A special committee of the Wisconsin Senate approved the release of a report detailing allegations from Republicans that Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul and the Department of Justice skirted the law by using funds from out-of-state groups to hire lawyers. 

The report’s release comes as Kaul is set to face re-election in November against Eric Toney, the Republican district attorney of Fond du Lac County. 

Republicans said the report shows Kaul’s willingness to circumvent the law in a way that amounts to the DOJ being “for sale,” while Democrats accused Republicans of making baseless accusations to create political theater in an election year. 

Faced with a limited budget from the GOP-controlled Legislature and increased scrutiny on the DOJ since the enactment of the Republican lame duck laws in 2018, Kaul hired the out-of-state lawyers to assist with the enforcement of the state’s environmental regulations. 

The lawyers were given fellowships to work as special assistant attorneys general through a New York University program tied to former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The attorneys were paid by the NYU program and officially classified as volunteers under the state employment system yet given the powers of an assistant attorney general. 

Kaul appeared before the committee in February to give testimony. During that hearing, he said the classification as volunteers had been discussed with and approved by the state’s ethics commission. An ethics complaint against the arrangement has been pending for more than a year. 

In the report, which the oversight committee voted 4-2 along party lines to adopt on Tuesday, the Republicans allege that the arrangement was “not authorized” by Wisconsin statutes, that the DOJ violated state law by not immediately administering the attorneys oaths of office, exposes concerns about the state’s system for adjudicating ethics complaints, opens the state up to influence from outside interests and that the DOJ did not fully cooperate with records requests filed by the committee. 

The report recommends that the DOJ immediately terminate the agreements that facilitated the hiring of the attorneys. It also recommends that the Legislature pass a resolution declaring the hirings unlawful, more strictly manage the processes through which the DOJ is funded and pass legislation that only state employees can conduct prosecutions. Additionally the report states that government attorneys should take their oaths of office before conducting any work for the state and that the state Ethics Commission should be subject to faster timelines for adjudicating complaints.

Sen. Eric Wimberger (R-Gillet) said he’s concerned that allowing arrangements like the one DOJ established with the NYU program means an attorney general from any party can outsource DOJ functions to outside interest groups. 

“If attorney generals, not just Josh Kaul, but if attorney generals are permitted to do this, then the DOJ is for hire. It’s for sale,” Wimberger said. 

At a news conference following the committee meeting, Sen. Jodi Habush Sinykin (D-Whitefish Bay) said that the attorneys were “focused solely … on bread and butter environmental issues, keeping out air, our water and our Wisconsin lands safe, and that’s what people want” from the DOJ. 

Habush Sinykin and the other Democrat on the committee, Sen. Melissa Ratcliff (D-Cottage Grove), argued that the Republicans were focused on creating political drama out of standard DOJ functions when instead they should have been working to solve problems Wisconsinites care about. 

“What we just heard in there was that definition of political theater, the opposite of what the people of Wisconsin are seeking from our legislators,” Habush Sinykin said. “Which is very much what they want us focusing on, housing affordability, Knowles-Nelson, child care, all those matters which this Legislature and under this Republican majority, we have not gotten to.” 

The Democrats pointed out that last February, Republicans introduced a bill that would have explicitly prohibited the DOJ from using legal services of anyone who is not a state employee. The bill, authored by Wimberger and Sen. Cory Tomczyk (R-Mosinee), who is also on the committee, did not even receive a public hearing. 

Instead, the Democrats said, the issue was ignored until the report was released after the Legislature had adjourned for the year. 

“You should have moved it through committee. We should have voted on it on the Senate floor,” Habush Sinykin said during the meeting. “And I wish I could have had that chance, rather than to let it just sit there and go nowhere, and to then call us back for this purpose and to use it as a weapon.”

Gov. Tony Evers vetoed Republican lawmakers’ bill that would have opted Wisconsin into a federal program rewarding taxpayers for contributions to private voucher schools and other educational organizations, saying he objected to the national expansion of private school choice and that public funds should go to public schools.

A provision in the federal tax and spending law signed by President Donald Trump in July 2025 will provide a dollar-for-dollar tax credit of up to $1,700 to people who donate to qualifying “scholarship granting organizations.” Donations to organizations are used for educational expenses including tuition and board at private schools, tutoring and books. The provision created the first major federal program to allocate public money towards private school tuition in the form of tax incentives. 

Republican lawmakers, who hold the majority in Wisconsin’s state Legislature, as well as conservative and school choice advocacy groups have advocated for Wisconsin’s participation in the program — highlighting that the funds could be used for costs for public school students, including tutoring, as well as for private school students. However, governors are responsible for opting their states into the program by 2027, meaning they needed to convince Evers, a former state superintendent and public school teacher who had previously expressed skepticism about the program, to opt in. Without Evers’ approval, Wisconsin taxpayers can still reap the benefits of the federal tax credit, but the money they donate will support private school programs in other states.

