Amtrak's Borealis passenger train connecting Chicago to Minneapolis through Milwaukee arrives at the Columbus, Wisconsin, station on Friday, Sept. 12. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

On a sunny Friday afternoon, a half-dozen lawmakers and at least as many passenger rail advocates boarded an Amtrak train in Columbus, Wisconsin, for a 90-minute ride across the countryside.

Their destination was Tomah, where they spent another 90 minutes talking about why Wisconsin should expand train service and how to make that happen.

The event was a debut of sorts for the state Legislature’s Passenger Rail Caucus, a body that began coming together this year.

There are many reasons to expand passenger rail service in Wisconsin, according to Rep. Lori Palmeri (D-Oshkosh), a principal organizer for the group.

She sees economic and environmental benefits to rail travel — moving more people with less pollution per individual. But it also provides options for people no longer interested in driving but who don’t want to be stuck at home.

Rail service can address “the spatial mismatch between where people are living and where people are either working or going to school or getting their health care or recreating,” Palmeri said in an interview. “When I talk to seniors, they want to have that access to not just urban centers, but some of our second-class cities, too.”

An adult granddaughter of hers has epilepsy and will never be able to drive, Palmeri said, but others in that age group appear to drive less for other reasons.

“Fewer and fewer younger people are investing either in the learning piece” — driver training — “or the financial piece of car ownership,” she said, especially as cars get more expensive to own.

In short, for lawmakers in the passenger rail caucus and for the advocates encouraging them, passenger rail service is more than a nostalgic indulgence. It’s an underappreciated alternative to cramped airliners and congested highways.

‘Our time to stand up’

And it’s an alternative that Susan Foote-Martin, vice president of communications for the Wisconsin Association of Railroad Passengers, says will require a concerted campaign to gain more attention and support.

“We feel now is our time to stand up, and to speak up, and to ante up for the things that mean something to us,” Foote-Martin told the lawmakers and other advocates gathered in a Tomah restaurant’s banquet room.

“If we don’t do it, it’s not going to happen,” she said. “We can’t wait for a posse to come riding out of the sunset to save us. We are the posse.”

The caucus is building up steam while the view ahead is murky.

Amtrak’s Borealis train, which makes round trips once a day from Chicago to the Twin Cities through southern and western Wisconsin, has lived up to early projections, transporting nearly 230,000 riders in the first year of  its launch in May 2024.

Meanwhile, a  bus service connecting the Amtrak station in  Milwaukee to Green Bay through the Fox Valley will end abruptly Oct. 1. The service was funded through the Wisconsin Department of Transportation (WisDOT), but money to continue the route was left out of the 2025-27 state budget.

“We’re working with WisDOT to do more, but to do more takes funding,” Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari told the assembled group. “And if there’s a way to put that back together again or find funding for it, we’re at WisDOT’s disposal and yours to go hunt that down.”

The bus service offered, in effect, proof of concept for a long desired  revival of passenger rail service to Green Bay. That proposed extension is the farthest along in development and planning of various Amtrak extension proposals in Wisconsin, according to Larry Rueff, who represents NEWRails, a nonprofit formed to promote the Green Bay extension. (The first three letters in the name stand for Northeast Wisconsin.)

The line is ready for the next phase in planning. “We need to know that it’s going to be funded, or it won’t get any further — and that’s going to be bad for Green Bay and bad for the rest of the state’s projects,” Rueff said in an interview.

High-speed memories

There’s no shortage of other ideas. Sen. Mark Spreitzer (D-Beloit) said he’d like to see passenger service into Beloit some day. Rep. Vincent Miresse (D-Stevens Point) would like to see service connecting Stevens Point and other central Wisconsin communities to the Twin Cities through the Chippewa Valley.

“I just want to see passenger rail as being a viable alternative to everyone having to have a car right now,” Miresse told the Wisconsin Examiner. “I think people would like the opportunity to travel to Chicago, Milwaukee, Madison and be able to hop on a train and not have the burden of having a vehicle.”

The choice of Tomah for Friday’s discussion harkened back to the high-speed rail project approved during former Gov. Jim Doyle’s second term. After Scott Walker was elected governor in 2010 promising to cancel the project, Doyle killed it just before leaving office at the end of that year.

The project’s demise also put off plans to put a passenger stop in Madison. Columbus, the nearest Amtrak station, is 27 miles northeast of the capital city.

“As someone who works in Madison almost every week, it was a great disappointment to lose that high speed rail option,” Rep. Jill Billings (D-La Crosse), who also came to the Tomah meeting, said in an interview. “There are times when I’m driving to Madison and I think, ‘I could be on a train working right now.’”

Tomah had begun planning an intermodal hub as part of the high speed rail project. While that plan died, Tomah City Administrator Nick Morales told the group the city has seen bustling tourism and regularly draws in traffic to the region’s two military bases and a veterans hospital.

“We struggle with a lot of our transportation needs, and increased rail services to Tomah would greatly benefit us,” he said.

Getting Republicans on board

The lawmakers and advocates who gathered in Tomah contend that expanding rail service in Wisconsin should be a bipartisan objective, but only Democratic legislators were on hand for Friday’s event.

The late Republican Rep. Ed Brooks is reported to have proposed a railroad caucus years ago. “This was a dream of his,” Billings told the group, recalling fondly how she got to know Brooks early in her Assembly career.

Palmeri said she has reached out to several GOP lawmakers, some of whom have put their names on railroad-related bills in the past. “The hope was that we would have folks on the other side of the aisle also join us and hear the same information,” she said after the session was over Friday.

The canceled bus connection to Green Bay was among the casualties when the Republican majority on the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee  removed $15 million for passenger rail service from Gov. Tony Evers’ draft budget.

The new passenger rail caucus is working on a bill that would make up for what was lost. There isn’t yet a draft, but Palmeri doesn’t expect it simply to be a rewrite of the Evers proposal.

“No disrespect to what was put in the budget, but I think there are some folks who are interested in going big or going home,” she said.  

