Rice-Eccles Stadium on the University of Utah campus in Salt Lake City is pictured on Monday, Jan. 15, 2024. (Photo by Spenser Heaps for Utah News Dispatch)
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday that bars payments from university boosters and some other private-sector donors to college athletes.
The NCAA changed its rules in 2021 to allow athletes to profit from their own name, image and likeness, or NIL. A White House fact sheet Thursday said third-party payments from boosters and other private donors “created a chaotic environment that threatens the financial and structural viability of college athletics.”
“Waves of recent litigation against collegiate athletics governing rules have eliminated limits on athlete compensation, pay-for-play recruiting inducements, and transfers between universities, unleashing a sea change that threatens the viability of college sports,” the order said.
A patchwork of laws exists across states, with no federal NIL law in place. A federal judge in June approved the terms of a nearly $2.8 billion antitrust settlement, which paved the way for schools to directly pay athletes.
“While changes providing some increased benefits and flexibility to student-athletes were overdue and should be maintained, the inability to maintain reasonable rules and guardrails is a mortal threat to most college sports,” the executive order said.
According to the White House fact sheet, the order’s prohibition of “third-party, pay-for-play payments” does not apply to “legitimate, fair-market-value compensation that a third party provides to an athlete, such as for a brand endorsement.”
The order also seeks to preserve and expand “opportunities for scholarships and collegiate athletic competition in women’s and non-revenue sports” and calls on the secretary of Labor and the National Labor Relations Board to clarify the “status” of college-athletes.
A day before the order, two U.S. House panels advanced a measure that would set a national framework for college athletes’ compensation and bar them from being recognized as employees.
That bill, the Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements Act, or ‘‘SCORE Act,” was approved in the House Energy and Commerce and Education and Workforce committees, which both have jurisdiction.
The Federal Corrections Institution in Tallahassee, Florida, photographed on Thursday, July 24, 2025. Ghislaine Maxwell, former girlfriend of the late financier and Florida sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, is serving a 20-year sentence at the low-security prison for conspiring with Epstein to sexually abuse girls. (Photo by Christine Sexton/Florida Phoenix)
WASHINGTON — The fallout over President Donald Trump’s handling of financier and Florida sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s case files permeated business on Capitol Hill Thursday, as Senate Democrats urged release of the information.
Meanwhile, in Tallahassee, Florida, a top Department of Justice official interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend and a key figure in the growing controversy.
David O. Markus, lawyer for Ghislaine Maxwell, speaks to reporters outside the Joseph Woodrow Hatchett United States Courthouse and Federal Building in downtown Tallahassee, Florida, on Thursday, July 24, 2025. (Video by Christine Sexton/Florida Phoenix)
Members of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary accused their Republican counterparts on the panel of “concealing the Epstein files” after they voted to quash an amendment from New Jersey’s Sen. Cory Booker, who proposed tying the start date of an opioid data collection bill to the release of Epstein case material.
The committee’s tumult came a day after U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson sent his members home early for their six-week August break to avoid voting on efforts by both House Democrats and Republicans to make the files public.
Before heading back to their districts, three House Republicans voted Wednesday with Democrats on a House Committee on Oversight panel to subpoena the Department of Justice to turn over all Epstein investigation records. GOP Reps. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Brian Jack of Georgia voted in favor of the push led by Pennsylvania Democrat Summer Lee.
Earlier, House Oversight Chair James Comer of Kentucky issued a subpoena for an Aug. 11 deposition with Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence in Florida for conspiring with the financier to sexually abuse girls.
‘Lies and obfuscation’
Epstein died in his New York City jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal charges for sex trafficking minors. He pleaded guilty in 2008 in Florida for procuring and soliciting minors for sex.
The wealthy broker was surrounded by a powerful circle of friends, including Trump. Attorney General Pam Bondi informed the president in May that his name appeared among many others in the case files, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. The context in which Trump’s name appears is unclear.
“We had the power today, the possibility today, to force out the truth regarding the Epstein files and the lies and the obfuscation that is happening by this administration,” Booker said after the GOP-led panel advanced an amendment offered by Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas that rendered Booker’s effort moot.
Booker eventually withdrew his amendment after roughly 40 minutes of back-and-forth in the middle of a vote, and after Sen. Lindsey Graham vowed to help him with a separate funding issue related to the underlying bill to address opioid overdose deaths.
“What we’re trying to do with this bill is really good, and there’s no end to this (Epstein debate). If this is a headline about ‘Cornyn blocks transparency of Epstein,’ then that would be sad because he’s responding to your amendment that would make the bill, quite frankly, fail,” said the South Carolina Republican. “I don’t think it’s helpful.”
Schumer calls for private Senate briefing
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer also put a spotlight on the Epstein case in his floor remarks Thursday, calling for the Trump administration to provide a closed-door briefing for all senators on details uncovered during the Epstein investigation, including whose names appeared in relation to the sex offender.
“The Senate deserves to hear directly from senior administration officials about Donald Trump’s name appearing in these files and the complete lack of transparency shown to date,” Schumer said.
Trump and his supporters, including some now working in his administration, dealt in conspiracy theories for years on the information surrounding the Epstein case, including whose names turned up during the investigation and the circumstances of his death.
A July 7 Department of Justice memo poured cold water on the fervor, declaring no incriminating “client list” exists and that officials would not be releasing any materials because of the risk of revealing victim identities. The department concluded Epstein harmed over 1,000 victims.
Trump answered swift and sharp criticism from his voter base by calling them “weaklings” for falling for a “Jeffrey Epstein hoax” in several social media posts.
In lieu of releasing the files, he ordered the unsealing of grand jury testimony in the case, which a Florida federal judge blocked Wednesday.
The president also told reporters that it was “appropriate” for Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, his former criminal defense lawyer, to interview Maxwell.
Interview at Florida federal courthouse
Blanche traveled to Florida, where reporters Thursday waited at the Joseph Woodrow Hatchett United States Courthouse and Federal Building in downtown Tallahassee, where the U.S. attorney’s office is located.
The Joseph Woodrow Hatchett United States Courthouse and Federal Building in downtown Tallahassee, Florida, where Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche met on Thursday, July 24, 2025, with David O. Markus, lawyer for Ghislaine Maxwell. (Photo by Christine Sexton/Florida Phoenix)
The courthouse is about 4 miles from the city’s Federal Correctional Institution, where Maxwell is serving time.
Blanche arrived around 9 a.m. Eastern at the courthouse, according to media reports. Maxwell’s appellate lawyer, David O. Markus, told ABC News, “We’re looking forward to a productive day” and declined further comment.
Markus, a Miami-based attorney with the firm Markus/Moss PLLC, emerged just before 4 p.m. Eastern and told news media outside the courthouse, including the Florida Phoenix, that Blanche “took a full day and asked a lot of questions, and Ms. Maxwell answered every single question.”
“She never invoked a privilege, she never declined to answer. She answered all the questions truthfully, honestly and to the best of her ability, and that’s all the comment we’re going to have about the meeting. We don’t want to comment on the substance of the meeting for obvious reasons,” Markus said.
National Public Radio headquarters on North Capitol Street in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, July 15, 2025. (Photo by Jacob Fischler/States Newsroom)
President Donald Trump signed into law Thursday the bill Congress passed earlier this month to revoke $9 billion in previously approved spending for public broadcasting and foreign aid.
Trump’s signature was expected after his Office of Management and Budget compiled the list of requested rescissions.
Congressional Republicans approved a small slice of what the White House initially wanted, but the effort still represents a win for Trump, who used small majorities in both chambers of Congress to claw back money approved in bipartisan spending laws.
The law rescinds $1.1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a congressionally chartered nonprofit that provides a small share of funding for National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service but accounts for much larger portions of local public broadcasters’ revenue. The funding had been approved to cover the next two fiscal years.
The law also cancels about $8 billion in foreign aid accounts, including global health initiatives.
Republicans have long criticized NPR and PBS news programs as biased toward politically liberal points of view, while Trump’s America First movement has consistently called for reducing foreign aid.
The law does not touch the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, after Senate Republicans removed a provision to defund the program created during Republican George W. Bush’s presidency.
No Democrats voted for the law. Two Republicans in each chamber — Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Mike Turner of Ohio — voted against it.
Senate Appropriations Vice Chair Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat, warned the move undermined the annual appropriations process, which typically involves consideration of rescissions requests during bipartisan negotiations over government spending.
Congress last approved a stand-alone rescissions bill in 1992, following a series of requests from President George H.W. Bush, according to a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.
The Lyndon Baines Johnson Department of Education Building pictured on Nov. 25, 2024. (Photo by Shauneen Miranda/States Newsroom)
WASHINGTON — U.S. Senate Democrats on Thursday slammed the “assault” on public education by President Donald Trump’s administration, underscoring the impact of billions of dollars in funds still frozen for K-12 schools and ongoing efforts to dismantle the Education Department.
Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono, who hosted a forum alongside several Democratic colleagues that also heard testimony from education leaders, advocates and leading labor union voices, said Trump is engaged in “an all-out, coordinated attack on public education.”
The agency has seen a dizzying array of cuts, overhauls and changes since Trump took office as he seeks to dramatically redefine the federal role in education and take an axe to the agency.
This month, the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily cleared the way for the administration to carry out mass layoffs and a plan to dramatically downsize the Department of Education that Trump ordered earlier this year.
“How can we expect our schools to plan for the upcoming school year when they are confronted with chaos and uncertainty from this administration?” Hirono said at the forum.
Compounding the issue, the administration garnered bipartisan backlash after notifying states that it would be withholding $6.8 billion in funds for K-12 schools just a day before July 1, when these dollars are typically sent out as educators plan for the coming school year.
The administration last week confirmed the release of a portion of those funds that support before- and after-school programs and summer programs, totaling $1.3 billion, but it has yet to release the remaining $5.5 billion that go toward migrant education, English-language learning, adult education and literacy programs, among other initiatives.
“How dare they take the monies that you appropriated, that schools need right now, as schools start in the next two weeks, taking it away from summer school, from after-school, from kids that need English-language acquisition — how dare they do that?” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said at the forum.
“How come we have to constantly go in and sue them and sue them and sue them to get things that you already appropriated?” said Weingarten, who leads one of the country’s largest teachers unions.
Jacqueline Rodriguez, CEO of the National Center for Learning Disabilities, said the withheld money was devastating to students with disabilities.
“This funding delay is sabotaging student learning, educator preparedness and essential services, causing heavy impacts on those students with disabilities,” she said.
“To educators, this isn’t a delay, it’s a breach of public trust,” she said, adding that the freeze is “forcing schools to make tough choices about how they now have to reallocate funding.”
National school voucher program
The forum also took aim at a sweeping national school voucher program included in the mega tax and spending cut bill that Trump signed into law July 4.
The permanent program starts in 2027 and allocates up to $1,700 in federal tax credits for individuals who donate to organizations that provide private and religious school scholarships.
“What we are seeing is just a wholesale dismantling and disruption of the public education system,” said Denise Forte, president and CEO of the nonprofit policy and advocacy group EdTrust.
“And with this new national voucher scheme — which is exactly what it is — that’s really about making sure that students from wealthier families who had already been participating in private schooling will have access to even more public dollars.”
Former Education secretary speaks out
Earlier Thursday, former U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona also criticized Trump’s “attacks” on education, including the billions of dollars in frozen funds.
“The irony is, this is really impacting many of the communities that really were rooting for this current administration,” Cardona, who was Education secretary under then-President Joe Biden, said on a press call hosted by Defend America Action that also featured Karen Smith, a member of Pennsylvania’s Central Bucks School District School Board as well as Nick Melvoin, a member of the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education.
“They’re being impacted the most in many ways,” Cardona said. “I always say, all students are going to be impacted, but the students furthest from opportunity are going to be impacted the most and more severely and more quickly, so let’s put that perspective on what’s happening in education — policies have consequences, and the consequences are going to be felt for decades, just from what was done in the last five months.”
Gov. Tony Evers will not run for a third term in office. Evers delivers his 2025 state budget address. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)
Gov. Tony Evers announced in a two-minute video Thursday that he would not be running for reelection — launching the first open race for governor in Wisconsin since 2010.
The decision came after months of waiting as Evers said he wouldn’t make a decision until the 2025-27 state budget was completed. After he signed the budget in early July, anticipation of his decision increased along with debate over whether he would be the best candidate among Democrats.
Evers said there was “no question” he could win another term, but said that “whether I’d win or not has never been part of my calculus about running again.” He said he won’t run in order to spend time with his family.
“Wisconsin, the only thing I love more than being your governor is being a husband, a dad, and a grandpa,” Evers said. “For five decades, my family has sacrificed to give me the gift of service. They’re my world. And I owe it to them to focus on doing all the things we enjoy and love doing together.”
Evers was elected to the office in 2018 — ousting Gov. Scott Walker in a close election. Previously he served as state superintendent of public instruction from 2009-2019 and was known for his advocacy for public education.
During his time in office, Evers has worked with Republican and Democratic lawmakers to write four state budgets, using his partial veto power extensively at times, and signed new, fairer legislative maps into law.
Democrats expressed appreciation for Evers’ service and are now considering the future, including who might run for the office.
U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin said Evers’ “commitment to every kid’s education, our teachers, and public schools will undoubtedly shape our future for the better and be a cornerstone of his legacy” and that his “steady hand led us through a once-in-a-generation pandemic, and Wisconsin came out the other side with a strong economy, record low unemployment, and a strong sense of community that bonds us all.”
Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer (D-Racine) said Evers’ election in 2019 “signaled the end of an era of right-wing governance and a new path forward for Wisconsin” and commended him for vetoing Republican bills that would have “harmed Wisconsinites” and working under split government to get “get things done where possible.” She said she respects his decision to do what’s right for him and his family.
“Making the decision to step away from public office is not easy,” Neubauer said. “As Democrats, we will continue the work of ensuring the will of the people is the law of the land.”
Senate Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein (D-Middleton) said Evers’ career has been built on “hard work, compassion, service to others, and family.”
“He has sought and found practical solutions to tough problems, worked across the aisle when he could, and, when that was not possible, he has fought hard for Democratic principles in the face of Republican extremism,” Hesselbein said.
Sen. Chris Larson (D-Milwaukee) told the Wisconsin Examiner that Evers has been a great “goalkeeper” during his time in office, but said Democrats need someone that will try to make goals. He expressed immense disappointment in the budget deal that Evers and Senate Democrats came to with Republican lawmakers and recently penned a letter, which has received over 40 signatures, laying out expectations for a potential 2026 candidate.
“I for one am glad that the governor is reading the room and ready to pass the torch to the next generation to step forward and to lead in this fight,” Larson said. “Now that he is moving on and not running, I’m excited to see who steps forward and what kind of platforms they are going to have to basically meet the moment, not just on K-12 education, but higher ed, on tackling climate change… [and] talking about health care.”
Larson said he thinks the decision to step down could help build enthusiasm among the party’s base, which could bode well as Senate Democrats work to flip the Senate to a Democratic majority for the first time in 16 years.
“It builds an energy, and it builds an excitement,” Larson said.
Larson said he isn’t worried about how a new candidate will match up with a Republican candidate.
“The Republicans, [who are] all lining up behind a right-wing zealot who demands loyalty and has supporters who have driven themselves to be irrational and violent…,” Larson said, referencing Trump, “they’re all going down with the ship.”
This will be the first open election for Wisconsin governor since 2010. Some of the Democrats who have been mentioned as potential candidates include Attorney General Josh Kaul, Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson, state Sen. Kelda Roys, former Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chair Ben Wikler and former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes.
Rodriguez thanked Evers for his work in a statement, saying he has led the state with “integrity, compassion, and a deep belief in doing what’s right – even when it’s hard.”
“There’s still work to do to make sure every family in Wisconsin has a fair shot at a better life – and I’m ready to roll up my sleeves and get to work,” Rodriguez said.
Crowley told WISN-12 just before the announcement that he needs to speak with his family as he considers whether to run. In a statement, he praised Evers for his work that has supported Milwaukee County, including the passage of Act 12, which reworked local government funding in Wisconsin and gave Milwaukee the ability to levy a new sales tax.
“I’m especially grateful for Governor Evers’ partnership in passing Wisconsin Act 12 and securing new revenues and resources for Milwaukee County, putting us on a path to long-term fiscal stability for generations to come,” Crowley said. “Simply put, Milwaukee County is stronger, healthier, and better off because of the leadership and partnership of Governor Evers.”
According to the Associated Press, Barnes, who lost the 2022 U.S. Senate race against Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, said he is “considering” running.
Republicans pan Evers’ record
Two Republican candidates, Washington Co. Executive Josh Schoemann and Whitefish Bay businessman Bill Berrien, have already launched their campaigns. Other Republicans are still considering whether to run, including U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany.
Schoemann said in a statement that he wouldn’t be “outworked” while running for governor and said any Democratic candidate that runs “will be more of the same status quo but even more extreme than Gov. Evers.”
“I look forward to contrasting my record of cutting taxes, reducing government and innovative reforms with their woke, radical agenda,” Schoemann said.
Berrien told reporters on a Zoom call that Evers stepping down would not change his approach to the race. He jumped into the race earlier this month, declaring that he is similar to President Donald Trump, as an “outsider” and businessman. He is the CEO and owner of Pindel Global Precision Inc. and Liberty Precision New Berlin, which are contract manufacturers that make machined parts.
