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

Wisconsin’s jobs and employment numbers showed a slightly softening economy in July, following national trends, the state labor department reported Thursday.

“The Wisconsin labor market has cooled a bit along with the national economy. Unemployment remains historically low,” said Scott Hodek, section chief in the office of economic advisors for the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development (DWD), in a briefing on the July numbers.

Private-sector jobs dropped slightly in July from June, DWD reported. Employment and labor force participation edged down slightly, too, as did the state’s unemployment rate.

“What we’re seeing is that Wisconsin seems to be following the national trend,” Hodek told the Wisconsin Examiner. While the economy is cooling down, “we’re actually still seeing historically low unemployment rates,” Hodek said. “So you’ve got kind of a mix of up and down indicators.”

He pointed to national economic uncertainty as well as the longstanding challenge of Wisconsinites aging out of the workforce faster than younger residents are entering it as likely contributors to the economic cooling. 

DWD pegged the number of Wisconsinites working in July at 3.05 million, a drop of 4,500 from June and down 32,500 from July 2024.

The number of people who were unemployed in July was projected at 98,600 — down 2,200 from June, but up 5,400 from July 2024. The unemployment rate for July was 3.1%.

The labor force shrank in July to just under 3.15 million, a decline of 6,700 from June and a decline of 27,000 from July 2024. The labor force is defined as people 16 or older who are working or seeking work, excluding people in the military or who are in institutions such as nursing homes or prisons.

Wisconsin’s labor force participation rate was 65% of the state’s population 16 or older in July — down 0.1% from June and down just under 1% from July a year ago. Labor force participation remains ahead of the U.S. as a whole, while unemployment is lower, DWD reported.

Employment and labor force participation numbers are projected from a monthly survey of households. A separate survey, polling employers, produces data on the number of jobs in the state.

Wisconsin counted just under 3.06 million nonfarm jobs — an increase of 1,800 over June and 20,200 over July a year ago. Private sector jobs in July totaled more than 2.6 million, a decrease of 3,800 from June but still 15,100 ahead of July 2024.

Construction jobs fell by 500 from June, Hodek said, but remained 3,100 ahead of July 2024. Manufacturing jobs fell by 500, and are down 1,800 from a year ago.

Rosier picture in Wisconsin than broader U.S.

Wisconsin’s jobs report Thursday lacked the drama of the national jobs numbers reported two weeks ago that prompted President Donald Trump to fire the nation’s chief statistician.

On Friday, Aug. 1, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported the U.S. gained 73,000 jobs in July, below analysts’ estimates. The BLS also updated national job numbers for May and June, dramatically reducing both: in June, a gain of 14,000 jobs instead of previously reported 147,000, and in May, an increase of 19,000 instead of the previously reported 125,000.

The national unemployment rate of 4.2% was in line with economic forecasts, CNBC reported. Other indicators nationally added up to “a slow but persistent cooling trend,” the North America regional president at Manpower Group, Ger Doyle, told CNBC.

Trump took to his social media platform, Truth Social, to declare without evidence that the numbers were “RIGGED.” He summarily fired the director of the BLS, replacing her this week with an economist from the far-right Heritage Foundation who has called for a broad overhaul of the agency.

Hodek told the Wisconsin Examiner Thursday that DWD has not received any communications about changes in procedure from the BLS.

“We’ve certainly seen the news and we’re monitoring the situation, of course,” Hodek said. “But we do have confidence in our data and we can’t really speculate on what could possibly happen. We’ll just need to wait and see what the Bureau of Labor Statistics actually does down the road.”

Hodek said that revisions of previous months’ reports are “a normal part of the data process.” The first round of data isn’t inaccurate, but “as you take more time, the data become more accurate,” he said.

“Ideally you want a combination of both —  something that kind of gives you the current edge of where you’re headed, and then as more and better data come in, you get a better sense of what has been happening,” Hodek said.

For example, a quarterly collection of information from the unemployment insurance system “actually covers most employers and it’s very solid data,” he said. “But it lags by half a year.”

Information from that report can be used to further refine the calculations and assumptions that go into the state’s monthly reports.

The monthly numbers for the nation as a whole and for each state go through different calculations and formulas, Hodek said, so it’s not possible to draw direct connections between the state jobs numbers and the national jobs numbers.

It’s also too soon to explain the seemingly dramatic differences between the national jobs picture and Wisconsin’s, he added: “We’ve only got a couple of data points where we saw those large revisions, so that doesn’t really make a trend necessarily yet.”

Hodek doesn’t think Wisconsin is somehow “diverging from the national economy,” however, he said. “In fact, it’s fairly unlikely in general, just because what happens to the national economy and the global economy is going to impact us as well. We tend to follow the national and global trends.”

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Mitchell Berman is seeking the 2026 Democratic nomination to run for the U.S. House of Representatives in Wisconsin's 1st Congressional District. (Berman for Congress photo)

Mitchell Berman, a Racine County nurse, announced Tuesday he will seek the Democratic nod to run for Congress in Wisconsin’s 1st District against fourth-term incumbent U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Janesville).

Berman is the second candidate to enter the Democratic primary race for the seat. Randy Bryce, who lost to Steil in 2018 in one of the nation’s most closely watched congressional contests, announced May 20 that he would try again.

Berman introduced his candidacy Tuesday with a video shot on a mobile phone that stresses his working class background and rural Wisconsin upbringing.

“I’m running for Congress because Bryan Steil isn’t looking out for families like mine,” Berman says in the video. “We deserve a government that works for us, not the elite.”

Berman worked as a nurse at the Milwaukee VA hospital for 10 years and in the video highlights his service to military veterans.

He told the Wisconsin Examiner on Tuesday that he left the job when he decided to run for Congress because the federal Hatch Act bars federal employees from running for partisan  office.

