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• Criminal defendants needing a constitutionally guaranteed lawyer are experiencing longer and longer waits for their day in court.

• The median time it takes for felony cases to be adjudicated increased from 126 days in 2015 to 205 days in 2024. The case backlog remains more than 12,000 as of Aug. 1. A 2022 lawsuit against the State Public Defender office continues to move through the courts.

• The state budget added far more funding for prosecutors than support staff for the State Public Defender office. State reimbursement rates for private attorneys continue to lag average lawyer pay.

Tracy Germait has waited more than two years for a public defender in her Brown County felony drug cases.

In the time since her two cases were first opened, Germait has worked on turning her life around: She has led two addiction support groups, became a certified peer support specialist, worked toward her bachelor’s degree in criminal justice online from Colorado Tech University, gained custody of her three children and has stayed clean for 18 months. 

But every day she faces the possibility of being sent to prison once she finally has legal representation and stands trial. 

“My biggest fear is not being there for my kids,” Germait said. “I’m barely getting their trust back, having them on a routine, a schedule, and giving them stability, and that getting ripped all away.”

Germait reports to court every couple of months, only to learn she still lacks an appointed attorney. The last time she appeared, the court told her it attempted to contact an attorney 10,410 times for her 2023 drug possession case and 4,184 times for her 2022 drug possession and delivery case. 

“I’m kind of just stuck here,” Germait said. “I wish I could spend my vacation time with my kids, or doing something outside of work with them, but I can’t because I don’t know how many court dates I’m going to have in between now and the end of the year. So that is taxing.”

Germait isn’t the only defendant facing a long wait. In 2022 several indigent defendants lacking timely appointment of counsel filed a lawsuit against Wisconsin’s State Public Defender (SPD) office, claiming an ongoing pattern of delays in appointing a public defender for open criminal cases around the state. The suit found at least 8,445 defendants experienced a delay of 30 days or more in obtaining counsel for trials since 2019.

In January, the plaintiffs renewed their motion for class certification, meaning the suit would be able to continue. The case is awaiting a court ruling on the motion. If granted, the next step would likely be to begin litigating the case, moving toward a resolution. 

As of Aug. 1, the Wisconsin Court System reported a backlog of around 12,586 felony cases.

Court data show the median age of pending felony cases has risen since before the pandemic. In 2015, the median time cases were pending was 126 days. In 2020, during the pandemic, it was 192 days, compared to 205 days in 2024.

And yet in the latest state budget, Republican lawmakers only granted 12.5 of the 52.5 requested SPD support staff positions, while increasing the number of prosecutors statewide by 42 and providing state funding for 12 expiring federally funded prosecutors in Milwaukee. As Wisconsin Watch reported in August, those 12 Milwaukee positions may have been funded in a way that violates the state constitution.

A right guaranteed by the Constitution and courts

The Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and Article 1, Section 7, of the Wisconsin Constitution guarantee a defendant the right to a fair, speedy trial, including a lawyer. The landmark 1963 Supreme Court decision Gideon v. Wainwright required states to protect those rights. But how to do so was largely left up to the states. 

For the first few years, Wisconsin took a county-by-county approach to assign counsel, rather than relying on a state standard. But in 1977, Wisconsin established the independent Office of the State Public Defender to enforce the Gideon decision statewide. 

“That office was never expected to handle all of the cases,” said John Gross, director of the Public Defender Project at the University of Wisconsin Law School and a former New York state public defender. “It was never funded to that degree.” 

The backlog of open criminal cases stems from problems dating back decades that have yet to be solved.

When SPD first started, the agency was only expected to handle about half of the cases, and members of the private bar would enter into agreements to take on remaining public defender appointments, according to Gross. 

“It’s necessary in any system for the simple reason that you have conflicts of interest, so if three guys get arrested for a robbery, the public defender’s office can only represent one of them,” Gross said.

In Germait’s 2023 case, she was told there was an unspecified “conflict,” which means she’s waiting for SPD to appoint a private attorney.

The Legislature didn’t raise the $40 hourly rate — the lowest nationwide — for private attorneys handling public defender appointments for nearly 20 years. In 2020, it was raised to $70, then in the 2023-25 state budget the rate increased to $100 an hour.

But that rate remains well below the average hourly private attorney rate in Wisconsin, which averaged around $248 in 2023, according to SPD’s 2023-25 biennial budget request. 

Over the past decade private attorneys have handled anywhere from 37% to 40% of public defender cases. 

But private attorneys are often not interested in taking up public defender appointments due to low pay or just the stressful nature of working in a trial setting. 

Christian Thomas, a Milwaukee County-based criminal defense attorney, said one of the first things he looks for in a public defender appointment is whether the defendant has previously had an attorney. 

If an attorney previously dropped the case, that could make it more difficult to obtain evidence because a new attorney would rely on the previous lawyer rather than getting it directly from the prosecutor.

“After having spent much of my career doing sexual assault and homicide cases, I don’t take those anymore, unless they are my full pay clients,” Thomas said. “The public defender’s office is left holding on to a number of very serious cases that need very serious defense for whom there are very few of us (private attorneys) around, and most of us that have been around just don’t want to touch those cases anymore.” 

For the 2025-27 budget cycle, SPD requested and Gov. Tony Evers proposed a $25 hourly increase for the most severe criminal cases, which the Legislature rejected. 

Even when a private attorney takes on a public defender case, the lower reimbursement rate compared to full-paying clients incentivizes attorneys to cut a quick deal, risking the defendant’s legal outcome, according to a report from the Sixth Amendment Center.

To make the problem worse, during the COVID-19 pandemic, more public defenders aged out of the system to turn to the private sector, which increased wages more quickly than government employers to respond to pandemic-era inflation, the Wisconsin Policy Forum reported. 

Meanwhile, the State Public Defender office is struggling to attract law school graduates who are discouraged by low pay and the demanding nature of public defender appointments while still paying off student loans. The office has 37 unfilled positions, amounting to a 10% vacancy rate. The vacancy rate has decreased since the pandemic, when it rose to about 25%. 

Private law school tuition today is 2.54 times more expensive than it would have been if it had increased by inflation since 1985, while public law school tuition is over five times more expensive. 

The annual starting salary for a public defender in 2023 was $56,659, a Wisconsin Policy Forum analysis found, less than half of averages for all lawyers statewide.

Lawmakers this budget cycle approved two wage increases: a merit-based 3% general wage adjustment for all civil servants in the state for 2025 and 2% for 2026. 

But higher pay alone won’t likely solve the backlog issue that has plagued Wisconsin and other states. The Oregon Legislature, for example, approved hourly wage raises for public defender appointments, but the state still has a massive backlog. 

Public defenders require extensive training and education, so it may take years to see a noticeable increase in law school graduates willing to pursue a career as a public defender.

Recently, the UW Law School laid off Gross among other employees due to budget cuts. The future of the Public Defender Project, a clinic designed to prepare law students for a career in public defense, remains uncertain.

Cases in limbo destabilizing families

Defendants are facing consequences as cases pile up without attorneys to defend them. Even though those charged with a crime are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court, an open felony case can hurt a defendant’s chance of finding employment and housing, creating financial instability for them and their families.

Housing and job insecurity put someone at risk of homelessness, increasing their chances of ending up back in jail or stacking up additional charges. 

Delaying a hearing by years or even months also jeopardizes the credibility of the evidence and witness testimony, said Amanda Merkwae, advocacy director at ACLU Wisconsin. In 2024, only 28% of cases were active for fewer than 90 days in Wisconsin. Over 5,000 cases were open for nearly two years.

“When people are detained pre-trial, it makes the problem even worse from a civil rights and liberties perspective because even spending a few days in jail can have devastating, long-lasting consequences for people who are presumptively innocent under the law,” Merkwae said. “It impacts them, it impacts their families, you think of the risk of job loss, losing housing, potential impact on child custody and parental rights.”

Many defendants awaiting counsel are sitting in jail because they can’t afford bail. 

In Brown County, only one in five county jail inmates is serving a sentence. The rest are awaiting a sentence. On July 30, the jail, which has a capacity of 750 inmates, was over capacity by 107 people with an average stay of 256 days.

So what can be done?

A problem that has worsened in recent decades has no quick fix. 

This past budget cycle, the State Public Defender office proposed two budget items aiming to  decrease the backlog and increase staffing. Neither passed as proposed. 

The first was to increase SPD administrative and support staff by about 52.5 positions; the agency was ultimately only granted 12.5. 

Support staff include investigators, who help collect evidence and identify witnesses for a case, and personnel to help clients understand the legal system, ensuring they are well-equipped for court.

Merkwae said another way to reduce the backlogs is reexamining and changing charging practices. 

The state’s three most charged crimes are disorderly conduct, felony bail jumping and misdemeanor bail jumping. 

This past budget cycle, the public defender office recommended changing the sentencing and charging for a first-time disorderly conduct violation, which was projected to yield $1.9 million in savings for SPD by affecting 2,448 cases.

Felony and misdemeanor bail jumping are bail rule violations that get tacked onto other felony cases. They range from missing a curfew or appointment to not updating an address or having beer, and they can dramatically affect case outcomes, Merkwae said, adding that they can make defendants feel “coerced into entering a plea to their original charge because of the leverage that’s created by the bail jumping charges.”

Wisconsin is one of only seven states that allow prosecutors to file additional felony charges if someone violates pretrial release conditions.

During this budget session, the Legislature also added 42 new prosecutors around the state, with the highest number in Brown and Waukesha counties, where felony bail jumping is the most commonly charged felony.

Adding prosecutors without boosting resources for public defenders and private attorneys could exacerbate backlog issues, according to Thomas.

“This is simple economics,” Thomas said. “If you’re paying 12 extra people to do that job, you’re going to end up with 12 extra people’s worth of charges.”

In Wisconsin, the median case age at disposition for nontraffic felony cases is 247 days. In Brown County, it’s 373 days, with over 2,000 open felony cases filed in 2024. 

For Germait, the limbo is constantly on her mind — and it’s shaping her life. 

After living in Amanda’s House, a sober-living home for women and children, Germait applied to several housing programs and apartments but was denied from most due to the active felony case.

Germait now lives in a transitional housing unit set to expire in April 2026. But with no updates or progress on her open cases, Germait faces the added stress of finding stable housing for herself and her children. 

“I had to do an appeal and go through all that, and eventually they said yes because I had letters of support,” Germait said. “We have to move out in April, and it’s like, ‘What am I going to do then?’”

Three years and more than 10,000 lawyer calls after being charged, this Wisconsin mother still doesn’t have a defense attorney is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Children in an elementary school classroom. (Getty Images photo)

Gov. Tony Evers is on a back-to-school tour, visiting classrooms around the state and touting the budget deal he recently struck with Republicans after declaring 2025 the “Year of the Kid.” Evers “proudly signed a pro-kid, bipartisan state budget into law earlier this summer that invests nearly $1.4 billion in spendable revenue for K-12 schools,” according to a press release from his office celebrating Back to School Week.

You would never know from that announcement that the amount of new general aid schools receive from the state in the current, two-year budget cycle is exactly zero. Or that, as a result, about 70% of school districts across the state are starting the year with less money in the budget than they got in the last, austerity-level biennial budget deal. 

True, the budget includes a total of about $500 million in special education funding, with the state increasing the share of special ed costs it covers from less than 30% to 42% in the first year and 45% of costs in the second year. As Evers’ office puts it, that’s “the largest increase to the special education reimbursement rate in state history.” But it follows decades of decline and amounts to significantly less than the 60% rate reached under former Gov. Tommy Thompson, and which Evers originally proposed. And the zeroed-out general aid from the state seriously undermines the impact of those long-awaited special education funds. 

The lion’s share of the $1.4 billion in “spendable revenue” Evers is celebrating comes in the form of increased taxing authority the state gave to local school districts — meaning the amount by which they are allowed to raise local property taxes to cover their costs. But local property taxpayers are getting weary of the constantly increasing demand on them to pay more for schools, and local school officials are dismayed that the state did so little to take on some of that cost.

Since special education is a federally mandated expense, the state’s shrinking reimbursement rate has taken a heavy toll on all school programs. For years, schools across Wisconsin have had to cut art, music, sports and other programs to pay a larger and larger share of special ed expenses. That’s why, at budget hearings throughout the state, so many people showed up to say a top priority for the new budget was an increase in the state’s share of special ed. 

“But never did anyone in those budget hearings come to the mic and say, ‘you should either give us general aid or special ed funding,” says Heather DuBois Bourenane, director of the Wisconsin Public Education Network, a statewide group that lobbies for public schools.

DuBois Bourenane says she’s already been getting calls asking her to help local communities put together springtime referendum campaigns asking local property taxpayers for more money on top of what the budget allows them to raise — something that’s never before happened this early in the year. She predicts another record-breaking year of school referendum efforts. Meanwhile, “we’re hearing in some districts they’re afraid to use the authority because local taxes are so high,” she says. “They’re talking about cuts.”

“It’s scary,” she adds. “The belt-tightening is going to be really bad.”

Advocates and school leaders had high hopes that Evers, a former science teacher and state superintendent, would fight to adequately fund public schools. Determined to get a deal, and negotiating with Republicans who seemed all too willing to let schools starve, Evers got what he felt was the best deal he could. And now he’s selling that deal as a good one. But the victory lap is misleading. Public school leaders across the state say the budget leaves teachers, students and local taxpayers in a bad situation. 