AB 602 directed Evers to join the program on behalf of Wisconsin. In his veto message, Evers laid out a number of his concerns. 

“This nationwide voucher program has no student achievement metrics, no school accountability measures, no minimum or maximum scholarship size, no certain end date, and no cap on how much the federal government can spend,” Evers said. “Republicans in Washington have given private voucher expansion carte blanche to run roughshod over public education in this country — and a blank check to do so at taxpayer expense, clearly without any regard for whether it actually does what is best for kids.”

Evers also noted that the rulemaking process for the program has not been completed. 

According to an estimate by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), the cost of the program could range to as high as $51 billion annually.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, 23 states had opted into the program as of January. Those states, mostly led by Republican governors, include Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, Idaho, Montana, Louisiana and Texas. In February, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis became the first Democratic governor to opt into the program. Other Democratic governors have remained skeptical. 

Evers said in his veto message that Wisconsin is uniquely positioned to understand the effects of voucher expansion and disputed claims that the federal program would provide sufficient support to public school students.  

“As a former science teacher, principal, superintendent, state superintendent and a son of the state that created the nation’s first-ever private school voucher program, I have spent decades of my life watching the impacts that draining public funds from public schools to fund private voucher school programs instead has had on kids, schools and public education in Wisconsin,” Evers said. 

Wisconsin’s school voucher program — from the number of students and schools that participate to the amount of state money invested — has grown exponentially since its inception in Milwaukee in 1990. Growth is likely to accelerate dramatically in the next few years.  Participation caps, which limit the number of students in each district who can participate, have been lifted by 1% each year since 2017. Next year they will be phased out completely. 

“With each passing school year, public school districts continue to endure capped and prorated state funding, strict revenue limits and the need to go to referenda in many cases just to keep up with inflationary pressures to provide a quality education for their kids,” Evers said. “Even now, the Legislature has simultaneously failed to act on my calls to increase funding for special education to ensure the state meets the targets promised in our bipartisan budget.” 

In the most recent state budget, Wisconsin lawmakers provided increases to payments for the school voucher program, but did not provide any additional funding for general aid for public schools. The state’s investment in the special education reimbursement for public schools was not enough to cover the estimated  42% of costs in the first year of the budget and 45% in the second year. 

With funding from the state not keeping pace with inflation, public school districts have turned increasingly to property taxpayers for additional funding that must be approved by voters.

Next week, there will be 74 referendum requests on April ballots across the state — and the results will shape whether school districts can pay their bills, how much staff get paid and whether schools can open their doors next year. A lawsuit filed in February argues that the state isn’t fulfilling its constitutional duties and the current funding formula needs to be overhauled.

Rep. Jessie Rodriguez (R-Oak Creek), who coauthored the school donation tax credit bill with Senate President Mary Felzkowski (R-Tomahawk), wrote in an email to the Wisconsin Examiner that she was “disappointed, but not surprised” Evers vetoed the bill, saying he misunderstands the purpose of the bill. 

“AB 602 would have allowed Wisconsin students to be eligible for more scholarships to use towards the education style that works best for them, whether that be private school tuition or hiring a tutor outside of school time,” Rodriguez said. “This would have benefited K-12 students in all educational settings. For example, a scholarship could have been created to help low-income families send their 8th grade students on their class field trip to Washington, D.C.” 

“It’s just unfortunate, because opting in would have cost the state nothing, and by not opting in Wisconsin will sit idly by while our residents donate to scholarship granting organizations in other states and receive a federal tax benefit for doing so,” she said. “Sadly, we can’t just wait for a new governor in January.” 

Evers is not running for a third term in office this year, meaning the new governor could be a Republican or a Democrat, but will not take office until Jan. 4, 2027. The deadline for states to opt in to the federal program is Jan. 1, 2027. 

Felzkowski said in a statement that Evers was “putting politics over helping Wisconsin students.”

“Apparently, expanded educational opportunities for students in all schools, whether public, private, homeschool or charter, (at NO cost to the state and without the need for a single new bureaucrat!) makes too much sense for the governor. Wisconsin students and families deserve better,” Felzkowski said.

Evers addressed proponents’ argument that “the program will benefit public school students, families, and schools, too” in his veto message.

“Perhaps I am wrong and maybe it will. Nevertheless, right now, I have no such comfort, and my decades of experience in public education in the state with the first and oldest modern voucher program tell me the opposite will be true,” Evers said. “Therefore, I must veto this bill in its entirety. What’s best for our kids is what’s best for our state, and it remains unclear how this bill will do what’s best for the more than 800,000 Wisconsin public school kids for whom the state has a constitutional obligation to adequately provide and invest in public education.”

Peggy Wirtz-Olsen, president of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state’s largest teachers union, celebrated the veto in a statement. 