“We have a vision and a mission of where we need to take Wisconsin,” Berrien said. “Now that it’s not going to be Gov. Evers that I’m running against, it’s going to be someone probably sharply like him, so, you know, we’ve got our plan. We are aggressively getting around the state, listening and crafting a vision and a strategy.”
Tiffany fell short of saying whether he would run for the office in a social media post, but said Evers “leaves behind a legacy of decline” and said the state needs to change course before “we end up like MN and IL.”
Former Gov. Scott Walker also made a cryptic post on social media following the announcement, saying “interesting” with a photo of a red hat with the slogan “Make Wisconsin Great Again” and the numbers 45 and 47, referencing nonconsecutive terms served by President Donald Trump.
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) took a more cordial tone, wishing Evers and his wife well.
“No matter what side of the aisle we stand on, the decision to run for statewide office comes with many personal sacrifices that are worthy of recognition,” Vos said. “I want to thank Governor Evers for his service to the state of Wisconsin.”
Republicans have struggled to win statewide elections in Wisconsin in recent years, with the candidates the party supported losing the last three state Supreme Court races, the last two governor’s races, the last two state superintendent races and the last U.S. Senate race.
Republican Party of Wisconsin Chair Brian Schimming said in a statement on Evers’ decision to step aside that he “saw the writing on the wall: Wisconsinites are fed up with far-left policies.”
“While Wisconsin Democrats continue to lose the approval of voters, Republicans are already working on winning up and down the ballot,” Schimming said.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Jamie L. Whitten Federal Building in Washington, D.C., pictured on Dec. 18, 2017. (USDA photo by Preston Keres)
The U.S. Department of Agriculture plans to slash its presence in the Washington, D.C., area by sending employees to five regional hubs, Secretary Brooke Rollins said Thursday.
The department wants to reduce its workforce in the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia from 4,600 to less than 2,000 and add workers to regional offices in Raleigh, North Carolina; Kansas City, Missouri; Indianapolis; Fort Collins, Colorado; and Salt Lake City.
The department will also maintain administrative support locations in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Minneapolis and agency service centers in St. Louis; Lincoln, Nebraska; and Missoula, Montana, according to a memorandum signed by Rollins.
The effort, which the memo said is expected to take years, will move the USDA geographically closer to its constituents of farmers, ranchers and foresters, Rollins said in a press release.
“American agriculture feeds, clothes, and fuels this nation and the world, and it is long past time the Department better serve the great and patriotic farmers, ranchers, and producers we are mandated to support,” Rollins said.
“President Trump was elected to make real change in Washington, and we are doing just that by moving our key services outside the beltway and into great American cities across the country. We will do so through a transparent and common-sense process that preserves USDA’s critical health and public safety services the American public relies on.”
U.S. Sen. Todd Young, an Indiana Republican, called the announcement “very exciting news for Hoosiers.”
“Great to see these services move outside of DC and into places like Indiana that feed our nation,” he wrote on X.
Top Ag Democrat critical
U.S. Rep. Angie Craig, the top Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee, slammed the plan, saying it would diminish the department’s workforce and that Rollins should have consulted with Congress first before putting it in place.
The move by President Donald Trump’s first administration to move USDA’s Economic Research Service and National Institute of Food and Agriculture out of Washington, D.C., resulted in a “brain drain” in the agencies, as 75% of affected employees quit, Craig said.
“To expect different results for the rest of USDA is foolish and naive,” she said Thursday. “Sadly, farmers will pay the price through a reduction in the quality and quantity of service they already receive from the department.
She called on the committee’s chairman, Pennsylvania Republican Glenn “G.T.” Thompson, to hold a hearing on the issue.
“That the Administration did not consult with Congress on a planned reorganization of this magnitude is unacceptable,” Craig added. “I call on Chairman Thompson to hold a hearing on this issue as soon as possible to get answers. We need to hear from affected stakeholders and know what data and analysis USDA decisionmakers used to plan this reorganization.”
Pay rates
The USDA release also appealed to the plan’s cost efficiencies. By moving workers out of the expensive Washington, D.C. area, the department would avoid the extra pay workers in the region are entitled to, the department said.
Federal workers are eligible for increased pay based on the cost of living in the city in which they’re employed.
Washington has among the highest rates, boosting pay for workers in that region by 33%. Other than Fort Collins, whose workers also earn more than 30% more than their base pay, the other hub cities range from 17% in Salt Lake City to 22% in Raleigh, according to the release.
The plan includes vacating several D.C.-area office buildings that are overdue for large maintenance projects, the department said.
It will vacate the South Building in D.C., Braddock Place in Alexandria, Virginia, and Beltsville Agricultural Research Center in Maryland. The George Washington Carver Center in Beltsville will serve as an additional office location during the reorganization, but will also be sold or transferred once the reorganization is complete, the memo said.
Each of USDA’s mission areas will still have a presence in the nation’s capital, according to the release.
But the plan includes consolidating several functions into regional offices in an effort to “eliminate management layers and bureaucracy,” according to the memo.
Forest Service
The U.S. Forest Service, a key USDA agency, will phase out its nine regional offices primarily into a single location in Fort Collins. The agency will retain a small state office in Alaska and an Eastern office in Athens, Georgia, according to the memo.
The Agriculture Research Service will also consolidate from 12 offices to the five regional hubs.
And a series of support functions would be centralized, according to the memo.
Gov. Tony Evers announced Thursday he will not seek a third term. | Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)
Wisconsin Democratic Gov. Tony Evers announced he will not seek a third term in office Thursday — triggering a competitive Democratic primary ahead of the 2026 general election to fill the office.
In a two-minute video posted to social media, Evers said that he wouldn’t be running for reelection despite being sure he could win a third term, because he wants to spend more time with his family.
“I began my run for governor as a proud Plymouth Progressive, and that’s still who I am today. I’m a science teacher at heart who ended up running for office and winning five straight statewide elections,” Evers said. “So, would I win if I ran a sixth time? Of course. No question about that. But whether I’d win or not has never been part of my calculus about running again.”
“Here’s the truth: Wisconsin, the only thing I love more than being your governor is being a husband, a dad, and a grandpa. I’ve spent 50 years in public service. I’m damn proud I devoted my entire career — and most of my life — to working for you. And from Plymouth to Baraboo, Tomah to Oshkosh, Verona to Madison, and everywhere in between, Kathy and my family supported me all the way,” Evers said. “For five decades, my family has sacrificed to give me the gift of service. They’re my world. And I owe it to them to focus on doing all the things we enjoy and love doing together. It’s why, Wisconsin, I’m announcing that I will not be running for a third term.”
Evers had said he would make a decision following the end of the budget cycle, and after he signed the new budget in early July, public debate about whether Evers should run began picking up steam. Some Democrats, including Rep. Mark Pocan and newly-elected Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chair Devin Remiker, expressed their hopes that Evers would run. Some Democratic state lawmakers expressed opposition to a third Evers term. .
Evers was first elected to the office in 2018, ousting Republican former Gov. Scott Walker in a close election and placing a Democrat in office for the first time in eight years. Weeks before he entered office Republican lawmakers sought to strip him of some of his executive powers before he even took office.
Prior to his governorship, Evers served as the Superintendent of Public Instruction from 2009-2019 and was known for his advocacy for public education.
Two Republican candidates, Washington Co. Executive Josh Schoemann and Whitefish Bay businessman Bill Berrien, have already launched their campaigns. Other Republicans are still considering whether to run, including U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany.
A woman cries after her husband is detained by federal agents during a mandatory immigration check-in in June in New York City. The Trump administration’s arrests have been catching a smaller share of criminals overall, and a smaller share of people convicted of violent and drug crimes, than the Biden administration did in the same time frame last year. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
Despite Trump administration rhetoric accusing Democrats of protecting violent criminals and drug-dealing immigrants, the administration’s arrests have been catching a smaller share of criminals overall, and a smaller share of people convicted of violent and drug crimes, than the Biden administration did in the same time frame.
While the Trump administration has caught more immigrants with convictions for drugs and violence, their share of the rising arrest numbers is smaller, as more people get swept up for minor traffic violations or strictly immigration crimes, according to a Stateline analysis.
Forty percent of the nearly 112,000 arrests by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from Jan. 20 through late June were of convicted criminals. That’s compared with 53% of the nearly 51,000 arrests for same time period in 2024 under the Biden administration.
The share of people convicted of violent crime fell from 10% to 7% and drug crimes from 9% to 5%, according to a Stateline analysis of data from the Deportation Data Project.
The project, led by attorneys and professors in California, Maryland and New York, collects and posts public, anonymized U.S. government immigration enforcement datasets obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests.
