Milwaukee native Karl Michael Iglesias found connection through volunteering with a group of friends. He reflects on the experience in the poem "Muerto de Sed."
The post ‘Muerto de Sed’: Serving others in times of helplessness appeared first on WPR.
State regulators signed off on a first-of-its-kind plan in Wisconsin setting how large data centers served by We Energies will pay for the electricity they use and the infrastructure built to power them.
The post State regulators change We Energies’ data center rate proposal to protect customers appeared first on WPR.
Wisconsin U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin announced Friday that the federal government will transfer housing grants from a now-defunct northeast Wisconsin nonprofit to other organizations.
The post US Sen. Tammy Baldwin: HUD will transfer Newcap housing grants to other nonprofits appeared first on WPR.
Wisconsin is suing Kalshi, Robinhood, Coinbase, Polymarket and Crypto.com for allegedly illegally facilitating sports betting on their prediction market platforms, the state’s Department of Justice announced this week.
The post Wisconsin DOJ sues Kalshi, other prediction markets for illegal online sports betting appeared first on WPR.
About 120 Milwaukee high school students who are taking dual enrollment courses at UW-Milwaukee and considering careers in teaching heard from Teach for America alumni on Friday during its annual conference. The event comes at a time when nearly one-third of people who complete their teacher training never enter the classroom in Wisconsin, according to a report released last month by the state Department of Public Instruction.
The post Teacher pathway event gives Milwaukee high school students window into the field appeared first on WPR.
A Dane County judge has dismissed a case brought by Wisconsin youth who challenged state laws that they argue worsen the climate crisis and violate their constitutional rights.
The post Dane County judge dismisses climate lawsuit brought by Wisconsin youth appeared first on WPR.
In an aerial photograph, migrants are seen grouped together while waiting to be processed on the Mexico side of the border across from El Paso, Texas, on Sept. 21, 2023. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court Friday blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order that disallowed immigrants claiming asylum at the southern border.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia found that immigration law allows those fleeing persecution to apply for asylum.
“Congress did not intend to grant the Executive the expansive removal authority it asserts,” Judge J. Michelle Childs wrote, adding that they upheld a lower court’s ruling.
The three panel judges who heard the case were Childs, Justin R. Walker and Cornelia T.L. Pillard. Walker, a Trump appointee, filed a separate opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part from the majority.
Childs was appointed by former President Joe Biden and Pillard was appointed by former President Barack Obama.
“The (Immigration Nationality Act) does not allow the President to remove Plaintiffs under summary removal procedures of his own making,” according to the ruling. “Nor does it allow the Executive to suspend Plaintiffs’ right to apply for asylum, deny Plaintiffs’ access to withholding of removal under the INA, or curtail mandatory procedures for adjudicating Plaintiffs’ Convention Against Torture claims.”
The White House did not respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment.
“This decision puts an end to the inhumane Trump policy of sending people, including families with little children, back to horrific danger without even a hearing,” American Civil Liberties Union attorney Lee Gelernt, who argued the appeal, said in a statement. “The court made clear that the president does not have the unilateral power to wipe away all of the asylum laws enacted by Congress.”
One of Trump’s first executive orders suspended entry to the southern border on the grounds that there was an “invasion,” which the administration claimed was a condition that allowed the president to invoke a section of the law to suspend asylum claims.
The executive order is part of Trump’s immigration crackdown, as he aims to conduct mass deportations of immigrants in the interior and cease migration to the U.S. through curbing access to asylum and refugee resettlement.
In response to the order, immigration advocacy groups filed a class action lawsuit against the Trump administration. The groups who brought the suit were the ACLU, the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, and Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project.
RAICES, Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center and the Florence Immigrant And Refugee Rights Project provide legal services to immigrants, and argued that Trump’s executive order harms the legal aid work of the individual plaintiffs.
U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., in an elevator at the U.S. Capitol on June 30, 2025 in Washington, D.C. Tillis had vowed to oppose President Donald Trump’s pick to replace Fed Chair Jerome Powell unless the administration dropped its Fed investigation. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — The Department of Justice dropped its investigation Friday of the Federal Reserve and Chair Jerome Powell over building renovation costs, a move that could open the door for new Fed leadership next month — and signaled a victory for North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis.