Such legislation is unlikely to advance without support from Republicans, however. Asked what it would take to persuade GOP lawmakers to take it up, Palmeri answered, “them not being in the majority.”

So does that mean the developing legislation is intended for Democratic campaign messaging in the 2026 legislative elections?

“To a certain extent,” Palmeri said. “But I do also have the belief — maybe somewhat naïve — that there are people on the other side of the aisle who know this is good for their districts and who know that this could be their future — right?”

Children at The Playing Field, a Madison child care center that participates in the federal Head Start program. (Courtesy of The Playing Field)

Federal judges in Rhode Island and Washington have blocked the Trump administration from excluding people without legal immigration status from a group of federal programs, including Head Start early childhood education.

On Wednesday, a federal judge in Rhode Island halted a broad array of rules based on the new immigration restrictions from taking effect. Wisconsin was one of 21 states and the District of Columbia to join that lawsuit.  

Reuters reported that a White House statement said the administration expected a higher court to reverse the decision.

On Thursday, a federal judge in the state of Washington ordered the Trump administration to pause a requirement that Head Start early childhood education programs exclude families without legal immigration status. That ruling came in a case brought by Head Start groups in four states, including Wisconsin.

Head Start programs were included in a broader federal directive that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued July 10 listing federally funded “public benefits” that must exclude immigrants without legal status under the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act.

Certain programs, such as Medicaid, have been required to verify lawful immigration status for participants. But since 1998, the federal government has considered a range of programs exempt that are generally open to all in a community, according to Reuters.

The July HHS order revoked the 1998 policy and closed the door to immigrants lacking legal status for Head Start along with a collection of programs providing mental health and substance abuse treatment, job training and other assistance.

On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy issued a preliminary injunction that halted orders from HHS as well as the departments of Education, Labor and Justice based on the policy shift.

“The Government’s new policy, across the board, seems to be this: ‘Show me your papers,'” McElroy wrote in her order.

McElroy wrote that the administration acted “in a rushed way, without seeking comment from the public or interested parties,” likely violating the federal Administrative Procedures Act.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Ricardo Martinez issued a temporary restraining order directing HHS not to apply the immigration restriction to Head Start programs.

Head Start programs have never been required to determine the immigration status of families in the program since it started nearly 60 years ago, according to Jennie Mauer, executive director of the Wisconsin Head Start Association.

The Wisconsin association joined the lawsuit against the HHS order filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on behalf of Head Start programs in the states of Washington, Illinois and Pennsylvania as well as advocacy groups in California and Oregon.

“This ruling affirms what we know to be both right within the law and right for communities,” Mauer told the Wisconsin Examiner on Friday. “Keeping eligible Head Start Families in the program is the best outcome for Wisconsin. Kids are safer and it keeps Wisconsin working.”

Martinez wrote in a 26-page opinion focused on the Head Start portion in the HHS order that harms the plaintiffs warned of “are not merely speculative.” Martinez was appointed by President George W. Bush and confirmed in 2004.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs told the court that a Wisconsin Head Start program reported at least four families withdrew after the federal directive was issued. Several Pennsylvania programs reported withdrawals, one reported that it expects to have to close and another said it will have to close one of its rooms due to a drop in enrollment.

The plaintiffs’ arguments “detail confusion on how to comply with the Directive, how to verify immigration status, who status is based on, whether non-profits are exempt, difficulties in recruiting and families obtaining proper documentation, and the families’ overall fear that reporting immigration status will result in a choice between family safety and a child’s education,” Martinez wrote.

The directive has unclear guidance and has had a “chilling effect” on programs as well as on families who have relied on Head Start, resulting “in the immediate harm of childhood education loss” and “leading to long-term harms in development,” he wrote. “It also results in parents losing childcare, risking missed work, unemployment, forced dropouts, and inability to pay life expenses and support families.”

A draft bill Democrats are circulating would repeal Wisconsin's ban on unemployment insurance for people who receive Social Security Disability Insurance payments. (Getty Images)

After a federal court decision rolled back a Wisconsin law that blocked disability payment recipients from collecting unemployment insurance, Democratic lawmakers have drafted legislation that repeals that law.

“Our job is to correct mistakes or ensure that someone’s rights aren’t taken from them. And when this statute originally passed, I think that’s exactly what it did,” said Sen. Kristin Dassler-Alfheim (D-Appleton) in a phone interview Tuesday after circulating the draft legislation earlier in the day.

“The good news is the court has come down and we now have the proper stance. Now, it’s our job to ensure that those rights aren’t infringed on again,” she said.

Dassler-Alfheim’s draft bill is co-authored by state Rep. Christine Sinicki (D-Milwaukee). It codifies a ruling in July by U.S. District Judge William Conley that ordered the Department of Workforce Development (DWD) to stop denying unemployment insurance applications from people who collect Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI).

Conley ruled a year ago that the 2013 Wisconsin law disqualifying Social Security Disability Insurance recipients from collecting unemployment insurance violated two federal laws: The Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act. The ruling came in response to a class-action lawsuit filed in 2021 opposing the state’s ban on jobless pay for people on SSDI.

Conley delayed imposing a remedy in his July 17, 2024, decision. While DWD never indicated plans to appeal the ruling, the department continued to enforce the 2013 law, blocking jobless pay for people on SSDI.

A year after his first decision, Conley ordered DWD to stop enforcing the law, and on Aug. 20, issued a follow-up order on behalf of two groups of people in the original lawsuit.

DWD must pay jobless benefits to applicants between Sept. 7, 2015 — when the SSDI-unemployment ban law was last revised — and July 30, 2025, who were denied because they received SSDI payments. Those applicants must demonstrate that they were eligible for unemployment insurance except for the SSDI ban, Conley wrote.

DWD must also pay back people who had originally been awarded jobless pay but were then required to return the money because they were on SSDI, the judge ordered.

Conley ruled that applicants are not eligible for state jobless pay for weeks in which they received Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a federal program that was created at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A first-term lawmaker, Dassler-Alfheim said her career in the insurance and financial industry attuned her to the issue that the SSDI ban on jobless pay raised.