“Allowing an increase is one thing — paying for it is another,” LaCrosse News8000.com TV reporter Allyson Fergot explained in a story on how the state budget leaves schools strapped. “This summer lawmakers opted not to fund [a per pupil school funding] increase with state money, so if districts want it, they’ll have to raise district property taxes.”

“The state of Wisconsin currently has a $4.2 billion surplus, but no new general state aid has been provided to help schools meet rising costs,” Madison Metropolitan School District Superintendent Joe Gothard told Wisconsin Public Radio.

How did this happen?

During the budget debate, it was clear that Republicans were outraged by Evers’ line-item veto of the 2023-25 state budget, which extended a provision that increased the amount by which school districts could raise property taxes for the next 400 years.

In retaliation, Republicans promised that there would be no new state aid for schools in the current budget. And they stuck to their word. Wisconsin kids, not Evers, will pay the price of that maneuver. Clearly, it didn’t pay off. 

“It did real harm,” DuBois Bourenane says of Evers’ 400-year-veto. “This was a spite budget. It was petty.” And it wasn’t worth it: The amount of the increase Evers locked in for the next four centuries, at $325 per kid, didn’t even cover inflation. Overall, spending on schools in Wisconsin hasn’t kept pace with inflation for nearly two decades.

“We’re about a little over $3,000 short per kid just because of inflation over the past years,” Cochrane-Fountain City Superintendent Troy White told News8000.com

Could Evers have held out for a better deal? DuBois Bourenane thinks so. She was impressed by the massive public outpouring of support for schools at budget hearings, and the way public pressure helped shape bipartisan consensus on the need to support schools, take the burden off property taxpayers and increase state funding for special ed.

“And schools still came out with nothing,” she says.

When you add in the massive increases in funding for private schools through the state’s voucher programs, the outlook at the start of this school year is grim.

As the state mulls whether to accept a federal voucher program that has the potential to turbocharge the already rapidly expanding system of taxpayer-supported private schools, the Wisconsin Public Education Network is launching a voucher transparency project this month, to help taxpayers get a clear picture of how much they are spending on school vouchers on their property tax bills.

Meanwhile, “everyone should call their legislators and give them the numbers on how much less their districts are coming back to school with,” says DuBois Bourenane. “We need more leaders to do what they can with the leverage they can to fix this.”

Correction: An earlier version of this column misstated the special education reimbursement rate under former Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson.

At a press conference outside the state Capitol Wednesday, Sens. Jamie Wall, Jeff Smith and Senate Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein urged Republicans to schedule a hearing for their bill expeditiously. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)

Less than a month before the planned closure of two Wisconsin veterans’ housing sites, a handful of Democratic and Republican lawmakers are seeking a way to save the sites. But bipartisan work on a solution appears out of reach as lawmakers bicker over who is to blame for the lack of funding and over whether to take up Democratic- or Republican-authored bills.

Gov. Tony Evers’ administration announced, shortly after the state budget was completed in July, that two Veterans Housing and Recovery Program (VHRP) sites, one in Chippewa Falls and one in Green Bay, would be closing on Sept. 30 due to a lack of funding in the state budget. One facility in Union Grove will remain open. 

The program, which is run under the Wisconsin Department of Veterans Affairs, serves veterans who are on the verge of or are already experiencing homelessness, including those who have been incarcerated, unemployed or have physical and mental health problems. Participants get access to transitional housing, referrals to service providers, financial assistance, assistance with seeking vocational opportunities and access to a room at a reduced rent for working veterans.

Participants can stay for a maximum of 24 months, but the average length is six to 10 months.

The program has been funded with a combination of an appropriation from the Veterans Trust Fund, payments made by program participants and per diem payments, which are made to the agency by the federal government at a current rate of about $71 per resident per day. However, growing staffing and maintenance costs at the facilities led to the need for additional state support. Evers had included a funding proposal in his budget but that was removed by Republican lawmakers.

Following the news of the closures, Sens. Jeff Smith (D-Brunswick) and Jaime Wall (D-Green Bay) introduced a bill that would dedicate $1.9 million to the sites.

At a press conference outside the state Capitol Wednesday, the bill authors and Senate Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein (D-Middleton) urged Republicans to schedule a hearing for their bill expeditiously.

Citing the upcoming closure date, Hesselbein said the Senate and Assembly must meet. She said committees could meet this week or next to hear the legislation and pass it out of committee this month and have the bill on the floor in October.

“It’s a cool day out here today. The weather is going to get worse. We need to take care of our veterans,” Hesselbein said.

According to the Associated Press, the state Senate is not planning to meet for a floor session this month. 

“It’s way past time to take action to keep these facilities open so they can continue to provide vital services to our veterans,” Hesselbein said, adding that “when Democrats have the power of majority which we believe is coming in just a few years, we will always have your backs.” Democrats are seeking to flip control of the state Senate in the 2026 election cycle. 

Smith called Republicans’ lack of action on the issue “callous,” noting that Democrats tried months ago to include the funding in the budget. When Democrats proposed an amendment to  fund the veterans’ housing sites in the state budget, every Republican voted against it except for Sen. André Jacque (R-New Franken). 

It is unlikely that the Republican-led Legislature will allow Democrats’ bill to advance. 

“[Republicans] have ignored our pleas. As far as we know, we’re not going to see these bills on the floor this month, and this is the final chapter. This is when it ends. No hope for the veterans that they like to pretend that they care about,” Smith said. 

Jacque, meanwhile, began circulating his own bill last month to provide the needed funding for the facilities. 

The Republican bill, coauthored by Jacque and Rep. Benjamin Franklin (R-De Pere), includes $1.9 million for the VHRP program as well as two other policy changes related to veterans. 

One would require the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin system to provide funding to the UW Missing-in-Action Recovery and Identification Project to support missions to recover and identify Wisconsin veterans who are missing. The other would lower the eligibility threshold for veterans and surviving spouses to claim the veterans and surviving spouses property tax credit.

Jacque said the two policies were also left out of the budget and are critical to helping veterans.

“Every budget has missed opportunities, and I am hopeful that the rest of the session will provide openings to address those challenges in a number of areas, particularly providing for our veterans who have done so much in service to our country and communities,” Jacque told the Wisconsin Examiner in an email.

Jacque said he has “found a lot of support” from his Republican colleagues and is “hopeful that the bill will be referred to the Senate Committee on Natural Resources, Veterans and Military Affairs,” which he chairs.

In response to a question about Jacque’s bill and whether Democrats are working with any Republicans to advance funding for the facilities, Hesselbein brushed off the GOP bill saying it simply pulled from Democrats’ ideas. 

“What Sen. Jacque did is he took three Democratic bills and pushed them all into one omnibus. We’ll be interested if he gets a hearing. I’m not sure…,” Hesselbein said. “I like to have clean legislation when we try to have committee hearings so you can hear exactly what’s going on with those bills, so we are supporting the bill that Sen. Wall and Sen. Smith put forth.”

Smith said Democrats separated the VHRP funding from other policies purposefully. Wall added that their bill is a “smaller, cleaner ask” than a bill with multiple items. 

Jacque told the Wisconsin Examiner in an email that he is “extremely disappointed by Sen. Hesselbein’s comments and her unwillingness to put partisanship aside for the sake of working to support veterans — as I did when I voted for the omnibus veterans motion her caucus introduced during the budget. I am rather surprised at her comments due to her longstanding penchant for putting forward omnibus bills and amendments.” 

Jacque noted that he has supported and authored legislation to expand the property tax credit for veterans and surviving spouses in previous years “going all the way back to my service in the State Assembly,” and has also supported previous UW MIA legislation. 

“I supported VHRP within the budget and it was not introduced as standalone legislation by any legislator previously to that, at least to my knowledge,” Jacque added. “I didn’t think Sen. Hesselbein was that unaware of the history of these initiatives.”

Not every Republican lawmaker has appeared open to providing additional funding that would be used to keep the two VHRP programs open. Following the initial news of the planned closures, Sen. Howard Marklein (R-Spring Green) and Rep. Mark Born (R-Beaver Dam) co-chairs of the Joint Finance Committee, blamed Evers for not negotiating for the money in the budget.

According to the Green Bay Press Gazette, Sen. Eric Wimberger (R-Oconto) claimed last week that Evers had a “slush fund” — referring to federal pandemic aid — and should be able to find the money to keep the facilities afloat. He pointed to the Wisconsin DVA’s Veterans Trust Fund, a state fund that supports most grant and benefit programs for Wisconsin veterans, and said the agency has regularly returned around $1 million in unspent funds each year and in 2025, the agency sent back about $600,000.

WDVA Assistant Deputy Secretary Joey Hoey has disputed the comments, saying that the agency is “only allowed to spend the money they tell us to spend.” He has also said the trust fund cannot be used for the staffing costs and that there isn’t enough in it.

Wall objected to Wimberger’s “slush fund” comments as well on Wednesday, saying that federal American Rescue Plan Act money has been spent. ARPA funds were used to help support costs for the program in 2023-24. States had to expend the one-time ARPA funds by the end of 2024.

“[Evers] took some ARPA interest funds and used it to help prop up the program. Those funds don’t exist anymore. The ARPA funds all had to be allocated by the end of last year,” Wall said. “The ARPA interest money was all spent in the last budget, so that get out of jail free card doesn’t exist.”

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Click here to read highlights from the story

• Wisconsin’s latest budget diverts 100% of funds from the Common School Fund to pay for 12 assistant district attorneys in Milwaukee.

• The constitution requires net proceeds from a county’s traffic fines and forfeitures to go to the Common School Fund. A 1973 Supreme Court ruling found the Legislature can’t have a nominal amount of that money go toward the school fund, which pays for school library books in many counties.

• The Board of Commissioners of Public Lands, which oversees the fund, has asked the Legislature’s attorney for an opinion.

Editor’s note: This story was corrected to reflect that the 12 assistant district attorney positions are existing positions funded by expiring federal funding, not new positions.

A provision in the recently passed state budget that diverts $2.2 million annually from schools to fund 12 Milwaukee County prosecutors may violate the Wisconsin Constitution.

The budget act redirects all traffic fines and forfeiture revenues in Milwaukee County to the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office to fund 12 assistant district attorney positions that had been paid for with federal funding set to expire.

But under Article 10, Section 2, of Wisconsin’s constitution, all “clear proceeds” from traffic fines are required to go to the Common School Fund. 

A statute later established the “clear proceeds” at 50% of total revenue, while counties could retain the other 50% to reimburse the cost of prosecuting traffic violations or seizing and managing forfeitures. 

In a 1973 Wisconsin Supreme Court case, the court granted limited power to the Legislature to define “clear proceeds.” In doing so, the decision said counties couldn’t keep so large a percentage of fine and forfeiture revenue that “the sum left for the school fund is merely nominal.” It also ruled that a county can only use these funds to reimburse for the prosecution of the fines and forfeitures.

By giving all revenue to the Milwaukee County DA, the new law, part of the biennial budget, contradicts the Supreme Court’s decision that all “clear proceeds” — or net profits — from forfeitures and fines be directed to the Common School Fund. 

Established in 1848 under the state constitution, the Common School Fund is used by public schools to purchase school library books and instructional materials and may be the only source of library funding for some counties. The Office of the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands (BCPL) manages the fund. 

In two recent BCPL meetings, board members discussed how the amendment appears to contradict the Supreme Court decision — raising the prospect of litigation, according to meeting minutes. 

“This provision appears to directly violate the 1973 Wisconsin Supreme Court opinion regarding Article 10 of the Constitution,” Tom German, board executive secretary of BCPL, said during an Aug. 19 meeting. “That opinion expressly limited the Legislature’s authority to define clear proceeds in order to prevent only a nominal amount of fines and forfeitures going to the school fund. Zero is less than nominal.”

The provision is projected to reduce revenue directed to the fund by $2.2 million annually. Wisconsin’s remaining 71 counties are still required to direct 50% of revenue from fines and forfeitures to the Common School Fund. A report from April 2025 estimated the 2024-25 library aid to be $8.3 million for more than 130,000 pupils in Milwaukee County.

The Milwaukee County DA’s office has about 120 ADAs and 160 support staff. The provision allows the county to maintain 12 ADA positions, which German says also violates the Supreme Court opinion. 

The Legislature’s budget committee added the provision during the last executive session of this budget cycle under a “miscellaneous items” section of the motion as part of a budget deal with Gov. Tony Evers.

Before the provision was proposed and passed by the committee late in the budget process, the Legislative Fiscal Bureau did not publish budget papers to explain the redirection of revenue from fines and forfeitures, as it often would for other budget proposals that come before the Joint Finance Committee during normal budget deliberations. 

“The DPI will work with our partners in state government and professional organizations to ensure the Common School Funds — which are critical to student learning — continue,” a DPI spokesperson told Wisconsin Watch in response to the funding change. 

In the last BCPL meeting, German said he informed the Wisconsin Legislative Council — the nonpartisan state agency in charge of providing legal and policy analysis — of this violation, and the council is currently investigating the provision. 

The Legislative Council declined to comment. Evers’ office did not respond to a request for comment.

A Milwaukee County spokesperson said the funding for the 12 assistant district attorneys was a “bipartisan solution” to an “urgent need” to address court backlogs in the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office.

“Without this funding, Milwaukee County will lose a dozen assistant district attorney positions, which will significantly increase court backlogs that will impact public safety efforts now and in the future,” the county spokesperson said in an unsigned email.