U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro said her office closed the probe after a request to the Fed’s inspector general to examine the cost overruns.
“The IG has the authority to hold the Federal Reserve accountable to American taxpayers. I expect a comprehensive report in short order and am confident the outcome will assist in resolving, once and for all, the questions that led this office to issue subpoenas,” Pirro wrote on X just after 10 a.m. Eastern.
Pirro said she “will not hesitate to restart a criminal investigation should the facts warrant doing so.”
Powell, whose term expires in May, has been the target of repeated public criticism from President Donald Trump, who threatened to fire the central bank’s chair if he did not lower interest rates.
The Trump administration’s criminal inquiry into Powell for a $2.5 billion renovation project at the Fed’s offices has been eyed with suspicion, including from his own party.
Tillis, R-N.C., said he would not vote for Trump’s pick to replace Powell, former Fed Board Governor Kevin Warsh, unless the administration dropped its “bogus” investigation.
A favorable vote by Tillis on the closely divided Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs is necessary to advance Warsh’s nomination, as all panel Democrats oppose him.
Tillis’s office did not immediately respond for comment.
A federal judge last month blocked the administration’s subpoenas to probe the Fed and Powell.
The Department of Justice declined to comment and referred States Newsroom to Pirro’s social media post.
A White House official reaffirmed Pirro’s announcement Friday.
“American taxpayers deserve answers about the Federal Reserve’s fiscal mismanagement, and the Office of the Inspector General’s more powerful authorities best position it to get to the bottom of the matter. The White House remains as confident as before that the Senate will swiftly confirm Kevin Warsh as the next Federal Reserve Chairman to finally restore competence and confidence in Fed decision-making,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai told States Newsroom in a statement.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., issued a statement dismissing the DOJ’s announcement as “an attempt to clear the path for Senate Republicans to install President Trump’s sock puppet Kevin Warsh as Fed Chair.”
“Let’s be clear what the Justice Department announced today: they threatened to restart the bogus criminal investigation into Fed Chair Powell at any time while failing to drop their ridiculous criminal probe against Governor (Lisa) Cook. Anyone who believes Donald Trump’s corrupt scheme to take over the Fed is over is fooling themselves,” she wrote on X and Bluesky late Friday morning, referring to Trump’s abrupt August firing of Feb Board Governor Cook over alleged financial fraud.
Cook successfully challenged her firing in two lower courts. The U.S. Supreme Court is reviewing whether Trump legally dismissed Cook.
Trump, who routinely posts about news of the day on his own social media platform Truth Social, had not commented on the announcement as of 12:30 p.m. Eastern.
During an unrelated Oval Office event Thursday, Trump sidestepped a question about what he hoped to learn from Pirro’s investigation into Powell and the Fed.
Instead, Trump responded by saying he could have completed the Fed’s Washington, D.C., headquarters renovation for $25 million and “had money left over.”
“On top of that, he’s been terrible on interest rates because he should have lowered interest rates. That’s why call him Jerome ‘too late.’ ‘Too late’ — that’s his nickname — Jerome ‘too late’ Powell. He likes me a lot,” Trump said.
Jennifer Shutt contributed to this report.
President Donald Trump's budget for the coming fiscal year proposes to end federal funding for libraries. (Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is looking to eliminate funding in fiscal 2027 for the agency that serves as the primary federal funding source for libraries and museums nationwide.
But congressional appropriators — who rebuffed similar efforts to gut the agency in fiscal 2026 — expressed little enthusiasm for the proposed cut in interviews with States Newsroom. Groups representing museums and libraries across the country also blasted the president’s proposal.
The administration is requesting $6 million in fiscal 2027 for the agency, known as the Institute of Museum and Library Services, “for necessary expenses to carry out (its) closure.”
U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, chair of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies, noted that her panel did not agree to the same Trump request in fiscal 2026 to eliminate funding for the agency.