“More than 70 school districts in Wisconsin are going to referendum next week just to have enough money to continue operating because they have been abandoned by the state and federal government,” Wirtz-Olsen said. “Yet the Trump Administration and the Republicans in the Wisconsin Legislature think this is a good time to pour tens of billions of dollars into a voucher program that has no standards and no accountability. A veto is the least of what this program deserves.”

Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul said that the nearly eight hours of hearings held by the newly established Committee on the Oversight of the Department of Justice this week amounted to “political theater.” 

In a series of hearings Tuesday and Wednesday, the committee, chaired by Senate President Mary Felzkowski (R-Tomahawk), dug into allegations that the DOJ violated state rules when it hired out of state lawyers on contract to enforce the state’s environmental regulations. 

The attorneys were given fellowships to work as special assistant attorneys general through a New York University program tied to former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The testimony obtained by the committee included input from Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, the state’s largest business lobby and one of the state Republican Party’s most powerful allies, and a dairy farmer who was subject to an enforcement action by the state after he operated his factory farm without a permit for six years. 

The Republican members of the committee said the fellowships presented “troubling” opportunities for a third-party organization to exert partisan influence over the work of the DOJ. Throughout the testimony, Republicans also complained about the specifics of state employment classifications, the timeliness of paperwork filing and previous contributions Bloomberg has made to the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. 

At a press conference Wednesday afternoon, Kaul compared the committee’s work to former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman’s widely maligned review of the 2020 election. 

“Increasingly, what we’re seeing are actions from the committee that I would describe as Gableman-esque,” Kaul said. “This is clearly an exercise in political theater, not a substantive exercise, and that’s really unfortunate, because the reality is that we do have serious issues to address on behalf of the people of Wisconsin, and we have progress to make.”

Kaul also questioned how an investigation into outside influence on state government could give the state’s most powerful lobbying organization a multi-hour platform to testify.

“The purported basis for this is to investigate outside influence, and the only outside influence that is going on here is the outside influence on our Legislature,” he said. “Just yesterday, the state’s most powerful lobbying organization got a platform to testify from this Legislature. We did not hear from a single person who was impacted by the harmful pollution, who was there to talk about those harms. So we have a one-sided presentation from the Legislature, and any concerns about outside influence are ones that relate to the actions of the Legislature, not the Department of Justice.”

Republicans on the committee complained that the fellows were paid through the university program while officially being classified by the state as volunteers and that Kaul seeking this outside funding for staff attorneys amounted to an end-run around the Legislature’s authority to decide the department’s budget. 

“If you’re truly a leader of a department, you shouldn’t give up. You seem to believe in certain things, but you’ve given up on trying to help with your own state resources,” Sen. Cory Tomczyk (R-Mosinee) said, asking why Kaul didn’t ask the Legislature for additional money to fund environmental enforcement attorneys. 

Kaul said he’s “confident the current majority will not fund additional environmental positions.” 

Tomczyk also spent a significant chunk of his testimony asking about the timing of DOJ filing paperwork to officially hire the fellows, including when they took their oaths of office and got licensed to practice law in Wisconsin. He compared delays in the oaths being completed with the Tuesday testimony of dairy farmer Phil Mlsna — who missed a filing deadline with the DNR, causing the loss of his dairy farm’s permit.

Felzkowski, a former member of the Joint Finance Committee, has been among the Republicans most hostile to the state’s environmental rules and conservation programs. As a member of JFC, she anonymously held up the Pelican River Forest conservation project and has been heavily opposed to the extension of the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Grant program. 

Throughout her questioning of Kaul, she argued that funding environmental enforcement is inherently partisan. 

“You want the citizens of the state of Wisconsin to believe this is a non-partisan organization without a personal agenda or their own private agenda,” Felzkowski said. 

Kaul said enforcing the state’s environmental laws is a partisan issue only in that many Republicans don’t believe the government should address climate change. 

“Well, what I would say is that the center is focused on environmental protection issues, and so a lot of it is a question of if you view protecting the environment, addressing climate change, working to protect safe and clean water, as partisan issues or not,” Kaul said. 

Following the hearing’s conclusion, the Republican members of the committee held a press conference to say they’d assess the testimony and release a report. During the press conference, Tomczyk questioned if the DOJ should be “punished” over the fellowship issue. 

“If we’re going to punish a farmer for not having his paperwork done, should the DOJ be punished for not having theirs?” he asked, adding that he has “some ideas” for what the punishment would look like. 

The Democrats on the committee said that after two days of testimony, Republicans couldn’t point to any specific cases in which the fellows’ work on a case was unduly influenced. 

“What was clear from the testimony over the last two days is there was not one, not one example of any legal matter or enforcement action that was worked on by these legal fellows that pointed to any special interest,” Sen. Jodi Habush Sinykin (D-Whitefish Bay), a former environmental attorney, said. “They were working on bread-and-butter environmental enforcement actions pertaining to water quality, CAFO regulation, wetland remediation and the like, everything was what we need as a state to protect our communities.”