Federal disaster assistance is available to individuals in Milwaukee, Washington and Waukesha counties who were affected by historic rainfall and flooding last month.
The assistance could include grants for temporary housing and home repairs, low-cost loans to cover uninsured property losses and other programs to help individuals and families recover from the effects of the storms that occurred Aug. 9-12.
A spokesperson for Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson said that how and when the money will be distributed to individuals will be determined by the Trump administration.
People who sustained losses in the designated areas should first file claims with their insurance providers and then apply for assistance online at DisasterAssistance.gov, by calling 1-800-621-3362 or by using the FEMA App.
The request by Gov. Tony Evers for a presidential disaster declaration also included a request to FEMA’s Public Assistance Program for Door, Grant and Ozaukee counties.
On Friday, FEMA officials announced that additional designations may be made at a later date depending on what damage assessments show.
The Evers administration estimates 1,500 residential structures were destroyed and flooding caused more than $43 million in public sector damage throughout six Wisconsin counties.
“Over the past month, my administration and I have been working hard to ensure the folks and families whose homes, businesses, schools, and community centers were impacted have the support they need to recover,” Evers said in a statement released Thursday evening.
A recent Associated Press data analysis found that disaster survivors are having to wait longer to get aid from the federal government than they did in the past.
Wisconsin will receive nearly $30 million in federal disaster relief to aid victims of last month’s flooding.
President Donald Trump announced Thursday in a social media post that he had approved the state’s request to help Milwaukee and other parts of the state affected by floods. The total approved is $29.8 million.
State and federal officials found the floods caused more than $33 million in damages to private property in Milwaukee, Washington and Waukesha counties. The request by Gov. Tony Evers for a presidential disaster declaration also included a request to FEMA’s Public Assistance Program for Door, Grant, Milwaukee, Ozaukee, Washington and Waukesha counties.
In a statement, Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson called the approval “a significant stride forward in this area’s recovery efforts.”
U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore, D-Milwaukee, spoke on the House floor Thursday to advocate for federal help for the city. In a statement, she said the funds “will help my constituents pick up the pieces, and I will keep fighting for the resources they need until they are made whole.”
U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Oshkosh, received the news of the declaration from Trump.
“Thank you to President Trump for continuing to deliver BIG TIME for Wisconsinites,” Johnson wrote on social media.
U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Madison, in a statement said she would “continue to closely monitor to make sure Wisconsin gets everything we need to be on the road to recovery and the whole-of-government recovery effort does right by all Wisconsinites.”
FEMA representatives are scheduled to return to Wisconsin this month to assess damage to public infrastructure. In addition to the damages to private property, initial reports collected by the state found more than $43 million in damage to public property across six counties.
“I’m beyond excited to lead NNS through its next chapter of growth, as we continue to build on a strong foundation of trust and respect in the community,” Edgar Mendez says. “Our focus is going to be guided by their needs as we map out our future.”
Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service, the nonprofit newsroom dedicated to covering the city’s diverse neighborhoods, has promoted veteran journalist Edgar Mendez to managing editor following a national search.
Mendez, a Milwaukee native and one of the newsroom’s founding reporters, will guide the award-winning newsroom into its next chapter of community-driven journalism.
Mendez’s promotion marks a moment of growth as NNS expands its staff. Alex Klaus joins as an education reporter focused on accountability and solutions in Milwaukee’s K-12 schools, while Jonathan Aguilar, a bilingual multimedia journalist, brings reporting and photojournalism expertise to the team.
‘Trust and respect in the community’
A resident of Milwaukee’s Clarke Square neighborhood, Mendez has long grounded his work in the needs of the community. “I’m beyond excited to lead NNS through its next chapter of growth, as we continue to build on a strong foundation of trust and respect in the community,” Mendez said. “Our focus is going to be guided by their needs as we map out our future.”
Ron Smith, executive director of NNS, said the newsroom’s national candidate search confirmed what Milwaukee already knew: Mendez’s leadership, track record and connection to the city make him uniquely suited for the role.
“It’s funny how the national search for managing editor led us to a local treasure who was already in our newsroom,” Smith said. “Edgar has been with us since our beginning and has built trust in our community through his rigorous, people-centric reporting. He’s not only a champion of great journalism, he’s also a champion of the great journalists who do the work.”
A distinguished career
Mendez has built a career telling the stories of his Clarke Square neighborhood and beyond. His award-winning reporting has earned him a 2018 Regional Edward R. Murrow Award and multiple Milwaukee Press Club honors.
With Mendez’s appointment and the additions of Klaus and Aguilar, NNS is strengthening its capacity to deliver fearless, fact-based reporting to communities of color in Milwaukee.
Mendez’s deep roots in Milwaukee and his reputation for editorial excellence align with NNS’s mission to elevate local voices and cover stories that matter to the people who live, work and serve in city neighborhoods. As part of Wisconsin Watch, NNS continues to expand its impact and rebuild local news in Milwaukee and across Wisconsin.
“We want to give Milwaukee the newsroom it deserves,” Smith added. “The hiring of Edgar gives us the momentum we need to serve our neighbors at a time when fearless, community-centered journalism is needed more than ever.”
As immigration enforcement increases in Milwaukee, some community members want to better document the activities of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.
Comité Sin Fronteras, an arm of Voces de la Fronterra, is training people to serve as “community verifiers,” who confirm or deny reports of ICE actions and document incidents when they do happen.
A key element of the project, dubbed “La Migra Watch,” is to raise awareness about the hotline anyone can use to report possible ICE activity, said Raul Rios, an organizer with Comité.
“That is how, statewide, we can get involved and get on the ground to help each other,” Rios said.
In the video above, Rios explains how the verification process works, and we follow a verifier after a call to the hotline is made.
Thank you so much for being part of the Wisconsin Watch community and for using our mobile app! We launched it as a way to explore new ways of staying connected with readers. In a rapidly changing media landscape, experimentation is key to figuring out where to best invest our time and resources to reach new audiences.
After careful review we’ve decided to discontinue the current version of the app on Sept. 25, 2025. We know that some people may feel disappointed by this decision because they love the convenience of a button on their home screen.
In that case, we have good news for you. You can get a very similar experience by adding a bookmark for our mobile-friendly website to the home screen of your phone. Here’s how to do that:
You will continue to see updates in the app through Sept. 25, 2025, and after that date it will no longer refresh with new stories. We are so grateful for your continued support and thank you for reading and for being part of our work!
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A note for our app users is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
A pig’s head arrives in front of Christopher Lopez.
He knows the drill: cut into the area behind the ears, find two small lymph nodes and incise them three or four times each. Check the nose and mouth for signs of disease — six to nine seconds to finish the inspection. Wash the gloves and sanitize the knives. One to two seconds to breathe.
Another head is already coming.
For a year and seven months, Lopez performed procedures like this for 10 hours a day, five to six days a week. It’s what he was trained for as a consumer safety inspector at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS).
“I would have my fingers start to lock up because I was gripping my knives too hard,” Lopez said. “Even though we kept ourselves at a high standard of being clean, I felt dirty, so I didn’t like to eat. It’s hard to stay hydrated, because if I had to take a drink, I had to take off my gloves, and I don’t have a lot of time to do that.”
At larger processing facilities, Lopez — who left his position in April — would help inspect thousands of animals a day for issues ranging from fecal matter to pathogens. The fast operation rates posed a challenge but were manageable, he said.
“I would say I had enough time,” Lopez said. “Did I have as much time as I wanted? No, absolutely not.”
Many swine and poultry plants across the U.S. are now increasing rates of processing and inspecting animals — or line speeds. The change is part of what government officials call a “modernized” inspection system, which also shifts carcass sorting duties from federal inspectors to company employees.
U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins makes her first official address to employees at the USDA headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Feb.14, 2025. Four weeks later, she announced plans to make faster line speeds permanent for pork and poultry. (Paul Sale / USDA via Flickr)
In March, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced plans to extend modernization waivers and to make faster line speeds a federal standard under President Trump’s second administration.
The move could permanently change the level of oversight FSIS inspectors have on the lines.
The USDA has said increasing line speeds will help companies meet growing demand without “excessive government interference,” according to a March release. Pork and poultry industry groups backed the announcement almost immediately, and one company official told Investigate Midwest that privatizing certain responsibilities allows for more in-house accountability during inspections.
However, critics of the change argue that federal inspectors play an essential role as independent watchdogs in privately run plants, and increasing line speeds with less federal oversight poses a significant risk to consumers, workers and animals.
Paula Soldner, national joint council chairperson of a FSIS inspectors’ union. (Courtesy of Paula Soldner)
“To put it simply, the plant will control every aspect of it with minimal oversight,” said Paula Soldner, national joint council chairperson of an FSIS inspectors’ union.
Shifts to modernization began in 1997 as FSIS permitted faster line speeds and fewer federal inspectors at a handful of swine and poultry slaughterhouses nationwide. In 2014, a new program began permitting poultry plants to modernize voluntarily, and an opt-in system for swine plants followed in 2019.
As of August, 168 poultry plants and 18 swine establishments have converted to modernized models. Waivers for two poultry facilities and four pork plants are currently pending.
At modernized poultry plants, line speed caps have risen from 140 to 175 birds per minute, and their swine counterparts face no line speed limits. All these establishments rely on their own employees to sort carcasses — the process of analyzing meat and trimming off defects — while government inspectors remain hands-off at the ends of the lines.
Though FSIS insists the modernized system keeps federal inspectors in charge, just with fewer physical responsibilities, The Washington Post reported in 2019 that inspection duties are shifting to private companies under modernization — if not on paper, then in practice.
At Wayne-Sanderson Farms, the nation’s third-largest poultry producer with over 26,000 employees, modernization efforts have led to a handoff of inspection responsibilities, according to Juanfra DeVillena, senior vice president of quality assurance and food safety. He confirmed company personnel have taken over initial inspection tasks and are now in charge of ensuring quality, while federal inspectors continue to oversee food safety.
“FSIS is food safety inspection, and they were getting into areas that did not belong to them,” DeVillena said. “What FSIS did is they just switched their focus to what they should have always done, which is food safety, and put the quality oversight back into our operations.”
In a statement to Investigate Midwest, a USDA spokesperson maintained that modernization is backed by “science and common sense.”
“These reforms allow for greater efficiency while strengthening U.S. food production, reducing costs for producers and consumers, and supporting a more resilient supply chain,” the government spokesperson wrote.
‘Some of them can be sneaky’: Inspectors warn of food safety risks
From August 2023 to last April, Lopez worked as an inspector on and off the processing lines at 16 pork, poultry, beef or bison plants in three states. Multiple were modernized facilities, he said, including Pitman Farms, a Utah turkey establishment.
Christopher Lopez, former FSIS consumer safety inspector. (Courtesy of Christopher Lopez)
There, company personnel sorted the carcasses, and as a federal inspector, Lopez observed their actions and screened every bird at the end of the line.
There were benefits to this hands-off role, he said, like being able to “sit there and actually look at product and not have to focus on sharpening our knives.” That’s part of how FSIS framed the change in its modernization policy: By removing inspectors from hands-on duties, the agency said they could devote more time to evaluating carcasses online and completing offline verification tasks “that are more effective in ensuring food safety.”
But under the poultry modernization program, only one federal inspector is stationed on each processing line, responsible for reviewing all carcasses sorted by plant employees. And problems arose for Lopez when the workers he oversaw consistently outnumbered him five to one.
“Yes, we’re there, and we have the potential to see everything that’s going on, but in reality, it doesn’t always work out that way,” Lopez said. “You can’t look at five people and watch everything that they’re doing as well as pay attention to what you’re inspecting.”
To Lopez, the success of a plant’s modernization depends on staffing levels. If line speeds increase, so should the number of plant workers and federal inspectors to maintain food safety standards, he said.
A USDA spokesperson did not address questions from Investigate Midwest about how the agency enforces federal staffing standards at traditional plants, and how these regulations differ at modernized plants.
Soldner, of the FSIS inspectors’ union, has visited several modernized slaughterhouses over the past few years. She said she noticed no glaring food safety concerns because all the facilities were “adequately staffed.”
But even sufficient staffing may not be enough. According to Lopez, FSIS requires its inspectors to undergo “intensive” training prior to certification, where food safety is highlighted as the top priority. At the modernized plants where Lopez worked, he said private employees tasked with carcass sorting went through similar training, though he believes it was not nearly as rigorous.
FSIS does not mandate any standardized training for company sorters. The agency instead encourages companies to conduct independent training based on federal guidelines for both pork and poultry, which are derived from FSIS inspector training protocols.
At Wayne-Sanderson Farms, DeVillena said privately hired sorters undergo annual recertifications using an internal training manual developed from federal guidelines. The training includes classroom lectures, on-the-job training, follow-up sessions and continuous monitoring.