“Being keenly aware when people have limitations on income is just something that I’ve always paid attention to,” Dassler-Alfheim said. “Anytime you’ve got restrictions on people . . . when they’re trying to work and something goes wrong, to not be able to give them the compensation — it’s just not right.”

The federal Social Security Administration program allows disability insurance recipients to work part-time if they are able to, and encourages them to do so under programs that ensure they do not lose their disability payments or their medical coverage under Medicaid.

When Wisconsin banned SSDI recipients from unemployment pay, however, DWD under the administration of former Gov. Scott Walker discounted the possibility that people enrolled in the federal disability program might be able to work. A DWD proposal at the time asserted that disability payment recipients who applied for unemployment insurance were probably “double-dipping” and committing “fraud.”

The law was originally enacted in 2013, then amended in 2015, also during the Walker administration. 

The law “really was discrimination,” Dassler-Alfheim said Tuesday. “There’s no reason that that should have taken place.”

DWD proposal could blunt ruling’s impact

Waiting in the wings, however, is a proposal from the current DWD staff that critics say would undo the impact of Conley’s decision.

The proposal is part of the package that the department has submitted to the state Unemployment Insurance Advisory Council — a joint labor-management body that for decades has negotiated and recommended changes to the state’s jobless pay law. DWD presented its proposals — 12 in all — to the council in August.

The department’s proposal on unemployment pay for SSDI recipients calls for offsetting an applicant’s jobless pay by the applicant’s SSDI payment, “to prevent the payment of duplicative government benefits for the replacement of lost earnings or income, regardless of an individual’s ability to work.” 

The recipient’s monthly SSDI payment would be divided into fractions allocated for each week of jobless pay, and the equivalent amount of that payment would be subtracted from the recipient’s weekly unemployment check.

For many SSDI recipients that would wipe out their jobless pay entirely, according to unemployment insurance lawyer Victor Forberger. 

For example, a person who gets $1,000 from SSDI each month and is awarded unemployment pay would have $250 deducted each week from their unemployment benefits. 

“Very few SSDI recipients have a weekly unemployment insurance benefit of more than $250,” Forberger said in an interview in July — meaning that they would probably not collect any jobless pay at all despite qualifying for it. 

In a statement Tuesday, DWD defended the proposal.

The administration of Gov. Tony Evers has three times proposed budgets that would end the ban on UI for SSDI recipients on the grounds that “denying unemployment insurance (UI) benefits to social security disability insurance (SSDI) recipients was discriminatory,” DWD’s statement said.

Those same proposals included offset provisions. DWD said that those proposals “mirrored the treatment [of] SSDI with the treatment of pensions and lump sum payments under UI law.” Those payments can similarly reduce an unemployment insurance award. 

Lawmakers on the state Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee threw all those changes out of the budget each time, however. 

Conley’s July 2024 opinion found barring jobless pay for SSDI recipients violated federal law, the DWD statement said. But, the department statement added, his ruling also “noted that offsets to the receipt of SSDI have been upheld by other courts.” 

Conley’s most recent orders blocked DWD from enforcing the SSDI unemployment insurance ban, “but did not order an offset,” said the DWD statement, calling the judge’s order “consistent with DWD’s policy position.”

“DWD has already begun processing payments for individuals who receive SSDI,” the statement said. “DWD will continue [to] meet the requirements of the court’s order and any legislation that is signed into law.”

Forberger said reducing jobless pay by the amount of a recipient’s SSDI payment would effectively nullify the court’s ruling, however. “It would perpetuate the discrimination,” he said. 

SSDI benefits are “a bare minimum and in some cases not even that,” Forberger said. People enrolled in SSDI and who also take jobs “need to do this work to support themselves.”

Dassler-Alfheim told the Wisconsin Examiner that she would oppose including the offset proposal in a UI revision bill. 

“If they lose that job that they have gone out of their way to get, even though they’re disabled, they certainly deserve to be compensated for their unemployment at the same rate, under the same scruples, as anybody else,” Dassler-Alfheim said.

“These are people that are doing exactly what society wants them to do — not sitting home on a disability check,” she added. “Why would we disincentivize by removing benefits if they were to lose their job for something they didn’t do?”

Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) speaks Friday at a press conference to promote her legislation that would extend enhanced tax breaks on the cost of insurance purchased through the Affordable Care Act. Business owners Kyle LaFond, left, and Evan Dannells also spoke in favor of extending the tax credits. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Federal legislation that would hold down the cost of health insurance for millions of Americans and nearly a quarter-million Wisconsin residents has quiet support from Republicans in the Senate, according to Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin).

So far, however, none of them have spoken out, Baldwin said at a news conference in Madison on Friday.

Baldwin has introduced a bill that would extend tax credits that have cut the health insurance costs for people who buy coverage on the federal marketplace, HealthCare.gov.

When the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was enacted in 2010 and the HealthCare.gov marketplace was launched to make it easier and cheaper for people without health insurance to buy coverage, the law included tax credits to lower the cost of premiums for people with incomes up to 400% of the federal poverty guideline.

In 2021, the premium tax credits were supercharged to impart far greater savings to people buying insurance through the marketplace. The enhanced tax credits were extended in 2022 with a sunset at the end of this year.

The extra tax breaks helped insurance coverage through the HealthCare.gov marketplace rise to record highs in the last few years, both in the U.S. and in Wisconsin.

“This tax break, the enhanced premium tax credit, saves more than 230,000 Wisconsinites an average of $500 every single month” on their insurance premiums, Baldwin said. “Not extending these tax breaks and jacking up costs on the open marketplace will crush families — but also small businesses that are the fabric of our communities.”

In January Baldwin and New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) introduced legislation to make the enhanced tax credits permanent, in place of the lower tax credits that will resume when the enhanced credits expire Dec. 31.

A paper published Sept. 3 by the Georgetown University Law School Center on Poverty and Inequality reported that according to the Congressional Budget Office, without the enhanced credits 30 million more people will lack health insurance by 2034 — an average of 3.8 million a year.

For people with incomes between 100% and 150% of the federal poverty guideline, insurance premiums will go up by 7.9% between 2026 and 2034, the Georgetown researchers calculated.