The father of two and a 15-year resident of the 1st Congressional District, Berman said concern for his daughters “about whether or not they have the ability to make their own health care decisions” motivated his run for the seat.

“Seeing the cuts to the VA and just the overall gutting of Medicaid in general has also prompted me to get into this race,” he said. Cuts to Medicaid and the SNAP federal nutrition aid program were part of the Republican budget reconciliation bill that Steil voted for and President Donald Trump signed on July 4.

“These things were made for tax cuts for billionaires,” Berman said, adding that in the process, Congress added $3.5 trillion to the federal budget deficit instead of  reducing it.

“I think the No. 1  issue that we need to focus on is affordability,” Berman said. “And I think that umbrella covers many different issues … decreasing the cost of child care, decreasing the cost of health care, decreasing the cost at the grocery store.”

As of July 30, the Cook Political Report rated the 1st District a likely Republican win in 2026 with a 2-point edge for the incumbent, Steil. Cook defines seats rated “likely” for one or the other party as “not considered competitive at this point” but adds that they “have the potential to become engaged.”

Berman said he believes his life experiences will attract voters.

“I’ve lived paycheck to paycheck. I had to work three jobs in college,” Berman said. “I was a first-generation college student. I graduated with student loan debt. My wife and I, we struggled with fertility issues and our children are a blessing of IVF [in vitro fertilization]. So a lot of these kitchen table concerns for people, a lot of these things that people care about close to home, are things that I’ve experienced.”

Berman said he followed news accounts of Steil’s July 31 public event in Elkhorn, where the congressman was met with an angry, noisy crowd and questioners who loudly pushed back on many of his comments.

“I think that’s a good representation of people’s dismay and how upset they are in how Bryan Steil … his lack of representation for the district.”

A first-time political candidate, Berman said he’s been active in local politics as a volunteer, including filing a successful lawsuit that charged the Town of Raymond School District violated the state open meetings law in holding a school board retreat in 2022. The suit was settled in December 2024.

The school district was also embroiled in a dispute among parents over its  social-emotional learning curriculum and the firing of a popular principal. Berman was a leader in a campaign to recall two board members who opposed the curriculum. One of the board members resigned before the recall vote was held, while the other survived the recall election.

“Everyone in my community, everyone I’ve talked to about this opportunity, has been very encouraging,” Berman said.

A reliably Democratic seat in the 1970s and ‘80s, the 1st District has remained in GOP hands since 1994, despite recurring attempts by Democrats to unseat Republican incumbents. The seat was held for two decades by former Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Janesville), who rose to become U.S. House speaker before leaving office at the end of 2018.

Steil, a corporate lawyer who previously worked as Ryan’s aide, won his first term against Bryce with more than 54% of the vote to Bryce’s 42%. He won his two most recent races by similar margins. He beat former state Department of Revenue Secretary Peter Barca 54-44 in 2024 and Ann Roe, now a Wisconsin state representative from Janesville, 54-45 in 2022.

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Percy Brown stands outside the church where he grew up, Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Madison. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

For more than two decades, Percy Brown has worked as an educator, his core priority striving to address gaps in achievement between Black and white students.

There’s no single cause for those gaps, Brown says. Poor teaching methods are one factor, in his view. He points to changes in how reading is taught, for example, that have been shown to improve reading proficiency among white and Black students alike.

But, he contends, that’s only part of the answer. A legacy of discrimination through the generations demands more careful attention to making sure every student is fully welcome at the schoolhouse door and gets the opportunity to learn and thrive, he says, in the classroom and out.

Brown pursued that goal as the director of equity and student achievement in the Middleton School District, west of Madison, and more recently as a trainer and consultant on diversity and equity in education as well as a speaker on other education-related topics.

Biases about Black students’ inherent academic abilities persist, Brown contends — influencing not only white teachers but Black students as well.

“We’ve dealt with racial inferiority being placed on us and embedded in the psyche of all of America for a very, very long time,” Brown says. “And while we might have egalitarian beliefs, those stereotypes and biases are still there.”

Concern about that legacy drove Brown to write “Strength Through Generations” — a combination memoir, thumbnail sketch of Black history and call to action.

The book has more than one audience, Brown says. 

One audience is fellow educators — “to reach teachers, to help them be more culturally responsive in the classroom,” Brown says.

“I also wrote it for high school students that are African-American, so that they can learn more about their history, with the hope that that inspires them,” he says. “To know thyself is so key to what you’ll be able to do in life.”

DEI under attack

The book comes at a time when organized programs to address racial diversity, promote equity to overcome centuries of discrimination and subjugation, and promote inclusion of the broad range of people into national life and institutions are under fierce attack.

Starting on his first day in office President Donald Trump has issued a series of executive orders aimed at ending diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs in federal government and education while also condemning inclusive policies in the private sector.

Brown has critiqued some of the ways DEI has been carried out. When he read an audit of Universities of Wisconsin DEI programs conducted by the Legislative Audit Bureau on behalf of the Legislature, he was struck that there seemed to be no consistent definition throughout the system for DEI.

But he also considers the anti-DEI wave a backlash to the protests in 2020 after the police killing of George Floyd. “That woke up the world,” Brown says. “There was a coming together, and it wasn’t even politicized like that.”

Right-wing influencers began attacking critical race theory — a complex, academic concept — and subsequently DEI, he observes, deploying “the anti-woke rhetoric to really scare people.”

Six years earlier, however, in Middleton, “I was able to collaborate and get support from people on the right side of the aisle to try to make things better for historically disenfranchised students,” Brown says. “It wasn’t a boogie man.”

The book’s publication is especially timely, he believes.

“There’s a lot going on that I would say is just anti-‘We the people’ — unless you’re talking about ‘We the People’ in its original intent for this nation to be a nation for white people — and then nobody else,” Brown says.

Family history and Black history

Brown’s book weaves the stories of his grandfather’s involvement in the civil rights struggles in rural, segregated Mississippi and the lives of his father, aunts and uncles growing up there together with a primer on Black history.