Wisconsin’s budget shifts money from schools to Milwaukee prosecutors. That may violate the state constitution. is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

From left, Republican state Reps. David Steffen and Ben Franklin and Democratic state Sen. Jamie Wall plans for closing Green Bay Correctional Institution at an Allouez Village Board meeting Tuesday, Aug. 19. (Photo by Andrew Kennard/Wisconsin Examiner)

Now that the Wisconsin budget has called for closing the aging Green Bay Correctional Institution, lawmakers, the governor’s office and the Department of Corrections are having to grapple with how to carry it out. 

“For the first time in ever, we finally have agreements in the Legislature and with the executive branch on how to move forward,” said state Rep. David Steffen (R-Howard) after an Allouez village board meeting last week.

There are unresolved details that will need time to work out, Steffen said, but “we’re moving in the right direction.”

Steffen, state Rep. Ben Franklin (R-De Pere) and state Sen. Jamie Wall (D-Green Bay) spoke to the village board Aug. 19 about plans to close the prison, located in the village adjacent to the city of Green Bay. Gov Tony Evers and DOC Secretary Jared Hoy were invited to the meeting but were unable to come, Allouez Village Board President Jim Rafter said. 

The 2025-27 Wisconsin budget includes money for preliminary plans to  revamp Wisconsin’s prison system and close the Green Bay prison. But what Evers originally proposed and what the document looked like when it reached his desk were far apart.

Pushing for a deadline

Evers originally called for $325 million for a series of projects that would enable the state to close the Green Bay prison in 2029 and transform Waupun Correctional Institution. 

What the Legislature passed — largely written by the GOP majority on the powerful Joint Finance Committee — includes $15 million for prison system construction planning related to the corrections department’s realignment, including closing the Green Bay prison.

When he signed the budget July 3, Evers vetoed the 2029 closing  deadline, arguing in his veto message that the Legislature had rejected his own plan for closing the prison, which also aimed for closure in 2029. The Legislature, he wrote, provided “virtually no real, meaningful or concrete plan” in place of his.

Republican lawmakers criticized Evers’ veto.  In a statement the day that the budget was signed, Steffen said that “only in government would four and a half years be too short of a deadline to finalize the closure of a crumbling building.” 

Republican lawmakers want to restore the deadline. Franklin said at last week’s meeting that he will introduce a bill in the fall to set a closing deadline and wants it to be Dec. 31, 2029. The bill should specify that the deadline could only be extended with approval from the Legislature, he said. 

Wall gave less weight to the impact of setting a deadline. He pointed to Lincoln Hills, which houses male juvenile offenders. The facility has remained open for years after the original deadline to close it, Wall said, because the Legislature did not take the steps needed to meet that target date.

He also expressed concern that people might leave because of a deadline “that may or may not become real,” exacerbating ongoing staffing problems in the system. 

While the shortage of correctional officers improved after pay increased, vacancies have started rising again. The DOC and prisons across the country have experienced staffing troubles, which can lead to more restrictive conditions for incarcerated people. 

Vacancy rates published by the DOC for correctional officers and sergeant positions in adult prisons climbed to 35% in August 2023. The vacancy rate declined to about 11% in fall 2024, but it has since increased to 17%. At Green Bay and Waupun, it’s over 25%.  

“Historically speaking, from the time that I started there to the time that I left… if 10 new people would start at one point, usually half would quit,” former Green Bay corrections officer Jeff Hoffman told the Examiner last year. “Because they didn’t want to work in that environment.” 

Differences over prison system planning

Franklin said his proposed deadline bill will more specifically state how the $15 million will be spent.

Wall said the DOC is already developing a plan for spending the money, which will go through the state building commission. The plan is to direct the money to planning for the kind of facility changes that Evers proposed originally, he said.  

Franklin said Republicans will have to be flexible in adopting some of Evers’ proposals to restructure juvenile centers and medium and maximum security adult prisons. He said he doesn’t think everything will be adopted as Evers originally proposed, however. 

Franklin said he also wants to set milestone dates, for actions such as transfers of incarcerated people, which would provide “a barometer of where we’re at” ahead of the closing deadline. 

He said he also wants quarterly progress reports to the Joint Finance Committee.

Steffen said the committee and the Legislature should have the opportunity to see and understand plans and ask questions more than once and have time to deal thoughtfully with the situation instead of “in a pressure cooker budget environment.” 

Wall cautioned against moving too slowly, however. DOC has some projects that could go up for approval early in 2026, he said.

“And time is not necessarily on our side here when it comes to the state budget,” Wall said, noting that if the economy softens, that could affect the state budget. 

According to the Wisconsin Policy Forum, the state could be facing a more difficult budget in 2027 than it has seen in recent years, with recently approved spending and tax cuts using up most of the surplus.

Speaking to reporters after the Allouez meeting, Steffen said that “we are generally in agreement on what to do with the buildings, the expansions at the other facilities and the closure” at Green Bay. 

But he said there will be incarcerated people who need somewhere to go. Republicans and Democrats differ on whether to expand the earned release program — releasing some people before their sentence is completed — or “find the space within the system” to move them, Steffen said. He raised the possibility of having local jails take in prisoners, a tactic the Department of Corrections has used to reduce overcrowding. 

Funding remains uncertain, Steffen added. 

Aging prison system

A 2020 draft report on the Department of Corrections’ website includes information about problems created by the infrastructure inside the aging prisons in Green Bay and Waupun. 

“There are a lot of issues with running facilities that are that old,” Hoy said in April about the Green Bay facility. “We shouldn’t be running prisons in that manner in 2025… We want to do more with our population than what those facilities can afford us to do.”

Prison reform advocates hold vigils outside the prison. Wisconsin Department of Corrections data shows that on average, prisoners at GBCI spend an average of 48.5 days in disciplinary separation, where an incarcerated person may be sent for committing a violation — the most of any prison listed.

While lawmakers push to close the Green Bay prison, it’s unclear what will become of Waupun, the state’s oldest prison, which has attracted scrutiny for a string of prisoner deaths, a lockdown and living conditions. 

The governor’s proposal in February aimed to close the prison temporarily and convert it to a medium-security institution and “vocational village” emphasizing job training and readiness at an  estimated cost of $245.3 million. The provision did not pass the Legislature. 

While Allouez’s Rafter wants to close the Green Bay prison, Waupun mayor Rohn Bishop has called for keeping Waupun Correctional Institution open. 

Bishop has pointed to the economic impact on Waupun and to the city’s history and heritage. In a column in December, he said the city donated the land to bring the prison there, generations of people in Waupun have worked at the prison and local churches have had outreach to incarcerated people.

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• The $111 billion state budget adopted last month doesn’t extend the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Fund, but it does include two conservation earmarks totaling $15 million in Assembly Speaker Robin Vos’ district.

• The projects include repairs to Echo Lake Dam, which Vos said will save Burlington taxpayers $3,000.

• Environmental advocates are hopeful the Legislature will still extend the Knowles-Nelson fund before the end of the current session. A Republican bill would reauthorize it for four years at $28.25 million per year with additional legislative controls.

Wisconsin’s recently passed budget doesn’t include the extension of a popular land conservation program, but it does include two earmarks for environmental projects in the home district of the state’s most powerful Assembly Republican.

After Republican legislators declined to reauthorize the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Fund in the state budget, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers vetoed five natural resources projects, criticizing the Legislature for choosing “to benefit the politically connected few” instead of supporting stewardship through the statewide fund. 

“I am vetoing this section because I object to providing an earmark for a natural resources project when the Legislature has abandoned its responsibility to reauthorize and ensure the continuation of the immensely popular Warren Knowles-Gaylord Nelson Stewardship program,” Evers wrote in his veto message.

However, Evers didn’t veto other natural resources projects, including two totaling $15 million in Assembly Speaker Robin Vos’ district in southeastern Wisconsin west of Racine. Asked why Evers spared those projects, his spokesperson Britt Cudaback referred Wisconsin Watch, without specifics, to the agreement between Evers and legislative leadership that cemented the $111 billion two-year budget. 

Local environmental earmarks in the state budget are nothing new, but the latest examples highlight how such projects can take on greater political dimension when not overseen by civil servants at the DNR and the Legislature’s budget committee, as has been the process for more than 30 years since the creation of the Knowles-Nelson fund. Legislators have allowed the program to inch closer to expiration while attempting to secure stewardship programs in their own districts.

The Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Fund supports land conservation and outdoor recreation through grants to local governments and nonprofits and also allows the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources to purchase and maintain state land. The program is currently funded at $33 million a year until the end of June 2026.

Local governments and nonprofit organizations can apply for Knowles-Nelson grants during three deadlines every year, and DNR staff evaluate and rank projects based on objective criteria including local public support, potential conservation benefits and proximity to population centers. 

Despite not authorizing the fund through the state budget, Rep. Tony Kurtz, R-Wonewoc, and Sen. Patrick Testin, R-Stevens Point, committed to reauthorizing the fund and introduced stand-alone legislation in June to reauthorize the stewardship fund at $28.25 million per year for the next four years.

Burlington receives $15 million for two natural resources projects

The two projects in Vos’ district received a total of $15 million in state taxpayer dollars from the general fund and were the only natural resources earmarks mentioned in the state budget agreement between Republicans and Evers.

The only larger natural resources earmark — a $42 million grant for a dam in Rothschild — was added by the Joint Finance Committee and included in the final state budget, though it wasn’t mentioned in the agreement. That grant isn’t funded with general fund revenue, but rather a separate forestry account, which includes revenues from the sale of timber on public lands.

In a statement on the inclusion of funding for the projects, Vos, R-Rochester, touted how $10 million for the Echo Lake Dam will save Burlington residents an average of $3,000 in taxes that would otherwise fund the project. Upgrades to Echo Lake will cost as much as $12 million including $3.5 million for dam modifications and up to $5 million for lake dredging. 

For years, city officials in Burlington have grappled with how to address the Echo Lake Dam. In 2022, the Burlington City Council considered removing the 200-year-old dam but ultimately voted to keep it after residents expressed support though an advisory referendum. The dam needs upgrades because it doesn’t meet DNR requirements to contain a 500-year flood.

The Browns Lake Sanitary District also received $5 million for the removal of sediment in Browns Lake. Local residents have raised concerns over sedimentation in the lake, affecting the lake’s usability for recreation and ecological balance. 

In a website devoted to the Browns Lake dredging, Claude Lois, president of the Browns Lake Sanitary District, thanked Vos for including $5 million for the project and advised residents: “If you see Robin Vos, please thank him.”

DNR spokesperson Andrea Sedlacek directed Wisconsin Watch to Evers’ spokesperson, declining to answer questions on whether the two projects in Vos’ district could have been covered by Knowles-Nelson funds. The Echo Lake Dam project tentatively received a grant for over $700,000 from the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Fund last fall for development of gathering spaces adjacent to the lake. 

Vos did not respond to a request for comment. 

Other conservation projects were vetoed by Evers, including a $70,000 dredging project on a section of the Manitowoc River in the town of Brillion. Ultimately, the DNR and the Evers administration provided funding for the project after Sen. Andre Jacque, R-New Franken, and local farmers criticized the veto, claiming that they were at risk of flooding without funds for the dredging project. 

Rep. Rob Swearingen, R-Rhinelander, said he was surprised and disappointed with Evers’ veto of the Deerskin River dredging project in his district. He called Evers’ reasoning a “lame excuse, using the Knowles-Nelson program as political cover” in an email statement to Wisconsin Watch. Swearingen said he and Senate President Mary Felzkowski, R-Tomahawk, were considering alternative funding sources, including introducing stand-alone legislation to finance the dredging project.

Swearingen declined to say what he thought about the projects in Vos’ district getting funded. Other Republican lawmakers with vetoed projects in their districts didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Rep. Deb Andraca, D-Whitefish Bay, a member of the budget-writing Joint Finance Committee, told Wisconsin Watch she supports Evers’ vetoes because the earmarked projects did not go through the process the DNR uses to evaluate the benefits of particular projects.

Andraca said while several earmarked projects were likely strong contenders for Knowles-Nelson, without the DNR’s process of evaluating project merit, the most beneficial projects may not receive funding.

“We need to make sure that we’re taking into account that the best, most important projects are being funded, not just the projects that are in someone’s (district) who might have a little bit more sway in the Legislature,” Andraca said.

Paul Heinen, policy director for environmental advocacy organization Green Fire, lobbied for the first stewardship fund in 1989. Heinen said legislators have pushed for stewardship projects in their districts through the state budget process for as long as the stewardship fund has existed.

“The DNR has a process by which they go through to analyze projects, and that’s all set up in the code and everything,” Heinen said. “But of course, just like Robin Vos and any other legislator, if they can get something in the budget, it’s faster and you don’t have to go through the steps in order to get something done.”

In the 2023-25 budget cycle, the largest natural resources earmark was $2 million for dredging Lake Mallalieu near River Falls. 

Heinen said legislators are faced with a conundrum — they claim to oppose statewide government spending on stewardship, but want projects in their own districts. 

“Publicly, they say they’re opposed to government spending in this boondoggle stewardship fund,” Heinen said. “But then when it gets down to something in their district, they are at the ribbon cutting.” 

State Supreme Court decision complicates reauthorization

For years the JFC halted Knowles-Nelson conservation projects by not taking a vote on them, something critics referred to as a “pocket veto.” The Evers administration sued over the practice, and in July 2024 the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled 6-1 the Legislature’s pocket veto was unconstitutional.

“What the court said was that the finance committee by going back after the fact and blocking an appropriation that had already been approved by the entire Legislature, and that was an unconstitutional infringement on executive authority,” said Charles Carlin, director of strategic initiatives for Gathering Waters, an alliance of land trusts in the state.