For people with incomes between 150% and 400% of the federal poverty guideline, premiums would rise between 29% and 160% in the same period, according to the report.

The report also notes without the enhanced tax credits, people who lose Medicaid coverage due to cuts in the Republican megabill President Donald Trump signed on July 4 could be unable to afford insurance on HealthCare.gov.

‘Encouraged by conversations’

“There are, in the Senate, Republicans who have quietly indicated that they want to extend breaks to make [HealthCare.gov] marketplace insurance affordable,” Baldwin said. “I don’t have a count yet to tell you that we have enough, but I’m encouraged by the conversations I’m having.”

In the U.S. House, a bipartisan bill has been introduced extending the enhanced credits for a year — “notably getting them past the midterm elections,” Baldwin said. But that’s not long enough for her.

“I don’t think this should be political,” Baldwin said. “I think this should be something that Democrats and Republicans should agree on, that people should be able to afford their health care coverage.”

Baldwin’s press conference was held at Access Community Health Center, which serves low-income Wisconsin residents. Joining Baldwin, Madison chef and restaurant owner Evan Dannells said that the passage of the ACA and the opening of the HealthCare.gov marketplace made health care newly available in his industry after years of the youngest group of workers going uninsured.

Before the ACA, for people who entered hospitality jobs in their late teens or early 20s, “it was essentially, fundamentally understood that you wouldn’t have health care until you were in your 30s,” Dannells said.

The ACA required insurers to cover young people on their parents’ plans up to the age of 26, then made it possible for them to find more affordable coverage at HealthCare.gov after that.

“I have a half dozen full time employees over the age of 26 at a restaurant, and so what they’re going to do is they’re going to leave for corporate jobs that have the buying power to get their premiums down,” Dannells said — something not possible for small employers.

“This is essentially the beginning of the dismantlement of the Affordable Care Act with no plan and process for the future,” Dannells said.

Kyle LaFond, owner of a Middleton manufacturing firm that makes custom cosmetic products for celebrity brands, said the ACA and the HealthCare.gov was “a godsend” for small employers such as his company. “These subsidies are important because, of course, now more than ever, folks are living paycheck to paycheck,” he said.

Baldwin said she will campaign to attach her proposal to one of “several must-pass bills coming up in the days and the weeks ahead.”

Avoiding the ‘cliff’

While the enhancements increased the value of the tax credits for people with incomes up to 400% of the poverty guideline, they also made tax credits available for the first time to people with higher incomes — up to more than 1000% of the guideline.

Baldwin told the Wisconsin Examiner that those higher income groups were added to avoid “what we call a cliff.” That occurs when a person’s income rises even slightly above a benefit’s income ceiling — suddenly cutting off the benefit and possibly demanding they make a repayment. Many safety-net programs have cliffs, she explained.

In Wisconsin, most Medicaid programs have income limits, and many are only available to people with incomes up to the federal poverty guideline, she said. People who may work several part-time jobs and usually qualify for Medicaid can find themselves kicked off the program if they have a brief boost in their income, due to overtime work, for instance.

“Then you have to do all sorts of work to get back on, and then you have to be very mindful that you don’t get an extra hour or a raise” that could lead to being kicked off again, Baldwin said.

“So we were trying to avoid there being the sort of equivalent cliff in the Affordable Care Act marketplace tax credits,” Baldwin said.

For that reason, her bill would continue the tax credits available to the higher income population, she said, “and I would be committed to not reintroducing a cliff.”

Baldwin criticized GOP lawmakers for passing the Republican megabill that extended Trump’s 2017 tax cuts without considering an extension of the enhanced ACA credits.

“You would think including tax breaks for tens of millions of families to afford health care would be a centerpiece of that legislation. Right? Wrong,” Baldwin said.

Instead, she charged, the bill made cuts to Medicaid and the federal nutrition program SNAP to pay for tax cuts “in favor of the biggest corporations and the wealthiest Americans.”

LeVar Wilson, a Milwaukee glazer, describes how a project labor agreement that included requirements for local hiring made it possible for him to learn his trade and build a career. A bill to repeal a state ban on project labor agreements is part of a "Build a Stronger Wisconsin" package that Democratic lawmakers proposed Thursday. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Democrats in the state Legislature began circulating draft legislation Thursday that they said would strengthen the state’s economy by supporting workers and undoing policies that undercut union-represented employees.

The package includes four bills: restoring Wisconsin’s prevailing wage law, repealing a ban on project labor agreements, repealing the state’s “right to work” law, and strengthening laws against wrongly classifying employees as independent contractors.

“We know that these are popular policies that the people of Wisconsin need to be able to thrive in our state,” said Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer (D-Racine) at a press conference in the Assembly chamber Thursday morning. “We  have all 60 members of the Assembly Democrats and the Senate Democrats signed onto these bills.”

A crowd of union members and supporters occupied the Assembly, packed in rows where the body’s leaders usually sit as well as bunched throughout the seats that lawmakers typically use during floor sessions.

One draft bill would undo Wisconsin’s “right-to-work” law enacted during former Gov. Scott Walker’s second term. The law bars employers and unions from requiring in their labor contracts that all union-represented employees pay union dues or fees to cover the union’s operational expenses.

Sen. Mark Spreitzer (D-Beloit) said the law “allows private sector workers to benefit from union protections without paying their share of union dues.” Spreitzer recalled he was in his first Assembly term when the measure was enacted in 2015 and spoke twice against it during an all-night floor session.

“Under federal law, unions are required to represent all employees in a workplace, but right-to-work laws like Wisconsin’s allow non-dues paying employees to receive the benefits of belonging to a union — such as bargain contracts for higher wages and union representation in employment disputes —without having to pay union dues,” Spreitzer said.

“That is not fair. It is well past time to return to the requirement that every union represented worker pays their dues for that privilege in Wisconsin,” he added.

Nurse Colin Gillis, a member of SEIU Wisconsin, called the law’s name “a misnomer.” Union members deride such laws as “right-to-work for less” because they tend to weaken wage gains, he said.