“As a Black male educator with a background in social studies, I know that America’s schools focus heavily on teaching slavery, but this does not address the more significant curricular issue when it comes to the history of Black people,” Brown writes in the book’s introduction. “There’s no mention of ancient African civilizations, such as the Kingdoms of Mali, Songhai, Benin, Kemet, Nubia, Axum and Ethiopia.”

By teaching “a more comprehensive history of Black people,” he writes, educators can appropriately build self-esteem of Black children and also “change the perception of those who are not Black.”

Brown’s father, Percy Sr., and his father’s siblings integrated their local high school in Mississippi in 1965 after the district was forced to admit Black students. Ku Klux Klan members burned a cross at their home and fired gunshots. “The intimidation was real, as real as could be,” Percy Sr. told his son in an interview included in the book.

Finding common ground

His father moved north from Mississippi to attend the University of Wisconsin-Madison, graduating in 1975. Percy Brown Jr. grew up in Madison, and his book reflects on the racial divisions then and now in the state’s capital city despite its progressive image.

When it came time to go to college, Brown attended Delta State University in Mississippi near where his father grew up.

A bout of spring cleaning helped trigger Brown’s idea to write the book. He turned up a paper he had written as an undergraduate in 1997 “about the need to incorporate Black history into the curriculum to help build the self-esteem of Black children,” he recalls. The paper concluded with his declaration that one day he would write a book about Black history to help meet that need.

Not long after finding the paper, he traveled to Egypt in 2023 to learn about the African roots of one of the world’s oldest civilizations — roots that Brown says have long been unappreciated.

“Going to Egypt — that was transformational for me, and in a lot of ways I think I felt more closely connected to the human family,” Brown says.

The final push for the book came from the CEO at a publishing firm that specializes in producing books by entrepreneurs.

While his book focuses on Black experience, Brown says that in his consulting work he sees parallel experiences in places where the population is all white or nearly so.

Conducting a student assembly (about being safe online) in Door County, he got a firsthand look at the way schools there are also under-resourced. “My empathy for them up there is no different than the empathy that I have for the Black kids here in the community,” Brown says.

He worries about polarization and what he calls the tribalism that divides the public.

“The things that we have in common, that’s how you start to build those authentic relationships,” Brown says. “That’s how you start to build community, right? And it’s about our collective shared stories — not shutting down one story.”

 

Gov. Tony Evers signs AB 257 into law Friday. The bill creates a credential and pathway for advanced practice registered nurses to practice independently. (Photo courtesy of Office of Gov. Evers)

As expected, Gov. Tony Evers signed legislation Friday that clears the way for nurses with advanced training to practice independently.

“Nurses play a critical role in our healthcare workforce, and I’m proud of our work to expand opportunities for nurses to not only grow their career but create a system that allows for more advanced practitioners here in Wisconsin,” Evers said in a statement released Friday announcing his plans to sign AB 257, the advanced practice registered nurses (APRN) legislation, now Wisconsin Act 17.

The bill creates a new license category and a professional pathway for nurses who qualify to practice independently.

Evers vetoed two other closely watched bills — one that would have carved out app-based drivers from protections under state employment laws and one that would require the state Department of Corrections to recommend sending back to prison people charged with a crime while they are on probation, parole or extended supervision.

Altogether the governor signed 16 of the 21 bills that the Legislature formally presented to him on Thursday and vetoed five.

Advanced practice nursing bill wins approval

The Wisconsin state nursing board will oversee the credentialing of advanced practice nurses, a group that includes certified nurse-midwives, certified registered nurse anesthetists, clinical nurse specialists and nurse practitioners.

Advocates said the measure will increase the availability of health care providers, particularly in parts of Wisconsin where doctors are scarce.

Evers vetoed previous versions of the bill in 2022 and 2024. Both times he expressed support for the concept but insisted nurses should meet tighter qualifications before they can practice on their own.

The bill he signed Friday adds those requirements — increasing the amount of supervision that an APRN must have under a physician to 3,840 hours before practicing independently; adding additional supervision requirements for certified registered nurse anesthetists who specialize in pain management; and including language to restrict the titles APRN practitioners use so patients aren’t confused about their credentials.

The Wisconsin Medical Society cited those issues in opposing APRN bills in previous legislative sessions, and with the 2025 revision shifted its stance to neutral.  

In floor votes in June, lawmakers from both parties stressed the bipartisan compromise reflected in the measure that was presented to Evers this week.

In his announcement, Evers thanked lawmakers for their work on the measure, including Republican state Sens. Patrick Testin and Rachael Cabral-Guevara, Republican state Rep. Tony Kurtz and Democratic state Rep. Lisa Subeck.

He also thanked “the many nursing and physician groups that we worked with to get this bipartisan bill across the finish line to help bring more folks into the healthcare profession and ensure that Wisconsinites get the high-quality care they need when they need it while setting our nurses up for success.”

Bill classifying gig drivers vetoed

Evers vetoed AB 269, legislation that would have blocked drivers from app-based rideshare and delivery businesses from being declared employees.  

The legislation would have automatically classified drivers for Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and similar businesses as independent contractors, bypassing current Wisconsin laws that differentiate independent contractors from direct employees. 

It would have categorically excluded app-based drivers from coverage under the state’s unemployment insurance, workers compensation and minimum wage laws. 

“I object to the bill’s definition of independent contractor status in the absence of any guaranteed benefit for workers,” Evers wrote in his veto message.

In a campaign pushed most prominently by DoorDash and other app-based businesses that enlist drivers, advocates focused  on the bill’s provisions that would permit — but not require — those businesses to establish portable benefits for drivers.

Evers acknowledged in his veto message that app-based drivers “are a growing segment of Wisconsin’s workforce.” But he said changing the state’s independent contractor definitions “demands substantive conversations among several parties,” with management and  workers both at the table. 