Republicans have said trust issues with both the DNR and the Evers administration prevented them from releasing Knowles-Nelson funds without more control.

Kurtz and Testin’s proposed bill also includes new requirements for legislative approval for larger projects over $1 million in an effort to allow legislative oversight without the pocket vetoes.

The bill’s funding level is below the $100 million per year for 10 years that Evers proposed in his budget, but close to current funding levels of $33 million per year. 

In 2021, the fund was reauthorized with $33.2 million per year for four years. In 2019, the fund was reauthorized for only two years, breaking a cycle of reauthorization in 10-year increments.

A poll of 516 Wisconsin voters commissioned by environmental advocacy organization The Nature Conservancy found 83% supported Evers’ proposal, with 93% of voters supporting continued public funding for conservation. However, most respondents were unaware of the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Fund.

Funding for Knowles-Nelson peaked in 2011 and was reauthorized under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Former Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson was the first governor to approve funding for the stewardship fund in 1989.

“There was a lot of talk initially from mostly Republican legislators who were skeptical of the governor’s proposal,” Carlin said. “But it’s really only a huge amount of money in comparison to how the program had kind of been whittled down through the years.”

In a January interview with the Cap Times, Vos said the chances of Republicans reauthorizing the fund were less than half. 

Andraca said she hears more from constituents about the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Fund than almost any other program.

“I seriously hope that my Republican colleagues are serious about passing something because it would be a real tragedy to lose something like this that has bipartisan support and has been so instrumental in preserving Wisconsin’s natural areas,” Andraca said.

‘Totally uncharted territory’ for stewardship funding

Carlin said the failure to reauthorize Knowles-Nelson puts land stewardship organizations and local municipalities — the typical recipients of Knowles-Nelson grants — in “totally uncharted territory.” 

Although Knowles-Nelson funding is set to expire at the end of next June, Carlin said local governments and land trusts face uncertainty in planning because they aren’t sure the Legislature will get the new reauthorization bill done.

“Similar to what you’re probably hearing from folks about federal budget cuts … this just totally scrambles the planning horizon,” Carlin said.

Heinen, however, is more optimistic the Legislature will vote to reauthorize Knowles-Nelson. 

“90-plus percent of the people in the state of Wisconsin want the stewardship fund,” Heinen said. “Legislators know that. They’re not going to go running for reelection in November of next year and have their opponents say, ‘Why are you against the stewardship fund?’ So I’m really not worried about it at all.”

Budget deal’s $15 million in earmarks for Robin Vos’ district highlight politicization of Wisconsin’s conservation funding is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Gov. Tony Evers implementing pay raises for state employees that were approved in the state budget without additional approval from the Legislature’s Joint Committee for Employment Relations. Evers signed the budget, now 2025 Wisconsin Act 15, at 1:32 a.m. in his office Thursday, less than an hour after the Assembly passed it. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)

Gov. Tony Evers is implementing pay raises for state employees without additional approval from the Legislature’s Joint Committee for Employment Relations, citing a recent state Supreme Court ruling.

The state budget, which was passed by the Republican-led Legislature and signed by Evers last month, included about $385 million to provide state and University of Wisconsin employees with a 3% pay increase in the first year of the budget and a 2% increase in the second year.

“I fought hard in our bipartisan budget negotiations to secure much deserved pay increases for our talented state workers,” Evers wrote in a letter to state employees on Monday, adding that he was proud to sign the budget last month and it was important to him that state workers receive the wage adjustment as soon as possible.

Eligible employees will receive the 3% base pay adjustment to their current pay rate with their Sept. 4 paychecks, including a lump sum back pay from June 29. The second year of raises is supposed to be implemented June 28, 2026.

“The work that we do together every day on behalf of the people of Wisconsin is so important — perhaps never more so than it is today,” Evers wrote. “With Washington creating continued uncertainty through devastating cuts to investments and programs that so many across our state rely on, Wisconsinites will continue looking to us to lead, support them and build upon the work we’ve done together over the last six years. There is, as always, much hard work ahead of us. Having committed and exceptional partners like you in this good work will make all the difference.” 

The Joint Committee on Employment Relations has been tasked by state law with holding hearings on changes to state employee compensation and approving those changes. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) and Senate President Mary Felzkowski (R-Tomahawk) and Co-chairs of the Joint Committee of Employment Relations have not responded to requests for comment on Evers’ announcement. 

In a bulletin about the raises, the Department of Administration cited the recent Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling in the case Tony Evers v. Howard Marklein, which addressed the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program and the ability of the Joint Finance Committee to hold up already appropriated funds. The Evers administration asserted that the decision clarified its authority to implement the raises without the additional approval of the committee.

The Court ruled 6-1 in July 2024 that the ability for the committee to withhold funds was unconstitutional and a violation of the separation of powers. 

Justice Rebecca Bradley wrote for the majority that a statute that authorizes lawmakers to “exercise core powers of the executive branch violates the constitutional separation of powers and cannot be enforced under any circumstances.” 

“While the constitution gives the legislature the power to appropriate funds, the power to spend the funds the legislature has appropriated for a specific project belongs to the executive branch,” Bradley wrote. “While the legislature has the power to create an agency, define its powers, and appropriate funds to fulfill the purpose for which the legislature established it, the power to spend appropriated funds in accordance with the law enacted by the legislature lies solely within the core power of the executive to ensure the laws are faithfully executed. We conclude these statutes interfere with the executive branch’s core function to carry out the law by permitting a legislative committee, rather than an executive branch agency, to make spending decisions for which the legislature has already appropriated funds and defined the parameters by which those funds may be spent.”

The original lawsuit filed by Evers in October 2023 included the Knowles-Nelson program and two other issues: JOCER’s ability to withhold raises approved in the budget and the Joint Committee for Review of Administrative Rules’s block on administrative rules related to conversion therapy. At the time, JOCER was withholding pay raises approved in the budget for University of Wisconsin employees, so the raises could be used as a bargaining chip in Republican lawmakers’ efforts to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the system. The pay raises, approved in the budget in July, were released by JOCER in December 2023. 

The majority decided in February 2024 that it would only take up the Knowles-Nelson issue and leave the other two “held in abeyance pending further order of the court.” Conservative justices were critical of the majority allowing original action in the case and separating the issues from each other at the time.

Justice Annette Zeigler wrote in her dissenting opinion in the case that taking all of the issues at once could have produced consistency. 

“Selecting an issue that only impacts the Republican-controlled legislature and the longstanding Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program should raise eyebrows,” Zeigler wrote. “Determining all issues at the same time could serve to hold my colleagues to application of the same principles in the same way, even when it comes to a Democratic-controlled branch of government. Unfortunately, we will wait to see if that consistency will be forthcoming, as the majority handpicked and now limits only the legislative branch’s longstanding, statutorily authorized practice.”

The Court dismissed the compensation and Joint Committee on Employment Relations issue in October 2024 when it decided to take up the conversion therapy and Joint Committee for Review of Administrative Rules issue. The Court issued a ruling in July limiting the committee’s ability to block administrative rules.

The University of Wisconsin system will also be implementing the general wage raises. 

“We are grateful to Governor Tony Evers and the Wisconsin State Legislature for their continued support of our workforce and recognition of the vital role our faculty and staff play in education, research, and public service,” UW President Jay Rothman wrote in a memo to employees on Monday. 

The implementation of the raises is not the first time the administration has moved ahead with releasing funds following the ruling. The administration announced funding for 12 Department of Natural Resources projects under the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program in October of 2024.

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Gov. Tony Evers delivers his 2025 state budget address in February. The bipartisan budget Evers signed in July spends down much of Wisconsin's budget surplus. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)

Wisconsin could be facing a more difficult budget than it has seen in recent years with recently approved spending and tax cuts consuming most of the state’s historic surplus, according to the nonpartisan Wisconsin Policy Forum.

The research organization described the state’s most recent budget as an “all of the above” plan in its recent report. Mark Sommerhauser, communications director and policy researcher at the Wisconsin Policy Forum, said the previous budgets showed more restraint from policymakers when it came to spending and tax cuts. 

“There were some tax cuts, there were some spending increases, but certainly not of the magnitude that could have occurred,” Sommerhauser told the Wisconsin Examiner in an interview. “In this budget, we saw a lot more of both.”

Sommerhauser said it was “clearly a budget that was much more focused on the here and now than on where the state’s finances would be in two or four years.”

“There’s an argument that ‘hey, this money should be returned, either back to taxpayers or spent on programs that benefit our state’s residents, rather than just sitting in the general fund,” Sommerhauser added. “That’s what policymakers opted to do with this budget.”

The $111 billion state budget passed by the state Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Tony Evers in early July increased spending by 7.7% — an increase of $3.3 billion — allocating $46 billion to fund a number of priorities.

The budget also included more than $1 billion in tax cuts over the next two years. 

One major cut comes from a change to Wisconsin’s income tax brackets. The new budget expands the state’s second tax bracket, with a 4.4% tax rate, and shrinks the third bracket, which has a 5.3% rate. Wisconsin residents on average will see a $188 cut per filer — affecting more than 1.5 million tax returns. Sommerhauser described the change as a “modest but still notable income tax cut for almost everybody that has some degree of income tax liability, except those folks that have very, very little.” The change will cost the state about $320 million in each year of the budget.

The second major cut created an exemption from income taxes for the first $24,000 for single filers over 67 and $48,000 in retirement income for married filers over 67.

The new state spending in the budget covers an array of priorities including over $500 million for special education, over $80 million in state general purpose revenue for the University of Wisconsin system, over $380 million for wage increases for state employees and additional funding for child care.

Most Republican lawmakers voted for the budget apart from four Senate Republicans and one GOP Assembly member, celebrating the tax cuts as well as some of the investments in the budget and hailing it as a compromise. Most Democrats voted against the final proposal, saying it inadequately invested in education, child care and other priorities, though five Senate and seven Assembly Democrats joined Republicans in support.

With this budget, the state has now used most of the surplus that has formed the backdrop for the last few budgets. The surplus, Sommerhauser said, was mostly the result of federal pandemic aid and was also created in part by an increase in tax revenue, especially through the sales tax, as a result of inflation. At one point the surplus had grown to over $6 billion. 

“[A large surplus is] not business as usual in Wisconsin,” Sommerhauser said. “More often you see the opposite. You see shortfalls that lawmakers are having to scramble to figure out a way to bridge.”

Sommerhauser said that with the smaller reserves, the next budget is likely “going to be kind of coming back to Earth.”

By July 1 2027, Wisconsin’s general fund balance is projected to be $770.5 million — a drop of about $3.6 billion and the lowest balance since 2018. The state will also have $2.1 billion in its rainy day fund.

This leaves Wisconsin with a projected $2.8 billion in its reserves — about 11% of Wisconsin’s net general fund appropriations in fiscal year 2027, Sommerhauser said.

“That’s certainly not disastrous. It’s not cataclysmic at all. It is more than the state has had in reserve for many years prior to the pandemic,” Sommerhauser said. “Of course, it’s a lot less than the last couple of budgets here.”

Wisconsin isn’t the only state to be on this trajectory. At its annual summit in early August, the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) gave an overview of state budgets and asked whether it is time for states to “tighten the belt.”

Erica MacKellar, program principal of NCSL’s Fiscal Affairs Program, said during the presentation that, overall, states ended fiscal year 2025 in a “fairly strong position.” Looking back to the pandemic, she said state revenues didn’t take as big a hit as they were initially expecting. 

“As states recovered, they unexpectedly saw these big revenue surpluses, and that was due to a number of factors, including the large amount of aid that the federal government sent to states,” MacKeller said. “Revenue growth jumped to around 15%, but states always knew that that level of growth was really unsustainable, and have been really planning for a return to normal of state revenue growth and a revenue slowdown that I think we’re seeing now.” 

MacKeller said that prior to the pandemic, state year-end balances as a percentage of state spending were about 10% on average — an increase from the low of about 4% during the Great Recession.

“In fiscal year 2023, after we saw those record surpluses, that percentage soared to over 30%, and now that number has started to come back down,” MacKeller said. “The preliminary average from our survey shows about 16[%] for fiscal year 2025, so that’s putting most states on pretty firm footing at this point.” 

Sommerhauser said the bigger issue now is that Wisconsin is spending more than it brings in through taxes — creating a projected structural deficit. He said it’s something policymakers will have to grapple with in the coming years.

Under the new budget, the state’s general fund will spend about $24.4 billion and bring in $23.1 billion in tax revenues in 2027. The projected gap “would be one of the largest of the past generation,” according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum.

The state could use the reserves for the additional spending, but it wouldn’t be a long-term solution, Sommerhauser said. 

“The state can do that on a one-time basis if it’s got a bunch of money in the bank, which it does right now,” Sommerhauser said. “The issue with that is that you can only spend that money in the bank one time.”

If spending and revenue remain the same, Wisconsin would have an imbalance of -$727 million and an imbalance of -$1.4 billion by the end of 2028-29, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau. 

Sommerhauser noted that unlike the federal government, Wisconsin can’t run a huge deficit year after year. The state constitution requires lawmakers pass and the governor sign a balanced budget.

“The state can do these things, whether it’s drawing money out of reserves or sometimes there are other little tricks that the state can kind of pull out of its hat on a one-time basis,” Sommerhauser said. But, he added, “if your ongoing revenues are significantly out of alignment with your ongoing tax revenues, you’re gonna have a headache to deal with every two years, and you’re setting yourself up to have some really challenging budgets that could eventually make you have to do something really, really painful — whether it’s a big tax increase or some sort of big spending cut.”