Some Democratic states are among those with the highest share of violent criminals in this year’s ICE arrests: Hawaii (15%), Vermont (13%), and California and Nebraska (12%) — while some of the lowest shares were in more Republican states: Maine (2%), and Alabama, Montana and Wyoming (3%).
Immigration attorneys see an increased push to arrest and detain immigrants for any type of violation or pending charge as President Donald Trump pushes for higher arrest and detention numbers to meet his campaign promise for mass deportation. Trump officials have called for 3,000 arrests a day, far more than the current average of 711 as of June and 321 a day during the same time period under Biden.
The majority of recent ICE detentions involve people with no convictions. That’s a pattern I find troubling.
– Oregon Republican state Rep. Cyrus Javadi
Arrests have accelerated since about mid-May, when government attorneys began asking to revoke bail and arrest people who show up for court hearings after being released at the border, said Vanessa Dojaquez-Torres, practice and policy counsel for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, which represents more than 16,000 immigration attorneys.
“We’re not completely sure what the reasoning or the goal is behind some of these policies, other than they want detention numbers up,” Dojaquez-Torres said.
“They seem to have really been struggling to get their deportation numbers up, and so I think that’s one of the reasons why we see a lot of these policies going into effect that are meant to kind of circumvent the immigration court process and due process.”
Arrests of people convicted of violent crimes increased by 45% from about 5,300 to 7,700 compared with last year. For drug crimes, the increase was 21% — and they fell as a share of total arrests, from 9% under the Biden administration to 5% this year.
Arrests for those not convicted of any crime nearly tripled to about 67,000, and increased from 47% to 60% of arrests.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security defended ICE arrests Wednesday. Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that the agency was “targeting dangerous criminal illegal aliens and taking them off American streets. Violent thugs ICE arrested include child pedophiles, drug traffickers, and burglars.”
In Oregon, arrests during the first part of last year increased from 51 under the Biden administration to 227 under the Trump administration, with those not convicted of any crime increasing from 34 to 137. Those with convictions for violent crime increased from 3 to 16. Even some Republicans are concerned with the new emphasis on non-criminals.
“The majority of recent ICE detentions involve people with no convictions. That’s a pattern I find troubling, especially when it risks sweeping up people for things like expired tags or missed court dates,” said Oregon state Rep. Cyrus Javadi, a moderate Republican representing Tillamook and Clatsop counties.
Nationally, nonviolent crimes have risen as a share of immigration arrests. The most common crime conviction for those arrested this year is driving while intoxicated, which was also the top offense last year under Biden.
But this year it’s closely followed by general traffic offenses, which rose to second place from sixth place, surpassing such crimes as assault and drug trafficking.
Traffic offenses, outside of driving while intoxicated and hit and run, rose almost fourfold as the most serious conviction on record for those arrested, the largest increase in the top 10. Those offenses were followed by increases in the immigration crime of illegal entry, meaning crossing the border in secret, which tripled.
The increase in traffic violations as a source of immigration arrests is a reason for cities to consider limiting traffic stops, said Daniela Gilbert, director of the Redefining Public Safety Initiative at the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit devoted to ending mass incarceration.
“It’s an important point to consider intervening in so that there can be less interaction, and so ICE has less opportunity to continue its indiscriminate dragnet of enforcement,” Gilbert said.
The institute argues in general that traffic stops should be limited to safety issues rather than low-level infractions such as expired registrations or single burned-out taillights, both because they do not improve public safety and because they disproportionately affect drivers of color.
Such policies limiting stops under some conditions are in place in 10 states and in cities in six other states, according to the institute.
The most recent state polices took effect last year in California and Illinois, while a policy is set to take effect in October in Connecticut. The most recent city policies were in Denver and in East Lansing and Ypsilanti, Michigan. Six other states have considered legislation recently.
Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.
The U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., is pictured on Sunday, June 29, 2025, as the reconciliation package was under debate. (Photo by Jennifer Shutt/States Newsroom)
WASHINGTON — A majority of Americans believe Republicans’ “big, beautiful” law will either hurt them or not make much of a difference, according to a poll released Thursday by the nonpartisan health research organization KFF.
The survey shows 46% of people expect the new tax and spending cuts law will generally hurt them or their family, while 28% said it likely won’t make much difference and 26% said it will help them.
Those beliefs were skewed by political parties, with 54% of Republicans saying the law will help them or their family, compared to 19% of independents and 7% of Democrats.
People enrolled in Medicaid, the state-federal health program for lower income individuals and people with disabilities, have significant concerns about how changes to the program will impact them.
Sixty-five percent of Medicaid patients under the age of 65 said they expect the law to hurt them or their family. Another 17% said it won’t make much of a difference for them and 18% expect the policy changes to help.
The law makes more than a dozen changes to how Medicaid is run, resulting in a $1.058 trillion spending cut to the program during the next decade, according to an analysis released earlier this week by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
The report projects that 10 million people will lose access to health insurance before 2034.
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.
Some know little about new law
KFF’s survey shows most Americans know at least something about the new law, though 9% of those polled said they know nothing at all and 23% said they know just a little.
Democrats had the highest percent of respondents who said they knew either a lot, 35%, or some, 45%, about the law. Twenty-two percent of Republicans said they knew a lot about their party’s top legislative achievement this year, with 44% saying they knew something, 27% saying they knew a little and 7% saying they knew nothing.
Social media
The vast majority of those polled, 78%, said they saw information about Republicans’ new law on social media during the last month.
Facebook and YouTube were the more popular social media platforms for people to see information about the tax and spending cuts law, followed by Instagram, TikTok, X and Reddit.
Forty-seven percent of those surveyed said the content they saw on social media opposed the policy changes included in the law, while 41% said it was mixed and 11% said it supported the GOP’s work.
Republicans said 26% of what they viewed on social media was in support of the law, with 53% mixed and 21% opposed. Democrats polled said 76% of what they saw was opposed, 21% mixed and 3% was supportive.
Most of those surveyed said the social media content helped them understand what the new law actually does. Sixteen percent said it was very helpful, 46% said it was somewhat helpful, 27% said it was not too helpful and 11% said it wasn’t helpful at all.
David Sacks, U.S. President Donald Trump's "AI and Crypto Czar", speaks to President Trump as he signs a series of executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House on Jan. 23, 2025 in Washington, D.C. Trump signed a range of executive orders pertaining to issues including crypto currency and artificial intelligence. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
The administration’s action plan, called “Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan,” released on Wednesday, is a result of six months of research by tech advisors, after Trump removed President Joe Biden’s signature AI guardrails on his first day in office. The plan takes a hands-off approach to AI safeguards, and invests in getting more American workers to use AI in their daily lives.
“To win the AI race, the U.S. must lead in innovation, infrastructure, and global partnerships,” AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks said in a statement. “At the same time, we must center American workers and avoid Orwellian uses of AI. This Action Plan provides a roadmap for doing that.”
The action plan outlines three major pillars — accelerate AI innovation, build American AI infrastructure and lead in international AI diplomacy and security.
The Trump administration says that to accelerate AI in the U.S., it needs to “remove red tape,” around “onerous” AI regulations. The plan recommends the Office of Science and Technology Policy inquire with businesses and the public about federal regulations that hinder AI innovation, and suggests the federal government end funding to states “with burdensome AI regulations.”
The plan does say that these actions should not interfere with states’ ability to pass AI laws that are not “unduly restrictive,” despite unsuccessful attempts by Congressional Republicans to impose an AI moratorium for the states.
The plan also says that free speech should be prioritized in AI, saying models must be trained so that “truth, rather than social engineering agendas” are the focus of model outputs. The plan recommends that the Department of Commerce and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), revise the NIST AI Risk Management Framework to eliminate references to misinformation, DEI and climate change.
The Trump administration also pushes for AI to be more widely adopted in government roles, manufacturing, science and in the Department of Defense, and proposes increased funding and regulatory sandboxes — separate trial spaces for AI to be developed — to do so.
To support the proposed increases in AI use, the plan outlines a streamlined permitting process for data centers, which includes lowering or dropping environmental regulations under the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and others. It also proposes making federal lands available for data center construction, and a push that American products should be used in building the infrastructure.
The Action Plan warns of cybersecurity risks and potential exposure to adversarial threats, saying that the government must develop secure frontier AI systems with national security agencies and develop “AI compute control enforcement,” to ensure security in AI systems and with semiconductor chips. It encourages collaboration with “like-minded nations” working toward AI models with shared values, but says it will counter Chinese influence.
“These clear-cut policy goals set expectations for the Federal Government to ensure America sets the technological gold standard worldwide, and that the world continues to run on American technology,” Secretary of State and Acting National Security Advisor Marco Rubio said in a statement.