“I honestly don’t know the frequency in which the FSIS inspectors get trained, but I can tell you that for our group, it’s more strict because we own that process,” DeVillena said. “We gotta be able to defend it and validate it.”
But Wayne-Sanderson’s approach is not industry standard — or federally mandated. Critics say that flexibility is the problem. Without enforceable, uniform training requirements, each company can decide how thoroughly its workers are prepared to identify contamination and disease.
In public comments on the 2019 swine modernization policy, several advocacy groups urged FSIS to establish official training for company sorters. Even industry members requested that the agency improve existing training guidelines.
FSIS responded that its current guide was sufficient, and it would not be “prescribing specific sorter training or certification.” When Investigate Midwest asked why, the agency did not respond.
Adequate training only goes so far, Lopez said. In his experience, even if carcass sorters were well-trained, their priorities as private personnel may have leaned toward keeping the lines moving.
“Some of them can be sneaky about what they do,” Lopez said. In instances where he flagged a carcass for contamination but didn’t immediately take control of it, he said employees would sometimes make the contamination “mysteriously disappear” or mix the carcass in with others. “They might do it in the name of efficiency, but not necessarily in the name of food safety,” he added.
In response to Lopez’s experiences at modernized plants, DeVillena said the structure of modernized inspection systems at Wayne-Sanderson Farms makes it “impossible” to hide defects.
“Even if we wanted to do that, which we don’t want to, there’s no way for us to do that,” DeVillena said.
Juanfra DeVillena, senior vice president of quality assurance and food safety for Wayne-Sanderson Farms. (Courtesy of Juanfra DeVillena)
DeVillena described two levels of FSIS oversight at his company: a carcass inspector stationed at the end of the line to catch external contamination like fecal matter, and a verification inspector who examines 10 carcasses in detail each hour, including internal checks, to make sure company employees do their jobs effectively. He emphasized that the latter inspector can open the carcasses, examine every surface and is not directly supervising the sorters’ work — but still has full access to verify product safety.
However, other inspectors have described experiences similar to those of Lopez. In April 2020, Jill Mauer, a federal consumer safety inspector, filed a declaration as part of a 2019 lawsuit against the USDA over its swine modernization policy. In it, Mauer said she’d been working at a modernized pork plant in Austin, Minnesota, for 23 years prior.
“I have witnessed slaughterhouse employees attempt to sneak defective carcasses past me,” her declaration stated. Diseased animals and defects like “toenails, hair, and abscesses are routinely allowed for human consumption” at the facility, Mauer wrote.
Part of the problem, she said, was the short inspection time. At the modernized plant in Minnesota, “inspectors have about two seconds per pig to identify pathology and fecal contamination,” Mauer stated. Investigate Midwest reached out to her for comment, but she declined to speak on the record.
Soldner, who worked as a FSIS inspector for 32 years prior to her full-time role at the inspectors’ union, said this window wasn’t nearly enough time for federal inspectors to spot hazards — even if private employees had already reviewed the carcasses.
The shrinking role of inspectors on pork and poultry lines reflect a fundamental shift in oversight, she said.
“When I came in in 1987, we regulated the industry,” Soldner told Investigate Midwest. “Now, industry regulates what FSIS inspectors have the ability to do.”
Industry groups defend modernization
Pork and poultry industries claim faster line speeds do not make food any less safe.
When the USDA announced its plans to formally increase line speeds in March, the National Chicken Council, a trade association representing U.S. chicken companies, voiced its support. In a March 17 release, the council cited a 2021 study concluding that faster line speeds do not predict higher salmonella contamination risk in young chicken processing plants.
In a statement to Investigate Midwest, Tom Super, the council’s senior vice president of public affairs, emphasized that modernization in poultry processing applies only to the speed of evisceration lines — the “highly automated” areas that involve organ removal, carcass cleaning and inspection.
“Food safety outcomes are not determined by the speed of the evisceration line,” Super wrote. Instead, he said, they depend on maintaining strict protocols, using science-backed safety measures and ensuring consistent oversight.
Investigate Midwest reached out to several other modernized swine and poultry companies for comment about faster line speeds and the reorganization of federal inspectors. None responded to multiple requests for comment.
For years, industry groups have lobbied for faster line speeds, records show.
In 2017, the National Chicken Council petitioned the government to permit faster line speeds in young chicken slaughterhouses. Shortly after, multiple trade associations and corporations shared nearly identical letters of support.
In the letters, industry groups — including the Ohio Poultry Association, the Indiana State Poultry Association, Wayne-Sanderson Farms (then Wayne Farms) and House of Raeford Farms — celebrated the petition as a step forward in “promoting and enhancing FSIS inspection procedures” and “increasing industry efficiency.”
Industry members wrote that they believe modernization would maintain food safety, citing a 2017 federal report that found no increase in salmonella contamination at modernized poultry plants.
“The data also demonstrated that inspectors are performing four times more off-line food safety verification tasks” in modernized plants than in their traditional counterparts, the letters stated.
In one letter, House of Raeford Farms — one of the top poultry producers nationwide — highlighted the “competitive disadvantage” of line speed caps. Plants in other countries like Canada operate at higher line speeds, the company wrote, so eliminating domestic line speed limits would “put U.S. producers on more equal footing.”
FSIS ultimately denied the National Chicken Council’s petition in January 2018, but said it intended to allow faster line speeds at young chicken plants that follow certain criteria “in the near future.” A month later, the agency published that criteria, permitting certain facilities to increase line speeds.
Now, under Trump’s second administration, faster line speeds are on track to become the new federal standard for both pork and poultry.
For plants with high daily outputs, Lopez, the former FSIS inspector, said that faster lines and shifting federal oversight could lead to food safety risks. But he sees potential in modernized systems, he said, especially at facilities that maintain sufficient staff and don’t overwhelm them with thousands of animals a day.
“I think that some of the medium-sized establishments really could benefit from it,” Lopez said. “The large establishments just kind of take advantage of it.”
Is speed or staffing to blame for increased worker injury?
Data shows that meatpacking and poultry companies are among the most dangerous industries in America.
Many workers and advocates say faster line speeds increase risk of injury. Jose Oliva — campaigns director at HEAL Food Alliance, a coalition of food and farm system workers — called the change a “total travesty” for plant employees. Prior to HEAL, Oliva served as director of the Food Chain Workers Alliance, which represents hundreds of thousands of workers in the food system.
“Even though you are wearing protective equipment, that does not give you 100% protection,” Oliva said. “If (workers are) injured or cut themselves, if the injury is not too deep, they just continue to work. The line just keeps moving.”
A policy brief from Johns Hopkins University supports this conclusion, according to Patti Truant Anderson, the brief’s author.
“What we found in our review of literature was that there’s strong evidence that line speeds are associated with higher worker perceptions of injury risk, so they feel like it’s more unsafe when they’re made to work at these higher line speeds,” said Anderson, who is policy director at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. Her analysis also found that line speeds are associated with “lower worker well-being and higher injury risk from repetitive tasks,” she said.
Several reports by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog agency, highlight these concerns. The assessments, published between 2005 and 2017, repeatedly note stakeholder concerns about worker safety with faster line speeds. When asked if GAO is investigating modernization in light of Rollins’ recent announcement, public affairs specialist Jasmine Berry Franklin told Investigate Midwest the agency has “nothing currently in the works.”
The National Chicken Council, however, points to results from the January study on poultry workers, which suggest no associations between evisceration line speeds and MSD risk. The identical study on swine workers found conflicting evidence: Faster evisceration lines were linked to an increase in MSD risk at one facility and a decrease at another.
In the statement to Investigate Midwest, the USDA spokesperson cited the same studies, concluding “no direct link between line speeds and workplace injuries.” The agency’s March 17 announcement to formalize faster line speeds also halted any further collection of worker safety data from modernized plants, calling the information “redundant.”
According to Carisa Harris — principal investigator of both studies and director of the Northern California Center of Occupational and Environmental Health — evisceration line speeds aren’t the main determinant of worker safety.
Instead, she said, the critical metric is piece rate: the number of animal parts handled per minute by each individual worker. While evisceration line speeds measure the speed at which the lines move in one stage of processing, piece rate takes into account both line speeds and staffing levels to determine the individual workload of each employee throughout the entire process.
Both studies found a correlation between MSD risk and piece rate.
“There’s been so much attention on evisceration line speed, and our hope is that the conversation changes because that’s not the variable that’s going to help protect workers,” Harris said. “If we can talk about piece rate by area or by job, that would be a much more productive conversation to have.”
The two studies weren’t without limitations. One, as Harris called it, was “healthy worker survivor bias” — the tendency for results to reflect only workers healthy enough to continue on.
“Those who left employment due to work-related pain or the inability to keep up with the high pace of work were underrepresented,” the poultry report stated. The swine study echoed this limitation.
Debbie Berkowitz, who served as chief of staff at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration from 2009 to 2014, said she believes evaluated plants may have also added staff during the study period to reduce individual workloads while under observation.
“Because (the plants) knew they were being studied, they added workers to jobs, which meant that nobody was working harder and faster in the key jobs that they studied,” Berkowitz told Investigate Midwest.
The USDA spokesperson did not respond to a question about this phenomenon, but Harris acknowledged it was a concern — that plants may have temporarily improved working conditions during the study. However, she said her team regularly interviewed workers to assess whether the conditions they experienced during the studies matched their usual work environments. According to Harris, “very few” reported any differences.
Lori Stevermer, a Minnesota pork producer and immediate past president of the National Pork Producers Council, reiterated that “increased line speeds are not a leading factor in worker safety” in a statement to Investigate Midwest.
Super, of the National Chicken Council, said unsafe line speeds would be counterproductive for the industry itself.
“If line speeds are set too fast, then tasks will not be performed properly and the result will be a costly de-valuing of the final poultry products,” Super wrote in the statement. “No benefit exists for plant management to operate production lines at speeds that are unsafe, and will not permit all work to be performed at high levels of skill and competence.”
Where efficiency meets animal welfare
Slaughterhouse operations are systematic. Animals undergo a step-by-step process that stuns, scalds, removes organs, washes, cuts and chills in a highly efficient fashion.
However, protocol can go awry for a variety of reasons, ranging from worker error to machinery malfunction. And animal welfare advocates allege that it has, especially at modernized swine and poultry plants with increasing line speeds and shifting federal oversight.
Delcianna Winders, director of the Animal Law and Policy Institute at the Vermont Law and Graduate School. (Courtesy of Delcianna Winders)
Delcianna Winders, director of the Animal Law and Policy Institute at the Vermont Law and Graduate School, said that faster line speeds result in more inhumane practices.
“Animals who are not keeping pace with the line are handled violently by workers who are just trying to keep up,” Winders told Investigate Midwest. This involves “increased dragging of animals, hitting of animals and excessive electroshocking” leading up to slaughter, she said.
Concerns like these helped fuel a 2019 lawsuit filed by Winders and a group of animal welfare organizations, challenging the USDA’s swine modernization program. The lawsuit alleged, among other claims, that increasing line speeds and shifting responsibility from federal inspectors to slaughterhouse employees jeopardize humane handling.
“Even downed pigs — animals too sick or injured to walk — were handled in this way, because, according to a supervisor, they ‘don’t have time’ to handle them more humanely,” the lawsuit stated.
As part of the court case, advocates and inspectors submitted a series of declarations about personal experiences with modernization. One testimony came from Mauer, the consumer safety inspector who raised food safety concerns about her modernized pork plant in Austin, Minnesota.
Mauer wrote that on multiple occasions, she noticed pig carcasses with water-filled lungs from the scald tank — a stage in the slaughter process where animals should be dead.
“While there are a few reasons why tank water in the lungs may occur, tank water in hogs’ lungs is an indication that pigs were possibly still breathing at the time they entered the scalding tank,” her declaration stated.
Improper execution at slaughterhouses isn’t a new complaint. In 2013, the Washington Post reported that nearly 1 million birds were boiled alive in U.S. poultry plants every year, based on USDA data. This was in part due to rapid line speeds, which can result in unsuccessful slaughter prior to scald tank immersion, the article found.
But Super, of the National Chicken Council, maintained that modernization only changes the speeds of post-mortem evisceration lines. Leading up to and during slaughter, Super said, chicken processors consider animal welfare “the top priority,” and they “strictly adhere” to federal guidelines for humane handling.
Advocates remain critical. Michael Windsor — senior corporate engagement director at The Humane League, a nonprofit working to end farmed animal abuse — told Investigate Midwest in a statement that faster line speeds in any stage of processing add pressure to the entire system.
“Any increase in line speeds — pre- or post-mortem — create a dangerous ripple effect that increases suffering for animals and hazards for workers,” Windsor stated.
He added that consumers likely have a “limited sense” of what goes on behind closed doors at modernized plants.
“When people think about food safety or animal welfare, they don’t necessarily picture the exhausted workers racing to keep pace with hundreds of birds per minute or the animals being improperly stunned and boiled alive,” Windsor wrote. “This lack of awareness isn’t accidental. The meat industry operates in secrecy, and USDA policies — like allowing company employees to replace federal inspectors — only deepen the opacity.”