Right-to-work laws were first enacted in the segregated South after World War II. “Right-to-work laws were designed to divide and conquer and prevent us from joining together and increase living standards for working families from all races and backgrounds,” Gillis said. “Repealing ‘right to work for less’ will give me and my union siblings back the freedom to organize.”

A second bill would repeal another Walker-era law, enacted in 2017, that bars state and local governments from requiring contractors on public works projects to sign a project labor agreement with relevant unions. It also forbids government bids that require the bidder to have a union contract.

“Repealing the ban on project labor agreements, or PLAs, gives power to local and state governments to utilize a tool that would streamline the building process for public construction projects,” said Rep. Joan Fitzgerald (D-Fort Atkinson).

LeVar Wilson, a journeyman glazer represented by the Painters Union in Milwaukee, said he got his start as an apprentice 25 years ago when the Milwaukee baseball stadium, then known as Miller Park, was being built. The stadium project labor agreement guaranteed a percentage of jobs would go to Milwaukee County residents.

“I was one of those workers hired under this provision,” Wilson said. “It led me to a sustainable career that’s allowed me to raise a family of four without the struggle of poverty that I went through when I was a child.”

A third bill would increase enforcement and penalties for businesses that misclassify workers as independent contractors.

State Rep. Christine Sinicki (D-Milwaukee) said that when employers misclassify workers, they dodge state and federal payroll taxes, evade minimum wage laws and overtime payment requirements, and don’t pay into the worker’s compensation and unemployment insurance programs.

“By avoiding these costs, dishonest employers often successfully undercut their competitors with very low bids,” Sinicki said. “In this way, misclassification harms the law-abiding employers and their employees and also the taxpayers who have to pick up the slack.”

The draft bill would increase the penalties for lawbreakers and expand outreach both to contractors and the public about misclassification.

The legislation would “level the playing field for business owners like us, who play by the rules,” said Larry Statz, a second-generation union painting contractor with 30 employees who said that he’s seen more contractors misclassify employees in recent years.

“We refuse to break the law or shortchange our workers. But it’s getting harder to compete with dishonest companies who cut corners,” Statz said. “State laws on misclassification do not have enough teeth in them, and these cheating companies too often avoid being caught.”

The fourth bill would reinstate Wisconsin’s prevailing wage law, which set a standard for what workers on state and local government projects are paid. The prevailing wage law was repealed in the state budget Walker signed in 2017.

State Sen. Bob Wirch (D-Somers) said Republican lawmakers who voted to repeal the law “promised it would save the taxpayers money. Well, the opposite has happened.”

A study published in 2020 by the Midwest Economic Policy Institute found that  in the years that followed the repeal, construction workers’ wages fell by about $2,600 a year and highway construction costs increased.

At the time the report was published, a co-author, economist Kevin Duncan, said that the findings “underscore the longstanding academic consensus” that doing away with prevailing wage requirements leads to a lower-skilled, lower-wage workforce and doesn’t save money.

“Instead, it creates new inefficiencies in the form of workforce turnover, quality, cost overruns and safety problems,” Duncan said in a news release announcing the report. 

Senate Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein (D-Middleton) said she has sought to persuade GOP Senate Majority Leader Devin Le Mahieu (R-Oostburg) to pursue bipartisan lawmaking.

“I do not know if the Senate Republicans have caucused on any of these measures, but I’d encourage them to do so,” Hesselbein said.

Neubauer said the Assembly Democrats would continue advocating for the measures, but also tacitly acknowledged that they might not advance until after the 2026 election — when Democratic leaders are hoping to flip one or both chambers.

“We will continue pushing for them as long as it takes,” Neubauer said of the bills. “And if that’s next session, so be it.”

Sabrina Prochaska, a barista at Anodyne, tells reporters at a news conference Tuesday morning that the wages she and coworkers are paid aren't enough to live on. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Wisconsin grass-roots advocates called on state lawmakers Tuesday to adopt a platform for workers that would nearly triple the state’s minimum wage, then increase it to keep pace with rising prices.

“The key here is to not leave workers behind with a poverty wage, but instead bring that living wage number up to at least $20 an hour,” said Peter Rickman, president of the Milwaukee Area Service and Hospitality Workers union — MASH — at a press conference Tuesday in the state Capitol.

Wisconsin’s minimum wage is currently $7.25 an hour, the same as the federal minimum, which was last set in 2009.

The timing of Tuesday’s press conference, organized by a coalition that includes MASH, was part of the group’s message to lawmakers and to the public.

Monday was Labor Day, “when politicians issue statements celebrating the American worker, maybe even declaring their support for labor and the working class,” Rickman observed.

“But we’re here the day after Labor Day, calling on political leadership in Wisconsin to make all of those statements real,” he said. “To make work pay, to deliver for the working class majority in our state with a guarantee that no matter where we punch a clock, no matter where we bring our paychecks home, that paycheck has a living wage.”

A hotel worker named Adrienne, who did not give her last name, said the current minimum wage “keeps the pay ceiling embarrassingly low for workers at a time when housing has become less and less secure, health care is being threatened, grocery prices are at an all-time high, and educational expenses are crippling entire generations.”

Rickman told the Wisconsin Examiner Adrienne didn’t further identify herself because she works at a nonunion Milwaukee hotel that is currently being organized by MASH.

“I have to express my disappointment with the way many of our representatives have failed to show up for workers like myself,” Adrienne told reporters. “Twenty-five dollars an hour would be a wage that would allow workers to thrive and build further futures, but today we’re simply asking for a wage that will allow workers to survive.”

Sabrina Prochaska, a barista at Anodyne Coffee in Milwaukee, said her current wage of $15.81 an hour isn’t enough to cover her living expenses, including groceries, rent and health care.

“Every month my partner and I scrape together money to pay rent on our one-bedroom apartment,” Prochaska said. “And I’m stressed out every 30 days because I know half my paycheck is going to go to put a roof over our heads.”

A recent visit to urgent care was billed at more than $3,000, Prochaska said, “and the truth is I don’t know how to pay that off and I don’t know how I’m going to cover it.”