The policy goals outlined in the plan fall in line with the deregulatory attitude Trump took during his campaign, as he more closely aligned himself with Silicon Valley tech giants, many of whom turned Trump donors. The plan paves the way for continued unfettered growth of American AI models, and outlines the huge energy and computing power needed to keep up with those goals.
In an address at the “Winning the AI Race” Summit Wednesday evening, President Donald Trump called for a “single federal standard” regulating AI, not a state-by-state approach.
“You can’t have three or four states holding you up. You can’t have a state with standards that are so high that it’s going to hold you up,” Trump said. “You have to have a federal rule and regulation.”
The summit was hosted by the Hill & Valley Forum, a group of lawmakers and venture capitalists and the All‑In Podcast, which is co-hosted by AI Czar Sacks,
In addition to discussing the AI action plan, Trump signed executive orders to fast track data center permitting, expand AI exports including chips, software and data storage, and one that prohibits the federal government from procuring AI that has “partisan bias or ideological agendas.”
He spoke about the need for the U.S. to stay ahead in the global AI race, saying that the technology brings the “potential for bad as well as for good,” but that wasn’t reason enough to “retreat” from technological advancement. The U.S. is entering a “golden age,” he said in his speech.
“It will be powered by American energy. It will be run on American technology improved by American artificial intelligence, and it will make America richer, stronger, greater, freer, and more powerful than ever before,” Trump said.
During the address, Trump addressed his evolving relationship with tech CEOs, calling out Amazon, Google, Microsoft for investing $320 billion in data centers and AI infrastructure this year.
“I didn’t like them so much my first term, when I was running, I wouldn’t say I was thrilled with them, but I’ve gotten to know them and like them,” Trump said. “And I think they got to like me, but I think they got to like my policies, maybe much more than me.”
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI — one of the tech giants that stands to flourish under the proposed policies — spoke Tuesday about the productivity and innovation potential that AI has unlocked. The growth of AI in the last five years has surprised even him, Altman said. But it also poses very real risks, he said, mentioning emotional attachment and overreliance on AI and foreign risks.
“Without a drop of malevolence from anyone, society can just veer in a sort of strange direction,” Altman said.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared his view of the promise and peril of advanced artificial intelligence at a Federal Reserve conference in Washington, D.C. on July 22, 2025. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
For as much promise as artificial intelligence shows in making life better, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is worried.
The tech leader who has done so much to develop AI and make it accessible to the public says the technology could have life-altering effects on nearly everything, particularly if deployed by the wrong hands.
There’s a possible world in which foreign adversaries could use AI to design a bio weapon to take down the power grid, or break into financial institutions and steal wealth from Americans, he said. It’s hard to imagine without superhuman intelligence, but it becomes “very possible,” with it, he said.
“Because we don’t have that, we can’t defend against it,” Altman said at a Federal Reserve conference this week in Washington, D.C. “We continue to like, flash the warning lights on this. I think the world is not taking us seriously. I don’t know what else we can do there, but it’s like, this is a very big thing coming.”
Altman joined the conference Tuesday to speak about AI’s role in the financial sector, but also spoke about how it is changing the workforce and innovation. The growth of AI in the last five years has surprised even him, Altman said.
He acknowledged real fear that the technology has potential to grow beyond the capabilities that humans prompt it for, but said the time and productivity savings have been undeniable.
OpenAI’s most well-known product, ChatGPT, was released to the public in November 2022, and its current model, GPT-4o, has evolved. Last week, the company had a model that achieved “gold-level performance,” akin to operating as well as humans that are true experts in their field, Altman said.
Many have likened the introduction of AI to the invention of the internet, changing so much of our day-to-day lives and workplaces. But Altman instead compared it to the transistor, a foundational piece of hardware invented in the 1940s that allowed electricity to flow through devices.
“It changed what we were able to build. It became part of, kind of, everything pretty quickly,” Altman said. “And in the same way, I don’t think you’ll be talking about AI companies for very long, you will just expect products and services to use this technology.”
When prompted by the Federal Reserve’s Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman to predict how AI will continue to evolve the workforce, Altman said he couldn’t make specific predictions.
“There are cases where entire classes of jobs will go away,” Altman said. “There are entirely new classes of jobs that will come and largely, I think this will look somewhat like most of history, and that the tools people have to use their jobs will let them do more, achieve things in new ways.”
One of the unexpected upsides to the rollout of GPT has been how much it is used by small businesses, Altman said. He shared a story of an Uber driver who told him he was using ChatGPT for legal consultations, customer support, marketing decisions and more.
“It was not like he was taking jobs from other people. His business just would have failed,” Altman said. “He couldn’t pay for the lawyers. He couldn’t pay for the customer support people.”
Altman said he was surprised that the financial industry was one of the first to begin integrating GPT models into their work because it is highly regulated, but some of their earliest enterprise partners have been financial institutions like Morgan Stanley. The company is now increasingly working with the government, which has its own standards and procurement process for AI, to roll out OpenAI services to its employees.
Altman acknowledged the risks AI poses in these regulated institutions, and with the models themselves. Financial services are facing a fraud problem, and AI is only making it worse — it’s easier than ever to fake voice or likeness authentication, Altman said.
AI decisionmaking in financial and other industries presents data privacy concerns and potential for discrimination. Altman said GPT’s model is “steerable,” in that you can tell it to not consider factors like race or sex in making a decision, and that much of the bias in AI comes from the humans themselves.
“I think AIs are dispassionate and unemotional,” Altman said. “And I think it’ll be possible for AI — correctly built — to be a significant de-biasing force in many industries, and I think that’s not what many people thought, including myself, with the way we used to do AI.”
As much as Altman touted GPT and other AI models’ ability to increase productivity and save humans time, he also spoke about his concerns.
He said that though it’s been greatly improved in more recent models, AI hallucinations, or models that produce inaccurate or made-up outputs, are possible. He also spoke of a newer concept called prompt injections, the idea that a model that has learned personal information can be tricked into telling a user something they shouldn’t know.
In addition to the threat of foreign adversaries using AI for harm, Altman said he has two other major concerns for the evolution of AI. It feels very unlikely, he said, but “loss of control,” or the idea that AI overpowers humans, is possible.
What concerns him the most is the idea that models could get so integrated into society and get so smart that humans become reliant on them without realizing.
“And even without a drop of malevolence from anyone, society can just veer in a sort of strange direction,” he said.
There are mild cases of this happening, Altman said, like young people overrelying on ChatGPT make emotional, life-altering decisions for them.
“We’re studying that. We’re trying to understand what to do about it,” Altman said. “Even if ChatGPT gives great advice, even if chatGPT gives way better advice than any human therapist, something about kind of collectively deciding we’re going to live our lives the way that the AI tells us feels bad and dangerous.”
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.
Tiger Stadium at Louisiana State University pictured on Sept. 13, 2024. (Matthew Perschall for Louisiana Illuminator)
WASHINGTON — A measure that would set a national framework for college athletes’ compensation got one step closer to becoming law Wednesday after advancing in two separate U.S. House panels.
The bill’s fate remains uncertain as it makes its way through Congress, and Democrats argue that the legislation would give “unchecked authority” to the NCAA on athletes’ pay and fails to provide labor and employment protections for athletes.
Two panels with jurisdiction over the matter — the House Energy and Commerce and Education and Workforce committees — approved the legislation, known as the Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements Act, or ‘‘SCORE Act.”
The Energy and Commerce Committee’s vote fell along party lines, 30-23.
On the Education and Workforce panel, the 18-17 vote featured all Republicans who were present voting in favor of the measure except Rep. Michael Baumgartner of Washington state. All Democrats on that panel voted against the measure. GOP Reps. Kevin Kiley of California and Elise Stefanik of New York did not vote.
Rep. Tim Walberg, chair of the House Committee on Education and Workforce, said the bill “brings much needed stability to college athletics.”
“Since the NCAA lifted Name, Image and Likeness and transfer rules in 2021, college athletics have been in a period of chaos as constant litigation and efforts to classify student-athletes as employees jeopardize thousands of academic and athletic opportunities,” the Michigan Republican said during his committee’s consideration of the bill.
Kentucky GOP Rep. Brett Guthrie, chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said during his panel’s markup that “without this bill, student-athletes will be left to fend for themselves against bad actors, non-revenue generating sports could face devastating cuts and legal uncertainty will continue to hang over all of college sports.”
The full House will not consider the legislation until at least September, when members return from their summer recess that began one day ahead of schedule Wednesday.
A federal standard
The effort, nominally bipartisan, comes as the college sports world grapples with the fallout from the NCAA’s 2021 guidelines that let student-athletes profit from their name, image and likeness, or NIL. A patchwork of laws exists across states, and there is currently no federal NIL law.