“I personally have always been a fan of libraries, and it does a lot for local communities,” said Capito, a West Virginia Republican whose panel writes the annual bill to fund the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
“So, that’s what he does, he proposes, and then we look at it and make our own decisions,” she said.
The spending package signed into law by Trump in February provides roughly $292 million for the agency this fiscal year — a sharp rejection of Trump’s efforts.
Capito said that though her committee will consider the president’s fiscal 2027 request, “if you look at what we did last year, it shows that we kind of rejected that premise.”
Rep. Robert Aderholt, an Alabama Republican and chair of the corresponding Appropriations subcommittee in the House, appeared noncommittal about pursuing Trump’s fiscal 2027 request to gut the agency.
In response to States Newsroom’s request for a phone interview, Aderholt provided a written statement.
“We are reviewing the request from the Administration and the requests from every member of the House,” Aderholt said, adding that “this is a member-driven process, and we look forward to working with our colleagues in putting together a strong bill for the American taxpayers.”
The agency was created by Congress in 1996 and has a mission to “advance, support, and empower America’s museums, libraries, and related organizations through grantmaking, research, and policy development.”
The administration has taken major steps to try to dismantle the agency, including through a March 2025 executive order.
However, Trump’s Department of Justice reached a settlement earlier in April with the American Library Association — the nation’s largest library association — and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees — the country’s largest union of cultural workers — that protects the agency and guarantees it will continue issuing grants and program operations.
In another setback for the administration, the DOJ dropped its appeal this month in a case brought by 21 attorneys general, who challenged the administration’s efforts to dismantle the agency and had secured a major court victory in November.
Meanwhile, leading Democrats on the House and Senate appropriations panels dealing with the agency’s spending were quick to lambaste Trump’s proposal in interviews with States Newsroom.
Sen. Tammy Baldwin, ranking member of the Senate subcommittee and a Wisconsin Democrat, described the agency as “such an incredibly valuable entity” and vowed to fight “tooth and nail” to protect it.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro, ranking member of the full House Appropriations Committee and the spending subcommittee with jurisdiction over the agency, said the administration’s request is “just neanderthal.”
The Connecticut Democrat said “we’ll work to restore like we try to do every time,” while adding that Trump’s request indicates that “the barbarians are at the door.”
Leading library and museum organizations fiercely opposed Trump’s request and called on Congress to reject the proposal.
In a statement, Sam Helmick, president of the American Library Association, said Trump’s “continued attack” on the agency in the budget request and the March 2025 executive order to shutter it “shows the extent to which the administration is tone deaf to the needs of millions of Americans who rely on libraries every day: older adults and veterans who use library telehealth spaces; unemployed people who use library resources to find a new job or learn new skills; families who count on story time; and students and faculty who do research in school and academic libraries.”
John Chrastka, founder and executive director of EveryLibrary, said Trump’s proposal is “a direct threat to the infrastructure that millions of Americans rely on every day,” in a statement.
Chrastka, whose organization is dedicated to building support for libraries, said “libraries are not optional,” but instead represent “essential public resources that support literacy, workforce development, and community connection in every state.”
The American Alliance of Museums blasted the proposal as “misguided and out of step with the American public and Congress,” noting that similar efforts in fiscal 2026 and prior budget cycles to yank funding for the agency were rejected due to “strong bipartisan, bicameral support in Congress and sustained advocacy from the museum community.”
The Institute of Museum and Library Services declined to comment on Trump’s fiscal 2027 budget request.
The Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest across Wisconsin's Northwoods make the U.S. Forest Service the largest landowner in the state of Wisconsin. (Henry Redman/Wisconsin Examiner)
The Trump administration’s recently announced plans to radically restructure the U.S. Forest Service have raised concerns among advocates that forest land across Wisconsin and the Upper Midwest could suffer.
The plan, announced late last month, will relocate the agency’s head office from Washington D.C. to Salt Lake City while closing regional offices and research stations across the country. In Wisconsin, the changes are expected to affect about 250 employees across the agency’s offices in Madison and Milwaukee and smaller stations spread across the state.