Evers wrote that while the bill was moving through the Legislature, his staff asked lawmakers and groups with an interest in the measure to allow time for “robust dialogue and engagement to reach consensus and compromise” over the legislation. 

“Unfortunately the Legislature declined to meaningfully provide that opportunity, choosing instead to send this bill to my desk anyway,” he wrote. “My veto today will allow time for these important conversations to occur so Wisconsin can find a path forward.”

The Wisconsin AFL-CIO praised the veto. “Legislation that makes the loss of important worker rights a certainty while holding out the possibility of flexible benefits if and when the employer chooses to provide them is a bad deal for workers,” President Stephanie Bloomingdale said. 

Bill pushing revocation for offenders rejected

Evers vetoed AB 85, legislation that would require the Department of Corrections to recommend automatically returning a person to prison who is charged with a crime while on extended supervision, parole or probation. Evers vetoed a similar bill in 2019.

Evers wrote in his veto message that the legislation was “an unfunded mandate” likely to cost the state more than $330 million in the first two years, according to the fiscal estimate, “and hundreds of millions in unknown, ongoing costs.” 

In addition, he wrote, it would likely require building more prison facilities and would be expected to impose new costs on local governments, while he blamed lawmakers for “significantly underfunding existing operations at the Department of Corrections in the most recent state budget.”

The bill “would move Wisconsin in the wrong direction on criminal justice reform without improving public safety,” Evers wrote. 

Instead, he urged lawmakers, “Wisconsin should be investing in data-driven, evidence-based programming that addresses barriers to reentry, enhances educational and vocational opportunities for individuals who will be released after completing their sentence, and provides treatment for mental health and substance use issues, which will help to reduce recidivism and save taxpayer money while improving public safety.”

In a message posted on Facebook the bill’s author, state Rep. Brent Jacobson (R Mosinee), criticized the veto. “It is unacceptable to give repeat criminals the opportunity to continue to put our families and neighbors at risk again and again without facing consequences,” he wrote.

The bill was opposed by criminal justice reform organizations, including the national prison reform group Dream.Org and Wisconsin-based Ex-incarcerated People Organizing (EXPO).

“This harmful bill would have led to more people being revoked from community supervision and incarcerated, making it harder to build safe and thriving communities in Wisconsin,” Dream.Org posted on Facebook. The organization credited campaigning by advocates and community groups with persuading Evers to veto the measure. 

Primary care medicine measure falls 

Evers vetoed SB 4, legislation that would specify that subscription-based direct primary medical care arrangements are not subject to the state’s insurance laws.

While the legislation had some bipartisan support in concept, it foundered at the governor’s desk on the issue of anti-discrimination language.

Evers listed in his veto message a number of provisions in the legislation that forbid primary care providers from refusing to treat patients. 

Nevertheless, he wrote that he objected to “the Legislature failing to provide sufficient protections for patients receiving care under direct primary care agreements from being discriminated against and potentially losing access to their healthcare.”

Evers did not specify what additional protections he believed the measure should include. “I previously raised similar concerns when I vetoed earlier iterations of this legislation five years ago — concerns the Legislature has declined to satisfactorily address in the bill that is now before me and despite having ample opportunity,” he wrote.

In 2020, when Evers vetoed the version of the legislation on his desk at the time, he wrote that he objected to an amendment in which lawmakers had removed language protecting patients from being refused treatment on the grounds of “genetics, national origin, gender identity, citizenship status, or whether the patient is LGBTQ.”

In his veto message Friday, Evers wrote, “Every Wisconsinite should be able to get the healthcare they need when and where they need it — and without fear of discrimination. I welcome the Legislature revisiting this legislation and the opportunity to enact a version of this bill that sufficiently addresses my concerns.”

The announcement issued by the governor’s office Friday includes a complete list of bills that the governor signed and vetoed, with links to the enacted measures and to Evers’ veto statements.

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Workers install solar panels on the roof of a low-income household in California. On Thursday, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers wrote a letter to the EPA urging the Trump administration not to cancel the Solar for All program. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Gov. Tony Evers wrote to the federal Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday, urging the Trump administration not to cancel Wisconsin’s $62.4 million grant to install solar energy systems for low- and moderate-income households.

Evers’ letter to EPA administrator Lee Zeldin followed a New York Times report earlier this week that the agency was preparing to cancel the $7 billion federal “Solar for All” grant program. “Solar for All” was part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act passed by congressional Democrats and signed by then-president Joe Biden.

“To be clear, attempting to terminate Solar for All grants has no legitimate purpose or justification,” Evers wrote. “Beyond that, doing so will also negatively impact Wisconsinites and our state, causing increased energy bills for Wisconsinites and hurting efforts to improve air quality, boost resilience, and create good-paying jobs.”

The Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. has put out a request for proposal seeking an implementer for the state’s program, called “PowerUp Wisconsin.” Bidders were to submit a notice of their intent to bid by this past Monday, Aug. 4, and final proposals are due on Friday, Aug. 29.

According to the WEDC’s work plan for the project, Wisconsin’s grant would add rooftop solar power systems to 1,038 households in single-family homes and 2,200 more households in 24 multifamily homes. The plan also calls for 10 community solar projects that could serve an additional 4,239 households.

Evers told Zeldin in the letter that since Wisconsin’s $62.4 million grant was awarded in April 2024, the WEDC has worked with local governments, solar installers, utilities and housing developers to draw up the state’s program guidelines. The program would reduce Wisconsin’s reliance on out-of-state energy and save households up to $500 a year on their energy bills, Evers wrote.

The governor wrote that lowering costs has been “a top priority” for his administration.

“While the Trump Administration claims to share this priority, terminating Wisconsin’s Solar for All grant would have the exact opposite effect, preventing Wisconsin families and households from seeing the direct savings offered through PowerUp Wisconsin,” Evers wrote.