A federal judge in June approved the terms of a nearly $2.8 billion antitrust settlement that paved the way for schools to directly pay athletes.
The bill would prohibit college athletes from being recognized as employees and would require colleges to “provide comprehensive academic support and career counseling services to student athletes that include life skills development programs,” such as those regarding mental health, nutrition, strength and conditioning and financial literacy.
The bill’s lead sponsors are GOP Rep. Gus Bilirakis of Florida and Democratic Reps. Janelle Bynum of Oregon and Shomari Figures of Alabama.
Guthrie, Walberg and GOP Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Lisa McClain of Michigan, Scott Fitzgerald of Wisconsin and Russell Fry of South Carolina were also original co-sponsors.
‘Extreme employment ban’
Rep. Bobby Scott, ranking member of the House Committee on Education and Workforce, said that “instead of holding the revenue-rich NCAA and its powerful conferences accountable, the SCORE Act provides a series of blank checks and bailouts that will not uplift or protect college athletes,” during the panel’s markup.
The Virginia Democrat said the bill “imposes obligations without oversight, fails to include concrete protections and outright bans college athletes from ever having labor or employment protections.”
“This extreme employment ban will not only open the door for further exploitation of college athletes and protect athletic departments’ bottom lines more than the students they serve, it is a broad stripping of athletes’ rights, and that should not be the solution,” he said.
Rep. Frank Pallone, a New Jersey Democrat and ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, voiced similar concerns during his committee’s markup.
The measure “fails to offer meaningful protections to college athletes and completely ignores the true crisis facing colleges and universities,” he said, adding that President Donald Trump “continues to destroy America’s higher education system with reduced federal research dollars, taxes on endowments and cuts to federal student aid.”
Pallone also said the bill “gives the NCAA and conferences nearly limitless and unchecked authority to govern how athletes get paid, if they can transfer schools, and how much time they can be required to spend training, traveling and competing.”
Supporters of Kilmar Abrego Garcia protest outside the Fred D. Thompson Federal Courthouse in Nashville on June 13 before Abrego Garcia's arraignment on federal charges. (Photo: John Partipilo/Tennessee Lookout)
WASHINGTON — Two federal court rulings on Wednesday allowed Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man unlawfully deported to El Salvador by federal immigration authorities in March, to be released from pre-trial detention in Tennessee without the risk of immediate removal from the U.S.
U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw in Nashville denied the government’s request to keep Abrego Garcia jailed while he awaits trial on criminal charges stemming from a 2019 traffic stop.
Abrego Garcia denies the criminal charges lodged against him when the government quietly brought him back into the United States after months of illegal imprisonment in the central American country’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, where he remained until June 6.
“The pieces of evidence the Government cites to, taken alone or together, warrant a finding that Abrego is, at best, a low risk of nonappearance. As an initial matter, the Court agrees with Abrego that the nature of the crimes he is accused of do not, on their own, fall within the categories of crimes Congress specifically enumerated as warranting a presumption of detention,” Crenshaw, appointed by President Barack Obama, wrote in a 37-page opinion.
In a separate ruling in Maryland Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis ordered that authorities cannot immediately take Abrego Garcia into custody upon his release in Tennessee.
Xinis granted Abrego Garcia’s emergency request to return to his home state of Maryland while he awaits trial. Federal authorities previously told Xinis they intended to swiftly arrest Abrego Garcia, if released, on an immigration detainer.
“Accordingly, the Court shares Plaintiffs’ ongoing concern that, absent meaningful safeguards, Defendants may once again remove Abrego Garcia from the United States without having restored him to the status quo ante and without due process. Thus, additional relief is necessary,” Xinis, an Obama appointee, wrote in her 18-page order.
Xinis’ order requires Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, to return Abrego Garcia to the agency’s order of supervision in Baltimore, the jurisdiction of his original immigration proceedings. If ICE initiates his removal to a third country, the authorities must provide 72 hours notice of the destination to Garcia and his legal counsel.
Sent to CECOT
ICE arrested and detained Abrego Garcia in Maryland on March 12, and days later sent him among hundreds of other migrants on legally contested deportation flights to CECOT.
Upon returning Abrego Garcia to the U.S., the Justice Department indicted him on human smuggling charges, stemming from the 2019 traffic stop. His attorneys maintain the Trump administration used the indictment to save face in light of court orders finding Abrego Garcia’s deportation unlawful and the Supreme Court’s order for the federal government to facilitate his return.
Abrego Garcia has had deportation protections in place since 2019, barring authorities from sending him back to his native El Salvador due to concerns he would experience gang violence there.
New Nissan cars are driven onto a rail car to be transported from an automobile processing terminal located at the Port of Los Angeles on April 3, 2024 in Wilmington, California. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said late Tuesday he struck a “massive” trade deal with Japan, lowering his threatened tariffs on Japanese products.
The deal, according to Japanese negotiators, will include a lower rate on the country’s top export: automobiles.
Trump’s declaration of a new framework comes as a legal fight over a large portion of his tariff policy will be heard in federal appeals court next week.
The president announced via Truth Social Tuesday evening that Japan had agreed “at my direction” to invest $550 billion in the United States and will open its markets to more American products, including cars, trucks, rice and other agricultural goods.
In exchange, Trump agreed to lower what he calls “reciprocal” import taxes on Japanese products to 15%, down from the 25% rate he threatened in early July.
Tariffs are import taxes paid by U.S. companies and individuals who purchase goods from other countries.
While some details remained unclear, Trump said the agreement is “the largest Deal ever made,” and continued in a post on his online platform that “there has never been anything like it.”
Japan’s government confirmed the new deal Wednesday. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi said the parties agreed to a 15% tariff on Japanese vehicles and auto parts imported into the U.S. without any volume restrictions — down from the blanket 25% U.S. tariff on foreign cars that went into effect in April. Hayashi delivered the remarks through an English translation during a morning press conference.
Jeff Schott, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said securing $550 billion in investment from Japan would set the agreement apart from other trade deals.
“There isn’t a lot of information about over what period of time this would cover, and how it would be financed, and things like that, but the headline number of $550 billion is certainly notable, if it’s believable and if it’s achievable,” Schott said Wednesday in an interview with States Newsroom.
While specifics are unknown, possible investments from Japan might include Nippon Steel’s takeover of U.S. Steel, or a joint venture to export liquified natural gas from Alaska.
Schott said the trade deal “is likely going to set a template” for trade talks with other nations, including ongoing negotiations this week in Washington, D.C., with South Korean officials.
Aug. 1 deadline set
The news of a deal with Japan came just after the White House announced new trade arrangements with Indonesia and the Philippines ahead of a self-imposed Aug. 1 deadline, when steeper tariffs are set to trigger on trading partners around the world.
Trump had threatened Japan in a letter earlier this month with a 25% “reciprocal” tariff on all Japanese goods set to begin Aug. 1, in addition to special sectoral and national security tariffs on foreign automobiles, at 25%, and imported steel and aluminum, which now sit at 50%.
The president shocked global markets in early April when he announced a universal 10% tariff on every foreign good coming into the U.S., plus staggering additional “reciprocal” import taxes on major trading partners based on the country’s trading relationship with the U.S.
Trump initially slapped a 24% reciprocal tariff on Japan, which imports less from the U.S. than U.S. entities buy from Japan. The U.S. ran a $69.4 billion trade deficit with Japan in 2024, according to the Census Bureau.
Trump has twice delayed his so-called reciprocal tariffs on other economies as his administration attempts to leverage the threats into agreements. The administration has yet to strike a new deal with the European Union, another major trading partner.
Court hearing
The U.S. Appeals Court for the Federal Circuit is set to hear oral arguments July 31 over Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, which he triggered by declaring international trade a national emergency under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
The U.S. Court of International Trade struck down Trump’s emergency tariffs as unconstitutional in a May 28 decision, following two legal challenges brought by a handful of business owners and a dozen Democratic state attorneys general.
Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico and Oregon were among the states that brought the suit.
V.O.S. Selections, a New York-based company that imports wine and spirits from 16 countries, led the business plaintiffs. Others included a Utah-based plastics producer, a Virginia-based children’s electricity learning kit maker, a Pennsylvania-based fishing gear company and a Vermont-based women’s cycling apparel company.
Upon appeal from the White House, the Federal Circuit allowed Trump’s tariffs to remain in place while the case moved forward.
Federal payments for Head Start this year were significantly behind schedule compared with 2024 and that violated the Impoundment Control Act, according to the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office. (Photo by SDI Productions via Getty Images)
The Health and Human Services Department illegally withheld payments from Head Start for the first months of President Donald Trump’s term, a government watchdog reported Wednesday.