Four years after the 2019 lawsuit, the judge dismissed the case and upheld the federal swine modernization program. In a December 2023 ruling, the court found that FSIS had adequately considered humane handling impacts, which was all the law required.
Winders said she believes courts generally defer to the judgment of administration agencies like the USDA.
“It’s very hard to prevail against an agency because everything is going to be interpreted in their favor,” she said.
Winders and her team stand firm on one claim, arguing modernization reduces federal oversight and endangers animal welfare. They’ve appealed the ruling, and an oral argument is approaching in the next few months. With formal laws on the horizon, Winders said issues surrounding modernization are only growing more critical — not just due to risks to animals, but also to workers and consumers.
“It’s hard to disentangle the animal welfare concerns and human safety concerns,” she told Investigate Midwest. “They’re really intertwined.”
Investigate Midwest is an independent, nonprofit newsroom with a mission to serve the public interest by exposing dangerous and costly practices of influential agricultural corporations and institutions through in-depth and data-driven investigative journalism. Visit online at www.investigatemidwest.org.
If you avidly read Wisconsin Watch, you’ve learned plenty about prisons in Wisconsin. As our reporting has shown, they’re overcrowded, understaffed and particularly expensive to operate. In 2020, the state spent $220 per resident to lock up people — significantly higher than neighboring states.
Wisconsin Watch has covered prison issues for more than a decade, but we’ve prioritized that coverage since reporter Mario Koran teamed up with The New York Times to expose a staffing crisis that resulted in extended lockdowns, substandard health care for prisoners and untenable working conditions for correctional officers. Our press corps colleagues joined us with months of sustained coverage, forcing lawmakers and the Department of Corrections to respond in some ways.
We’re proud of that reporting. But as we continue exposing such problems, we’re doubling down on exploring solutions. For instance, Addie Costello and Joe Timmerman last month profiled Camp Reunite, a unique program that helps Wisconsin prisoners maintain relationships with their children — recognizing that family visits have been shown to reduce recidivism.
But how might Wisconsin solve its biggest prison problems? We’re discussing that as a staff. The question is tricky because so many challenges outside of prison walls shape the problems within them, whether its barriers to housing, jobs or health care. That’s why we’re discussing coverage with beat reporters across the Wisconsin Watch and Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service newsrooms.
In the coming months, expect more coverage that highlights more humane and cost-effective ways to protect public safety and rehabilitate people who do break the law. What can Wisconsin learn from other states that have reduced prison populations without jeopardizing safety? We’re asking.
As with all of our stories, we’ll prioritize those with the potential for impact. Our journalism aims to help people navigate their lives, be seen and heard, hold power to account and come together in community and civic life.
Meantime, we want to hear from you. What topics or storylines do you hope to see us follow? What perspectives would you like to share? Feel free to email me at jmalewitz@wisconsinwatch.org.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Every time third-year Milwaukee Area Technical College student Devin Hayden comes to the Office of Multicultural Services, student service specialists welcome her with open arms.
“It’s literally just nothing but ‘hi Devin, how are you doing? How’s your parents?’ ” she said. “I felt like I could talk to them about anything that was going on.”
Now, students like Hayden are wondering where they’ll find support once the office closes on Sept. 18.
In August, MATC announced it is restructuring the office into a new Office of Community Impact and eliminating four student service specialist positions to comply with federal recommendations to end race-based practices.
Some are questioning whether the decision aligns with the message the college sends regarding inclusivity and diversity.
‘Safe space’
Walter Lanier remembers students walking through the doors of the Office of Multicultural Services saying, “this is different when I walk in here.”
Lanier, who ran the department until 2020 and left MATC in 2022, said many students of color consider the office their “home base.” He thinks it will be almost impossible to fill the gap left by eliminating four student support specialists.
They specialize in serving the needs of Black, Indigenous, Asian and Hispanic students but also work with students from other backgrounds.
The office also rescued leftover food from the cafeteria and gave it out to students free of charge, Hayden said. She said some students came to the office for food every day.
“I would cash in on that because sometimes I don’t have enough money for lunch,” Hayden said.
Crystal Harper, a student who’s taken classes at MATC for nine years, said the office is her “safe space.” She credits the office for supporting her growth in school, even connecting her with an internship and supporting her candidacy for MATC governor.
“When eagles fly, they don’t have to move their wings. They’re just soaring. So they told me to be like the eagles — continue to soar,” Harper said. “That’s what my plans are, to continue to soar.”
Electronic signs promote support for MATC students at the front of the downtown campus student center. (Alex Klaus / Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service)
Hayden, who identifies as a Black queer woman, said she didn’t just feel like a number at the Office of Multicultural Services like she does in other spaces on campus.
Eliminating that space contradicts the college’s message of “community and inclusivity,” Hayden said.
“The message that (the college is) spreading that yes, we promote students, we promote students of different walks of life but then at the same time we’re going to eliminate this entire department is ridiculous to me,” Hayden said. “None of us are trusting that. None of us think that that decision is right.”
MATC to ‘champion holistic support for all students’
The four student service specialists received an email on Aug. 19 informing them that the Office of Multicultural Services will be restructured into the Office of Community Impact and their positions would be eliminated.
The office will “champion holistic support for all students,” MATC told NNS in a statement.
The decision comes amid the Trump administration’s efforts to revoke federal funding from colleges and universities that use “race-conscious practices” in programs or activities.
MATC leaders said they restructured the office to align with the administration’s guidance because the office solely serviced students who identify as a specific race or ethnic group.
“Fulfilling our mission to serve all students in our community while adjusting to this guidance from the U.S. Department of Education has been challenging,” read the statement from MATC. “We want to continue to stress our commitment and focus on supporting each and every one of our students, providing them with the resources they need to succeed.”
In August, U.S. District Court Judge Stephanie Gallagher in Maryland determined that the way the Trump administration attempted to threaten revoking Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs was unconstitutional.
MATC leaders said they are equally committed to supporting the employees whose positions were eliminated.
In the email, Michael Rogers, vice president of student engagement and community impact, invited support specialists to apply for two new positions within the Office of Community Impact: one that focuses on “specialized training and student events” and another for “mentorship programs,” if they wished.
Additional concerns
In an Aug. 26 MATC District Board meeting, student service specialist Floyd C. Griffin III, who worked in multicultural services for four years, asked the board why the college eliminated his position.
“I’m living through the indignity of working day after day knowing that my service, my dedication and my livelihood have already been dismissed by leadership,” Griffin said. “After years of commitment, this is how the college treats its employees of color — rushed, silenced and discarded.”
The four service specialists are people of color.
Tony Baez, the former MATC vice president of academic affairs, implemented bilingual programs at MATC in the 1990s. He said MATC President Anthony Cruz should rethink eliminating support specialists.
“MATC is an institution that is so large that with each (support specialist), you can ease them into other kinds of positions to help those students that need the support systems,” Baez said. “He had options.”
National Guard troops, like those President Donald Trump is using to crack down on big-city crime, generally are not trained in law enforcement.
Trump sent National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., in August as a crackdown. The Milwaukee police union president said he might ask Trump to send troops to Milwaukee.
D.C. police get 21 modules of criminal procedure training, and Guard members get none, an analysis found.
The Guard’s primary law enforcement training is crowd control, said the analysis’ co-author, Mark Cancian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
U.S. Naval War College professor Lindsay Cohn, a civil-military relations expert, said most Guard members are not trained in law enforcement, but some are spot-trained.
Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, head of the Wisconsin National Guard, said Guard members are the “wrong people” to fight crime because they’re not trained police officers.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
The top-elected official in Milwaukee County, who rose out of poverty in one of the state’s poorest neighborhoods, launched a bid for Wisconsin governor on Tuesday, saying his background and experience in office make him uniquely prepared for the job.
Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley joins the battleground state’s Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez as the two highest-profile Democratic candidates in the 2026 race to replace Gov. Tony Evers, who is retiring after two terms. The race is open with no incumbent running for the first time since 2010.
Crowley, 39, is vying to become the state’s first Black governor, while Rodriguez would be the first woman elected to the post. There are two announced Republicans, with several others in both parties considering getting in.
The primary is 11 months away in August.
Crowley told The Associated Press in an interview Monday that he wants to be a “governor for all of us,” focusing on lowering costs for families, affordable health care and housing and fully funding public schools.
“I understand the experiences of what many families are going through,” Crowley said. “It’s really about showing up for people and that’s what people want.”
Crowley grew up in the 53206 ZIP code, which a 2013 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee study found was the most incarcerated ZIP code in the country, with a majority of men who lived there having spent time behind bars. The area is also known for high rates of poverty, a high concentration of vacant lots and poor health care.
Crowley leans into his background in his launch video, highlighting how his family was once homeless in Milwaukee but he rose to become a community organizer and was elected to the state Assembly in 2016 at age 30. He served until the middle of 2020, when he was elected as executive of Milwaukee County, the state’s largest county. He was the first Black person to hold that job and also the youngest at age 33.
Three years ago, Crowley started pursuing a college degree at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and graduated in December, all while serving as county executive.
“My upbringing has really given me the guiding principles of how I govern,” Crowley said. “That’s why I stress being the governor for all of us. I know what it’s like to struggle. I know what it’s like to be poor.”
Rodriguez tried to contrast herself with Crowley in a statement reacting to his candidacy, saying that she brings “a proven record of delivering results across all 72 counties.” Rodriguez, unlike Crowley, has won a statewide election. She won the 2022 primary for lieutenant governor.
Both Crowley and Rodriguez have also targeted President Donald Trump early in the governor’s race. In his launch video, Crowley said that Trump’s “chaos and cruelty means that the Wisconsin that we cherish will perish unless we unite and fight back.”
Rodriguez called Trump a “maniac” in her launch video.
Democrats are hoping to hold on to the governor’s office as they also eye flipping majority control of the state Legislature, which Republicans have held since 2011.
Crowley is one of several younger Democratic candidates looking at replacing Evers, who is 73.
Rodriguez is 50, and another likely candidate, state Sen. Kelda Roys, is 46. Former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, who is also mulling a bid, is 38. Attorney General Josh Kaul, 44, is also considering a run.
On the Republican side, Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann, 43, and suburban Milwaukee businessman Bill Berrien, 56, are the only announced candidates. Others, including U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany and state Senate President Mary Felzkowski, are considering running.
Tiffany has indicated that he will announce his decision later this month. Felzkowski said last week that she would not run if Tiffany gets into the race and she was undecided about a bid if he declined.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.
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Juneau County has few grocery stores, and about one in seven county residents, often older and living on fixed incomes, struggles to make ends meet.
The county partners with local producers to host pop-up distributions of healthy foodstuffs.
The Local Food Purchase Assistance program allowed the county to host more than 30 pop-ups last year. Cuts by the Trump administration have reduced that to six, with local businesses backfilling funding.
Donors and volunteers hope to keep the program alive.
On a recent Wednesday about 11 a.m., Dustin Ladd turned the ignition on the county’sFord pickup. He left the office with a humming, refrigerated trailer in tow and wound along country roads through central Wisconsin, stopping at farms to pack the vehicle with food.
Dustin handled nearly all the retrievals and deliveries last year, too. He isn’t one to say “no.”
“It takes me to all sorts of places — good or bad,” said Dustin, 36, who has worked as Juneau County’s land and water conservation administrator for six years.
The county partnered with more than a dozen local producers to host countywide pop-up distributions of healthy foodstuffs in the Central Sands — one of Wisconsin’s most food-insecure regions.
About one in seven county residents, often older and living on fixed incomes, struggles to make ends meet.
There are few grocery stores. Even so, many folks can’t afford to shop at the county’s only supermarket. A loaf of off-brand bread costs $2.79, a gallon of milk $3.39 and a dozen eggs $3.49.
Residents often turn to local gas stations or dollar stores, without the luxury of variety.
County employees saw a need. And an opportunity.
They obtained a grant in 2024 to run a food distribution initiative — known as the Local Food Purchase Assistance program, or LFPA — and anticipated continuing it this year.
The federal funding underlying the state program enabled the county to purchase food from more than a dozen area farmers, supporting the economy and residents in need.
But the newly elected Trump administration abruptly canceled the awards in March. Wisconsin would have received $5.5 million.
Additional cuts to the nation’s social safety net coincided with rising inflation that has pinched people’s pocketbooks and stretched food banks.
This year, Juneau County and local businesses backfilled the costs of running a significantly smaller program with just a fraction of the cash: six pop-up distributions. Not the previous 30-plus. Fewer nutritious meals fill stomachs, and the program’s future is unclear.
Still, a dedicated team of county staff, donors and volunteers is working to ensure residents obtain something.
They find joy in that.
***
Three felines roam the grounds at Orange Cat Community Farm south of the Juneau County border.