The Evers administration and the Wisconsin Department of Justice have joined a number of lawsuits to block Trump administration executive orders and unilateral actions to cut funding approved by Congress.

Evers’ letter appeared to leave open the prospect for more litigation. “At a time when energy demand continues to increase, it is unfathomable for the Trump Administration to unnecessarily — and potentially illegally — terminate funding for a program designed to deploy affordable, renewable energy systems,” Evers wrote.

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Former state Sen. Dale Schultz, left, listens as former Dane County Sheriff Davd Mahoney speaks in a panel discussion on "fusion voting" in La Crosse Wednesday. (Screenshot/LeaderEthics Wisconsin YouTube channel)

Could letting multiple political parties endorse the same candidate bring political reform to Wisconsin, or the nation?

That’s part of the idea being promoted by a bipartisan pair of retired politicians — former state Sen. Dale Schultz, a Republican, and former Dane County Sheriff Dave Mahoney, a Democrat.

Mohoney and Schultz believe that “fusion voting” — a system that allows multiple parties to endorse the same political candidate — could help remedy the disaffection with politics that they see becoming ever more widespread.

Talking with his two adult sons over the weekend, “both of them told me, ‘I don’t vote. I’m not going to vote because my voice doesn’t matter,’” Mahoney said during a panel discussion in La Crosse on Wednesday. “Unfortunately I hear that all too often.”

In his conversations in the community, “a consistent message was, ‘I’m not being represented by my party,’” Mahoney said.

Schultz and Mahoney have established United Wisconsin — for now, an affinity group, but in the future, they hope, a new political party.

Wednesday’s panel discussion provided a platform for the pair to make their case for fusion voting to a few dozen people at the Black River Beach Neighborhood Center in La Crosse and a broader audience watching on YouTube. It was hosted by LeaderEthics Wisconsin, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that defines its purpose as “promoting ethical leadership among elected officials.”

Making it possible for candidates to run on more than one party line would strengthen the power of third parties and give them “a seat at the table” as candidates and officeholders shape public policy, Schultz said. “We can provide agency so that their voices are heard, that they do have the ability to negotiate.”

As a state lawmaker he sought to work across party lines “in a collaborative way that would best serve all of us,” Schultz said. Disagreements were common, “but we didn’t hate each other. And at the end of the day, we were proud when we could jointly stand up in front of our constituents or the public in general and say we have a solution which we think is worth trying.”

That sense of comity has deteriorated, Schultz said. He believes fusion voting could help restore a stronger spirit of cooperation and re-engage “those who don’t believe anyone is listening to them, those who believe that the only choice they have is … voting for the lesser of two evils, voting for a third party and throwing away their vote, or simply not voting at all.”

Chapter 8 of the Wisconsin statutes has two laws that ban candidates from running on more than one party’s ticket. Statute 8.03(1) states that a candidate’s name may not be listed on the ballot more than once. Statute 8.15(1) bars candidates from running in more than one party’s primary election at the same time.

Changing those laws is at the top of United Wisconsin’s agenda. The organization, along with Schultz and Mahoney and three other people described as potential members of United Wisconsin, are suing in Dane County circuit court to have the two statutes thrown out.

The lawsuit declares that the laws violate rights guaranteed under the Wisconsin Constitution to freedom of association and speech, equal protection under the law, and free government.

The plaintiffs are represented by Law Forward, the nonprofit law firm that focuses on voting rights, democracy and related issues, along with John Franke of Gass Turek. Franke is a former judge who was appointed to the former Government Accountability Board in 2014 by then-Gov. Scott Walker. The board was later dissolved by the Wisconsin Legislature.

“We should not have the dominating party squeeze out the input from the third parties, and we should not have the voters that are inclined to vote in independent ways to also be squeezed out by the two major parties,” said Lee Rasch, executive director of LeaderEthics Wisconsin, as he introduced the discussion. Rasch is one of the other plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

Mahoney said United Wisconsin aims to cool down the increasingly hostile rhetoric between political parties.

“I care what’s important to us as Wisconsinites,” he said. “I care what’s important to us as Americans. We have far more in common than we have separating us.”

Mahoney said he’s alarmed by the increasingly hostile political rhetoric as well as threats and acts of political violence, such as attacks on two state lawmakers in Minnesota and their spouses, killing one of them and her husband.

“I’ve had many calls myself from current lawmakers who want my thoughts on their safety and what they do to protect themselves from a security standpoint being out in the public,” Mahoney said. “That should never happen. That should never happen in our democracy.”

Schultz and Mahoney said if the lawsuit succeeds in throwing out the two statutes United Wisconsin would become a standing political party and work to build a support base. The party would negotiate with candidates to adopt compatible policy positions in return for the party nominating one of the candidates to run on its own ticket.

Mahoney said that having to compete for a block of voters from a third party “might actually bring some common sense into the positions of both major parties and moderate them and certainly the rhetoric that they send out to their members and constituents.”

The spirit of fusion voting has a long and honorable history in Wisconsin, Schultz said, with the Republican Party at its founding in Ripon in 1854 bringing together a collection of splinter political parties united in their opposition to slavery.

The state laws that bar the practice were enacted in 1897. Historian Josh Kluever, a lecturer at Alvernia University in Reading, Pennsylvania, told the Wisconsin Examiner that the law was likely written in reaction to the 1896 presidential election, when both the Populist Party and the Democratic Party endorsed William Jennings Bryan.

Kluever is from Wisconsin and has written about the history of collaborative politics in the state involving the Socialist Party and Robert La Follette’s Progressive Republican wing and later Progressive Party.

While fusion voting was formally outlawed in Wisconsin, the two groups worked to accomplish similar objectives, he said in an interview, allying to pass legislation and refraining from running candidates against each other.