HHS payments for Head Start this year were significantly behind schedule compared with 2024. That violated the Impoundment Control Act, a law governing the president’s duty to spend congressionally appropriated funds, according to a report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office.
The law, sometimes called the ICA, allows the president to withhold appropriated funds in some circumstances. But the publicly available data did not show those conditions were met and HHS did not mount any defense prior to the report’s publication, according to the GAO.
“Because that evidence indicates that HHS withheld appropriated funds from expenditure, and because the burden to justify such withholdings rests with HHS and the executive branch, we conclude that HHS violated the ICA by withholding funds,” the report said.
Before the report’s publication, HHS did not provide the GAO with information requested by the watchdog or a legal analysis, according to the report, which was signed by GAO General Counsel Edda Emmanuelli Perez.
However, an HHS spokesperson told States Newsroom in a Wednesday email that it would respond to the GAO and disputed the report’s conclusion.
“HHS did not impound Head Start funds and disputes the conclusion of the GAO report,” the spokesperson wrote. “GAO should anticipate a forthcoming response from HHS to incorporate into an updated report.”
How Head Start works
Head Start is a federal grant program to fund pre-kindergarten services for low-income families. The federal government provides up to 80% of a local program’s eligible costs, the report said. As of last year, 1,600 organizations received Head Start funding for education, nutritional, health and social services.
Organizations receiving Head Start funding generally win grant approvals for five years at a time. Programs in good standing are automatically renewed, according to the report.
Mere days after Trump took office in January, dozens of Head Start grant recipients found they were unable to access funds they’d expected from HHS, according to a Jan. 28 statement from the National Head Start Association, a coalition of grantees.
GAO’s analysis showed the department disbursed about one-third less grant funding in the first three months of the Trump administration than it had over the same period in 2024. The difference amounted to $825 million less for Head Start grants over those months.
The law does allow for HHS to stop funding for grantees before the end of the five-year period under certain circumstances, such as for failing to meet performance standards or becoming under-enrolled.
In those cases, though, HHS must warn the programs of potential cuts in grants, provide a detailed plan the organization can implement to avoid grant cancellation and give the grantee a fair hearing as well as the ability to apply for refunding — all before funding can be cut off, according to the GAO report.
There is no indication HHS took any of those steps before abruptly cutting funds in January, according to the report.
‘The president is not a king’
Sen. Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee, blasted President Donald Trump and his HHS in a lengthy statement that asserted Congress’ power over spending decisions and admonished the administration for harming an important program for working families.
“Trump has signaled he would like to eliminate Head Start—but that’s not his choice to make,” Murray said. “Congress delivered this funding for Head Start on a bipartisan basis, and instead of trying to destroy preschool programs and breaking our laws to hurt working families, President Trump needs to ensure every penny of these funds get out in a timely, consistent way moving forward—and he must also finally get out the rest of the investments he has been robbing the American people of.”
Oregon Democrat Jeff Merkley, the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, highlighted Congress’ role in directing federal funding, calling on Trump and White House Budget Director Russell Vought to comply with appropriations laws.
“The President is not a king, and laws are not suggestions,” Merkley said in a statement. “Once again, we’re seeing proof that this administration is in clear violation of the law under the Impoundment Control Act. The funds appropriated by Congress are not merely suggestions for Donald Trump and Russ Vought to ignore – these are funds that hardworking families rely on, and Head Start is essential to making sure the doors of opportunity are open to every child in our country.”
ACLU lawsuit
The GAO report did not list any further action the agency would take but did note that litigation over the withheld funding is ongoing.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a suit in April in federal court in Seattle that included parents and Head Start grant recipients.
The suit described widespread confusion that Head Start organizations experienced when they could not access expected federal funding, compounded by cuts to support staff in regional offices.
No cooperation
The report detailed the lack of participation by HHS in the GAO’s investigation and tied it to a separate legal fight involving a public website.
“HHS has not provided the information we requested regarding factual information and its legal views concerning the potential impoundment of appropriated funds,” the report said.
Without information from the administration, the watchdog based its findings on publicly available data.
The White House Office of Management and Budget added an obstacle to that task, the watchdog said.
The office “removed agency apportionment data from its public websites, which is both contrary to OMB’s duty to make such information publicly available and to GAO’s statutory authority to access such information,” the GAO report said.
On that question, 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.
Flood waters left debris including vehicles and equipment scattered in Louise Hays Park on July 5, 2025 in Kerrville, Texas. (Photo by Eric Vryn/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration official running the Federal Emergency Management Agency testified Wednesday the response to flash flooding in Texas over the Fourth of July weekend served as an “outstanding” model for the rest of the country.
His conclusions about the catastrophic flooding, which had a death toll of 135 and included extensive search and rescue operations, were questioned by several members of the U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure subcommittee holding the hearing.
David Richardson, the senior official performing the duties of FEMA administrator, told the panel that he “can’t see anything that we did wrong.”
“The response in Texas, which was community-led, state managed and federally supported, brought the maximum amount of capability to bear in Texas at the right time and the right place,” Richardson said. “We made that happen and that is a model of how response should be done.”
Richardson testified that in his view “emergency management is not a pile-on sport. It’s well coordinated, relies on personal relationships, it’s got to be exercised beforehand. And all those things came together on Texas’ worst day.”
‘Texas got what they needed’
Richardson told the panel that while he was on vacation when the Texas flooding began and for several days afterward, he “remained in my truck the whole time” making phone calls to state and federal officials.
“Texas got what they needed when they needed it,” he testified.
When asked by Texas Republican Rep. Brian Babin “what steps will FEMA take to ensure that something like this will never happen again,” Richardson said the agency works “as closely as we can with emergency managers in Texas and the local communities.”
“Through mitigation grants, resilience and those type of efforts, we work with them to build the best emergency management system we can have,” Richardson said. “And as you saw in Texas, under the secretary’s leadership and the president’s leadership, it worked very, very well.”
Arizona Democratic Rep. Greg Stanton, ranking member on the subcommittee, rejected Richardson’s characterization that the Texas response and recovery efforts were handled appropriately.
“It haunts me that we could have had more urban search and rescue pre-positioned in place,” Stanton said. “We could have saved more of those people.”
Stanton alleged that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s requirement that any contract costing more than $100,000 get her approval hindered federal search and rescue operations.
“That bottleneck delayed urban search and rescue teams for more than 72 hours,” he said. “By the time many urban search and rescue teams reached Texas, no one had been found alive for days.”
Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Scott Perry, chairman of the subcommittee, appeared to defend FEMA’s approach to the Texas flooding, saying it’s not possible for FEMA to pre-position resources for all flood warnings.
“Flood warnings happen all across the country on a regular basis and FEMA doesn’t pre-position to every flood warning it gets because they would pre-position literally 365 days a year,” Perry said. “That having been said, with fast-moving disasters, like the one that occurred in Texas, it is not like a hurricane, which you can track, you can anticipate landfall or the location of the disaster to pre-position assets.”
Call-in center in Texas floods
Richardson defended staffing and wait times for FEMA’s call-in center during the two-hour hearing, rejecting reports that people were unable to get through to representatives following the Texas floods.
Stanton said that Noem’s sign-off policy on higher cost contracts caused issues here as well.
“On July 5, less than 24 hours after the tragedy, FEMA’s call center contract expired because of this $100,000 sign-off policy,” he said. “The result, the vast majority of calls from survivors went unanswered. Families desperate for shelter and aid were met with silence.
“Can you imagine losing a family member, losing your home and having your call go unanswered when you’re looking for a lifeline?”
Perry said that the subcommittee was told by another FEMA official that the call center prioritizes people in a disaster area when that disaster is ongoing, but emphasized the panel expected the correct information.
“So you might be getting calls into the call center from across the country, but the ones outside the disaster response area are put kind of behind the ones that are priority, which is the disaster that’s occurring now,” Perry said. “We don’t want to say that anybody is distorting the truth, but we got to make decisions on the correct information.”
Richardson testified that FEMA surged staff to the call center following the Texas flooding, but that Monday was an especially busy day for people contacting the agency.
“All calls were answered within three minutes … and no calls beyond 10 minutes. So it’s from three to 10 minutes,” Richardson said. “And the vast majority of phone calls were answered. The questions were addressed.”
Eliminate FEMA?
Richardson declined to say whether the Trump administration will try to completely eliminate FEMA, saying that the president “wants a better emergency management capability.”
President Donald Trump launched a FEMA review council earlier this year to assess how the agency, which is housed within the Department of Homeland Security, operates and where changes could be made.
Trump and Noem have repeatedly said they think the federal government could get rid of FEMA. Richardson said he expects the review council to issue its recommendations later this year.