Research stations in Prairie du Chien and Wisconsin Rapids are being evaluated for closure while the Madison office has been selected to serve as the state office covering Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri and Wisconsin.
These proposed changes come to an agency that has already seen staff attrition over the past year due to the Trump administration’s efforts to severely reduce the size of the federal government. Last year, Wisconsin saw a 19% attrition rate in its U.S. Department of Agriculture staffing level, which includes the forest service.
Proponents of the reorganization say that moving the headquarters out west will bring decision-makers closer to the majority of the public lands managed by the agency. However, through a combination of logging activity in the Upper Midwest, New England and southeastern states, more timber is harvested each year in states east of the Mississippi River.
But opponents have pointed out that Salt Lake City is the epicenter of the growing anti-public lands movement within the Republican Party. U.S. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) has worked to sell off millions of acres of federally owned land while the state of Utah has sued the federal government over its ownership of millions of acres of land in the state.
The advocacy infrastructure surrounding the anti-public lands movement has at times worked to influence environmental policy in Wisconsin.
In the large scope of the Forest Service’s public lands portfolio, Wisconsin’s Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest is just a drop in the bucket. But the existence of the national forest in the Northwoods makes the federal government the largest landowner in Wisconsin.
The Trump administration has explicitly worked to make it easier for extractive industries such as logging and mining to work on public lands. Green Light Metals, a Canadian company, has conducted exploratory drilling on national forest land in Taylor County. Last week, Congress voted to allow mining in the Superior National Forest on the edge of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.
Environmental advocates and union representatives of Forest Service employees say that sweeping changes to the agency could have dramatic repercussions for the rural communities where agency employees often work and could do irreparable damage to the forests themselves and the scientific research conducted at Forest Service stations.
Howard Lerner, president of the Environmental Law and Policy Center, said the plan was clearly an effort to undermine the Forest Service’s ability to conduct research while supercharging the extraction of resources from the country’s public forests.
“The Trump administration’s effort to take apart, as an effective matter, the U.S. Forest Service is deplorable,” Lerner said. “The U.S. Forest Service needs to do a job making sure that its forests, the vast lands across our country that are our national forests, are protected and managed.”
He noted that the agency is currently proposing one of its largest timber sales ever in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, which ELPC is working to stop, and that it’s much harder for regulators to protect the country’s forests if they’re based in a far-away office.
Several people from the National Federation of Federal Employees, which represents many forest service staff members, said the changes were coming to an already demoralized group of staff members while noting that the biggest harm would be felt by the rural areas where the national forests are located.
“Most Forest Service offices are in very rural, poor communities, so if these people are forced to move to Salt Lake, that could be two or three, good paying, middle-class jobs taken out of Rhinelander or wherever they may be sitting,” said Warner Vanderheul, president of union’s Forest Service council.
Steven Gutierrez, a business representative in the federal workers union’s land management division, said that staff members will be divided between those who can’t take any more meddling from the White House and those who stick it out in an effort to do what they can to defend the forests.
“There’s a lot that are standing strong in solidarity right now, and saying ‘I’m going to hold the line to protect democracy,’” Gutierrez said. “And that just by being a civil servant and being a Forest Service employee, that’s their way of standing up against this tyranny that’s happening from this administration.”
But, he said, others will leave and the risk from those departures is the end to all sorts of research projects.
“Now programs get shut down because there’s no one there anymore,” he said. “That research, that institutional knowledge, gets lost because now nobody’s there to do it. Nobody knows what anybody was working on.”
Jenny Van Sickle, a spokesperson for the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, said she’s concerned about the drain of expertise from Wisconsin.
“Moving these regional models to state-based models really complicates and piecemeals out decision-making with these arbitrary borders,” she said. “All of these waterways are connected. All of these forests are connected. So a comprehensive approach to management is vital.”
She said that an organization such as the fish and wildlife commission can help supplement the research done by the Forest Service, but not fully replace it. She noted that the commission has recently worked with the agency to study American marten habitat, wild rice and tribal climate adaptation. Vanderheul said that Forest Service research conducted in Wisconsin has helped produce recyclable glue on U.S. postage stamps and less breakable bats used by Major League Baseball teams.