Currently, only New York and Connecticut have any form of fusion voting. Kluever said that it’s “tricky to predict” how more widespread fusion voting might change political dynamics in a state or the country.

Nevertheless, “it is a positive for the small-d democratic process to have people’s voices feel that they’re being heard,” Kluever said. 

This report has been updated with additional information about United Wisconsin’s legal representation in its lawsuit.  

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First District U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Janesville) holds an in-person listening session at Elkhorn High School in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, Thursday evening July 31, 2025. (Copyright Mark Hertzberg/for Racine County Eye)

ELKHORN — At a raucous listening session in a high school auditorium Thursday evening, U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Janesville) defended the immigration and tariff policies of  President Donald Trump and the Republican budget reconciliation law that Trump signed on July 4.

From the roars of the crowd, critics of the congressman appeared to account for the majority of the group that filled nearly two-thirds of the 600-seat Elkhorn High School auditorium. But there were also recurring cheers, shouts and applause at key moments from a smaller coterie of supporters in the room.

Steil represents the 1st District in Congress, which covers Southeastern Wisconsin from Janesville and Beloit east to Racine and Kenosha on the shores of Lake Michigan.

Over the last several months, Republican members of Congress have been counseled not to hold in-person events with constituents after publicity about angry crowds turning up at some GOP town halls.

Steil’s constituents have been protesting weekly outside his office in Racine for months, calling on him to hold an in-person meeting rather than telephone ones. 

Taking the stage shortly after 5 p.m. and lasting for about 80 minutes there, Steil stuck with a cheerful, breezy tone. He treated the loud, impassioned and often angry audience cries as mostly a difference of opinion.

When an audience member asked Steil how he might take a stand against other congressional Republicans “who lie to the American public and malign the dignity of 70 million people on Medicaid by suggesting that they are lazy,” Steil lamented the tone of political discourse and vowed not to denigrate anyone. Then he turned the subject back to the boisterous auditorium.

“I’d say the overall majority of people here want to learn and understand my perspective, want to hear the question,” he said. “And then there’s a small group of people that are challenging.”

It was left to the moderator of the session, Janesville radio host Tim Bremel, to lecture the crowd to refrain from shouting over Steil’s answers during a Q&A period.

During one interruption, the radio host scolded, “Ladies and gentlemen, we will never get questions if we can’t keep the auditorium quiet. And please do the person who asked the question the respect of allowing his question to be answered.”

Pledge of Allegiance

Steil kicked off the session with the Pledge of Allegiance, inviting the audience to join him. They did so, some shouting the final words “and justice for all” with vehemence.

He followed with a short talk offering “just kind of an overview of where we’re at in this country to get ourselves back on track” — words that prompted more angry taunts.

Steil said that the nation’s spending is about “$1.8 trillion more than on the revenue side,” a comment that prompted scattered shouts scoffing at “tax breaks.”

He defended the expansion in the budget reconciliation law of work requirements for SNAP food aid, saying the change followed a model that Wisconsin had already instituted for the program in the 1990s.

When he switched to immigration and a graph that Steil said showed “the dramatic drop, the decrease that we have seen in border apprehensions,” a cry of “We are all immigrants!” came up from several rows of seats.

Nine minutes in, Steil made a pitch for his office’s constituent services, then appealed for restraint from the crowd.

“The more civil we are with each other — there’s people that have different views in here, we heard applause and boos on the border security issue, we’ve heard it a couple of times,” he said. “We have people on all sides, it’s great, that’s what makes us so great.”

Tariffs, ICE and deportation

The questions that followed came from members of the audience who filled out forms at tables in the school lobby.

Bremel told the crowd that the questioners would be chosen at random. Some greeted that claim with loud skeptical scoffs. Over the course of the hour, however, the vast majority of people who were chosen asked questions sharply critical of Steil, Trump, the Republican congressional majority, or all three.

Criticizing Trump’s tariffs, Tom Burke asked Steil “what dire economic circumstances” justified the president’s executive orders to impose them.

“What we need to do is make sure that we’re having other countries treat the United States fairly,” Steil replied, adding that the U.S. should “work collectively with our allies to address the real culprit, which is China.”

Burke wasn’t satisfied with the answer. U.S. allies, “seem to be alienated beyond belief,” he told Steil, adding that until he got a satisfactory answer to his question about their rationale, “I’m going to be totally opposed to these tariffs — period.”

Specifying that her question was about “not politics, but morality,” Jean Henderson of Elkhorn told Steil, “What I see happening to our immigrant population embarrasses me, terrifies me.”

Henderson criticized the deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) personnel, their faces hidden by masks, against immigrants “who are doing the right thing by going to the immigration office,” only to be taken into custody. “It is a trap,” she said. “Why is this happening and why aren’t you stopping it?”

Steil began in reply, “What I view is the moral hazard created by the Biden administration…,” prompting a roar of disapproval from the crowd, then a shout of “Joe Biden sucks!” from someone perhaps more sympathetic to the congressman.

The rest of Steil’s response was largely drowned out.

When it was her turn at the microphone, Kelly Neuens connected the experiences of her grandparents and great aunt and great uncle, who were held in U.S. internment camps during World War II as U.S. citizens of Japanese descent, to the conditions in the El Salvador prison where the Trump administration has sent some immigrants taken into custody.

“President Trump said, ‘Homegrowns are next’ when he was speaking to the El Salvador president,” Neuens told Steil. “My worry is that we are repeating history here.”

A plea for the climate

In his answer, which was repeatedly interrupted, Steil described the World War II internment as “one of the more darker chapters of American history,” then added, “As we look at the engagement that law enforcement is doing now against immigrants who are in the country illegally, I don’t see the  exact parallel.”

Another questioner asked Steil to explain “why you support Linda McMahon and defunding the Department of Education?”