Anodyne employees voted unanimously in June for MASH to represent them. “We’re ready to do whatever it takes to win living wages at the bargaining table,” Prochaska said. “It’s time for these politicians to do what people like me do every day: Show up, do their job and take care of their people. It’s time to make work pay. It’s time for a living wage for all Wisconsin workers like me.”

In addition to MASH the coalition that sponsored Tuesday’s press includes Citizens Action Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Working Families Party/Power, along with Our Wisconsin Revolution and the Fighting Oligarchy Coalition.

Our Wisconsin Revolution grew out of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. The Fighting Oligarchy Coalition is a new grass-roots organization that formed as Sanders embarked on a “Fighting Oligarchy” tour to oppose the influence of billionaires in the current U.S. political environment.

The proposal outlined Tuesday hasn’t yet found its way into proposed legislation, but organizers of the campaign said they are clear on what it should include.

“We are calling on [state lawmakers] to, in collaboration with the Living Wage Coalition, draft comprehensive living wage legislation, with a $20 minimum, indexed to inflation, reduce the tip penalty, and restore local control,” Rickman said.

The “tip penalty” refers to the lower minimum wage for Wisconsin employees whose jobs make them eligible for tips — $2.33 an hour. The group also wants to repeal state laws that prevent local governments from setting labor standards.

Rickman said recent state and federal measures to abolish the tax on tips for tipped employees should not undermine the effort to stop paying tipped employees much less than the minimum wage.

“Tax policy… in lieu of wages has never done enough to increase working class household income,” he said. “It’s a scam.” All businesses, he added, “no matter what they do, [should] guarantee a living wage, not leave it up to government tax expenditures.”

Simon Rosenblum-Larson, an organizer for the Fighting Oligarchy Coalition, said the campaign to guarantee livable wages would “create real economic growth as workers here in Wisconsin spend their money here in Wisconsin instead of CEOs that take the money out of state [where] they buy houses, they put money in offshore bank accounts and trust funds for their kids.”

The campaign also lays down a marker for the 2026 elections.

In Wisconsin, 800,000 workers would see a raise if the minimum wage were increased to $20 an hour, Rosenblum-Larson said. “And we will be demanding that every legislator, Democrat or Republican, pledge their support in the 2026 election cycle for a $20 an hour minimum wage for every Wisconsinite.”

Sydney Badeau, an advocate and outreach worker for people with disabilities, has been able to afford health insurance thanks to enhanced premium subsidies that will end at the end of 2025. (Photo courtesey of Sydney Badeau)

Macy Buhler, a DeForest child care provider, has spent the last several years grappling with the challenges to her business. At the top of the list: hiring and keeping qualified teachers.

Adequate pay is important, of course, but Buhler says good health benefits are as well.  

She would like to offer health insurance, but the margins make that unsustainable. The majority of her employees either have their health insurance on a spouse’s plan or through their parents if they’re younger than 26 — or they go uninsured.

About one-third of her employees are able to get covered through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the ACA’s health care marketplace, HealthCare.gov.

HealthCare.gov was the first-ever national marketplace for people without health insurance to buy coverage for themselves and their families. The law also set standards for what plans sold through the marketplace must cover.

To make insurance more affordable, the ACA included tax credit subsidies tied to the consumer’s income and available for people with household incomes up to 400% of the federal poverty guidelines. 

Those subsidies were substantially increased in 2021 under the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), then extended in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. But without another extension, they’ll disappear at the end of 2025.

Buhler says the enhanced tax-credit subsidies have helped make it possible for her employees who use HealthCare.gov to afford their health insurance. 

“I’m thinking I’m very concerned for them next year,” Buhler says of her employees who have been covered under the ACA. “My staff is exposed to everything,” she adds. “Can I keep my staff healthy? … There’s some definite fears going forward.”

For Sydney Badeau, health insurance through the ACA made it possible for her to work two part-time jobs, neither offering health coverage. She does outreach and advocacy working 20 hours a week for The Arc-Wisconsin and 20 hours a week for People First Wisconsin, both of which serve people with disabilities

Badeau has long-term disabilities and was on Supplemental Security Income (SSI), which ended when a review found that she would be able to work.

Being on SSI qualified her for Medicaid. Neither of her jobs provided health benefits for part-timers, but Badeau was able to buy her own through HealthCare.gov, with the enhanced subsidies keeping it affordable for her.

Her premium is expected to increase 30% next year, beyond what she can afford, Badeau says. She has an option — one of her two jobs could take her full time, qualifying her for that employer’s health plan.

But for many people with disabilities who have gotten coverage through the ACA, the options are more difficult. “There’s going to be a lot of people panicking probably in the next six months to a few years, and not insured, because it’s like a giant mess right now,” Badeau says.

Amanda Sherman, a Mequon real estate broker’s assistant, says her current health insurance policy would cost her about $550 a month without the enhanced subsidies, instead of the $300 she’s paying now.

Sherman gets weekly shots for lupus, an autoimmune disorder. Without insurance the injections would cost $4,000 a month. Her plan has brought that down to $500 a month, and the medication’s manufacturer has a program to help cover her copayments and lower that cost further.

Sherman requires monthly bloodwork and sees five different specialists. She’s undergone a bone marrow biopsy, MRI exams and CT scans.

The annual deductible for Sherman’s health insurance is $7,500. She reached that limit in February. Her out-of-pocket expenses are capped at $9,500; she reached that in February as well.

Sherman’s medications reduce the power of her body’s immune system, making her more likely to get infections. Earlier this year she got walking pneumonia and was hospitalized for sepsis. Three days in the hospital would have cost $20,000 without her insurance, she says.

“If I didn’t have the Affordable Care Act I wouldn’t be able to afford health insurance,” Sherman says. “It’s still very hard for me to afford all my medical expenses — even just the copays are a lot.”

Sherman has asked her health insurer how much her premium will increase next year, but the answers have been vague

Pondering her alternatives, “I’m honestly really scared,” Sherman says.

It bothers her when she hears assumptions others make about the people who will be affected as safety-net programs are slashed.