“A massive reduction in the workforce and professionals that have dedicated their lives to research and protecting these ecological systems is concerning,” Van Sickle said.
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.
Large data centers served by We Energies will pick up the entire tab for new power plants, solar farms and other generators needed to power the massive structures in eastern Wisconsin.
But the full picture of a payment structure the Wisconsin Public Service Commission unanimously approved Friday is more complex.
The new agreement, among the first of its kind in the Midwest,“has the potential to fundamentally reshape the utility system,” Commissioner Kristy Nieto said. It will set a precedent for how the utility will divide the costs and benefits of the vast generation buildout needed to support new data centers, including campuses set to open in Port Washington and Mount Pleasant.
The payment structure diverged from We Energies’ initial proposal in several key ways. Most notably, it requires data center operators to cover the full cost of generators and fuel needed to power their facilities.
Under the utility’s original proposal, data centers could have paid for just three-quarters of the cost of new generators. Other customers would have covered the remaining quarter — along with fuel costs — in exchange for revenue from selling excess power during periods of high electricity demand.
“Existing Wisconsin customers should not pay a single cent to subsidize the service of data centers,” Nieto said during Friday’s marathon hearing.
The scale of data centers’ energy needs leaves utilities and regulators in uncharted territory.
The soon-to-open Vantage data center in Port Washington and Microsoft data center in Mount Pleasant will likely require a volume of electricity “comparable to a mid-sized metro area,” PSC Chair Summer Strand said.
The Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), which oversees most of the Midwest’s grid, anticipates the region may need to add new generation capacity at twice the current rate to avoid shortfalls within the next five years, largely to accommodate rising electricity demands from new data centers.
We Energies’ new arrangement with data center customers follows a year of negotiation with ratepayer advocates, data center developers and the PSC, which regulates the state’s utilities.
From the outset, We Energies said it aimed to shield current customers from worst-case rate hikes.
Data centers “can and will” operate in Wisconsin with or without a payment model tailored for their needs, Strand said Friday. Over the past year, We Energies argued that without a new rate structure, data centers would pay for electricity as if they were ordinary large industrial customers.
That status quo, We Energies Vice President for Regulatory Affairs Richard Stasik testified in January, would leave other customers paying too much for generators needed to power data centers.
Even under the utility’s original proposal, Stasik argued, customers would have saved $1.5 billion compared with a scenario in which data centers paid under the same structure as smaller industrial customers.
But ratepayer advocates, clean energy groups and some elected officials said We Energies’ proposal would have saddled existing customers with unfair costs and risk.
Critics said customers should not pay at all for power plants needed to serve data centers, even if that means giving up potential revenue.
“Requiring the large customers to own both the costs and the benefits,” wrote Cassie Steiner, a senior campaign coordinator with the Sierra Club of Wisconsin, is the “safest” option for the rest of We Energies’ ratepayers.
The We Energies proposal covered only the largest tier of data centers, critics noted. That would have left Wisconsinites to shoulder costs arising from future facilities that, while smaller than those in Port Washington and Mount Pleasant, would still rank among the state’s largest energy users.
“Smaller data centers pose the same level of risk,” Steiner wrote in an email to Wisconsin Watch.
The PSC echoed such concerns on Friday. Commissioners said the structure they approved offered stronger ratepayer protections without tossing aside much of what We Energies negotiated with Vantage and Microsoft.
“I disagree with those that suggested we should simply reject the proposal and send the applicants back to the drawing board,” Commissioner Marcus Hawkins said. He acknowledged the utility’s willingness from the outset to protect non-data center customers, including supporting a requirement that data center operators pay the full cost of generators built to serve them even if they withdraw early from their service contracts.
The three commissioners unanimously agreed that the new payment structure also applied to data centers far smaller than those in Port Washington and Mount Pleasant. Under the new structure, any customer using more than 100 megawatts at peak demand must “subscribe” to enough generators, either existing or newly built, to meet that peak.