Sommerhauser said the Great Recession was the point in recent memory when the state dealt with the greatest budget shortfalls.

“There were some significant tax increases that were put into place in 2009, when we had Democratic controlled state government,” Sommerhauser said. During the 2009-2010 budget (the last time there was a Democratic trifecta), former Gov. Jim Doyle and the Legislature created a new tax bracket of 7.75% on married couples filing jointly with taxable income above $300,000 to help close the budget gap the state was facing. The state’s highest bracket is currently 7.65%.

“You had the big election in 2010 where everything flipped, and then you have Gov. [Scott] Walker and Act 10, and everything happening in 2011 which brought about some really large spending cuts in the state,” Sommerhauser said. At the time, Walker’s administration was projecting the state would have a $3.6 billion deficit and the Republican trifecta took the route of drastically cutting public employee benefits to address it.

“We obviously are hopeful that we’re not going to see a recession again anytime soon… but this is our best sort of attempt to give a sense of what the Legislature might be needing to grapple with in two years,” Sommerhauser said.

The partisan composition of Wisconsin’s state government could also look quite different by the next budget. 

Evers announced that he won’t be running for reelection just a few weeks after wrapping up the 2025-27 state budget, making the 2026 election the first open race since 2010.

The Republican and Democratic fields of candidates are still shaping up. Some of the announced candidates have made comments signaling what they would like to see from a budget. 

Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, the first Democratic candidate in the race, has said she would invest additional state funding in Wisconsin’s schools. Republican Washington Co. Executive Josh Schoemann has said the recent budget spends too much and is taxing people too much. Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, who is still considering a run, noted the potential deficit on social media when he said that Wisconsin “must change course before we end up like MN and IL.” 

The state Senate and Assembly will also be up for grabs in 2026.

Sommerhauser said it’s likely the next governor and state Legislature could be dealing with a challenging state budget, though it’s still unclear how challenging.  

“If economic growth is really strong for the next two years, we could be in a position where we have a projected shortfall, but it’s quite manageable… That’s kind of the best case scenario,” Sommerhauser said. “Worst case scenario is if we would see a recession in the next couple of years, that could be setting us up for a very challenging budget.”

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White House budget director Russ Vought speaks with reporters inside the U.S. Capitol building on Tuesday, July 15, 2025. (Photo by Jennifer Shutt/States Newsroom)

WASHINGTON — The White House budget office has until Friday to republish a website detailing the pace at which it plans to spend money approved by Congress, following a federal court ruling. 

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in an opinion filed Saturday denied the Trump administration’s request to halt a lower court’s ruling that required it to once again post information about spending decisions called apportionments.

The 27-page opinion, written by Circuit Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson, said that to “grant the Executive a stay pending appeal in this separation-of-powers standoff would effectively cut the Congress’s purse strings.”

“No President would allow a usurper to command our armed forces. And no Congress should be made to wait while the Executive intrudes on its plenary power over appropriations and disclosure thereof,” Henderson wrote. “The public interest is best served by maintaining the separation-of-powers balance struck by the Constitution and especially so if the challenged statutes keep the citizenry abreast regarding duly appropriated expenditures.”

Henderson was nominated to the Circuit Court in 1990 by then-President George H.W. Bush, a few years after then-President Ronald Reagan nominated her as a federal district judge in 1986.

Cerin Lindgrensavage, counsel for Protect Democracy Project, one of the organizations that filed the lawsuit, released a statement cheering the Circuit Court’s decision.

“Restoration of this website could not have come at a more important time — over the last two weeks journalists have broken story after story of OMB holding back funds using apportionment footnotes — and once this website goes back online we should all have a chance to learn where else OMB has been holding up money that — under law — should be spent,” Lindgrensavage wrote.

The Office of Management and Budget did not immediately respond to a request for comment from States Newsroom on Monday. The Department of Justice replied “no comment” when asked if they planned to appeal the Circuit Court’s decision.

OMB pulled down website

Congress began requiring OMB to publicly post information about how quickly, or how slowly, the executive branch was spending taxpayer dollars during the Biden administration.

White House budget director Russell Vought opted to pull down that website in March, leading to two separate lawsuits — one from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, and one from Protect Democracy Project.

U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Emmet Sullivan ruled in late July that OMB must republish the website, writing that Congress “has sweeping authority” to require the president to detail how his administration doles out taxpayer dollars throughout the year.

“As explained in this Memorandum Opinion, there is nothing unconstitutional about Congress requiring the Executive Branch to inform the public of how it is apportioning the public’s money,” he wrote. “Defendants are therefore required to stop violating the law!”

The Trump administration appealed that ruling and asked for the district court’s decision to be put on hold while the case played out in the circuit court.

The weekend ruling from Henderson denied that request. 

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“The state of recruitment and retention in police agencies is in trouble.”

That’s according to a 2024 report from the International Association of Chiefs of Police. And Wisconsin’s police departments aren’t strangers to the staffing shortage.

The total number of law enforcement officers in Wisconsin has dropped for years and now sits at near record lows, The Badger Project has found. As chiefs and sheriffs across the state say they struggle to fill positions in an industry less attractive to people than it once was, small departments are especially struggling.

A bipartisan bill working through the state Legislature aims to alleviate some of the problem.

The proposal would allow small police departments to apply for state grants to help put a recruit through the police academy. The grants would extend after graduation and cover the costs associated with the recruit’s department field training. The bill requires the hire to stay with the department for one year.

“There’s such a need for this,” said Rep. Clinton Anderson, D-Beloit, who introduced the Assembly’s version of the bill in mid-July.

Anderson, who also introduced the bill in 2023, explained that getting it passed this session will be an uphill battle because the state budget did not fund it. Divided government and the rush to pass the budget before the federal government passed its own tax and spending bill were factors, Anderson said.

“I know I care about law enforcement. I know they say they do too,” Anderson said of Republicans.

If the bill were passed now, Anderson said, the GOP-controlled Joint Finance Committee would need to release the funding for it. His goal, since that’s not happening, is to open up the conversation and get a public hearing. Anderson hopes Republicans will take it up later in the session.

“While I am disappointed, the advocacy does not end,” said Rep. Bob Donovan, a Republican from Greenfield who worked with Anderson to introduce the bill. “I am still pursuing this bill to show my colleagues, and the public, the need for this legislation.”

While larger departments frequently sponsor a new hire as they go through the academy and move on to field training, smaller departments often can’t afford to do that, Anderson said. Small departments pull from the few who weren’t sponsored or they may make lateral hires from other departments.

“These struggles are all too real,” wrote Sen. Jesse James, a Republican from Clark County, in an email.

James, a current police officer for the village of Cadott in Chippewa County, introduced the Senate’s version of the bill in June, weeks before Gov. Tony Evers signed the state budget.

“I think it will be a significant challenge getting the bill funded and signed into law this session,” James wrote. “I still strongly believe in the importance of this program and will continue to advocate for it as the session continues. If we can’t get it across the finish line this year, I’ll try again next year.”

Both versions of the bill were assigned to committees the same day they were introduced. Neither has progressed since.

“Even if it takes another five terms,” Anderson said, “I will keep hammering home on this. It’s really important.”

This article first appeared on The Badger Project and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

The Badger Project is a nonpartisan, citizen-supported journalism nonprofit in Wisconsin.

Bipartisan bill to aid recruiting at small Wisconsin police departments stalls after state budget snub is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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State revenue is projected to outpace spending during the next two years leaving a $770 million surplus as of July 1, 2027. If spending and revenue are the same over 2027-29, the state will have a deficit of -$1.4 billion in its general fund by the end of that biennium, the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau reported.

That excludes the state’s $2.1 billion rainy day fund.

Wisconsin ended 2023 with a record $7.1 billion surplus and the last budget cycle with $4.4 billion.

The current state budget spends down $3.6 billion as Gov. Tony Evers prioritized spending increases for education and childcare while Republicans pushed tax cuts.

The state’s general fund in 2027 is projected to be at the lowest level since 2018. Wisconsin faced structural deficits from 1996-2011, with a projected $3.6 billion deficit during the 2011-13 biennium. That prompted steep public employee benefit cuts under the controversial Act 10 law.

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

Sources

• Legislative Fiscal Bureau 2025-27 and 2027-29 General Fund Budget — 2025 Wisconsin Act 15
• Legislative Fiscal Bureau State Tax and Fee Modifications Included in 2025 Wisconsin Act 15
• Wisconsin Policy Forum An All of the Above Budget
• Wisconsin Policy Forum Home to Roost? The 2011-13 State Budget
• WPR Report confirms Wisconsin’s $7.1B budget surplus is highest in state history

Is Wisconsin facing a structural deficit in the 2027-29 state budget? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

U.S. Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, left, and the top Democrat on the committee, Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state, at a committee markup on Thursday, July 31, 2025. (Photos from committee webcast)

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations Thursday largely rejected Trump administration proposals to slash funding for education programs, medical research grants, health initiatives and Ukraine security assistance.

Instead, senators from both parties agreed to increase spending in the Labor, Health and Human Services and Education spending bill for fiscal year 2026, as well as the Defense bill, and rebuked the White House’s move to dismantle the Department of Education.

The pushback against President Donald Trump was significant as Congress heads toward a possible standoff and partial government shutdown when the fiscal year expires on Sept. 30.

In response to the Trump administration’s separate cancellation of grants and freezing of funds approved by Congress, senators also included language in the Labor-HHS-Education spending bill to create deadlines for formula grants to be released to states on time.

Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, said the bill to fund the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services and Education “prioritizes funding to make Americans healthier and supports life-saving medical research through targeted funding.”

The measure provides $116.6 billion for HHS, an increase of $446 million in discretionary funding over the previous fiscal year. Included is a $150 million increase for cancer research and a $100 million increase for Alzheimer’s disease research, as well as a ban on an administration cap on indirect costs at the National Institutes of Health, according to a summary from Democrats. The cap on how much NIH pays research universities and medical schools for indirect costs is the subject of a permanent injunction in an ongoing lawsuit.

Trump’s budget proposal also cut funding for the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to $4.2 billion, but senators voted to instead allocate $9.1 billion for the agency.

Also included is $8.8 billion for the Child Care and Development Block Grant and nearly $12.4 billion for Head Start.

The top Democrat on the committee, Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state, said that while the bill rejects many of the funding cuts from the Trump administration, it’s “only half of the equation.”

“We have an administration right now that is intent on ignoring Congress, breaking the law, and doing everything it can without any transparency, to dismantle programs and agencies that help families,” she said. “There is no magic bullet that will change that unfortunate reality.”

Murray also expressed her disappointment that the bill did not fund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Trump sent what is known as a rescissions request to Congress, approved by both chambers, that yanked $1.1 billion in previously approved funding over the next two years for the agency, which funds NPR and PBS.

The Labor-HHS-Education spending bill for fiscal year 2026 passed out of the Senate committee with a bipartisan 26-3 vote.

Senators also passed the Defense appropriations bill for fiscal year 2026 on a 26-3 vote.

Dismantling of Education Department spurned

The bill text tightens requirements so that Education Department staffing levels must be sufficient to carry out the agency’s missions, and its work cannot be outsourced to other agencies or departments to fulfill statutory responsibilities, according to Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, the top Democrat on the spending panel dealing with Labor-HHS-Education spending. 

The agency saw a reduction in force, or RIF, earlier this year that gutted more than 1,300 employees and hit wide swaths of the department. The Supreme Court cleared the way earlier in July for the agency to temporarily proceed with those mass layoffs.

The bill also provides $5.78 billion for School Improvement Programs — which support before- and after-school programs, rural education, STEM education and college and career counseling, among other initiatives.

Trump’s fiscal 2026 budget request had called for $12 billion in spending cuts at the Education Department but the committee allocated $79 billion in discretionary funding.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon defended Trump’s sweeping proposals while appearing in June before the Senate Labor-HHS-Education subcommittee.

During Thursday’s markup, Murray called the president’s proposal to defund the Department of Education “absurd.”

“I still hope we can do more when it comes to demanding accountability, transparency, and that this administration actually follows our laws,” Murray said. “We all know President Trump cannot dismantle the Department of Education or ship education programs to other agencies. Authorizing laws prevent that.”

The agency has witnessed a dizzying array of cuts and changes since Trump took office, as he and his administration look to dramatically overhaul the federal role in education and dismantle the department.

The bill maintains the same maximum annual award for the Pell Grant from the previous award year at $7,395. The government subsidy helps low-income students pay for college.

Trump’s budget request had called for cutting nearly $1,700 from the maximum award.

Health spending

Baldwin said the overall bill is a “compromise.” She pointed to how Republicans and Democrats agreed to increase funds for the 988 Suicide hotline by $2 million and by another $20 million for substance abuse recovery.

The spending bill will also provide $1.6 billion for State Opioid Response grants, which is a formula-based grant for states to address the opioid crisis.

Senators rejected the Trump administration’s request to cut National Institutes of Health research by 40% and instead included a more than $400 million bump in funding for a total of $48.7 billion.

Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff said that he was grateful that the committee worked on a bipartisan basis to reject major Trump cuts for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in his home state.

“I made (it) very clear that I would not accept the destruction of the CDC,” Ossoff said. “I am grateful that Republicans and Democrats on this committee are coming together to defend this vital institution based in the state of Georgia.”

Advocates for medical research praised the legislation.

“Chair Collins and Vice Chair Murray deserve special recognition for their leadership in making this a priority. Thousands of ACS CAN volunteers from across the country have been writing to their lawmakers on this issue and it’s deeply encouraging to see their voices have been heard loud and clear,” Lisa Lacasse, president of the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, said in a statement.

