through advancing this budget.”

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Tami Jackson of the Wisconsin Board for People with Developmental Disabilities describes how unpaid family caregivers could be affected by proposed Medicaid cuts in the Republican budget reconciliation package in Washington, D.C. Janet Zander of the Greater Wisconsin Agency on Aging Resources, seated at right, also spoke. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Among the many people whose health care could be in jeopardy from possible Medicaid cuts, one group may be even less visible than the rest.

For elderly residents as well as children and adults with disabilities whose health care is covered by Medicaid, family members who help with their care will also be affected by the proposals coming from Republican members of Congress.

“Medicaid is the primary thing that supports family caregivers,” said Tami Jackson, policy analyst for the Wisconsin Board for People with Development Disabilities (BPDD), in a presentation to social workers Thursday in Dodgeville. 

The person under the caregiver’s care could be living at home, but will probably still require long-term support of some kind — support covered by Medicaid, Jackson said. Medicare provides coverage only for a limited time, such as when a person has come home after being hospitalized.

Private long-term care insurance plans “are unaffordable and they have not been workable for many years,” she added. “So Medicaid is it — and we happen to have a lot of people who need long-term care.”

Jackson and Janet Zander of the Greater Wisconsin Agency on Aging Resources met with Iowa County social workers in Dodgeville Thursday to explain the likely effect of Medicaid cuts that are part of the budget reconciliation bill that has passed the U.S. House and is now in the Senate.

The GOP majorities of both houses want to pass the legislation so they can extend tax cuts enacted in 2017, when President Donald Trump was in his first term. Those tax cuts have been found to heavily benefit wealthy Americans. Without action they will expire at the end of 2025.

Cutting Medicaid, hiking other costs

Medicaid is the single largest source of federal funds in the state budget — about $9 billion a year.

Under the U.S. House version of the budget reconciliation bill, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS) has projected between 71,000 and 111,000 Wisconsinites would lose Medicaid coverage, including more than 3,800 people with disabilities and 2,400 older adults. The state’s federal Medicaid revenues would be cut by $501 million to $663 million.

The Medicaid cuts on the scale of those in current iterations of the bill “are too large to not cause states to have to cut many things in their state budget,” Jackson said.

The bill’s Medicaid cuts as well as changes it would make to the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance marketplace — including ending subsidies that have made marketplace plans more affordable for lower-income people — would increase the number of uninsured Americans by 16 million in the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

“Whether you’re a caregiver, whether you’re on Medicaid, whether you’re working for somebody who’s on Medicaid,” everyone will be affected by 16 million more uninsured people, Zander said.

With more uncompensated care for hospitals and providers, she predicted that the cost for other payers will increase.

“We’re going to see premiums for any kind of [health] insurance skyrocket — the employer’s portion, the employee’s portion,” Zander said.

Reduced Medicaid care, more unpaid care

Family caregivers feel Medicaid’s impact in several ways. For many people who are elderly or have disabilities it enables them to get paid, professional care at home. If that care is cut back, that means more work for the unpaid family member.

“Those paid caregivers — they’re paid for by Medicaid dollars and there aren’t enough of them. There haven’t been enough of them for years,” Jackson said.

 If Medicaid cutbacks reduce the pay for those caregivers, the workforce that is already underpaid is likely to be even harder to find — making access to paid care even more difficult, she added, to the point where “it’s either the unpaid caregiver or nothing.”

Family caregivers who take on more unpaid care responsibilities may have to cut back on their own paid jobs.

“The amount of people who are reducing, limiting [work hours or] leaving the workforce because there isn’t a stable, paid caregiving workforce to provide what they need is huge,” Jackson said.

A BPDD survey found that for unpaid family caregivers in Wisconsin providing or coordinating care or filling in for missing care workers took 80% of their time. Two-thirds said caregiving had a negative impact on their family finances and 50% said they left jobs or reduced hours to provide care because there were no care workers to hire.

Unpaid caregivers who leave the workforce not only lose income but reduce the earnings that contribute to their Social Security retirement, Jackson said.

Kristin Voss, a Madison public school teacher for 24 years, had to retire to help manage and care for her 23-year-old daughter. Her daughter has epilepsy, autism and an intellectual disability and “functions at about anywhere from 6 to 12 years old,” Voss said in a panel discussion that was part of Thursday’s presentation.

Until her daughter was 21, she was entitled to public education, where she got “tons of support” including in her transition period that started when she was 18, Voss said. At 21, those supports were no longer available, however.

Her daughter enrolled in the state’s self-directed long-term care program called IRIS. The program includes a caseworker, but Voss also has responsibility as her daughter’s family caregiver, helping to manage day-to-day changes in her daughter’s placement and activities.

“I don’t mind doing these things, but there’s things that I don’t always know about and I’m not always prepared for,” Voss said. “And so, no, I couldn’t do this and be a public school teacher.”

Instead, she has put together a collection of part-time positions that give her flexibility that she needs — although none of them have health insurance, Voss said.

Unpaid caregivers ‘untangling the mess’

Some unpaid caregivers who leave the workforce may also turn to Medicaid for their health coverage because they can’t afford health insurance or work at a job that doesn’t provide insurance.

“About 4 million people nationally are unpaid caregivers who are in Medicaid themselves,” Jackson said.

Among the changes proposed for Medicaid is a requirement for participants in the program to prove every six months that they are still eligible for the program, instead of once a year, the current standard. Another change proposed is to add a work requirement for certain Medicaid participants.

Both of those changes will mean more paperwork. “Unpaid caregivers are the folks that are keeping people who are in Medicaid programs already,” Jackson said — by filling out the forms that are required to prove the person is still eligible.  

“Often these processes are so complex,” Jackson said. And when something goes wrong, because of an error in an eligibility form or a billing mistake, family caregivers “are the people who are untangling the mess.”

The current version of the bill in the Senate gives caregivers an exemption from the work requirement — but Jackson said the definition has raised concerns.

The current proposal limits the exemption to people who are caring for a person under the age of 14. National advocates have said that “really narrows that caregiver exemption and doesn’t quite fit with the reality that most unpaid caregivers are providing care for people with disabilities and older adults,” Jackson said.

Including exemptions in the proposed work requirement provisions also doesn’t necessarily reduce the paperwork.

“You either have to prove you’re meeting the work requirements, or you have to prove that you’re exempt for those requirements,” Jackson said. “And if you’re a caregiver who’s in Medicaid, you have to do that for yourself and probably the person you’re supporting.”

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