The PSC retained We Energies’ plan to give data center operators leeway to overshoot their “subscribed” supply before paying a premium for extra electricity.
Some forms of cost-sharing are mostly outside the PSC’s jurisdiction. The new data centers also require a vast buildout of transmission infrastructure. That undertaking is largely the responsibility of American Transmission Company (ATC), in which Wisconsin’s largest utilities own a majority stake. Because Friday’s case did not directly involve ATC and federal regulators have substantial say in the company’s billing practices, the PSC could only partially address its concerns about the amount non-data center customers will pay to plug in data centers.
By 2027, We Energies’ existing customers will likely pay $63 million for transmission infrastructure needed to serve data centers, Hawkins said. That figure will approach $100 million by 2028.
ATC has not yet reached an agreement with data center operators to limit rate hikes for other customers, but the company is in talks with We Energies on the subject. In what Nieto called a “temporary stopgap measure,” the PSC voted to require a minimum payment for transmission costs based on data centers’ projected energy needs.
If data centers use less electricity than anticipated, Hawkins said, other customers could be left paying more than expected for overbuilt transmission infrastructure — a “huge stranded asset.” The minimum payment requirement could partially shield existing customers in that scenario, but Hawkins added, the issue remains far from resolved.
Despite the loose ends, ratepayer and clean energy advocates welcomed the PSC’s decision as a victory.
“This decision signals that the PSC commissioners heard loud and clear that Wisconsinites have significant concerns about energy affordability and AI data centers,” said Tom Content, executive director of the Citizens Utility Board of Wisconsin. “How this gets implemented in future rate cases remains to be seen, but customers’ interests are in a better place.”
We Energies also raised no public objections to the outcome. The ruling “underscores the importance of our plan to ensure data centers pay their full share for the power they use in our state,” spokesperson Brendan Conway said in a press release. “That is important to us and to the data center companies we are working with.”
The decision could reshape We Energies’ separate rate case before the PSC. That case, filed earlier this month, includes a projected 9.2% increase in customers’ electricity rates over the next two years, in part to accommodate the construction of new generation capacity to support data centers.
The PSC and ratepayer advocates alike said Friday that the new payment structure may set a precedent within Wisconsin and beyond. The decision will not go into effect until the PSC issues a final written order.
Wisconsin regulators: Data centers must cover full cost of their energy needs 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.
Wisconsin is poised to forgo more than $2 billion in sales tax revenue to subsidize hyperscale data centers built by trillion-dollar companies such as Microsoft and Meta.
Data centers were granted a sales tax exemption in the 2023-25 state budget, which was approved by the Republican-controlled Legislature and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers as a way to attract economic development to the state.
That means the $1 billion data center in Beaver Dam, a $20 billion complex in Mount Pleasant and a $15 billion facility in Port Washington don’t have to pay the 5% state sales tax, or local sales taxes, on purchases for constructing and equipping their facilities.
When the budget passed in July 2023, the scale of the data center boom was so uncertain that the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau did not estimate how much state revenue would be “forgone” under the exemption, aside from a hypothetical example.
But now a fiscal bureau projection is in:
The state will be out $1.5 billion in forgone state sales tax revenue during construction, which can take years, plus $369 million annually once the facilities are built.
The estimates apply to the hyperscale data centers under construction in Beaver Dam and Port Washington and the facilities under construction or planned in Mount Pleasant. A much smaller Epic project in Verona is also part of the estimate.
It’s unclear whether the data centers would have been built in Wisconsin without the tax incentive.
“Obviously it’s a big number, but it’s right to think that this is not really revenue that the state realistically could have ever captured,” said economist Ross Milton, a state government tax expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“It seems quite likely that if Wisconsin wasn’t providing incentives of these kinds, we wouldn’t be seeing these data centers being built here.”
Highlighting the fierce competition for development, 38 states offer data center sales tax exemptions or other tax breaks, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Wisconsin offers sales tax exemptions for a wide array of products and services. One of the largest exempts food bought at the grocery store, which reduced state revenue by about $920 million in 2024.