“I just think it’s gotten really ugly the way that people are looking at each other and dehumanizing different groups of people,” Sherman says.

She has heard others assume that people “are just leeching off the system” if they use Medicaid or have relied on the ACA subsidy to afford health insurance.

“Anybody can get a chronic illness. Anybody can end up with a job where they don’t offer insurance, and that doesn’t make them less of a person,” Sherman says.

“Health care should be something that everybody has access to,” she adds. “It shouldn’t be that hard.” 

If coverage declines

When Republicans and President Donald Trump enacted the tax-cut and spending cut reconciliation bill in July, the measure placed new limits on who can qualify for the ACA’s premium tax credit subsidies. The bill also included provisions that will cut Medicaid enrollment and put new barriers to enrollment in federal nutrition aid programs. 

When drawing up the bill, the authors declined to include a provision that would have extended enhanced subsidies based on a person’s income on health plans purchased through HealthCare.gov.

William Parke-Sutherland, government affairs director of Kids Forward, says that the combination of Medicaid cuts and ACA changes could lead as many as 18 million people to lose health care coverage.

“This will mean America will get sicker,” Parke-Sutherland says. “Individuals and families and everybody will have less regular and affordable access to primary care. Uncompensated care is likely to go up. Taking people off of health care coverage doesn’t make their health care needs go away.”

Those factors are likely to drive up health costs and health insurance costs for the rest of the public, according to health care and insurance experts.

Wisconsin Commissioner of Insurance Nathan Hodek says insurers have filed their rate plans for the marketplace with the Office of the Commissioner of Insurance (OCI), and while the new rates won’t be announced until early this fall, “what we are seeing is a trend of higher rates.”

The changes are also likely to show up in the Wisconsin Health Care Stability Plan, Hodek says.

The stability plan provides reinsurance to help absorb the risk for insurers and has helped keep rates 13 to 19 percentage points lower than they would have been without the stability plan, he explains.

State lawmakers and the state budget have given the plan full support, Hodek says. Federal support, however, is based on a formula that includes the size of ACA marketplace enrollment in the state.

If enrollment goes down because of the ACA changes this year, “we are concerned that we’ll also see decreased federal funding” for the stability plan,” Hodek says. If so, the plan will need more from the state “to make sure that program is fully funded and continuing to keep rates more affordable.”

Dr. Jill McMullen, a Tomah family practitioner, says that as insurance rates are driven up, people will be driven out of the insurance marketplace.

“Anything that makes it more expensive to get insurance on the health insurance marketplace means that higher percentage of healthy people, younger people will opt out of getting insurance,” McMullen says.

One consequence is that the people who do buy insurance are likely to be sicker, with higher health care costs, she adds — driving up the cost of insurance premiums even more.

The impact on people’s health may take longer to show up — in the form of uncontrolled, chronic illness such as high blood pressure or diabetes.

“That may not show up in terms of what we call poor outcomes, complications, or difficulties for a few years,” McMullen says. “But then when they do come into place, then they will be more expensive because it’s much more expensive to fix the problem than to prevent it.”

Part One: After years of growth, advocates fear Affordable Care Act is going backward

A doctor takes the blood pressure of a pregnant patient. The Affordable Care Act has expanded the number of people with access to health insurance and health care, but advocates say changes being made since President Donald Trump took office could lead people to lose access. (Getty Images)

Months away from 2026, Amanda Sherman worries often about how the new year will change her health care.

Sherman, a broker’s assistant in a real estate office, buys her health insurance through the federal health insurance marketplace, HealthCare.gov. Her coverage has helped her through a chronic illness and critical health setbacks.

Her health plan costs her $300 a month. Without it, she says she couldn’t afford the weekly shots that she gets for lupus — a chronic autoimmune disorder she was diagnosed with five years ago.

HealthCare.gov was established in 2014 as part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). “It’s been there as a great resource when I haven’t been able to get insurance at work,” Sherman says.

In 2026, however, Sherman expects the cost of her health insurance to skyrocket. An enhanced federal subsidy that helped her afford the coverage is set to disappear at the end of this year. When that happens, she isn’t sure what she’ll do.

In the last few years, record numbers of Americans, including record numbers of Wisconsin residents, have been signing up for coverage that the ACA has made possible.

“When we look back over the last decade, the number of uninsured people in our state has dropped by over 200,000 thanks to the Affordable Care Act,” Wisconsin Commissioner of Insurance Nathan Houdek tells the Wisconsin Examiner. “So we’ve seen a lot of success in terms of more people getting health insurance coverage and being able to access the health care they need as a result.”

Advocates warn that that is about to change under policies coming from the administration of President Donald Trump and the Republican majority in Congress.

“It’s going to take apart a lot of the advances that have been made to extend coverage to more people,” says Bobby Peterson, executive director of ABC for Health, which provides nonprofit legal services and advocacy for people caught up in medical debt.

Obamacare and HealthCare.gov

The ACA was enacted in 2010 during then-President Barack Obama’s first term and phased in over four years.

Nicknamed Obamacare — by detractors at first but later by its supporters — the law made changes that affected health coverage for everyone. It prevented insurers from rejecting coverage or hiking the premium cost because of a pre-existing health condition, for example.

The ACA also created a first-ever national marketplace where people without health insurance could buy coverage for themselves and their families: HealthCare.gov. And the law set standards for the policies sold in the marketplace.

In addition, the law established a nationwide navigator system — nonprofit agencies that help people who buy coverage at HealthCare.gov review their policy options and assess what might best fill their needs.

Dr. Jill McMullen, a family practitioner in Tomah, says she saw “a big improvement in people having access to care and the consistency of care since the Affordable Care Act went in place.”

The ACA required insurers to cover preventive care visits, for example.

“We could predict what was covered regardless of what insurance a patient was signed up with,” McMullen says. “That just makes it a lot easier for patients to get their care” — and also reduces the chance that providers would not get paid for their services.

