Wisconsin’s version of C-SPAN is back online after going dark for about seven weeks due to a lack of funding.
In a vote tallied Monday, a state Legislature committee unanimously approved funding to the nonprofit public affairs network.
WisconsinEye’s website was back up Monday morning, including its archive of old videos of hearings and legislative sessions. The nonprofit also livestreamed a press conference in the Capitol Monday and has plans to broadcast legislative activity Tuesday.
It comes after the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Legislative Organization voted 10-0 to approve $50,000 to WisconsinEye for operations costs to resume broadcasting for the Legislature for February.
Those costs will be divided equally between the Senate and Assembly. The full Legislature does not need to vote on the funding.
WisEye went offline on Dec. 15. At the time, the network said it needed “consistent annual funding” to ensure the public doesn’t “lose the only reliable and proven source of unfiltered State Capitol news and state government proceedings.” In November, the network said it needed $887,000 in donations to cover its operation budget for one year.
During WisconsinEye’s absence, Republican state lawmakers enforced rules banning members of the public who are not credentialed media from recording legislative hearings inside the State Capitol.
WisEye has created a GoFundMe with the goal of raising $250,000, or three months of its operating budget. As of Monday morning, the campaign had raised more than $56,000.
WisconsinEye CEO Jon Henkes did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday. He had previously asked the Legislature and governor to remove a matching provision for roughly $10 million in state funding for the network that was included in the most recent state budget.
While WisEye may still face long-term funding challenges, Bill Lueders, president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, said it’s good news for Wisconsinites that the network is broadcasting again.
In addition to providing live coverage of legislative meetings for residents who can’t make it to Madison, Lueders said WisEye’s archive of past meetings is important for historical purposes because it provides a record of the debates and discussions that took place in state government.
“WisconsinEye has long been a tremendously important resource for Wisconsin and advances the cause of transparency in government by letting people see the process of laws being made,” he said. “It was a very sad thing that it was forced to go offline for about six weeks or so. I’m glad that they found a way to bring it back.”
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when many businesses closed or laid off workers, a massive influx of 8.8 million unemployment claims overwhelmed Wisconsin’s aging unemployment insurance system.
That created a backlog of hundreds of thousands of claims. Many potential applicants weren’t able to connect to the department’s call center to complete the process, and some Wisconsinites waited months without receiving a single unemployment payment.
Following those backlogs, the state has made strides to update the system and move away from outdated, decades-old computer systems, said state Department of Workforce Development Secretary Amy Pechacek.
She said DWD now has a digital portal for people to file unemployment claims and send documents online. The department also uses online chatbots to respond to questions in multiple languages, as well as uses artificial intelligence tools to assist with data entry.
“With these enhancements, the department is now paying 88% of all claims filed within three days or less,” Pechacek said. “That other 12% of claims that go a little bit longer are typically just because we have to do investigations if there’s some discrepancies between what the claimant and the employer are saying.”
In a letter to the Trump administration on Tuesday, Gov. Tony Evers said the administration is blocking nearly $30 million in federal funding to Wisconsin, which could prevent the state from finishing the project and potentially leave it vulnerable to cyberattacks and fraud.
“If the Trump Administration does not reverse course and provide the $29 million Wisconsin expected to receive, the state will not be able to complete its UI system modernization project,” Evers wrote to U.S. Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer.
That funding was part of the American Rescue Plan Act, a pandemic recovery law signed by former President Joe Biden, and was being primarily used on anti-fraud measures, according to the governor’s office. Evers’ letter says the U.S. Labor Department “suddenly terminated” the funding in late May.
The termination halted work on identity authentication tools, a digital employer portal, artificial intelligence enhancements, fraud prevention and cybersecurity tools, according to Pechacek. She said the employer portal was the DWD’s next major rollout and would have made it easier for employers to provide information to the state.
“The employer portal is really one of the largest losses from this federal action,” Pechacek said. “Our employers … have to submit quarterly wage information (and) verify claim information, and some of those components are still very antiquated.”
Evers wrote that the Department of Labor “cited no objections” to those initiatives beyond “an unsupported assertion that they ‘no longer effectuate the Department’s priorities.’”
Pechacek said the state has already spent “slightly over half” of the $29 million. She said those grants were “reimbursement-based,” meaning the state first had to spend the money and then be paid back by the federal government.
“There are seven projects that have now been paused in a variety of different states of completion, so those are sunk costs,” she said. “Without realizing the full modernization effort, we can’t roll those projects out.”
The state appealed the Labor Department’s termination and received a letter from the federal government in late July that “acknowledged the appeal while restating the Department’s earlier basis for termination,” the governor’s letter states.
“The people of Wisconsin deserve systems that function, state of the art, with high integrity and accuracy,” Pechacek said. “We are also going to pursue litigation to reclaim the funds which were rightfully awarded to us already and improperly rescinded.”
In addition to the $29 million in lost funding, the project was using $80 million from a different program under the American Rescue Plan Act, according to a report sent to the Legislature’s budget committee. The document states that the $80 million has not been impacted but is “insufficient to support the full modernization work.”
Pechacek said DWD has also asked the state Legislature to allocate additional state funds toward finishing the effort but said there hasn’t been much movement on that front.
Wisconsin isn’t the only state that’s had federal funding to upgrade unemployment systems clawed back by the Trump administration. In May, Axios reported the White House terminated $400 million of that funding across the country. A July report from state agencies said $675 million in grants awarded to unemployment programs in over 30 states and territories had been terminated.
The U.S. Department of Labor did not immediately respond to WPR’s request for comment. In May, the federal agency told Axios in a statement that the unemployment modernization funding was “squandered” on “bureaucratic and wasteful projects that focused on equitable access rather than advancing access for all Americans in need.”
In the letter, Evers also said failing to complete Wisconsin’s modernization effort would put the state’s unemployment system at risk of becoming overwhelmed again during any future economic downturn. He says that would “create acute hardship for Wisconsin families.”
“It is our obligation to prevent this scenario from coming to pass,” Evers wrote. “I urge you to reverse the decision to defund these critical government efficiency and fraud prevention initiatives.”
Pechacek said the state isn’t reverting back to old technology in the pieces of the modernization that have already been completed in “major areas.” But she said failing to fully finish the effort poses a risk to Wisconsinites because there are still aspects of the system running on an outdated coding language.
“Any time we don’t fully invest in upgrading and reach the programmatic goals that we have set to get fully off of the antiquated systems, we are at risk to be overwhelmed again,” she said. “All of that leads us to be more vulnerable, in a time of significant increase of accessing the system, to the cyber attacks, to fraudulent efforts, to being compromised.”
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