AmeriCorps, Job Corps funding sustained

Trump’s budget request also proposed $4.6 billion in spending cuts at the Department of Labor. 

The spending bill also maintains funding for Job Corps, a residential career training program for young adults, at $1.76 billion.

Trump’s budget request sought to eliminate the program entirely.

The administration says the program is “financially unsustainable, has an exorbitant perparticipant cost, risks the safety of young adults, and has often made participants worse off,” according to a summary of the budget request.

The spending bill also includes $15 billion for the Social Security Administration, an increase of $100 million from the president’s budget request, to address staffing shortages.

The administration also proposed the elimination of AmeriCorps.

However, senators kept funding for AmeriCorps for fiscal year 2026 at $1.25 billion.

Defense spending also increased

The Defense appropriations spending bill for fiscal year 2026 that senators worked on represented an increase from the president’s budget request.

“I think not only the prior administration, but this administration as well, have underestimated the level of challenge that we have,” said Sen. Mitch McConnell, chairman of the Defense appropriations panel.

The Kentucky Republican said the bill provides $851.9 billion for fiscal year 2026.

He said the topline is higher than the president’s budget request because “we cannot seriously address these challenges while artificially constraining our resources” — challenges such as the war in Ukraine and conflicts in the Middle East.

The bill also rejects the Trump administration’s effort to slash funding to aid Ukraine in its war against Russia.

“Shutting off engagement with Ukraine would undermine our military’s efforts to prepare for the modern battlefield,” McConnell said.

During the markup of the defense spending bill, Sen. Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, introduced an amendment to require the Department of Homeland Security to reimburse costs to the Department of Defense for immigration enforcement.

As the Trump administration aims to carry out its plans for mass deportation of people without permanent legal status, it’s intertwined the U.S. military and immigration enforcement, ranging from deploying the National Guard to quell immigration protests in Los Angeles to housing immigrants on the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba military base.

Durbin said that so far, DHS has cost the Defense Department $900 million, from personnel costs to housing immigrants on military bases.

Durbin said the cost to house 180 people on Guantanamo Bay cost the Department of Defense $40 million over three months.

His amendment failed on a 14-15 vote. 

Children, with one of their teachers, at the Waunakee child care center operated by Heather Murray. (Photo courtesy of Heather Murray)

I have owned and operated a child care center for the past 19 years. Not only do I make sure staff and the bills are paid, I clean toilets, clean windows and change diapers.  I have devoted my life to educating and caring for young children. I didn’t go into this profession to line my pockets with money. But everyone in my field deserves a living wage and to know they are supported in their community. My goal is to create a safe and nurturing learning environment for the children who enter my center.  My belief is that their parents have decided to partner with us to make sure their children are getting the best possible environment to learn and grow.  

Creating  this high-quality environment for children has become increasingly hard over the years for child care providers in Wisconsin. Parents can’t pay more and providers need to keep qualified staff and pay them a liveable wage. For my center, wages for employees went up by $4 an hour recently  to keep up with the other businesses in my community.  

I started advocating and organizing around child care and early education right before the latest state  budget cycle. I found  there were some pretty big hurdles to jump over to get our legislators to listen to child care providers.

 I’ve heard legislators tell providers “all you want is money.” I’ve heard them say   “these women just need to learn how to run their business.”  My favorite observation is: “We don’t need child care.  Women should just stay home and take care of their children.”  It wasn’t easy to get anyone at the Capitol to take providers seriously. In the last state budget child care received no funding.  Wisconsin was  one of six states that did not put any state money into child care or early education. Gov. Evers did find a way to support providers with direct payments using federal money, which  helped keep many providers’ doors open throughout the state.  

Meanwhile, advocates and early educators kept coming to hearings,  talking about what we do on a daily basis and how that is important to our communities and the state.

Providers across Wisconsin held Community Conversations and Day Without Childcare events. Many elected officials from both sides of the aisle received tours of centers.  Providers also sent letters to the editor and talked with every type of news outlet that would listen. I am so proud of all the providers who stepped up and continued to push this message that what we do is important and we deserve support. As a result,  ideas at the Capitol started to shift.  

I spoke to legislators from both sides of the aisle. I heard legislators starting to talk about the “child care crisis” and realize that it wasn’t happening just because we didn’t know how to run our businesses. They started to say out loud that parents shouldn’t have to pay 25% of their income for  child care. Legislators who previously wouldn’t have said they supported child care investment said they would try and get something done.

In the end, the new state budget  wasn’t ideal but it did do two things: Direct payments will continue to go to providers for the next year and early education is finally funded with state dollars in the Wisconsin budget.

Does this budget solve everything? No. Does it provide the $330 million Evers sought in direct payments  to providers? No. Did Wisconsin for the first time  put state money into  early education? Yes — including $110 million in direct payments to providers Does it deregulate child care, increasing the number of  infants and toddlers one staff person can care for and allowing 16-year-olds to count as full-time assistants? Yes.

I absolutely do not think deregulation is the answer to the child care crisis. I believe it is harmful to children. I will not be participating in the deregulated infant/toddler program outlined in this budget.  I know I cannot get staff in my center to continue work when I ask them to take care of three more toddlers on their own. A single teacher in this proposed program would take care of seven toddlers ages 18 months and up. Right now that same teacher is expected to care for four toddlers that age. Even though some states have this ratio,  the National Association for the Education of Young Children clearly states best practice is 1:4 for this age group.

I would also not hire a 16-year-old as an assistant teacher to add to my staff. I don’t believe 16-year-olds are ready to handle large groups of small  children and provide the  quality time and interaction they need; 16-year-olds are still children themselves. And since they are in school themselves, they are not that much help with the labor  shortages centers experience all day long.

I’m grateful that Gov. Evers made child care a priority, and that our state finally joined the majority of other states in providing some support for this essential resource in the state budget.

Advocating for policy changes is a constant back and forth. Much of the time you don’t get  what you want. This means that we must go back in two years, to make Wisconsin’s child care support better and  more durable.  Child care advocates have created a strong network and we are not done advocating for the change needed for providers to keep their doors open and for educators to earn a living wage. I believe child care is infrastructure and a public good.  Together with other child care providers, I will continue to advocate and educate our leaders about how a well supported child care system is essential to  our community and our economy.

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The Lyndon Baines Johnson Department of Education Building in Washington, D.C., in a file photo from November 2024. (Photo by Shauneen Miranda/States Newsroom)

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration said Friday it’ll soon release billions in Education Department funding that has been frozen for weeks, delaying disbursements to K-12 schools throughout the country.

The funding — which goes toward migrant education, English-language learning and other programs — was supposed to go out before July 1, but the administration informed schools just one day before that it was instead holding onto $6.8 billion while staff conducted a review. Members of both parties in Congress objected to the move.

The Education Department released $1.3 billion for before- and after-school programs as well as summer programs in mid-July, but the rest of the funding remained stalled.

Madi Biedermann, a Department of Education spokesperson, wrote in an email to States Newsroom that the White House budget office “has completed its review” of the remaining accounts and “has directed the Department to release all formula funds.”

The administration will begin sending that money to school districts next week, Biedermann wrote.

Appropriators cheer

Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins, chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee, wrote in a statement the “funds are essential to the operation of Maine’s public schools, supporting everything from classroom instruction to adult education.”

“I am pleased that following outreach from my colleagues and me, the Administration has agreed to release these highly-anticipated resources,” Collins wrote. “I will continue working to ensure that education funds are delivered without delay so that schools have adequate time to plan their finances for the upcoming school year, allowing students to arrive back to class this fall to properly-funded schools.”

Collins and nine other Republican senators wrote a letter to Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought earlier this month asking him to “faithfully implement” the spending law Congress approved in March.

“The decision to withhold this funding is contrary to President (Donald) Trump’s goal of returning K-12 education to the states,” the GOP senators wrote. “This funding goes directly to states and local school districts, where local leaders decide how this funding is spent, because as we know, local communities know how to best serve students and families.

“Withholding this funding denies states and communities the opportunity to pursue localized initiatives to support students and their families.”

West Virginia Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, chairwoman of the appropriations subcommittee that funds the Education Department, wrote in a statement released Friday she was glad to see the funding unfrozen.

“The programs are ones that enjoy longstanding, bipartisan support like after-school and summer programs that provide learning and enrichment opportunities for school aged children, which also enables their parents to work and contribute to local economies, and programs to support adult learners working to gain employment skills, earn workforce certifications, or transition into postsecondary education,” Capito wrote. “That’s why it’s important we continue to protect and support these programs.”

Middle income Wisconsinites got a $180 tax cut and lost services worth much more than that. | 3D illustration rendering by Getty Images Creative

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers and state legislators cut taxes by $1.3 billion in the new state budget, paying out a quarter of the state’s $4.6 billion surplus so that Wisconsinites who earn up to $200,000 can get a tax break worth an average of $180 per year.

That’s not a lot of money to trade for losing access to child care, reducing services that help veterans find jobs and housing, and cutting programs at schools. But somehow cutting taxes has become an agreed-upon, bipartisan top priority, even as the defunding of everything begins to take a major toll on our quality of life.

As Baylor Spears reports, more than 65% of Wisconsin school districts will face a reduction in funds under the new state budget. Many will go to local property taxpayers to ask for more – to the annoyance of citizens who are getting tired of the constant begging from schools that no longer receive adequate funding from the state. Local residents were willing to say yes to a record number of school funding referenda in 2024. But there are signs their patience is wearing thin.

Republican legislators are tapping into that annoyance with a bill to repeal the results of Evers’ partial veto of the last budget, which extended a temporary increase in the cap on revenue school districts could raise for the next 400 years. Evers’ maneuver outraged Republicans, who challenged the veto before the Wisconsin Supreme Court and lost. The new bill would undo the veto’s effect on school revenue caps (and the bill itself will also, presumably, be vetoed by Evers).

“The pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock 402 years before this veto,” the Republican sponsors of the bill write. “It is hard to justify locking in a funding increase for just as long into the future.” 

But like the 180 bucks a year in “tax relief” Republican legislators are touting as a major victory for middle class Wisconsinites, Evers’ 400 year veto amounts to less than meets the eye. For one thing, it doesn’t lock in an increase — it just allows districts to raise an additional $325 per pupil through a combination of local property taxes and state aid. Individual school boards must still vote to pass any property tax increase. And the state could head off those property tax increases by putting more money into schools. Instead, Republican legislators insisted on no increase at all in general school aid in the budget. The same legislative Republicans who are howling about property tax increases created the problem, refusing to fund education and then blaming districts that turn to the only other source of funding they can tap.

Overall, the Wisconsin Policy Forum reports, Wisconsin has slipped from one of the top states for education spending into the bottom half over the last 25 years. Tax-cutting replaced education as the state’s top priority. While most other states increased spending on education after the pandemic, in Wisconsin spending on schools went down. And we spend far less as a share of personal income on education now than we did in the early 2000s, and less than the national average.

Behind all of this budget math is the sad reality that, if we don’t agree to shoulder some expenses as a society, a lot of the elements of a decent life are out of reach for most people. Not paying for things through taxes doesn’t make expenses go away. It just makes them more burdensome on the smaller group that has to pay. It takes a bigger bite out of local property tax payers to pick up the cost of their schools than if the cost is spread across the state in the form of income taxes, and it’s even more expensive for individual families to pay the full cost of educating their kids. In the early 2000s, Wisconsin had the best school system in the Midwest at a cost of about 5% of personal income for taxpayers, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum. That’s about $2,500 of a $50,000 income. Try to find full-time private education for less than that. 

Not just schools but a clean environment, public safety, good roads and reliable services and infrastructure that doesn’t fail are things we’ve long taken for granted. Those things are all threatened now. 

When I was a high school exchange student in Quito, Ecuador, I learned that running water in the affluent suburb where I lived was not guaranteed. Sometimes the water would go out when you were taking a shower. Keeping a bucket of water in the bathroom just in case was normal. Then a well known government official moved into the neighborhood and the problem, temporarily, cleared up. 

We are moving toward that sort of social setup now in the U.S. 

The assumption that drives tax-cutting mania at the state and national level is that we shouldn’t have to spend money toward collective, public goods. We should all pay our own way. That’s fine if you can hire your own private security firm, send your kids to private academies, and avoid contact with an increasingly desperate populace. For most people, it’s a terrible bargain.

It’s both cheaper and better for all of us, as individuals, to support a decent society for all. It only becomes unaffordable when we start pulling apart the fabric of society, convincing people they’ll be better off going it alone, after liquidating our collective wealth.

Undermining confidence in public institutions and cutting taxes so those institutions are underfunded and strained are part of the same push to increase the wealth of the already wealthy, and help them shirk any responsibility to contribute to society

Why should poor people have health care? Why should the elderly and disabled be protected from being thrown out on the street? Why should little kids have nutritious meals? If you weren’t clever enough to be born rich, you deserve nothing. That’s not exactly how the Trump administration puts it, or the Republicans in the state Legislature who have been insisting for years on frittering away the state’s budget surplus on tax cuts worth very little to anyone who doesn’t already make a ton of money. But it’s the basic, underlying idea.

This argument is compelling only to people who don’t understand the math.

Elon Musk, whose $400 billion fortune is more than the wealth owned by one-half of all U.S. citizens combined, doesn’t want to pay what for him is a pittance to help maintain the health and wellbeing of our country.

Wisconsin Republicans were unwilling to spend $4 million — .004% of the total state budget — to maintain veterans’ services to keep military vets from becoming homeless.