Congress, Steil said, is still “analyzing what the spending will be for the upcoming fiscal year.” He added that the department “has burdened a lot of our local school districts with unnecessary red tape” in the course of distributing funds to the states. “I think what we will see as we negotiate this going forward is a way to make sure that those funds are there” for local schools, he said.

When it was her turn to ask a question, Sharna Ahern of Fontana thanked Steil and his staff “for answering all the contacts I’ve made with you over the years.”

She enumerated a wide range of concerns she has had — about the Department of Education, about the treatment of immigrants, “about the rule of law and civil rights” — and then turned her focus on the environment.

“Extreme weather conditions are happening more frequently as we experience them,” she told Steil. “The EPA is deregulating the standards that are in place to fight climate change, to protect the citizens. Where do you stand on this issue? And how can you be an advocate for us to initiate legislation to restore our safeguards?”

Steil praised Wisconsin as “one of the most beautiful states in the country” and asserted that “making sure that we’re protecting our air and water and soil is absolutely essential.” He said that on the issue of climate change, “what we need to be doing is focused on addressing that global aspect. But again, make sure other countries are doing their fair share of it.”

The crowd largely jeered at the response. When another audience member asked about Trump’s executive orders rolling back Biden administration measures to address climate change, Steil said that action was necessary to “correct … the overreach in the previous administration.”

It was after 6 p.m. when Bremel called for the final question.

A few minutes earlier, someone had shouted a question about “children starving in Gaza,” and the woman whose turn it was asked Steil to address that topic as well as to defend the SNAP cuts.

“I can do them both,” Steil said. He started with SNAP, reiterating his earlier assertion that Wisconsin would not be affected by the program’s changes to work requirements because of policies the state had in place already.

Turning to Gaza, Steil said, “To me the easy answer to address this crisis is for Hamas to surrender and release the hostages. Release them. Israel was unfairly, unjustly attacked.”

His comments gave rise to another brief demonstration, punctuated by repeated chants of “60,000 people are dead!”

By the time the chanting ended, Steil had left the stage. 

The photos accompanying this report are not available for republishing except by agreement with photographer Mark Hertzberg. 

At a news conference Tuesday in the state Capitol, Rachel Smith of New Berlin speaks in favor of a bill that would make app-based drivers independent contractors and allow the businesses they drive for to provide some benefits. The bill was authored by Sen. Julian Bradly, on the right. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Backers of legislation that would block drivers from app-based rideshare and delivery businesses from being declared employees are making a full-court press to persuade Gov. Tony Evers to sign the measure into law.

If enacted, AB 269 would automatically classify drivers for Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and similar businesses as independent contractors — bypassing current Wisconsin laws that differentiate independent contractors from direct employees. It would exclude those drivers from Wisconsin’s unemployment insurance, workers compensation and minimum wage laws.

The bill would also allow those businesses to set up payroll plans to fund benefit programs for drivers, but it would not require them to do so.

Along with other bills that passed both houses after May 8, the Legislature’s calendar requires the independent contractor measure to go to Evers on Thursday, Aug. 7. Evers hasn’t spoken publicly about the bill, but opponents contend it deprives drivers of worker protections in return for meager benefits.

“It just seems to be a PR move to entrench drivers’ status as independent contractors,” said state Rep. Ryan Clancy (D-Milwaukee), who drives for Lyft and who voted against the bill in the Assembly. 

A heavy lobbying campaign for which DoorDash has been the most visible sponsor has put all the attention on the benefits provision. On Tuesday, Chamber for Progress, a tech business lobbying group, organized a press conference in the state Capitol to urge Evers to sign the bill.

State Sen. Julian Bradley (R-New Berlin), the bill’s Senate author, said it would allow the driving-app companies “to voluntarily contribute to portable benefit accounts that travel with the worker and allow them to use the funds for health care, sick time or retirement without stripping workers of their independence.”

Gig workers “want to be independent,” said Ruth Whittaker, of Chamber for Progress. “We should protect their independence and the flexibility of gig work, and we should also give them access to benefits.”

Joe DeRose, a retired state employee, said his work driving for DoorDash provided “flexible income to help with rising costs” without tying him to a fixed schedule.

“I strongly support portable benefits,” DeRose said. “These accounts would let app-based workers save for unforeseen events or retirement without giving up the flexibility that makes this work so appealing.”

Rachel Smith of New Berlin said she delivers for DoorDash while building an online wellness business.

“The reality is, like many entrepreneurs and independent workers, I don’t have access to traditional benefits, so this portable benefits legislation would change that,” Smith said. “Portable benefits would let me plan for my future without giving up the freedom that makes this work possible in the first place.”

“Without this offer, there are no portable benefits,” said state Rep. Sylvia Velez-Ortiz (D-Milwaukee), who cast the only Democratic vote for the bill in the Assembly. “This is something that the platforms are wanting to do on their own, and government should not stand in their way of doing what they know is right.”

While Evers hasn’t said whether he’ll sign or veto the bill, its passage with only Republican votes — besides that of Ortiz-Velez — has almost always been a precursor to a veto.

Wisconsin labor laws include a series of tests to determine if a worker is an independent contractor or an employee.

An employee is covered by unemployment insurance, workers compensation insurance and state labor standards that include minimum wage, work hours and overtime regulations. An independent contractor is not.

The worker-business relationship must meet each one of nine qualifications to be exempt from workers comp law. It must meet 6 out of 9 qualifications to be exempt from unemployment insurance. And it must meet all six qualifications to be exempt from the state’s wage and hour laws.

The bill would make the app-based rideshare and delivery companies automatically exempt from all three areas of employment law. 

They could lose the exemption only if they flunked all four parts of a new four-part test — by prescribing when drivers must be logged in; terminating a driver for turning down an assignment; restricting drivers from working for other app-based companies; and restricting drivers from any other lawful job or business.

“This is a dangerous bill for working people,” Stephanie Bloomingdale, president of the Wisconsin AFL-CIO, said Tuesday.