When the 2023-25 budget bill made it to Gov. Tony Evers, he exercised his partial veto power, striking two digits and a dash from the years to extend the annual increases through 2425 — an additional 400 years. Evers signed the 2023-25 budget bill on July 5, 2023. (Baylor Spears | Wisconsin Examiner)
A handful of Republican lawmakers are seeking, again, to take away schools’ authority to raise their school revenue limits by $325 per pupil annually for the next four centuries, given to them through a partial veto by Gov. Tony Evers.
Reps. Dave Maxey (R-New Berlin) and Jim Piwowarczyk (R-Hubertus) alongside Sens. Chris Kapenga (R-Delafield) and Steve Nass (R-Whitewater) said in a memo that the bill would put “property tax decisions back into the hands of local voters and taxpayers where they belong.”
“The pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock 402 years before this veto,” the lawmakers said. “It is hard to justify locking in a funding increase for just as long into the future.”
In the 2023-25 state budget bill, lawmakers included a $325 increase to schools’ revenue limits for only two years, 2023-24 and 2024-25. When the bill made it to Evers, he exercised his partial veto power, striking two digits and a dash from the years to extend the annual increases through 2425 — an additional 400 years.
In the last state budget, the Legislature allocated money to school general aid to support the revenue limit increase. The new state budget approved earlier this month did not include any general aid increase meaning that if school districts decide to use the $325 per pupil revenue increase, it will come solely from property taxes. The increase is not automatic and would need to be approved by individual school boards.
The partial veto was controversial at the time with Republican lawmakers complaining that property taxpayers would be burdened by the veto and Evers had broken the deal with lawmakers. Evers defended it, saying he was giving schools a reliable annual funding increase. Republicans sued, attempting to get the veto declared unconstitutional, but the state Supreme Court upheld it in April, saying it was within Evers’ constitutional powers.
Evers celebrated that decision, saying at the time that schools deserve “sustainable, dependable, and spendable state support and investment.”
“For over a decade, the Legislature has failed to meet that important obligation,” Evers said in April. “Importantly, this decision does not mean our work is done — far from it.”
The bill faces a difficult path to becoming law as it would need to pass the Assembly and Senate and not be vetoed by Evers.
The bill authors also complained about the governor’s vast veto power, which is one of the broadest in the nation.
“This use of that power has gone way too far,” the lawmakers said. They referenced the dissent from Justice Brian Hagedorn in the lawsuit, saying that the veto gives the governor “monarchical” powers.
The power has been curtailed in the past through state Supreme Court rulings, including recently when the Court unanimously ruled in another case that one of Evers’ partial vetoes was unconstitutional. Wisconsin governors have also lost some of their considerable partial veto authority through constitutional amendments.
Evers’ 400-year veto led Republican lawmakers to introduce constitutional amendment proposals that would limit the power further. A constitutional amendment would need to pass the Senate and Assembly twice in consecutive legislative sessions and get approval from voters before it would become law.
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 aninterview 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.
From left, Corrine Hendrickson and Brooke Legler take part in a panel discussion on child care and the 2025-27 Wisconsin state budget in the state Capitol on Thursday, Jan. 23, 2025. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)
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 thedocumentary “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.
Child care provider Corrine Hendrickson addresses a rally in front of the state Capitol Friday, July 11, demanding a re-do on the state budget to increase child care funding. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)
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.
Children play at Corrine’s Little Explorers family child care in 2011. (Photo courtesy of Corrine Hendrickson)
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.”
Corrine Hendrickson describes the challenges of being a child care provider during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the importance of government support to the survival of her business, during a Congressional hearing Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2023. (Screenshot via YouTube)
People listen to a sermon before being admitted to lunch at the Hope Center, which assists homeless and addicted residents in Hagerstown, Md. Experts say Medicaid cuts will exacerbate rural communities’ access to mental health care. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Across the nation, Medicaid is the single largest payer for mental health care, and in rural America, residents disproportionately rely on the public insurance program.
But Medicaid cuts in the massive tax and spending bill signed into law earlier this month will worsen mental health disparities in those communities, experts say, as patients lose coverage and rural health centers are unable to remain open amid a loss of funds.
“The context to begin with is, even with no Medicaid cuts, the access to mental health services in rural communities is spotty at best, just very spotty at best — and in many communities, there’s literally no care,” said Ron Manderscheid, former executive director of the National Association of County Behavioral Health and Developmental Disability Directors.
Cuts over the next 10 years could force low-income rural families to pay for mental health care out of pocket on top of driving farther for care, experts say. Many will simply forgo care for depression, bipolar disorder and other illnesses that need consistent treatment.
“Not only do you have very few services available, but you don’t have the resources to pay for the services,” Manderscheid said. “That makes the problem even worse.”
Rural communities are already at higher risk of suicide, with rates almost doubling over the past two decades. Already, rural communities are grappling with a shortage in mental health professionals, making them more vulnerable to losses compared with more urban areas, experts say.
Paul Mackie, assistant director of the Center for Rural Behavioral Health at Minnesota State University, Mankato, studies rural mental health workforce shortages.
“If it [coverage] goes away, what would then be the person’s next option if they already don’t have the resources?” said Mackie, who grew up on a rural Michigan dairy farm. “You can have a rural psychologist or a rural clinical social worker working under a shingle, literally alone.”
Small rural hospitals often provide critical behavioral health care access, he said. One analysis found the cuts next year would leave 380 rural hospitals at risk of shutting down.
States such as Mackie’s Minnesota, which expanded Medicaid eligibility under the 2010 Affordable Care Act, would suffer significant slashes in federal matches as a result of President Donald Trump’s signature legislation. The law, which includes tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the wealthy, cuts the federal government’s 90% matching rate for enrollees covered under expansion to anywhere from 50% to 74%.
States will have to redetermine eligibility twice a year on millions enrolled under Medicaid expansion. Some Medicaid recipients also will have to prove work history. The new law creates work requirement exceptions for those with severe medical conditions — including mental disorders and substance use — but experts say proving those conditions may be convoluted. The exact qualifications and diagnoses for the exceptions haven’t been spelled out, according to a report by KFF, a health policy research organization.
Not only do you have very few services available, but you don't have the resources to pay for the services. That makes the problem even worse.
– Ron Manderscheid, former executive director of the National Association of County Behavioral Health and Developmental Disability Directors
“You can’t work when your mental illness is not treated,” said Dr. Heidi Alvey, an emergency and critical care medicine physician in Indiana. “It’s so counter to the reality of the situation.”
Alvey worked seven years at Baylor Scott & White Health’s hospital in Temple, Texas. As nearby rural critical access hospitals and other mental health centers shut down, the hospital became the only access point for people hours away, she said.
“People who just had absolutely no access to care were coming hours in to see us,” she said. Many had serious untreated mental health conditions, she said, and had to wait days or weeks in the emergency department until a care facility had an open bed.
She’s concerned that Medicaid cuts will only make those problems worse.
Jamie Freeny, director of the Center for School Behavioral Health at advocacy group Mental Health America of Greater Houston, worries for the rural families her center serves. The organization works with school districts across the state, including those in rural communities. Nearly 40% of the state’s more than 1,200 school districts are classified as rural.
She remembers one child whose family had to drive to another county for behavioral health. The family lost coverage during the Medicaid unwinding, as pandemic provisions for automatic re-reenrollment expired. The child stopped taking mental health medication and ended up dropping out of school.
“The child wasn’t getting the medicine that they needed, because their family couldn’t afford it,” Freeny said. “The catalyst for that was a lack of Medicaid. That’s just one family.
“Now, you’re multiplying that.”
Family medicine physician Dr. Ian Bennett sees Medicaid patients at the Vallejo Family Health Services Center of Solano County in California’s Bay Area. The community health clinic serves patients from across the area’s rural farm communities and combines primary care with mental health care services, Bennett said.
“When our patients lose Medicaid, which we expect that they will, then we’ll have to continue to take them, and that will be quite a strain on the finances of that system,” Bennett said. The center could even close, he said.
“The folks who are having the most difficulty managing their lives — and that’s made worse by having depression or substance use disorder — are going to be the folks most likely to drop off,” said Bennett, a University of Washington mental health services researcher. “The impacts down the road are clearly going to be much worse for society as we have less people able to function.”
The psychiatric care landscape across Michigan’s rural western lower peninsula is already scarce, said Joseph “Chip” Johnston. He’s the executive director of the Centra Wellness Network, a publicly funded community mental health care provider for Manistee and Benzie counties. The network serves Medicaid and uninsured patients from high-poverty communities.
“I used to have psychiatric units close by as an adjunct to my service,” he said. “And they’ve all closed. So, now the closest [psychiatric bed] for a child, for example, is at least two hours away.”
Those facilities are also expensive. A one-night stay in an inpatient psychiatric facility can be anywhere from $1,000 to $1,500 a night, he said.
Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.
Login