The youngsters are the unrelated successors of the farm’s namesake cat, Little Ann. Before she died, the cat kept her human, Laura Mortimore, company as Laura grew three acres of organic vegetables.
Dustin Ladd, Juneau County land and water conservation administrator, loads melons onto a refrigerated truck at Orange Cat Community Farm on Aug. 27, 2025, in Lyndon Station, Wis. The Local Food Purchase Assistance program allowed the county last year to host more than 30 pop-ups with distributions of healthy foods. Cuts by the Trump administration have reduced that to six, with local businesses backfilling funding. (Bennet Goldstein / Wisconsin Watch)
Feeding the community through Juneau County’s LFPA program in 2024 felt awesome, said Laura, 43. Nothing went to waste.
“I feel like I made a bunch of new friends,” she said. “I just wanted to keep going.”
Dustin pulled into the farm’s driveway around 1:30 p.m. He and Laura started loading small watermelons and vegetables into the trailer, stacking plastic totes to its ceiling.
The vegetables are growing ravenously this year. Tomatoes are in. Butternut squash and pumpkins on the way.
The two strolled through Laura’s fields.
“I’m scared that I’m gonna have a lot of five-pound sweet potatoes,” she told him, burying her arms into a carpet of vines.
The monster tubers caused the soil to bulge out of the ground.
The farm overproduced in anticipation of a full year of pop-ups. Laura solicited additional customers and is adding extra produce to her subscribers’ food shares. She also threw away seedlings that she grew for the LFPA program.
Dustin Ladd, Juneau County land and water conservation administrator, holds green tomatoes on Aug. 27, 2025. The produce was grown by Laura Mortimore, owner of Orange Cat Community Farm in Lyndon Station, Wis. She is one of several farmers participating in a Juneau County food purchase and distribution program. (Bennet Goldstein / Wisconsin Watch)
“But this is really great to keep, you know…” Laura said, pausing. “Moving forward in some way.”
Maybe the local farmers and county staff could have another LFPA committee meeting, she told Dustin. How about applying for some grants?
But as they seek donations, they have to compete with other good causes.
Dustin recently put in an application for $10,000 from the local electric utility. He pondered the unlikely possibility of starting a nonprofit to maximize the Juneau County program’s eligibility.
Will staff be able to run the program next year?
They’re going to keep trying.
***
To Dustin’s knowledge, Juneau County is the only local government in Wisconsin to oversee an LFPA program.
Staff and local producers ironed out the details the first year: crafting business plans, purchasing equipment, charting trucking routes, arranging shifts and building community trust.
Volunteers and employees from the county’s Aging and Disability Resource Center and Land and Water Department passed out food at village halls, parks and fairgrounds.
It’s not easy starting a new service.
“A lot of weeks of late Wednesday nights,” Dustin said.
Laura Mortimore, owner of Orange Cat Community Farm in Lyndon Station, Wis., chats with Dustin Ladd, Juneau County land and water conservation administrator, while walking across the property on Aug. 27, 2025. (Bennet Goldstein / Wisconsin Watch)
Deer also preyed upon vegetables growing in farmers’ fields. Wild storms dropped hailstones across rows of sweet corn and apple orchards. One farmer lost about 200 pounds of ground beef when someone left a freezer door ajar.
But the trailer continued to visit all the major communities from May through January.
Sometimes, just 80 families came. Or as many as 200. Everyone left with something. Other than marking their township, age group and household size on a paper slip, no questions asked.
The county ultimately gave away about 4,500 food shares.
The only thing that’s still missing is the promised money to fuel the well-oiled machine.
Amid the polarized politics in Washington, there’s one glimmer of bipartisanship: the Strengthening Local Food Security Act, introduced in July by Sens. Jim Justice, R-West Virginia, and Jack Reed, D-Rhode Island.
The bill would allocate $200 million each year for states to pay farmers and fishers to sell goods to food providers and schools.
Reed called the new proposal a “win-win-win” for local producers, domestic supply chains and hunger relief agencies. He hopes to see the provisions included in the federal farm bill, which sets the nation’s agricultural policies and spending plan.
In Wisconsin, state lawmakers also set aside $10 million in the current two-year state budget for assistance groups to purchase Wisconsin-made foodstuffs.
***
At 3:15 p.m. Dustin rolled into Lyndon Station, a village of 500 residents. He headed to Travis Fitzgerald Memorial Park. Volunteers emptied the trailer and arranged the veggie totes atop impromptu serving tables under a picnic shelter.
Gina Laack, director of the Juneau County Aging and Disability Resource Center, dished out pumpkin bars and brownies as she welcomed arrivals.
Dave Dearth, 77, of Mauston, Wis., collects a bag of fresh produce during a community pop-up food distribution event on Aug. 27, 2025, at Travis Fitzgerald Memorial Park in Lyndon Station, Wis. Juneau County is holding six food giveaway events this year, supplied with fresh produce and meat from local farmers. (Bennet Goldstein / Wisconsin Watch)
The trickle of pedestrians turned into a stream, then a chattering crowd. Volunteers handed out registration forms and carried groceries to people’s cars, which now lined the street. More than 120 arrived that afternoon.
Some pushed walkers, others leaned on canes. A woman crinkled her face as she limped to the front of the line. Her sciatic nerves were acting up.
For many, the program expands the foods they can access. Produce straight from the field, better than a food pantry. Each pop-up brings blessings instead of tears.
“You have to remember this is a healthy food distribution,” Gina said, as she carved up the brownie trays.
Dave Dearth, 77, has been coming to nearly every pop-up since LFPA started in Juneau County. He heard about it through the ADRC, which also runs the Men’s Shed social club and dementia classes he attends with his wife, Anna.
“It’s nice to get some fresh vegetables,” he said through tinted eyeglasses. “Just something to look forward to. See people that you know.”
A retired counselor, Dave moved to the nearby city of Mauston to live close to his son. Dave picks up vegetables at the pop-ups he wouldn’t ordinarily buy. Growing up poor, he said, he learned to like eating everything.
Dave glanced at the bags of apples sitting atop the bar. Those don’t come cheap, he said.
Dave joined the line, and a volunteer handed him a sack loaded with a head of lettuce, a white onion, a red tomato, a green zucchini and a yellow squash. Another passed him a packet of ground beef.
Behind Dave, Anna adjusted her short blond hair and smiled.
Volunteers and Juneau County employees mingle inside a park shelter following a community pop-up food distribution event on Aug. 27, 2025, at Travis Fitzgerald Memorial Park in Lyndon Station, Wis. (Bennet Goldstein / Wisconsin Watch)
By 4:30, the shelter hollowed out, but extra food remained.
Gina looped through the village — home to Mac’s Stumble Out Pub and the Swagger Inn — peeking into the local bars and grills. She beckoned people to the park.
“I will not have a beer at each of the bars!” she insisted as she left the shelter.
Seven minutes later, Gina returned with a train of locals — one dressed in denim overalls and a conductor’s hat.
He approached the serving line.
“Well, I’m hungry,” he said.
The LFPA crew swung into motion.
Those wanting to donate to Juneau County’s Local Food Purchase Assistance program should contact the ADRC of Eagle Country Juneau County Office at (608) 847-9371 or jcadrc@juneaucountywi.gov. They can also reach Juneau County Land and Water at 608.847.7221 ext. 3 or dladd@juneaucountywi.gov.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
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Criminal defendants needing a constitutionally guaranteed lawyer are experiencing longer and longer waits for their day in court.
The median time it takes for felony cases to be adjudicated increased from 126 days in 2015 to 205 days in 2024. The case backlog remains more than 12,000 as of Aug. 1. A 2022 lawsuit against the State Public Defender office continues to move through the courts.
The state budget added far more funding for prosecutors than support staff for the State Public Defender office. State reimbursement rates for private attorneys continue to lag average lawyer pay.
Tracy Germait has waited more than two years for a public defender in her Brown County felony drug cases.
In the time since her two cases were first opened, Germait has worked on turning her life around: She has led two addiction support groups, became a certified peer support specialist, worked toward her bachelor’s degree in criminal justice online from Colorado Tech University, gained custody of her three children and has stayed clean for 18 months.
But every day she faces the possibility of being sent to prison once she finally has legal representation and stands trial.
“My biggest fear is not being there for my kids,” Germait said. “I’m barely getting their trust back, having them on a routine, a schedule, and giving them stability, and that getting ripped all away.”
Germait reports to court every couple of months, only to learn she still lacks an appointed attorney. The last time she appeared, the court told her it attempted to contact an attorney 10,410 times for her 2023 drug possession case and 4,184 times for her 2022 drug possession and delivery case.
“I’m kind of just stuck here,” Germait said. “I wish I could spend my vacation time with my kids, or doing something outside of work with them, but I can’t because I don’t know how many court dates I’m going to have in between now and the end of the year. So that is taxing.”
A calendar hangs on the wall at Tracy Germait’s transitional housing unit Aug. 12, 2025, in Green Bay, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Tracy Germait, left, cleans up with her daughter, Isis, after leading a Cocaine Anonymous meeting Aug. 12, 2025, at MannaFest Church in Green Bay, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Germait isn’t the only defendant facing a long wait. In 2022 several indigent defendants lacking timely appointment of counsel filed a lawsuit against Wisconsin’s State Public Defender (SPD) office, claiming an ongoing pattern of delays in appointing a public defender for open criminal cases around the state. The suit found at least 8,445 defendants experienced a delay of 30 days or more in obtaining counsel for trials since 2019.
In January, the plaintiffs renewed their motion for class certification, meaning the suit would be able to continue. The case is awaiting a court ruling on the motion. If granted, the next step would likely be to begin litigating the case, moving toward a resolution.
As of Aug. 1, the Wisconsin Court System reported a backlog of around 12,586 felony cases.
Court data show the median age of pending felony cases has risen since before the pandemic. In 2015, the median time cases were pending was 126 days. In 2020, during the pandemic, it was 192 days, compared to 205 days in 2024.
And yet in the latest state budget, Republican lawmakers only granted 12.5 of the 52.5 requested SPD support staff positions, while increasing the number of prosecutors statewide by 42 and providing state funding for 12 expiring federally funded prosecutors in Milwaukee. As Wisconsin Watch reported in August, those 12 Milwaukee positions may have been funded in a way that violates the state constitution.
A right guaranteed by the Constitution and courts
The Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and Article 1, Section 7, of the Wisconsin Constitution guarantee a defendant the right to a fair, speedy trial, including a lawyer. The landmark 1963 Supreme Court decision Gideon v. Wainwright required states to protect those rights. But how to do so was largely left up to the states.
For the first few years, Wisconsin took a county-by-county approach to assign counsel, rather than relying on a state standard. But in 1977, Wisconsin established the independent Office of the State Public Defender to enforce the Gideon decision statewide.
“That office was never expected to handle all of the cases,” said John Gross, director of the Public Defender Project at the University of Wisconsin Law School and a former New York state public defender. “It was never funded to that degree.”
The backlog of open criminal cases stems from problems dating back decades that have yet to be solved.
When SPD first started, the agency was only expected to handle about half of the cases, and members of the private bar would enter into agreements to take on remaining public defender appointments, according to Gross.
“It’s necessary in any system for the simple reason that you have conflicts of interest, so if three guys get arrested for a robbery, the public defender’s office can only represent one of them,” Gross said.
Tracy Germait, right, leads a Cocaine Anonymous meeting with Mark Stevens, co-chair of the group, left, on Aug. 12, 2025, at MannaFest Church in Green Bay, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
In Germait’s 2023 case, she was told there was an unspecified “conflict,” which means she’s waiting for SPD to appoint a private attorney.
The Legislature didn’t raise the $40 hourly rate — the lowest nationwide — for private attorneys handling public defender appointments for nearly 20 years. In 2020, it was raised to $70, then in the 2023-25 state budget the rate increased to $100 an hour.
But that rate remains well below the average hourly private attorney rate in Wisconsin, which averaged around $248 in 2023, according to SPD’s 2023-25 biennial budget request.
Over the past decade private attorneys have handled anywhere from 37% to 40% of public defender cases.
But private attorneys are often not interested in taking up public defender appointments due to low pay or just the stressful nature of working in a trial setting.
Christian Thomas, a Milwaukee County-based criminal defense attorney, said one of the first things he looks for in a public defender appointment is whether the defendant has previously had an attorney.
If an attorney previously dropped the case, that could make it more difficult to obtain evidence because a new attorney would rely on the previous lawyer rather than getting it directly from the prosecutor.
“After having spent much of my career doing sexual assault and homicide cases, I don’t take those anymore, unless they are my full pay clients,” Thomas said. “The public defender’s office is left holding on to a number of very serious cases that need very serious defense for whom there are very few of us (private attorneys) around, and most of us that have been around just don’t want to touch those cases anymore.”