“It is a bill that will carve out our existing tests to determine unemployment, workers’ comp, wage and hour [standards] with a very simplistic four-part test that would forever remove drivers’ ability to access those kind of benefits that we fought for for decades,” Bloomingdale said in an interview.

“They could offer benefits without taking away these tests,” she added. “And what they’re really after is taking away these tests.

Although Bradley described the bill as giving Wisconsin gig drivers “access to benefits like health care, dental and retirement savings,” critics say that those kinds of benefits are unlikely to accrue under the system the law describes. 

In Pennsylvania, DoorDash has established a trial benefits program without a law in place there. A report commissioned for the program found that participants on average were able to save about $400 over the course of a year.

“It’s just a savings account with a very meager contribution from the companies,” said Laura Padin, director of Work Structures at the National Employment Law Project (NELP), who sent a letter to Evers urging him to veto the bill. “Real employment-based benefits are worth so much more than that.”

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Michael M. Bell, shown here in a promotional video for a documentary project about his son's death, is asking the Kenosha County district attorney to take a new look at the police shooting that killed his son. (Screenshot/via Michael Bell Facebook page. Used with permission)

The father of Michael E. Bell is asking the new Kenosha County district attorney to open a new investigation of Bell’s 2004 death at the hands of Kenosha police.

In a letter sent this week that arrived at the prosecutor’s office Thursday, Russell Beckman, a retired Kenosha Police Department detective, has asked the DA, Xavier Solis, to meet with Beckman and Bell’s father, Michael M. Bell.

Beckman has been working with the elder Bell for more than a decade to analyze the events on the night of the fatal shooting and challenge the official police account of the incident.

Their research has turned up “credible and well documented issues with the integrity of the investigation,” Beckman wrote. “There are multiple indications of a cover up of the true circumstances of the death by high level Kenosha police and government officials.”

The letter comes after a change in the administration in the DA’s office, and after years of conflict that Bell and Beckman have had with the previous DA, Michael Graveley.

After Graveley opposed an independent investigation of the case — and made claims about some of the evidence that Bell and Beckman disputed — they unsuccessfully sought legal sanctions against Graveley through the state Office of Lawyer Regulation.

Graveley, who served as DA for two terms, did not run for reelection in November 2024. His successor on the Democratic ticket, Carli McNeill, a veteran prosecutor in the DA’s office, lost to Solis, who ran as a Republican.

Michael E. Bell was fatally shot during a confrontation with police in the driveway of the home where he was living on Nov. 9, 2004. A Kenosha Police Department internal investigation exonerated all the officers involved within two days.

Officer Albert Gonzales shot the younger Bell at point-blank range after another officer at the scene shouted that he believed Bell had grabbed his gun.

The elder Bell sued the city, ultimately winning a settlement of $1.75 million in 2010. He subsequently campaigned for a state law requiring that police hand over investigations of deaths in their custody to another agency. The law was enacted in 2014.

Since the settlement of his lawsuit, Bell, with the assistance of Beckman and various technical consultants, has highlighted eyewitness testimony as well as physical evidence that contradict key details in the police department’s account of the events.

Because of those discrepancies, Bell and Beckman contend that the officer who thought his gun had been grabbed was mistaken, and that Gonzales was in a position to realize as much but fired his gun too hastily.

Gonzales, who ran unsuccessfully for sheriff in 2022 and has self-published his own account of the incident, has stood by the official police account.

In his letter to Solis, Beckman wrote, “I feel compelled to state that it is my belief that the actual shooting death of Mr. Bell’s son was legally justified, despite my concerns that it was not necessary.”

Nevertheless, Beckman charged in the letter, Kenosha police and city officials were responsible for “criminal acts committed to conceal the true circumstances of the death. I submit that this cover up started immediately after the shooting and continues to this day.”

Along with the letter, Beckman submitted a 95-page document outlining discrepancies and details that he and Bell have compiled to support their argument against the Kenosha Police Department description of the shooting and their claims of a willful coverup.

One discrepancy that Bell and Beckman found involves where various officers were standing during the confrontation in which Bell’s son was shot.

While the Kenosha Police account placed Gonzales on Bell’s son’s left side, with his gun pointing away from the house, eyewitness testimony and the medical examiner’s report indicated that Gonzales was on the young man’s right side, and his gun pointed toward the house.

That is a key difference that could demonstrate that the other officer who thought his gun was being taken was mistaken, Bell and Beckman contend.

“My son was being accused of trying to violently disarm an officer, and that he was the cause of his own death, according to the Kenosha PD,” Bell said Thursday.

“And that’s not the case. It was an accident,” he added, referring to the shooting. “But instead of coming back and saying it was an accident, they lied about it, and they discredit my son, and they discredit our family, and they discredited the law enforcement system. And so those things are really important to me.”

After Bell retrieved a sample of siding from the house several years later that included an indentation possibly from a bullet, he repeatedly sought the fatal bullet from the city of Kenosha, hoping to compare it to the indentation and support his and Beckman’s scenario of the incident.

As part of that campaign, Bell offered to donate $200,000 to charity and to indemnify the city in return for the bullet. City officials repeatedly rejected his appeal.

This past November, according to Bell and Beckman, they obtained records showing that an officer had signed out the bullet from the evidence material in 2007.

The officer did not document his reasons for doing so and did not disclose he had done so during a deposition in Bell’s lawsuit against the city that was underway at the time, they state in the appendix to the letter to Solis.  

“That’s really a new finding,” Bell told the Wisconsin Examiner, raising additional questions about the police handling of the incident.

The Wisconsin Examiner contacted Solis by email and left a voicemail message Thursday seeking comment on his initial reaction to the letter. The DA has not yet responded.

Bell has begun working with a documentary filmmaker interested in producing a film about his case. He posted a promotional video for the project on Facebook Thursday and later on YouTube as well. 

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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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