Efficiency, cost savings — these are the alleged goals of the federal and state austerity programs. But the real goal is to make you forget what it was like to live in a functional society, one where kids had enough to eat and people didn’t die of preventable diseases, the environment was clean and Wisconsin children could get a great, free education, afford to go to college and dream of owning a home.

What the anti-government tax-cutters want is a society riven by resentment and anger, where people are divided against each other and the dysfunction makes it easy to “divide and conquer” as our last Republican governor memorably put it.

Down with education, down with clean water, down with health care and nutrition for poor kids. Up with lurid crime stories and hateful, divisive rhetoric.

When society falls apart, it’s much easier for greedy charlatans to plunder and steal the wealth of the state. And after we’ve codified irresponsibility — spent down the treasury and starved society and made permanent the arrangement whereby the richest people in society are not obligated to contribute, well then it becomes much harder to make the rich pay their fair share.

Try to remember what it was like to have a decent, functional Wisconsin. Try not to give in to the politics of distraction and division. Because $180 is a pathetic bribe to give up stability, security and the opportunity for the kids of today to grow up with hope that they can still have a decent life. 

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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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KUSD's referendum failed in February, and as the state budget process progressed, the district had a $19 million budget gap to fill. A participant at a February rally rolls out a scroll with the names of every school district that has gone to referendum since the last state budget. Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner.

Between the Wisconsin state budget providing no new general aid to schools and the Trump administration withholding federal funds, Kenosha Unified School District (KUSD) Superintendent Jeff Weiss and Chief Financial Officer Tarik Hamdan say school funding has never been so uncertain.

“We really, right now, are at a very unsure, very uncertain time, and it just makes planning extremely difficult,” Weiss told the Wisconsin Examiner in an interview.

The district leaders were among many public school advocates who for months lobbied for large investments in Wisconsin’s K-12 schools during the state budget process that wrapped up earlier this month. 

Weiss said state funding for schools that has not kept pace with inflation over the past 16 years has created the difficult financial situation that Kenosha and other districts across the state are facing and are the reason so many have gone to local taxpayers through referendum to ask for more money.

A recent Wisconsin Policy Forum report found the state’s per pupil education spending has fallen below the national average. In the 2023 fiscal year, Wisconsin spent $14,882 per pupil on public education — 9.9% less than the national average of $16,526 per pupil.

KUSD sought a referendum early this year to bring in $23 million annually for five years to help the school district meet its safety improvements, staffing, curriculum, technology and major maintenance costs. The process was controversial in the community, dividing residents and even eliciting boos at a chorus concert. 

The referendum failed in February, and as the state budget process progressed, the district had a $19 million budget gap to fill. In April, Weiss asked lawmakers at a public hearing to address the long-term problem so he and the district could spend less time struggling to get local taxpayers to pay more and more time on student learning and improving educational offerings.

“This is not how I want to spend our time in the school district,” Weiss said at the time. 

District leaders were hoping for two main changes in the budget: an increase in the state’s share of special education costs to cover 60% and an increase to the state’s general aid to schools of $415 per pupil in year one and $430 per pupil in year two. 

“Special education reimbursement at 60%… would have generated about $11 million,” Weiss said. “The additional per pupil increases would have added around $2 million, a little bit less than that, so together, these two items would have generated about $13 million of additional funding for KUSD.”

Ultimately, the bipartisan budget deal approved by lawmakers and Evers provided an increase for special education funding but no general aid increases. Evers has defended the education portions of the budget, saying it helps with school funding in a “significant way.” 

“That’s a good thing, because we did exactly what the school districts were asking us to do,” Evers said. 

Education advocates haven’t had the same reaction. The Wisconsin Public Education Network called on lawmakers to vote against the budget, and for Evers to veto it. Peggy Wirtz-Olsen, president of Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state’s largest teacher’s union, said the budget was “a complete betrayal of public schools” and schools could not handle the “double-blow” from federal cuts to public education and the state’s inadequate investments. 

“Given the ugly truth about this budget, educators are exploring every option to force politicians to bring forward a long-term solution to Wisconsin’s school funding crisis,” Wirtz-Olsen said. “This state can’t keep shattering the foundation of our public schools and expect the professionals who teach them to pick up the pieces.”

For his part, Weiss said he was glad to see some movement from lawmakers, who agreed to raise the special education reimbursement rate to 42% in the first year and 45% in the second year of the budget — a significant jump from the current 30% and the biggest increase in over 30 years. However, the total cost picked up by the state — $207 million in year one and $297 million in year two —  still falls short of what districts need. 

“The fact that there was movement — I was glad to see that,” Weiss said. “Is it game changing? No, not by any means.”

The district is now trying to plan with the new budget.

District budget planning 

Kenosha leaders said they are anticipating the special ed reimbursement rate will fall below the estimated levels. That’s because the pool of money for special education is finite as a “sum certain” allocation, meaning if costs for districts are higher than estimated the state won’t pay more and the percentage of those costs the state covers will go down.

“We’re expecting to get 39[%] just based on some of the historical patterns of sum certain funding,” Weiss said.

Weiss said district officials are expecting about $3 million per year in additional funding from the boost — $10 million per year less than what they initially hoped for from the state budget.

The district has already made significant cuts of about $5 million to help balance its 2025-26 budget. Staffing is the largest expense and most of the cuts came from the elimination of nearly 43 positions. Prior to seeking a referendum, the school district had already closed schools, including five elementary schools and a middle school, and made other cuts to staff and programs.

Salaries and benefits are increasing, driving up costs. 

“Health insurance trends have been increasing at about 10 to 13% each year alone. The salary component, when you’re talking about inflationary increases… and movement on salary schedule just in recent times, is somewhere around 4.5%,” Hamdan said. “There’s all these factors that make budget planning… very, very difficult.”

Weiss said the district also put some items on hold, including security upgrades, staff raises and curriculum.

“As we’re able to find funding, we’ll start putting some of those [on] short term holds — trying to fund those,” Weiss said. “We know that we can’t stop buying curriculum materials or fixing our buildings or buying technology.”

Weiss said there is also some pressure on compensation from neighboring school districts, one of which recently succeeded in passing a referendum. 

“How do we stay competitive with compensation for our employees?” Weiss said, adding that the state budget money will likely be used for labor costs and other items on short-term hold. 

Long-term items, including controlled entrances for seven schools, will continue to be on hold.

“We’re going to have to find another funding stream for that,” Weiss said. “At this point, we haven’t identified what that funding stream is, so those are some of the things that we have taken into account as we look at the budget.”

Potential property tax increase 

Even with the failed referendum, Kenosha’s district leaders are concerned about how property tax changes could appear to residents. School districts will be allowed a $325 per pupil revenue limit increase each year due to a partial veto by Evers in the last budget, but there is no state funding behind it in the 2025-27 budget.

“The state is not going to pay their portion of that. It’s going to be a straight tax increase,” Hamdan said. The last state budget that established the $325 increase paid for it in part through a general aid increase.

The total state general aid to Wisconsin schools is $5.58 billion, the same as 2024. The distribution of the funds is determined by a formula that considers property valuation, student enrollment and shared costs.

The Department of Public Instruction’s July 1 estimate shows that 135 districts — or 32.1% — will get an increase, while 277 districts — or 65.8% — will lose general aid.

In comparison, in 2024 when a general aid increase was budgeted, 68.6% districts were estimated to receive more general aids, while 29.5% of districts were estimated to receive less. 

Hamdan compared it to having one pizza at dinner for a family. 

“The state budget determines the size of the pizza that all 421 districts are going to eat from that year. Is it a 16-inch pizza? Is it an 18-inch pizza?” Hamdan said. “Depending on how hungry each of our school districts are, some of us are going to eat a bigger portion than the others, but there’s only so much pizza available. When some of the other school districts are passing referendums to increase their spending, they’re changing their position in that formula so their hunger is getting higher. They’re allowed to eat more, and that leaves less for some of the other school districts.”

With its increasing property values, decreasing student enrollment and the failed referendum, KUSD is estimated to lose 4.55% — or about $7 million — in general aid funding for 2025-26.

The decrease doesn’t mean the district loses its ability to bring in revenue, but means the district will have to make it up via property taxes — a worry for school leaders. The school board will be responsible for approving any levy increases meant to fill the loss of state general aid and the $325 per pupil school revenue increase. 

“When we lose equalization aid, that does not mean that we get $7 million less budget authority, that means that the state will pay $7 million less towards our revenue limit number,” Hamdan said. “The board then will increase tax levies to make that up and that’s what the kicker is, we end up with a tax increase bump without getting more spending authority.”

Wiess said they are worried about whether community members will understand any property tax raises and the situation schools are in.

“My concern is that the message is going to be: ‘Our taxes were raised and we voted no. What did you do?’” Weiss said. “When you have to dive into the intricacies of the state funding formula, it’s not a quick answer to explain it. It’s very concerning.”

The long-term solution 

On a state level, Weiss and Hamdan said part of the issue is that state leaders have yet to address the long-term problem that schools face.  

“The whole point is that the state budget doesn’t keep up with our inflationary increases, and this state budget does not do that either,” Hamdan said. “It’s not that we don’t appreciate the movement and the increases, but the point is still being missed, that there’s a problem here, and it’s not being fixed.”  

Weiss said the pathway for a long-term solution can be found in the 2019 bipartisan Blue Ribbon Commission report, which included raising the special education reimbursement to 60% and adjusting per pupil funding based on inflation. 

“I don’t know why it hasn’t been enacted, but that’s the type of action that’s needed at the state to fix this problem,” Weiss said. “It’s not a two-year budget cycle. It’s a long term plan. It’s not a band aid.”

Trump administration withholds money 

In addition to concerns about state funding, Wisconsin school districts are facing uncertainties about federal funding as the Trump administration has pushed ahead with trying to close the U.S. Department of Education and is withholding already approved funding for programs that support English language learners, migrants, low-income children, adult learners and others.

Wisconsin gets about 8% of its funding for schools from the federal government, and over $72 million is being withheld from the state for these programs. 

About $1.6 million of that is meant for Kenosha Unified School District.

“We have staff attached to those grants,” Hamdan said. Withholding the funds, he said, “causes us to front that money while we wait for this other stuff to be figured out until we can claim reimbursement on it. The uncertainty is at an all-time high in my 20-year career.”

Wisconsin has joined a multi-state lawsuit against the Trump administration.

The funds were already approved by Congress and signed into law on March 15 and are typically distributed to states by July 1. The Department of Education notified state education agencies across the country on June 30 they would be withholding the funds without any specific explanation. On July 18, the Trump administration confirmed it would release a portion of the $6.8 billion in withheld funds, worth about $1.3 billion, for after-school and summer programs. 

Weiss said he thinks the district will eventually receive all the funds, but is still disappointed and worried about  federal funding. 

“I anticipate we’ll receive it,” Weiss said. “I don’t know when, but it does — moving forward, it makes me wonder what future budgets will look like, and well, what we will do for some of our students who have needs in those areas?”

Kenosha isn’t the only district concerned. 

Madison Metropolitan School District Superintendent Joe Gotthard and Verona Area School District Superintendent Tremayne Clardy warned at a press conference on July 9 that school districts will continue to be stuck in a cycle of seeking funding through referendum. 

“Although we have community support, public education, including our district, continues to feel the impact of decreased funding from the state and federal level,” Gothard said. “This defunding of public education has to stop.”

Weiss said that even with the federal and state challenges, the school district is going to continue doing “what’s right by our students” and working “to give them the best education we possibly can.”

Hamdan added that he hopes in general people understand that public education is at the core of communities. 

“Whether it’s building up the next workforce or creating the citizenry in your own community, your property values and what’s going to attract your businesses, public education is at the core of every single community and it needs to be supported.”

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President Donald Trump holds up the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" that was signed into law during an Independence Day military family picnic on the South Lawn of the White House on July 4, 2025 in Washington, D.C.  (Photo by Alex Brandon - Pool/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — Republicans’ “big, beautiful” law will add $3.394 trillion to deficits during the next decade and lead 10 million people to lose access to health insurance, according to an analysis released Monday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

The updated assessment of the sweeping tax and spending cuts law came weeks after nearly every GOP lawmaker voted to approve the legislation ahead of a self-imposed Fourth of July deadline. The law made permanent the 2017 tax cuts from President Donald Trump’s first term and provided billions to carry out his plans of mass deportations, an immigration crackdown and increased defense spending.

Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, wrote in a statement that it is “still hard to believe that policymakers just added $4 trillion to” deficits after Republican lawmakers “have spent months or years appropriately fuming about our unsustainable fiscal situation.”

“This is a dangerous game we are playing,” MacGuineas wrote. “It has been going on for years, and it was brought to new levels with this bill. And it is time to stop.” 

CBO released numerous reports throughout the months-long process showing how various parts of the bill would affect federal spending and health care access, but the scorekeeper needed additional time to evaluate changes Republicans made during the last few days of debate.

The latest figures are similar to a preliminary report CBO released earlier this month projecting the final version of the package, which underwent considerable changes in the Senate, would likely lead to a $3.4 trillion increase in deficits between 2025 and 2034.

That total was significantly higher than the $2.4 trillion increase in deficits CBO expected the original House version of the bill would have had during the next decade.

Health spending to fall by more than $1 trillion

Republicans’ numerous changes to health programs, predominantly Medicaid, will reduce federal spending during the next decade by $1.058 trillion.

The law made more than a dozen changes to the state-federal health program for lower income individuals and certain people with disabilities, though some of those have larger budget impacts than others.