For the 2025-27 budget cycle, SPD requested and Gov. Tony Evers proposed a $25 hourly increase for the most severe criminal cases, which the Legislature rejected.
Even when a private attorney takes on a public defender case, the lower reimbursement rate compared to full-paying clients incentivizes attorneys to cut a quick deal, risking the defendant’s legal outcome, according to a report from the Sixth Amendment Center.
To make the problem worse, during the COVID-19 pandemic, more public defenders aged out of the system to turn to the private sector, which increased wages more quickly than government employers to respond to pandemic-era inflation, the Wisconsin Policy Forum reported.
Elena Kruse, left; Jennifer Bias, middle; and Katie York are leaders of the Wisconsin State Public Defender office. Bias, the agency’s top official, said the growth of criminal charges for violating release conditions is a great overreach by prosecutors. (Beck Henreckson / Cap Times)
Meanwhile, the State Public Defender office is struggling to attract law school graduates who are discouraged by low pay and the demanding nature of public defender appointments while still paying off student loans. The office has 37 unfilled positions, amounting to a 10% vacancy rate. The vacancy rate has decreased since the pandemic, when it rose to about 25%.
Private law school tuition today is 2.54 times more expensive than it would have been if it had increased by inflation since 1985, while public law school tuition is over five times more expensive.
The University of Wisconsin Law School laid off John Gross, director of the law school’s Public Defender Project, among other employees due to budget cuts. (Courtesy of University of Wisconsin-Madison)
The annual starting salary for a public defender in 2023 was $56,659, a Wisconsin Policy Forum analysis found, less than half of averages for all lawyers statewide.
Lawmakers this budget cycle approved two wage increases: a merit-based 3% general wage adjustment for all civil servants in the state for 2025 and 2% for 2026.
But higher pay alone won’t likely solve the backlog issue that has plagued Wisconsin and other states. The Oregon Legislature, for example, approved hourly wage raises for public defender appointments, but the state still has a massive backlog.
Public defenders require extensive training and education, so it may take years to see a noticeable increase in law school graduates willing to pursue a career as a public defender.
Recently, the UW Law School laid off Gross among other employees due to budget cuts. The future of the Public Defender Project, a clinic designed to prepare law students for a career in public defense, remains uncertain.
Cases in limbo destabilizing families
Defendants are facing consequences as cases pile up without attorneys to defend them. Even though those charged with a crime are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court, an open felony case can hurt a defendant’s chance of finding employment and housing, creating financial instability for them and their families.
Housing and job insecurity put someone at risk of homelessness, increasing their chances of ending up back in jail or stacking up additional charges.
Delaying a hearing by years or even months also jeopardizes the credibility of the evidence and witness testimony, said Amanda Merkwae, advocacy director at ACLU Wisconsin. In 2024, only 28% of cases were active for fewer than 90 days in Wisconsin. Over 5,000 cases were open for nearly two years.
“When people are detained pre-trial, it makes the problem even worse from a civil rights and liberties perspective because even spending a few days in jail can have devastating, long-lasting consequences for people who are presumptively innocent under the law,” Merkwae said. “It impacts them, it impacts their families, you think of the risk of job loss, losing housing, potential impact on child custody and parental rights.”
Many defendants awaiting counsel are sitting in jail because they can’t afford bail.
In Brown County, only one in five county jail inmates is serving a sentence. The rest are awaiting a sentence. On July 30, the jail, which has a capacity of 750 inmates, was over capacity by 107 people with an average stay of 256 days.
Tracy Germait leads a Cocaine Anonymous meeting Aug. 12, 2025, at MannaFest Church in Green Bay, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
So what can be done?
A problem that has worsened in recent decades has no quick fix.
This past budget cycle, the State Public Defender office proposed two budget items aiming to decrease the backlog and increase staffing. Neither passed as proposed.
The first was to increase SPD administrative and support staff by about 52.5 positions; the agency was ultimately only granted 12.5.
Support staff include investigators, who help collect evidence and identify witnesses for a case, and personnel to help clients understand the legal system, ensuring they are well-equipped for court.
Merkwae said another way to reduce the backlogs is reexamining and changing charging practices.
This past budget cycle, the public defender office recommended changing the sentencing and charging for a first-time disorderly conduct violation, which was projected to yield $1.9 million in savings for SPD by affecting 2,448 cases.
Felony and misdemeanor bail jumping are bail rule violations that get tacked onto other felony cases. They range from missing a curfew or appointment to not updating an address or having beer, and they can dramatically affect case outcomes, Merkwae said, adding that they can make defendants feel “coerced into entering a plea to their original charge because of the leverage that’s created by the bail jumping charges.”
Wisconsin is one of only seven states that allow prosecutors to file additional felony charges if someone violates pretrial release conditions.
During this budget session, the Legislature also added 42 new prosecutors around the state, with the highest number in Brown and Waukesha counties, where felony bail jumping is the most commonly charged felony.
Adding prosecutors without boosting resources for public defenders and private attorneys could exacerbate backlog issues, according to Thomas.
“This is simple economics,” Thomas said. “If you’re paying 12 extra people to do that job, you’re going to end up with 12 extra people’s worth of charges.”
In Wisconsin, the median case age at disposition for nontraffic felony cases is 247 days. In Brown County, it’s 373 days, with over 2,000 open felony cases filed in 2024.
For Germait, the limbo is constantly on her mind — and it’s shaping her life.
Tracy Germait, who has been waiting more than two years for a public defender, talks to her daughter, Isis, in her room on Aug. 12, 2025, at her transitional housing unit in Green Bay, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
After living in Amanda’s House, a sober-living home for women and children, Germait applied to several housing programs and apartments but was denied from most due to the active felony case.
Germait now lives in a transitional housing unit set to expire in April 2026. But with no updates or progress on her open cases, Germait faces the added stress of finding stable housing for herself and her children.
“I had to do an appeal and go through all that, and eventually they said yes because I had letters of support,” Germait said. “We have to move out in April, and it’s like, ‘What am I going to do then?’”
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When Kristen Payne learned her child’s classmate at the Golda Meir Lower Campus tested positive for lead poisoning earlier this year, she said Milwaukee Public Schools had underestimated the amount of lead dust in the school.
“We have come to find out that Golda Meir had one of the highest levels of lead dust of any of the schools tested,” said Payne, founder of the advocacy group Lead Safe Schools MKE.
After MPS replaced the windows at Golda Meir in the 1990s, she said, district officials thought they eliminated a major hazard. But after starting remediation work earlier this year, they realized the problem was worse than they thought, she said.
Payne said the experience broke her trust with the district. She’s one of several advocates calling for MPS to be more transparent with its lead action plan.
As the school year approaches, lead safety groups want the district to share more documentation, open up about the money being spent on the plan and keep an eye on subcontractors doing remediation.
Advocates urge transparency
As of Aug. 29, the Milwaukee Health Department had cleared 39 MPS schools, meaning lead hazards have been removed and it is safe for children to return.
The district has posted full health department clearance reports for six schools and interim clearance reports for three schools, including Golda Meir.
An interim clearance report means all indoor lead hazards have been addressed, even if there are still lead hazards outside, said Caroline Reinwald, marketing, communications and public information officer for the Milwaukee Health Department.
“Some schools receive interim clearance reports because completing all exterior work can take months or even years,” Reinwald wrote. “In these cases, the buildings are still considered safe to occupy.”
An interim clearance report was issued for Trowbridge School of Great Lakes Studies on March 19. The school was closed last year due to lead hazards. (Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service file photo)
As of Aug. 29, the district had sent letters to families at 28 schools saying the Health Department cleared their school for occupancy, yet few of the full clearance reports are available online.
“Trust is not going to be rebuilt if they continue to withhold information,” Payne said. “There’s many of us who aren’t clear or sure that truly these schools are safe.”
Richard Diaz is the co-founder of Coalition On Lead Emergency, which works to prevent and respond to lead poisoning in Milwaukee.
He said he wants to know how much money MPS is spending on abatement efforts and how long the cleanup keeps students safe from lead exposure.
Lead hazards can reappear after abatement, so the district will need to monitor schools for future lead risks, according to the Milwaukee Health Department clearance reports. New lead hazards can also appear as the building deteriorates, the reports read.
“Because these aren’t full-fledged abatements, these are, you know, kind of just Band-Aids on a solution that will need to be addressed in years to come,” Diaz said.
Contractor concerns
JCP Construction, the company MPS hired to assist with lead remediation, started the work with about 150 painters, but about 30 painters have since left due to difficult work conditions and high temperatures, MPS Interim Chief Operating Officer Mike Turza said in the July 31 school board meeting.
Turza said JCP Construction hired Illinois-based Independence Painting to fill the void, a decision that raised concerns among advocates and the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades. The district currently has 172 painters working across buildings.
Andy Buck, political affairs director with the painters’ union, said safety is a big concern. He said people want to know and ensure contractors doing lead remediation have the necessary qualifications.
“How’s that being documented?” Buck asked.
MPS media relations manager Stephen Davis said the district holds the contractor, JCP Construction, accountable for ensuring subcontractors are compliant with state regulations and licenses.
When the public raised concerns about out-of-state contractors like Independence Painting, the district worked with JCP to ensure it had all the necessary qualifications, Davis said.
There are generally no restrictions on the use of contractors from outside the area or state, but the district mandates that any staff meet the qualifications of state and building code requirements, Davis said.
Payne said the situation is another example of why she struggles to trust the district. Like Buck, she wants to see the documented qualifications of the subcontractors.
During the July 31 school board meeting, Turza said a district staff member was always monitoring each worksite and that certified lead stabilization staff or Wisconsin Department of Health Services workers were always present.
“It’s not clear to me who is correct,” Payne said. “I would want to see actual data on that before coming to any conclusion.”
What’s next
The first day of class for most Milwaukee Public Schools was Sept. 2. As of Aug. 29, there were still 11 schools that had not been cleared by the Milwaukee Health Department.
Remediation efforts are ongoing with clearance of all schools expected by the start of the school year, according to the district’s most recent lead action plan report.
You can check on the progress of lead remediation efforts on this website.
Jonathan Aguilar is a visual journalist at Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service who is supported through a partnership between CatchLight Local and Report for America.
Interstate truckers in the U.S. are required to read and speak English under guidance by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (MCSAP).
The federal register states that interstate drivers must read and speak enough English that they can “sufficiently converse with the general public” and respond to official inquiries. English-speaking regulations for drivers first came into effect in 1937 under the Interstate Commerce Commission. In 2016 the Obama administration relaxed enforcement, but in April the Trump administration rescinded that directive.
Enforcement of the rules vary from state to state. The U.S. Department of Transportation claimed in a press release that California, Washington and New Mexico have failed to enforce English requirements for commercial drivers.
On Aug. 26, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced the federal government would withhold all MCSAP funding for these states unless they “adopt and enforce” English requirements within 30 days.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.
The federal government’s demands that states turn over their voter rolls and related information highlights long-standing conflicts over how to ensure that only eligible voters are registered without endangering voting rights.
The U.S. Justice Department has sent letters to several states — and plans to send many more — asking them for copies of their voter lists and for detailed information about how they maintain them. The department has said it’s seeking to enforce requirements in federal law that President Donald Trump has ordered it to prioritize.
It has already sued North Carolina, alleging that the state has not been properly verifying voter identity, and sued Orange County, California, for refusing to provide full records for 17 people who have been removed from the rolls in connection with a probe of potential noncitizen voting. And it has threatened to sue or withhold federal funding from other states if they do not comply with their requests for information.
Everyone agrees that a “clean” voter list — cleared of people who have died or moved out of the jurisdiction, or who otherwise aren’t eligible to vote — is good practice. But they differ on how aggressively election officials should move to remove potentially ineligible voters, what exactly federal law requires election officials to do, and how to balance election security with the risk of wrongly removing and disenfranchising eligible voters.
Rhetoric and false claims can make the debate harder to follow. Here’s a guide to understanding the issues and arguments.
What does the law require?
There are two key federal laws that govern the maintenance of voter rolls.
The National Voter Registration Act requires election officials to make a “reasonable effort” to remove voters who become ineligible to vote because they move or die, a process known as list maintenance. The Help America Vote Act, enacted about a decade later, requires states to use a computerized statewide list of every registered voter and assign them a unique identification number. It also requires them to remove duplicated names.
Beyond that, it’s up to state and local governments to set their own policies for how and when to perform list maintenance, and it’s up to federal courts to decide what is “reasonable.” That term isn’t defined in the law, and it’s often where voting rights groups and advocates for stricter list maintenance disagree.
In a recent case in Michigan, for example, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that the state’s actions to remove the names of thousands of dead voters from the rolls were sufficient, even though the plaintiff, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, claimed to have identified thousands more on the rolls.
Logan Churchwell, research director at the foundation, said in an interview that the court’s decision amounted to giving Michigan an “E for effort.” He said his organization believes there should be a higher standard that would reduce the risk of fraud and administrative error.