Tricia Braun, executive director of the Wisconsin Data Center Coalition, a business group that supports data center development, pointed out that the fiscal bureau projection does not include economic benefits from data centers, including taxes paid by data center suppliers.
Wisconsin Watch reported in March that just three Wisconsin companies have done more than $1 billion in business supplying data centers.
Jason Stein, president of the Wisconsin Policy Forum, a nonpartisan think tank, said “the state has good possibilities for recovering” the forgone revenue. That could come from spending by construction workers and income taxes paid by those workers, their employers and permanent data center employees, as well as corporate income taxes and utility taxes, he said.
The unexpectedly large amount of forgone revenue has helped fuel efforts for data center regulation.
State Sen. Jodi Habush Sinykin, D-Whitefish Bay, who requested the estimate, said lawmakers should discuss what the state can get in return for the exemption. She said the exemption could be tied to, for example, requirements to protect the environment.
Habush Sinykin wants the Legislature, which Republicans control, to convene what is known as an extraordinary session to discuss a variety of data center bills, rather than waiting until the next regular session in January.
Sen. Romaine Quinn, R-Birchwood, and Rep. Shannon Zimmerman, R-River Falls, introduced legislation in 2023 that led to the exemption and have proposed expanding it. They did not respond to requests for comment.
Their original legislation received more than 200 hours of lobbying support from Microsoft, power companies such as We Energies and Alliant Energy, and business groups. No one registered to lobby against the bill.
Nationally, state data center legislation has shifted from incentives to regulation.
In 2021 and 2022, 44 of the 45 data center bills introduced in states across the U.S. offered tax and economic incentives, according to an analysis released April 22. Since then, many other types of legislation have emerged. In 2026, only 61 of the 262 state data center bills covered incentives. The vast majority dealt with regulation of energy, environment and transparency.
Some states, including Minnesota, have taken steps to restrict or roll back data center sales tax exemptions.
Data center opponent Shawn Haney, a former elected town board member in Dane County, said he understands that Wisconsin created its sales tax exemption to attract economic development. But he thinks it should be modified so that the state can collect some sales tax revenue from data centers.
“I don’t think anybody could have forecasted the size and magnitude of these massive data centers,” Haney said.
“You could do some good things with” the revenue, he said, tossing out a few ideas. “Look at all the roads we have to repair.”
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Wisconsin data center tax break to cost state more than $2 billion 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.
Wisconsin Watch has launched a new, searchable dashboard to track layoffs across the state — the latest release in a broader rollout of news applications, which began this week with a national immigration court data tracker.
The Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development (DWD) maintains a public dataset of layoff notices submitted by employers; our tool aims to make that information more accessible and to highlight statewide or county-level patterns. The tool draws from data dating to 2018 and allows for searches by employer, industry, county and year.
These tools can always be improved, and we welcome questions, suggestions or feedback. If you or your organization find a way to use these tools, please tell us about it.
We’ll release a few more new tools in the coming months, so keep an eye out.
New Wisconsin Watch tool makes statewide layoffs easier to track 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.
Track statewide layoffs across Wisconsin 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.
Several rounds of severe storms last week caused flooding in communities from Janesville to the Milwaukee area, as well as in northeastern and central parts of the state.
The post Repeated rains delay some crop planting in southern Wisconsin appeared first on WPR.
Known as the “Bubble Lady of Wisconsin,” Michelle Hackett has built a business presenting interactive bubble shows around the state and beyond. She's presenting at the fifth annual Dane Arts: Business of Art conference about the growth of interactive events in the digital age.
The post ‘Bubble Lady of Wisconsin’ makes a career out of creative niche appeared first on WPR.
Early Thursday morning, the U.S. Senate adopted a Republican budget measure that would deliver as much as $70 billion for immigration enforcement. The vote is a step toward the GOP using a process known as “reconciliation” to circumvent Democrats and pass the measure with a simple majority.
The post Wisconsin US Sen. Tammy Baldwin says Republican tactic to fund DHS leaves agents without guardrails appeared first on WPR.
Login