Language barring Medicaid spending from going to Planned Parenthood for one year would actually increase federal deficits during the 10-year window by $53 million.

The CBO score shows that policy change would decrease federal spending by $44 million this fiscal year and another $31 million during the next fiscal year, before increasing deficits by $91 million during fiscal year 2027 and continuing.

That section of the law is on hold for the moment after a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order earlier this month that required the Trump administration to continue paying Planned Parenthood for routine health care coverage for Medicaid enrollees.

Federal law for decades has barred the federal government from spending taxpayer dollars for abortion services with limited exceptions, so the one-year prohibition on Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood would have blocked patients enrolled in the program from going to their clinics for routine health appointments, like annual physicals and cancer screenings.

The CBO report didn’t include a state-by-state breakdown of the effects of the health care changes in the law, but the agency is expected to release more detailed analysis of the health impacts in the coming weeks.

Nutrition assistance cuts

Apart from Medicaid, two large projected deficit reductions in the law come in the agriculture title’s sections on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

A provision requiring states to pay for some portion of SNAP benefits starting in fiscal 2028 would save the federal government between $5.7 billion and $6 billion per year, totalling just less than $41 billion for the first seven years it will be in effect.

And new work requirements for SNAP would result in $68.6 billion less in federal spending over the 10 years starting in fiscal 2026, the CBO projected.

Federal student loan program

Republicans’ streamlining of the federal student loan program is projected to reduce federal spending in the next decade by $270.5 billion.

As part of a sweeping overhaul of higher education, the law limits repayment options for borrowers with any loans made on or after July 1, 2026, to either a standard repayment plan or an income-based repayment plan.

Extension and expansion of tax cuts

The extension of Trump’s 2017 tax law, plus new tax breaks, will cost $4.472 trillion over the next decade, according to the latest CBO score.

The United States collects the majority of its revenue from individual taxpayers, and the continuation of lowered income tax brackets, plus an increased standard deduction, will comprise the bulk of lost revenue over 10 years, adding up to $3.497 trillion.

Trump also campaigned on several other tax cut promises, including no tax on tips and overtime, as well as no tax on car loan interest. The temporary provisions come with stipulations and will end in 2029. Together they will cost $151.868 billion.

The child tax credit increases under the new law to $2,200, up from $2,000, though lawmakers did not increase the amount lower income families can receive as a tax refund. The CBO estimates the bumped-up tax credit will cost $626.345 billion over the next decade.

Lawmakers offset some costs of the bill by repealing clean energy tax credits, including ending tax credits for personal and commercial electric vehicles, nixing energy efficiency improvement credits for homeowners, and terminating clean electricity production credits. In all, Republicans saved $487.909 billion from axing the measures meant to address the effects of climate change.

Jacob Fischler, Shauneen Miranda and Ashley Murray contributed to this report.

Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought testifies before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Jan. 15, 2025. (Screenshot from committee webcast)

WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Monday ordered the Trump administration to once again publish details about the pace at which it plans to spend money approved by Congress.

U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Emmet Sullivan wrote in his ruling that Congress “has sweeping authority” to require the president to post a website detailing how it doles out taxpayer dollars throughout the year.

“As explained in this Memorandum Opinion, there is nothing unconstitutional about Congress requiring the Executive Branch to inform the public of how it is apportioning the public’s money,” he wrote. “Defendants are therefore required to stop violating the law!”

The ruling won’t take effect until Thursday at 10 a.m. Eastern, giving the Trump administration time to appeal and to seek the ruling be put on hold during the appeals process.

Sullivan was appointed to the federal district court by President Bill Clinton but was selected for two prior judicial appointments by President Ronald Reagan and President George H. W. Bush.

Website pulled down

More than two years ago, Congress began requiring the White House budget office to publicly post apportionment information and the Biden administration took that step, though Trump officials pulled down the website in March.

That decision led to two separate lawsuits, one from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and another from the Protect Democracy Project.

Apportionments are the first step the executive branch takes when spending money appropriated by Congress. The documents and their footnotes usually detail how quickly, or how slowly, departments and agencies plan to send money out the door throughout the fiscal year.

The documents and the public website would have been a window into whether the Trump administration was impounding, or refusing to spend, funding that lawmakers have said it should allocate on behalf of taxpayers.

Trump administration protested provision

An attorney for the Department of Justice argued during a May hearing the Trump administration believes the provision is unconstitutional and seeks to micromanage how the executive branch spends federal funds throughout the year.

The DOJ lawyer also said posting the information within two business days, as called for in the law, would require the White House budget office to divert staff from other work.

Lawyers for CREW and Protect Democracy Project told the judge the White House was in clear violation of the law and that the data is valuable information that helps the organizations monitor if a president were to cease spending on programs funded by Congress.

The watchdog organization attorneys noted during that hearing the Government Accountability Office is looking into dozens of instances where the administration held onto congressionally approved funding instead of spending it.

They said the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, wasn’t a helpful alternative to the website since it can take months or years for organizations to get a response to their request.

Public’s right to see decisions

Sullivan wrote in the 60-page ruling the Trump administration “complaining about the extra work” that goes along with posting the information on a public website represents “a management issue; not a constitutional one.”

“Here, Congress has determined that OMB’s apportionment decisions should be publicly available so that, among other things, it and the public can see whether they are consistent with congressional appropriations,” Sullivan wrote, adding the website aids Congress with “its undisputed oversight role.”

“The Acts do not dictate how OMB should apportion funds, nor do they establish a congressional management role in the administration of apportionments,” Sullivan wrote. “The Acts merely require that the final apportionment decisions be made publicly available to provide transparency to Congress and the public.”

Sullivan rejected an argument from the Trump administration that publicly sharing details about the pace at which it’s spending taxpayer dollars was unconstitutional because it required “the disclosure of privileged information.”

“There is no evidence in the record remotely supporting the notion that the apportionment documents are presidential communications or are in any way subject to the presidential communications privilege,” Sullivan wrote. “Accordingly, the Court rejects this constitutional claim.”

Advocates applaud ruling

Cerin Lindgrensavage, counsel for Protect Democracy Project, wrote in a statement the judge’s ruling “makes clear that the executive branch cannot simply ignore appropriations laws they disagree with on policy grounds, no matter what President (Donald) Trump or OMB Director Russell Vought thinks.

“Congress passed a law making sure the American public could see how their taxpayer dollars are being spent, and we will continue to hold the administration accountable for making good on that promise.”

Nikhel Sus, deputy chief counsel at CREW, wrote in a separate statement that the organization applauds “the court’s thorough and well-reasoned decision, which reaffirms Congress’s constitutional authority to require public disclosure of how taxpayer dollars are spent.

“Americans have a right to know how taxpayer money is being spent. Ensuring public access to this information serves as a critical check on the executive branch’s abuse and misuse of federal funds.”

Rachel Cauley, communications director for the White House Office of Management and Budget, wrote in a statement the administration strongly disagrees with the ruling.

“This leftist, anti-Trump judge undermines the President’s ability to effectively manage his agencies,” Cauley wrote. “Moreover, these progressive dark money groups have zero standing to claim injury for not having access to this privileged internal information.”

The Department of Justice did not return a request for comment about the ruling or whether the administration would appeal to the Circuit Court.

U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee ranking member Patty Murray, D-Wash., wrote in a statement that “the law is clear as day: every president is required to show the public how they are spending taxpayer dollars, and it is past time President Trump and Russ Vought get the website they illegally ripped down back up.”

Senate Appropriations Chairwoman Susan Collins, R-Maine, didn’t immediately return a request for comment. 

No Kings Day protest march viewed from the Wisconsin State Capitol | Photo by Gregory Conniff for Wisconsin Examiner

Early campaign reports this week goosed speculation that Gov. Tony Evers might not run for a third term. Evers, who hasn’t declared his intentions, has only raised $757,214 this year and has $2 million in the bank, compared with the $5 million he raised during the same period in 2021, before his successful bid for a second term.

Some progressives, most vocally Dan Shafer, creator of The Recombubulation Area blog, have been calling on Evers to step aside. Traumatized by former President Joe Biden’s fumbling 2024 campaign, Shafer says Evers, who is 73 (a decade younger than Biden) should not make the mistake of hanging around too long and instead should “pass the torch.”

“This is not ultimately an argument about ideological differences or policy disagreements,” Shafer writes. For him, it’s about age. It’s about the Biden trauma. And it’s about the problem Democrats at both the state and national level seem to have nurturing the next generation of leaders.

For some progressives, it’s also about ideology and policy disagreements. Advocates for child care, public schools, criminal justice reform and protecting health care access were furious that Evers didn’t drive a harder bargain with Republicans in the recently completed state budget deal. 

Still, if Evers announces his retirement, a large, non-MAGA portion of Wisconsin will experience a moment of fear. In our closely divided purple state, there is a real possibility a Republican could win the governor’s office, just as new, fairer maps are finally giving Democrats a chance to compete for power in the state Legislature. The Republicans who have declared so far are wrapping themselves in the MAGA flag. Evers is popular across the state and has shown he can win.

Devin Remiker, the state Democratic party chair, has said he is “praying” Evers will run again. U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, former chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told reporters recently that he couldn’t think of a better governor for Wisconsin than Evers.

If Evers doesn’t run, Attorney General Josh Kaul, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, state Sen. Kelda Roys and Secretary of State Sarah Godlewski are all likely Democratic candidates.

“There’s plenty of people on the bench who would love to be governor,” Pocan said. “… that’s not a concern. It’s really, I want the best person to be governor, and I think the best person who could be governor on the Democratic side is Tony Evers.”

Pocan calls Evers a “responsible adult” in contrast to Republicans who are following President Donald Trump off a cliff, slashing health care and food aid and driving up prices and deficits, making life a lot worse for a lot of people, including a projected 276,000 in Wisconsin who will lose health insurance and 49,000 who will lose food assistance under the federal mega bill.

There is an argument that Evers — “the most quintessentially Wisconsin politician I’ve ever seen,” as Pocan put it — accomplished what most Wisconsin voters wanted him to do in the budget process, put politics aside and get the best deal he could for state residents. Working across the aisle to achieve shared goals with the other party — including a last-minute maneuver that mitigates the disastrous Medicaid cuts Trump and congressional Republicans pushed through, drawing down $1 billion per year in federal funds for Wisconsin, was, as Evers himself pointed out, “significantly different” from the dynamic in Washington. 

“How about that, compromise?” Evers said Wisconsin voters told him, happily, when they heard about the deal. 

If the definition of compromise is a bargain that makes everyone unhappy, Democrats and progressives are clearly the more unhappy parties to this bargain.

Despite the glow of productive bipartisanship when the deal was struck, the details — and how the deal was done — are beginning to grate on some of Evers’ biggest former backers.

Big majorities of Republican legislators voted for the deal in both chambers. Five out of 15 Senate Democrats joined them, and there were only seven yes votes out of 45 Democrats in the state Assembly, where Speaker Robin Vos, who helped craft the budget, made it clear he didn’t need or want Democratic votes.

Arguably, the Democrats who gave impassioned floor speeches denouncing the budget have been in the minority in the Legislature for so long they never have to think about making the kinds of compromises involved in governing a divided state. If you look at it that way, it seems unfair of them to react angrily to Evers, a decent man who shares their goals and has worked diligently to accomplish what he can in the face of nasty opposition. Apart from Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein, who joined the budget negotiations behind closed doors after it became clear Republicans were going to need some Democratic votes in the Senate, Democrats were largely shut out of the whole process.

And that’s the real problem with the way Evers governs, according to Robert Kraig of Citizen Action. By not involving legislative Democrats from the beginning, he disempowered not just those individual legislators but their constituents, giving up the pressure he could have brought to bear on Republicans if he leveraged citizen outrage and demands for action on broadly popular priorities — funding public schools, expanding Medicaid, keeping child care centers open, and the whole list of progressive policies in Evers’ original budget proposal.

Instead, Evers was the kind of adult in the room who sends everyone else out when it’s time to make a decision. 

This governing style, Kraig argues, is badly out of step with the political moment. As an increasingly dangerous, destructive administration sends masked agents to grab people off the street and throw them in detention centers or deport them without due process, liquidates safety net programs and deliberately destroys civil society, it’s going to take a massive, popular movement to fight back.

Maybe Shafer is right that a younger, dynamic Democratic candidate could emerge as a leader of that movement. Maybe the Democratic Party needs to stop praying for likeable, bipartisan father figures to deliver victory and instead open the doors to the somewhat chaotic, populist backlash that is brewing against the oligarchic, authoritarian kleptocracy led by Trump.

It’s a big risk. But we are in very risky times. Democrats, and the public at large, have not yet figured out how to defend against the unprecedented maliciousness of our current federal government and the MAGAfied Republican party. The whole idea of bipartisanship seems outdated in a world where one side is seeking to tear up the social contract, the Constitution, due process, the justice system, fair elections, and the most basic, longstanding protections against poverty, hunger and disease.

These are the same conditions that gave rise to the Progressive Era. Fighting Bob LaFollette fought the leaders of his own party and founded a nationwide movement to wrest control of government from the wealthy timber barons and railroad monopolies who, through corrupt, captive politicians, fought to control all the resources of our state and nation.

Now those same powerful interests are fighting to claw back everything, to destroy the reforms of the early 20th century protecting workers, the environment, and the public sphere. They are smashing public institutions and flouting legal constraints.

Democrats need to make the case to the public that they will fight back. And they need the public to rise up behind them to help them do it. 

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