For her part, Lata Nott, director of voting rights policy for Campaign Legal Center, said the National Voter Registration Act’s requirement for a “reasonable effort” at maintaining lists is designed to set a floor, but it doesn’t prevent states from creating extreme policies that lead to eligible voters being mistakenly removed.
What is the central issue in the debate?
The main disagreement is over how aggressive list maintenance should be. A recent congressional hearing highlighted the differences between Democrats and Republicans on this question.
House Republicans claimed dirty voter rolls enable fraud and said ensuring that only eligible voters are on the list increases election security and voter confidence. They dismissed the idea that their efforts are meant to purge certain types of eligible voters from the rolls, such as people of color.
“This is not and should never be a partisan issue,” said Rep. Laurel Lee, a Florida Republican and former secretary of state. “Maintaining accurate voter rolls is fundamental to election security and public trust.”
House Democrats made it clear that they, too, don’t want ineligible voters, such as dead people or noncitizens, on the list. But they questioned why Republicans would want to take any actions that could potentially disenfranchise eligible people, citing recentincidents of state list maintenance actions that led to eligible voters being removed.
“What we do want is every eligible voter gets the chance to vote and their constitutional rights are not infringed upon,” said Rep. Julie Johnson, a Texas Democrat. “And that seems to be a huge distinction.”
Why is it hard to keep voter rolls updated?
It is difficult partly because of the decentralized nature of voting.
The U.S. doesn’t have a national database of eligible voters or citizens. Under federal law, states maintain their own lists. They assign voters the ID number that’s required under the Help America Vote Act, but that number doesn’t have to be connected to any existing federal identification, such as a Social Security number.
To remove voters who were eligible, but aren’t anymore, election officials must have ways to find out when a voter dies, moves to another state, is convicted of a felony, or otherwise becomes ineligible to cast a ballot.
Many election officials get data on address changes from their state’s motor vehicle department and the U.S. Postal Service and get death reports from state and federal agencies. Some states allow or mandate the use of other sources, such as obituaries and responses to jury duty summonses.
But there are potential gaps and time lags in these systems. When people move, for example, they don’t often tell the election office for their old address to remove them from the rolls.
It’s fairly easy for officials to track in-state moves because people carry the same state-assigned voter ID number when they go to register in a new location in the state. But it’s harder for officials to find out when someone moves out of state. That requires coordination between states, or more detailed searches through government records.
Many states are members of the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, a consortium that collects state voter roll data and alerts its members to potentially duplicate registrations across state lines. But two of the largest states, California and New York, are not members. And several Republican states have withdrawn from ERIC in recent years, citing concernsabout the program, including about how the organization shares some of its data with researchers.
Do some states have more registered voters than residents?
Statistics like this are often used to back up claims of voter fraud or poor state practices. But there’s a legitimate explanation for this that’s tied to federal and state laws.
In some instances, state laws allow election officials to remove voters from the rolls quickly, such as when they die, or if they respond to a jury duty summons by saying they are not a U.S. citizen.
But when a state finds out a voter may have moved, federal law requires election officials to send a confirmation mailing before removing that person from the rolls. If the voter doesn’t respond, they remain on the roll of registered voters, but are moved to the “inactive” list, and their names must stay there for two federal election cycles before they are removed, unless the state hears from them.
That four-year wait, and a large number of voters on the inactive list, can make the voter roll appear bloated at any given time.
But another reason for the disparity is that population estimates themselves are imprecise, said Chris Fowler, a professor of geography and demography at Penn State University who studies voter rolls and census data.
The U.S. Census Bureau’s American Communities Survey is currently our best measure of population changes from year to year, Fowler said. But the uncertainty in the national population count is about 10 million residents, he said — roughly equal to the population of Michigan.
Some use the disparities between the numbers to cast doubt on the accuracy of elections and raise alarm about voter fraud, such as Elon Musk with his misleading claim that Michigan had “more registered voters than eligible citizens.” His numbers included inactive voters as if they were eligible voters. But before those voters could cast a ballot, they would have to correct their voting record to prove eligibility, most commonly by showing documentation proving they still live in the jurisdiction.
How ‘dirty’ are the voter rolls?
Some of the most cited data available on this comes from more than a decade ago and has helped inspire efforts at improvement since then. But those efforts have run into challenges.
In 2012, a research study by the Pew Center on the States found that more than 2.75 million people were registered to vote in more than one state, and there were more than 1.8 million dead people whose names were still on the voter rolls. These and other findings “underscore the need for states to improve accuracy, cost-effectiveness, and efficiency,” Pew said.
There have been multiple attempts to create systems allowing states to share data to help with voter list maintenance. That’s a difficult task because any such effort must comply with state and federal laws governing data use and privacy. Officials must also cross-check data from various sources, using enough different data points to ensure that the matches are accurate and that a person with the same name as another isn’t mistakenly removed as a duplicate.
One prior program, the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, was ultimately shut down under a court settlement because it did not do enough to protect sensitive voter data. It was also found to be highly inaccurate, often incorrectly identifying registrations as duplicates because of poor matching techniques.
After Pew’s study, the nonprofit provided funding to help launch ERIC, to try to screen out duplicate voter registrations across state lines. Since then, ERIC has helped states identify hundreds of thousands of voters each year who have moved across state lines, and tens of thousands of voters who died. But in part because some Republican states have left the program, only half of states now participate, leaving a lot of gaps.
Some states use more data sources and perform checks more frequently than others. In the latest federal survey of election officials, for example, about 30% of states said they do not use National Change of Address reports from the U.S. Postal Service or data from motor vehicle agencies to identify potentially ineligible voters.
Do poorly maintained voter rolls allow for more fraud?
Generally speaking, removing voters who have moved prevents them from wrongly voting in their old voting jurisdiction, and removing a voter who has died prevents another person from fraudulently casting a ballot in their name.
That said, prosecutions for double voting and voting for others are rare, and Votebeat could not find any studies showing that states that do a better job of cleaning voter rolls have less voter fraud.
The Heritage Foundation’s database of voter fraud across all states since 1982 includes 174 convictions for duplicate voting, 99 cases of noncitizen voting, and two cases of someone voting under a dead person’s name.
But Churchwell, of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, said the number of prosecutions does not properly measure how much fraud occurs. Rather, he said, it indicates the state’s propensity to prosecute. “I doubt you’ll find research showing where a state is simultaneously terrible at list maintenance yet zealous with prosecutions,” he said.
Are there noncitizens on the voter rolls?
Yes, but states that have looked have not found them in large numbers.
Audits in multiple states have found small numbers of noncitizens on the rolls, few of whom had actually cast ballots, and there are no known instances of noncitizens voting in large enough numbers to influence the outcome of an election.
The threat of noncitizen voting has become a prominent talking point for Republicans, driving their efforts to pass proof-of-citizenship requirements for voters. But even in Republican-led states, officials who have recently tried to find noncitizens on the rolls have reported only small numbers.
In an audit last year, for example, the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office found 20 noncitizens out of 8.2 million registered voters. Nine of them had voted in prior elections, the office found. In Ohio, only one of the 641 cases of noncitizen voting that Secretary of State Frank LaRose referred for prosecution resulted in a voter fraud charge.
In Texas, which has more than 18.6 million registered voters, the Secretary of State’s Office identified 581 noncitizens from 2021 to August of 2024. The state referred 33 potential noncitizens who voted in the 2024 election to the attorney general for investigation. The state also is investigating potential cases from the 2020 and 2022 election cycles.
In Arizona, which requires proof of citizenship to vote in state and local elections, Jesse Richman, a political science professor at Old Dominion University, identified at least 2,331 registered voters who he believes are highly likely to be noncitizens. He studied the state’s voter rolls as an expert defense witness for a case challenging the state’s proof of citizenship laws. Richman said those people could have become naturalized citizens since last updating their license, but the ID they used when registering to vote or updating their registration was a noncitizen ID.
On Aug. 28, the U.S. Justice Department announced the indictment of a Canadian citizen charged with registering to vote and voting in federal elections in North Carolina in 2022 and 2024.
Are there dead people on the voter rolls?
Yes, there are voters who have died but whose names are still on the rolls.
But claims about the number of such voters often turn out to be inaccurate.
In 2012, for example, South Carolina’s State Election Commission reviewed 207 cases that the South Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles had referred to as potential cases of ballots being cast in the names of dead voters. Of those, the commission was able to conclude that 197 did not involve dead voters — instead, they were either clerical errors or identified through bad matches. There wasn’t enough information on the remaining 10 cases to make any determination.
States that are members of ERIC receive reports about voters who may have died while out of state, and the service has identified about 644,000 voters who died over the last 13 years and whose names needed to be removed from the list. But some state laws may limit how states use that information.
Pennsylvania, for example, is an ERIC member, but state law allows officials to remove the names of dead voters only if they learn of it through the state’s health agency or an obituary. Election officials in the state, including Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, have advocated for that to change.
Can list maintenance measures lead to eligible voters being purged?
Yes. In Texas, some of the people removed from the rolls last year were eligible citizens who did not respond to a mailed notice seeking more information about their status, an investigation by Votebeat, The Texas Tribune and ProPublica found.
And that’s the concern that voting rights advocates have about states that take aggressive steps to clean their lists, especially close to an election. Two of the most recent cases were in Alabama and Virginia, just before the November 2024 election.
This is why federal law has safeguards on when states can remove potentially ineligible voters, such as the rule that election officials cannot conduct systematic voter removals within 90 days of an election, Nott with Campaign Legal Center said.
“The more aggressive your list maintenance laws are,” she said, “the more likely you are probably going to be purging people who are eligible to vote.”
Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.
Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for Votebeat‘s newsletters here.
This story is from Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powers stalling climate action. Sign up for Floodlight’s newsletter here.
In south-central Wisconsin, near-record warmth in January and two record-breaking summer heat waves have cross-country skiers nervous they won’t be getting much snow this winter — again.
And it’s not just skiers in Wisconsin who are worried. New research shows heat waves are prompting a growing number of Americans to make the connection between hotter weather and climate change.
Ski seasons in the United States have shrunk by an average of 5.5 to 7.1 days between 2000 and 2019 compared to the 1960s and ’70s, according to a 2024 study by researchers from Canada and Austria. And in the coming 25 years, ski seasons could be even shorter — by between two weeks and three months — depending on how much the world reduces its greenhouse gas emissions, the researchers said.
Tamara Bryant, executive director of a cross-country ski club in Madison, Wisconsin, has seen this dynamic firsthand — both in her professional and personal lives.
“I remember the winters where my son could build snow forts in the front yard, year after year, and we’re just not getting the same (amount of snow),” she said. “Having a white Christmas is not something we can totally rely on.”
Madison’s chain of lakes also aren’t freezing like they used to, creating hazards for people who fish on the ice.
Hilary Dugan, associate professor in the Center for Limnology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says back in the 1800s, lakes would remain frozen approximately 130 days a year, but now, on average, it’s about 75 days. Here, a young ice fisherman shows off his catch on Lake Monona in Madison in 2024. (Sharon Vanorny / Courtesy of Destination Madison)
Hilary Dugan, associate professor in the Center for Limnology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says back in the 1800s, lakes would remain frozen approximately 130 days a year, but now, on average, it’s maybe 75 days a year.
“That’s something that people around here notice because winter is a big part of life,” Dugan said. “Traditionally, winter would start in December (and) it would end probably like April. That meant that you could consistently go out and ice fish, cross-country ski, you know, winter recreation.
“We’re talking months of change — not just a couple of days.”
Heat curbs desert hiking
More than 1,700 miles away in Phoenix, dangerous heat has prompted officials to close the city’s extensive system of mountain trails. But that hasn’t stopped some from hiking in 100-degree-plus weather, leading to emergency rescues and the death of a 10-year-old last year.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found 2024 was the hottest year in its 130-year climate record. NOAA reported the average annual temperature across the contiguous United States in 2024 was 55.5 degrees — or 3.5 degrees above the 20th-century average — heat that it said fueled a near-record number of tornadoes.
Hotter summers and warmer winters are not only disrupting outdoor activities. The record-breaking heat has also been driving national concern about climate change — more so even than dramatic events such as wildfires and hurricanes, according to new research.
Yale’s latest Climate Opinion Maps found that 65% of U.S. adults somewhat or strongly agree that global warming is affecting weather patterns, while 72% of adults nationally think global warming is real.
Its recent study showed that people’s interest in learning more about climate change consistently spikes during weather events like heat waves. And the public’s interest in climate change increases in specific areas experiencing extreme weather events, researchers found.
The Phoenix Mountains Preserve is criss-crossed with trails. But extreme heat caused by climate change is making hiking them much more dangerous. (Andy Hall / Floodlight)
“Certain weather events — like heat waves — seem to produce consistent jumps in climate change interest across all regions simultaneously,” the researchers wrote, “while others — like wildfires — show more geographic variation.”
The study involved research through Yale’s partnership with Google. The team analyzed online search trends across the country, finding that searches on climate change followed “consistent and predictable patterns.”
Heat waves in 2023 sparked consistent interest in climate change, the study found, while Hurricanes Helene and Milton in 2024 garnered an increase in searches only in the places affected by those storms. Similarly, interest in climate change increased during bouts of wildfires in the United States and Canada, but only in the areas most directly affected by the smoke, the study found.
The authors suggest the findings can be used by officials to help people prepare for extreme weather. And, the authors note, “this timing could help the public better understand the need to transition to renewable energy sources, reduce fossil fuels, update risk assessments, increase planning, and strengthen building codes.”
Heat not just inconvenient — it’s deadly
Climate Central’s analysis of heat streaks between 1970 and 2024 found that their frequency has at least doubled in nearly 200 cities across the Southwest, Northeast, Ohio River Valley and southeastern parts of the country — and those heat waves were attributed to greenhouse gas emissions.
The data, released in July by the nonprofit group of scientists and climate researchers, also found heat waves are the leading cause of weather-related deaths in the United States. In 2023, the group reported that 2,325 people in the United States died from extreme heat — a record high.
This heat, Phoenix Fire Department Capt. Rob McDade said, “It’s very dangerous.” In July 2024, a 10-year-old boy died from heat-related injuries while hiking South Mountain Park and Preserve with his family.
In 2021, Phoenix adopted a safety program to restrict access on parts of the city’s 200-plus miles of trails during extreme heat — especially on rugged stretches where it’s more difficult for the fire department to rescue hikers.
“We have more people hiking than ever, and we are seeing rescues that have to happen that definitely are related to the heat,” said Jarod Rogers, deputy director of the city’s Parks and Recreation Department.
Last year, between May 1 and Oct. 13, the city had 45 days of trail closures due to extreme heat. Since adopting the safety program, there have been fewer rescues — from 57 in 2021 down to 35 in 2024.
“The proof is in the pudding,” McDade said. “Setting up these restrictions is dramatically cutting back those extreme (heat) day mountain rescues.”
Warm weather hits winter sports
Rising temperatures are causing a different kind of risk in northern regions. Last winter, Dugan said she repeatedly heard about people being rescued after falling through melting lake ice.
“It felt higher than normal,” she said. “People are willing to go out on the thinnest ice to go get some fish. It’s definitely a passion for people here.”
Skiers are also feeling the burn from a warmer climate. Bryant, executive director for the MadNorSki Club (Madison Nordic Ski), said there has been little snow in recent years, shortening the cross-country skiing season.
Annual snowfall in Madison has decreased over the past three winters from 70 accumulated inches in 2022 to 43 inches in 2023 and 22 inches in 2024.
Bryant said popular ski races have had to cancel because of the lack of snowfall. Some event organizers have resorted to using artificially made snow.
The annual American Birkebeiner ski race in Cable, Wis., has had to adjust to less snow and warmer temperatures in recent years. In 2024, organizers used snowmaking machines to create a 10-kilometer loop instead of the normally linear 50- or 53-kilometer course. (Courtesy of American Birkebeiner Ski Foundation)
In 2017, organizers of the American Birkebeiner race (“Birkie”), which draws more than 10,000 nordic skiers to northern Wisconsin each year, canceled its cross-country ski races due to lack of snow.
In 2024, another low-snow year, Birkie organizers used snowmaking machines to create a 10-kilometer ski loop instead of the normally linear 50- or 53-kilometer course.
“In the photos, you would see this little white ribbon of snow on the trail, and it was brown everywhere else,” Bryant said, calling the recent lack of snow in Wisconsin “freaky.”
Birkie spokesman Shawn Connelly said the American Birkebeiner Ski Foundation has kept its ski events running thanks to donor funding to purchase the snow-making equipment. “As long as we have the cold, we’ll have the snow,” Connelly vowed, “and we’ll continue to host North America’s largest annual cross-country ski race.”
Trump seeks to halt U.S. climate push
While the Yale study shows Americans are increasingly concerned about climate change, President Donald Trump’s administration is moving in the opposite direction.
In July, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed rescinding the 2009 Endangerment Finding, which scientifically characterized planet-warming greenhouse gases as a danger to human health and the environment. The ruling was used as the foundation for the federal government’s regulation of emissions from vehicles and power plants for the last 16 years.
The proposal comes after the Trump administration gutted many of the initiatives of former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act that aimed to reduce the country’s climate impact over the next two decades.
Environmental advocates have accused the Trump administration of “burying its head in sand” when it comes to the climate crisis.
“Americans are already suffering from stronger hurricanes, more severe heat waves and floods, and more frequent fires,” Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, said in a prepared statement. “(Americans) are watching these climate disasters get worse (and) the danger to their lives and health intensify.”
Floodlight is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powers stalling climate action.
That includes Medicaid (low-income people), Medicare (age 65 and over) and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). And they aren’t eligible to buy coverage through the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) marketplaces.
Federal Medicaid can reimburse hospitals for providing emergency care to unauthorized immigrants, but that is not coverage for individuals.
Vice President JD Vance said Aug. 28 in La Crosse, Wisconsin, that health care benefits can’t be sustained “if you allow tens of millions of people” into the U.S. without authorization “and give them those benefits.”
White House spokespersons did not return requests for comment.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
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In Wisconsin, permanently and totally disabled workers haven’t seen a raise to their worker’s compensation benefits in nine years, despite prices increasing 34% and the Legislature granting companies premium cuts worth more than $1 billion.
There’s a chance the raise will finally happen now that the state budget includes the creation of a worker’s comp fee schedule for medical services, which was a sticking point in past worker’s comp bill negotiations.
The proposed bill would make an estimated 210 more people eligible for raises and increase the maximum weekly benefit to $1,051 from $669 effective Jan. 1, 2026. It still must pass the Legislature and be signed by the governor.
Jimmy Novy grew up on a farm with corn, cattle and chickens in Wisconsin’s smallest municipality. Yuba, in the Driftless Area northwest of Madison, covers a third of a square mile. Novy correctly quotes its population in the last census: 53.
In 1967, at age 19, married with a child, Novy got a job at the Rayovac plant in nearby Wonewoc. It made batteries used in walkie-talkies in the Vietnam War.
In his late 20s, Novy learned he had been exposed to manganese, a key component in batteries. He suffered neurological problems that affected his left leg, severely limiting his ability to walk or even maintain his balance.
“The nerves from the brain to my leg, they can’t do nothing about that,” he said.
With four children to raise, Novy turned to Wisconsin’s first-in-the-nation worker’s compensation system. After three years of legal back-and-forth, the state agreed that Novy was permanently and totally disabled (PTD), meaning he was among the worst-off of Wisconsin workers injured on the job. As a result, he qualified for worker’s comp checks for life.
But there was no guarantee of how often those checks would increase.
Jimmy Novy suffered neurological problems in his late 20s after a decade handling toxic chemicals at a Rayovac plant in Wonewoc, Wis. (Courtesy of Jimmy Novy)
A now-abandoned factory once housed Rayovac Corp., a battery company at which Jimmy Novy suffered a workplace injury in his late 20s. The site is seen July 29, 2025, in Wonewoc, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Now 77, widowed, remarried and using hearing aids and a cane, Novy hasn’t seen an increase in his $1,575 monthly worker’s compensation check — nor have the other more than 300 other PTD recipients — since 2016.
“I can’t make it,” Novy told Wisconsin Watch in mid-July. “I got $8 left in my checkbook right now to last me through the last week of the month.”
“The wife buys food and stuff, otherwise I’d be starving to death,” he added.
Had Novy’s worker’s comp payment kept pace with inflation, which rose 34%, he would have received nearly $21,000 more over the past nine years, according to calculations by University of Wisconsin-Madison economist Menzie Chinn.
Meanwhile, Wisconsin employers have seen their premiums for worker’s compensation insurance decrease 10 years in a row, saving them $206 million in the past year and over $1 billion since 2017, according to the Wisconsin Hospital Association, which is part of the state Worker’s Compensation Advisory Council.
Twenty-three states, including Illinois, Michigan and Minnesota, provide automatic cost-of-living raises for PTD recipients. In Wisconsin, raises have been provided only when they are included in a wide-ranging worker’s compensation “agreed bill,” proposed every two years, and only if the bill becomes law.
That moment might be at hand.
The advisory council has recommended raises for PTD recipients in the next agreed bill, which is being drafted.
The bill still has to be approved by the Republican-controlled Legislature and signed by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers.
Making history, creating PTD raises
In 1911, Wisconsin became the first state to adopt a comprehensive worker’s compensation law that was upheld as constitutional. Before that, the burden was on the worker to prove that a job injury was the employer’s fault. Now it’s a no-fault system. Workers injured on the job can receive regular payments based on their salary, plus coverage of medical bills to treat their injuries.
Wisconsin’s system has received high marks for getting injured workers back on the job quickly and for worker satisfaction in health care for their injuries.
The money for worker’s compensation checks comes from worker’s compensation insurance companies and from employers who are self-insured for worker’s comp. No tax dollars are involved.
About 21,000 people annually receive Wisconsin worker’s comp checks, the vast majority of them for a temporary period. Only about 500 people receive PTD benefits, and only 300 of them, like Novy, are eligible for raises.
That’s because the 2016 agreed bill limits raises, known as supplementary benefits, only to PTD recipients injured before Jan. 1, 2003.
Wisconsin Watch’s Tom Kertscher explains how permanently and totally disabled workers haven’t seen a raise to their worker’s compensation benefits in nine years. He also talks with Jimmy Novy, 77, who grew up on a farm in Yuba, Wisconsin, and became severely disabled after his job at the local Rayovac company exposed him to manganese. (Video by Trisha Young / Wisconsin Watch)
How PTD raises are decided
The process that determines whether PTD raises are granted is not unlike the bargaining that an employer and a union do to reach a contract. Both sides have priorities, and there is horse trading and eventually compromise, at least on some issues.
The Worker’s Compensation Advisory Council is composed mainly of five representatives from management and five from organized labor, though it also includes nonvoting members representing insurance, health care and the Legislature.
Every odd year, the council develops a bill proposing multiple changes to worker’s comp. The process typically takes months of negotiations, said John Dipko, the council’s non-voting chair and administrator of worker’s compensation for the state Department of Workforce Development.
If approved by the Legislature and the governor, the bill becomes law the next year.
That process has produced 11 PTD raises since 1972. The 2016 raise put the maximum PTD payment at $669 per week.
‘The most severely changed’
Circumstances have left PTD recipient Scott Meyer better off financially than Novy, but delays in raises have forced Meyer to dip into savings and, as his health conditions worsen, worry about the future.
Meyer grew up outside of Milwaukee, playing in the woods and farm fields of rural Washington County. He was a member of the hockey team at West Bend West High School.
In 1993, at age 19, Meyer was working on a loading dock when a co-worker backing a semi-trailer pinned Meyer between the trailer and the dock. Meyer closed his eyes and tried to remain calm, thinking his right leg was broken.
“One of the paramedics in the ambulance thought that I was unconscious and said to the other paramedic that this was going to be his first fatality call,” Meyer recalled. “And I immediately then knew that something more major had happened.”
Scott Meyer in 1992 in his West Bend West High School hockey uniform. (Courtesy of Scott Meyer)
Scott Meyer in 2023 with his dog Luna near their home in Frisco, Colorado. (Courtesy of Lynn Meyer)
Worker’s comp recipient Scott Meyer’s video request to the state for a raise.
Meyer underwent multiple surgeries, spent more than a year in the hospital and dropped to under 100 pounds. He was left a paraplegic.
Though unable to work, Meyer became an Alpine skier in Colorado, where he now lives, competing in the 2014 Paralympics in Sochi, Russia.
Meyer, 51, said he receives about $2,300 per month from worker’s compensation – nearly $370 per month less than what he was paid on the job in 1993.
Meyer, who owns a condominium with his wife, a mental health therapist, said he has been able to live comfortably only by preserving savings, including from a one-time payout he received from his former employer for his injury. But with no raises in nine years, he has had to dip into savings to get by.
Earlier this year, both Novy in an email and Meyer in a video asked the Worker’s Compensation Advisory Council to recommend raises for PTD recipients.
“These are people whose lives are the most severely changed and are legitimately dependent upon these funds,” Meyer told Wisconsin Watch. “We’re talking about pennies on the dollar to the kind of money that is in the system.”
The process that results in PTD raises involves negotiations on a variety of worker’s compensation issues. That has made the road to another raise rocky in recent years.
Delayed raises and a possible breakthrough
The Worker’s Compensation Advisory Council’s agreed bill for 2018 would have raised the maximum weekly PTD payment to $711 from $669 and made more PTD people eligible for raises. But the bill also proposed a “fee schedule,” generally opposed by health care organizations, to limit how much health care providers can charge for worker’s comp care. The bill did not pass the Legislature.
Since then, the labor side of the advisory council continued to propose PTD raises, while the management side continued to seek a fee schedule. Wisconsin is one of only a handful of states without one. The two sides did not agree to include PTD raises in their 2020, 2022 and 2024 agreed bills.
A key barrier was cleared when a fee schedule for worker’s comp was included in the 2025-27 state budget adopted in July.
Days later, the advisory council proposed raises for current PTD recipients and made more PTD recipients eligible for raises.
Jimmy Novy smokes a Wrangler cigar on his porch July 29, 2025, in Hillsboro, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Under the 2026 agreed bill, the injury date for PTD recipients to be eligible for raises would change from Jan. 1, 2003, to Jan. 1, 2020 — making an estimated 210 more people eligible for raises.
The bill would also raise the maximum weekly benefit for PTD recipients to $1,051 from $669 effective Jan. 1, 2026.
And it would add raises each Jan. 1, though those amounts would not be set until shortly before they become effective.
For individuals, the raise amounts would vary based on when they were injured.
For example, a PTD recipient injured in 1985 and receiving $535 a week would get a 57% increase to $840. The increase would amount to nearly $16,000 per year.
Once it’s drafted, the new agreed bill would need a final vote from the advisory council, which is expected in September. Then the bill would be submitted to the labor committees of the state Senate and Assembly.
Council management representatives didn’t reply to calls and emails requesting comment. Wisconsin AFL-CIO President Stephanie Bloomingdale, the lead labor representative, said she understands the frustration over delayed raises. But she said the advisory council system, with management and labor hashing out worker’s compensation issues, provides stability.
Without it, “it would be up to the Legislature, and the whims of the political winds would determine the policy,” she said.
Dipko, the DWD administrator, said the department is sympathetic.
“We agreed that an increase is overdue,” he said.
Jimmy Novy holds out his arm to show his new tattoo on July 29, 2025, in Hillsboro, Wis. He has been collecting worker’s comp checks from the state since his injury in his late 20s. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
An archival photograph of Jimmy Novy, one of 312 permanently and totally disabled individuals in Wisconsin who haven’t seen a raise in their supplemental income since 2016. (Courtesy of Jimmy Novy)
After waiting this long, Novy isn’t sure what to think. He’s happy he and wife share a $125,000 brick house they own “with the bank,” as he puts it, and for his monthly $1,635 Social Security check, which increases each year. But he has filed for bankruptcy three times, most recently in 2020. He feels that at this stage of his life, he should be more secure, and a raise in worker’s comp would help.
“The Legislature should be — forget Republican, Democrat — just vote for what’s good,” he said.
“I can’t see how come they can’t give us a little raise every year,” he added.
How to express your opinion
The Legislature later this year is expected to consider a bill that recommends changes in state law on worker’s compensation, including providing raises to the permanently and totally disabled. Here is contact information for the two labor committees:
The chair of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, Labor and Economic Development is Sen. Dan Feyen, R-Fond du Lac: Sen.Feyen@legis.wi.gov; 608-266-5300.
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Some of the state’s fastest-growing jobs are in the health care and green energy fields.
Jobs projected to have the most openings tend to have high turnover and pay lower wages, according to state and federal data.
Many jobs that are shrinking the fastest are based on outdated technologies or practices.
Wisconsin’s Department of Workforce Development keeps a list of the “Hot Jobs” statewide – jobs that pay above the median wage, are expected to grow faster than average and have the most projected openings.
When Wisconsin Watch this spring launched a new pathways to success beat focused on jobs and job training, we set out to learn how Wisconsinites are building family-sustaining careers and what’s standing in their way.
Doing that required knowing how the job tides are changing in Wisconsin. What jobs are growing the fastest? Which are shrinking? What will be the most common jobs in the coming years, and what do they pay? The six charts below use state and federal data to answer those questions.
To learn more about any of these jobs, including what the work entails, how much it pays and how to get trained, click on the links in the article or visit a website like careeronestop.org, onetonline.org or skillexplorer.wisconsin.gov.
We’re planning follow-up coverage related to some of the growing fields on these lists. Which job or jobs would you like to learn more about? What questions do you have? Fill out this short Google form to let us know.
Which jobs are growing the fastest in Wisconsin?
Some of Wisconsin’s fastest-growing jobs are jobs in health and green energy fields, as you might expect. That includes the top four:
Six of the jobs that ranked in the top 10 fastest-growing have median salaries of $85,000 or more. Seven of the top 10 typically require a college degree, and four typically require a graduate degree.
Of the jobs that ranked in the top 10, just two (nurse practitioner and data scientist) are projected to add more than 1,000 jobs. Several are projected to add fewer than 200. By comparison, the state’s most common job, home health and personal care aide, is projected to have 14,150 annual openings, in part because of high turnover among those workers.
Three jobs were tied with physician assistants for 10th place. One is rail yard engineers, also known as hostlers or dinkey operators, who inspect train equipment and drive small locomotives to move railcars. The others are aircraft service attendants, who re-fuel planes and service them between flights, and administrative law judges or adjudicators, who rule on government matters. But while all three are projected to grow by 33% in Wisconsin, the number of physician assistants is projected to grow by 970, and the ranks of aircraft service attendants are projected to grow by just 50. Administrative law judges and rail yard engineers are projected to grow by just 10.
One note: These projections may not account for the latest developments in the job landscape, including how artificial intelligence might change the way Americans work, or what kinds of workers are needed. Gov. Tony Evers in 2023 appointed a task force to study how AI might transform Wisconsin’s labor market. The group found that bookkeepers, data entry keyers, credit analysts and insurance claims processors are among those whose work most overlaps with AI capabilities. They note that that doesn’t mean those workers will necessarily be replaced by AI; they could instead end up using AI tools to make their jobs easier or more efficient.
The task force also did the same analysis for the state’s 10 most common jobs. It found all had “middling” levels of AI exposure, suggesting they may not experience as much change with AI as some occupations will.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s administration has taken steps to reverse renewable energy initiatives, a move that could threaten the projected job growth for wind turbine service technicians. Twice this year the federal government halted construction of offshore wind farms.
Which jobs will have the most openings in Wisconsin?
Some occupations have lots of openings each year not because the industry is growing but because turnover is high. The jobs projected to have the most future openings in Wisconsin also pay some of the lowest wages. The top four have median annual salaries of less than $35,000 a year, and all of the top 10 have salaries under $46,000. None require education beyond a high school diploma, and most don’t require any formal education.
One in 10 Wisconsin workers holds one the top five jobs on this list, all with a 2022 median wage under $46,000. About 215,000 of those people work in jobs with a median wage under $35,000.
Of the 10 most common jobs, two stand out for higher average wages: registered nurse ($86,070) and truck driver ($57,380).
The state’s most common job involves caring for older adults or people with disabilities in their homes, helping with tasks like bathing, medication and grocery shopping. Across the country, demand for these workers is growing as more Americans choose to age in their homes rather than in assisted living or nursing facilities. In Wisconsin, the number of residents over 65 is expected to almost double by 2040, increasing demand. Industry leaders and disability advocacy groups say they already struggle to hire and retain enough workers as wages in other entry-level jobs rise, and they’ve called on the state to raise the Medicaid reimbursement rate, which pays for most of this care. The 2025-27 state budget allocates $19 million to raise that rate, less than half of what Evers requested.
Declining employment
Many of the jobs shrinking the fastest are ones you might expect: those based on outdated technologies or practices. About one in four positions held by telemarketers, switchboard operators, couriers, door-to-door salespeople and street vendors is projected to vanish by 2032.
Of the top 10 fastest-shrinking jobs, nine don’t usually require a college education.
Secretaries and administrative assistants are expected to lose the most jobs (2,420), followed by couriers and messengers (1,990), customer service representatives (1,550) and tellers (1,290).
Nursing assistant ranks are projected to shrink, too (by 720, or 3%), though that field will remain big in Wisconsin, with estimated 26,510 nursing assistant jobs in 2032.
‘Hot Jobs’
Wisconsin’s Department of Workforce Development keeps a list of the “Hot Jobs” statewide and in each of 11 regions. These jobs pay above the median wage for the state or region, are expected to grow faster than average and have the most projected openings. Visit this website to see the data and sort it in various ways.
One major caveat about this data: It compares 2032 to 2022, when COVID-19 was still disrupting the economy, so it favors jobs that have rebounded after shrinking during the pandemic.
For example, registered nurses don’t appear on the “Hot Jobs” list. The job pays well and it’s growing quickly, but few nurses lost their jobs in the pandemic. That means the field isn’t growing as much as those that saw major pandemic layoffs, said DWD Senior Research Analyst Maria del Pilar Casal. She expects registered nurses will make the list next time.
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Northeast Wisconsin’s fastest-growing jobs span a variety of industries, including health care and logistics.
Jobs in the region with the most openings tend to have low barriers to entry and tend to pay relatively low wages.
While the paper industry has a strong foothold in the northeast, paper goods machine operators are expected to lose the most positions.
What are the roughly 450,000 workers in northeast Wisconsin doing for a living? And how will that change in the next decade? We pored over state workforce data to find out.
Below are six charts you can use to make sense of which jobs are growing and shrinking across the region.
Wisconsin Watch also published a version with data that encompasses jobs across the entire state.
This article is solely focused on job trends in northeast Wisconsin. As we continue to build our new northeast Wisconsin bureau, you can expect us to provide more stories tailored to the region.
Wisconsin’s Department of Workforce Development — the state agency from which we sourced this data — defines the “Bay Area” as Brown, Door, Florence, Kewaunee, Manitowoc, Marinette, Menominee, Oconto, Outagamie, Shawano and Sheboygan counties.
Home health and personal care aides are the fastest-growing occupation in the region, expected to add nearly 1,200 jobs by 2032. Wisconsin will need more workers to assist older adults as the state’s population continues to age significantly, with the number of residents over the age of 74 expected to increase 41% between 2020 and 2030.
Several of the occupations on this list are already some of the most popular in the region, so the hundreds to thousands of jobs they’re expected to add represent a smaller share of the area’s overall workforce. When looking at growth by percentage, some other occupations are expected to add a smaller number of jobs, but they will constitute a larger share of the workforce.
The occupations expected to grow most percentage-wise include:
Nurse practitioners, projected to grow 62% by adding 450 jobs.
Data scientists, projected to grow 47% by adding 148 jobs.
Physician assistants, projected to grow 41% by adding 128 jobs.
Actuaries, projected to grow 41% by adding 49 jobs.
Information security analysts, projected to grow 41% by adding 115 jobs.
Some occupations have lots of openings each year — not necessarily because the industry is growing but because there are more people leaving their roles.
Many of the jobs projected to have the most future openings have low barriers to entry, meaning they don’t require formal education or certification to obtain. They also pay relatively low wages — for example, topping the list is fast food counter workers, who made an average salary of $27,890 in the region in 2024.
Many of the jobs that have the most openings each year are also the most common jobs for northeast Wisconsinites to hold.
The 10 most common occupations in the region span largely essential jobs, including the workers who treat you at the hospital, those keeping the region’s restaurant industry alive and the people who make sure your packages are safely packed and delivered.
While the paper industry has a strong foothold in the northeast, paper goods machine operators top the list for anticipated job loss. This includes workers who tend paper goods machines that convert, saw, corrugate or seal paper or paperboard sheets into products.
Other industries are expected to lose fewer jobs, but those losses will make a larger dent in the profession. Some of the occupations expected to lose the most percentage-wise are:
Broadcast technicians, expected to lose 35 jobs, a 60% decrease.
Word processors and typists, expected to lose 10 jobs, a 37% decrease.
Nuclear engineers, expected to lose eight jobs, a 23% decrease.
Pressers, textile, garment, and related materials, expected to lose 18 jobs for a 20% decrease.
Data entry keyers, expected to lose 72 jobs, a 19% decrease.
Most of these occupations — telemarketers, typists and data entry keyers — are based on outdated technologies or practices, so the fact that they’re shrinking quickly may not be surprising.
Wisconsin’s Department of Workforce Development keeps a list of the “Hot Jobs” in every region of the state. To be classified as such, the occupation must pay above the state’s median salary, have an above-average growth rate and top the list of projected job openings.
Use the table to explore what education and training northeast Wisconsin’s “Hot Jobs” provide, what they pay and how they’re expected to grow.
Note: This data may be slightly skewed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The department says it accounts for pandemic impacts “as accurately as possible.” Some occupations that regularly have large growth rates didn’t make the cut if they didn’t show a significant decline in 2020 followed by a notable recovery, the department notes.
Is there a job you’re curious about that didn’t make one of our charts? Use this searchable database of hundreds of occupations to see how each is expected to change in the northeast region by 2032.
We’re planning follow-up coverage related to Wisconsin’s fastest-growing fields. Which jobs would you like to learn more about? Fill out this short Google form to let us know.
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