To make insurance more affordable, the ACA included tax credit subsidies tied to the consumer’s income and available for people with household incomes up to 400% of the federal poverty guidelines. Those subsidies reduce, but don’t eliminate, the HealthCare.gov premium cost and reduce the annual out-of-pocket deductible that the patient has to pay.

Program improvements, record enrollments

In 2021, after President Joe Biden took office, Congress passed and Biden signed the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), legislation to provide economic relief in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. ARPA included a provision that supercharged the premium tax credits and lowered patients’ out-of-pocket costs.

For the first time, subsidies were available to people with incomes more than four times the poverty guideline, according to the nonpartisan health research organization KFF. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act extended those enhanced subsidies through the end of 2025.

The Biden administration increased funding for navigator agencies and extended the annual ACA open enrollment period to run from Nov. 1 to Jan. 15.

Those changes helped produce higher-than-ever HealthCare.gov enrollments in Wisconsin in the last few years, Houdek says.

For 2025 alone, a record 313,579 people signed up for coverage at HealthCare.gov. National marketplace enrollment for 2025 also reached a record, 24 million, according to KFF.

Since taking office President Donald Trump and his administration have made or proposed changes in how HealthCare.gov works.

In June the Trump-appointed administration at the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) filed a new administrative rule governing Healthcare.gov enrollment that also would add roadblocks for the premium subsidies and shorten the open enrollment period for HealthCare.gov in future years.

On Friday, however, a federal judge in Maryland issued an injunction halting several provisions in the rule pending the outcome of a lawsuit to overturn it.

Even if the new rule doesn’t get enacted, experts say other Trump administration changes to the ACA are almost certain to make health insurance more expensive for people who buy their own coverage.

Navigator cutbacks, mega-bill changes

The administration has cut back support for the nonprofit health care navigators.

Wisconsin’s navigator agency is Covering Wisconsin, part of the University of Wisconsin Extension. Over the course of 2024, the agency’s 41 navigators helped with 100,000 coverage issues, says Covering Wisconsin Director Allison Espeseth.

Those include about 10,000 people who needed assistance through the full process of enrollment at Healthcare.gov, she says. But navigators up to now have helped people with other related needs, such as getting people who qualify enrolled in Medicaid, called BadgerCare in Wisconsin.

“The role of the navigator is to be that hub,” Espeseth says. “To be that one person who understands the health system, hospitals, health plans, understands government.”

In May, Covering Wisconsin received word from the federal government that, like navigator programs across the country, the Wisconsin program would lose 90% of its federal funding, Espeseth says. The cutback took effect Wednesday, Aug. 27.

Espeseth said that will reduce the number of Covering Wisconsin navigators from 41 to 17. With just one-third the number of navigators, “it’s going to make it more difficult for sure to see as many consumers as we have in the past,” she says.

Espeseth says Covering Wisconsin is connecting with insurance agents and brokers who can help with HealthCare.gov marketplace enrollment. The nonprofit is also coordinating with county agencies that qualify and enroll people in Medicaid and other safety net programs.

During the Healthcare.gov open enrollment period, “Typically we help anybody with any coverage issue that comes up, not just for the marketplace,” Espeseth says. “But this year, we need to prioritize. So we’re going to be really focusing as much as we can on marketplace consumers [who] need to renew or find a plan [or] don’t have coverage.”

The tax-cut and spending cut reconciliation bill that Republicans in Congress passed this summer and Trump signed on July 4 includes new limits on who can qualify for the ACA’s premium tax credit subsidies.

Meanwhile, Trump and the congressional Republicans rejected appeals to keep the ARPA enhanced subsidies in place after 2025.

“The federal reconciliation bill is the biggest change to health care in this country since the passage of ACA, and it goes in the wrong direction,” says William Parke-Sutherland, government affairs director for Kids Forward, an advocacy organization for families and children.

The ARPA enhanced subsidies “made health insurance way more affordable for people under 250% of the federal poverty level,” he says — and also made it possible for middle class families who previously had no support to get “a little bit of support to help pay for the cost of their health insurance.”

KFF reported earlier in August that insurers on the ACA marketplace on average plan to increase premiums 18% for 2026. But without the enhanced subsidies, consumers’ out-of-pocket expenses for health coverage could increase by 75%, the research organization calculates.

“You could see 50,000 or more Wisconsin residents lose their ACA coverage because of some of the changes related to not extending the enhanced premium tax credits, increasing the maximum out-of-pocket cost for consumers, shortening the open enrollment period, reducing funding for navigators,” Houdek says. 

“All of these things are going to have a negative impact on people’s ability to access coverage through the Affordable Care Act.”

Next: The threat to coverage and widespread consequences

A state Supreme Court ruling hasn't ended the friction between Republican lawmakers and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers over administrative rulemaking. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)

Republican leaders of the Legislature moved Thursday to block the Evers administration from bypassing legislative committees in implementing administrative rules.

Republican leaders of the Joint Committee on Legislative Organization (JCLO), with members from both the Assembly and the Senate, sent committee members a motion Thursday instructing the Legislative Reference Bureau not to finalize or publish any rules unless they have gone through a review by the Legislature in accordance with Wisconsin law.

The motion came two days after a published report that Gov. Tony Evers  instructed cabinet heads to skip the Legislature in the final steps of the rulemaking process.

It is the latest development in an ongoing feud between the Democratic governor and Republican leaders in the Legislature over the power of the executive branch to write rules in order to carry out state laws.

In a memo Aug. 12, Evers told department secretaries, “There no longer remains any statutory requirement to wait for legislative committee review before promulgating a rule once I have approved it.”

The governor’s memo cited the July 8 Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling in the case Evers v. Marklein that curtailed the power of the Joint Committee for the Review of Administrative Rules (JCRAR) to block executive branch rulemaking.

In the 4-3 decision, which has become known as Evers v. Marklein II, the Court majority ruled that state laws giving JCRAR broad powers to block administrative rules indefinitely were unconstitutional.

“This is good and important news as it means we can — and must — continue the people’s work in earnest,” Evers wrote in the memo, first reported by WisPolitics.com. “Accordingly, I am directing agencies to submit rules that have made it through that relevant part of the process to the Legislative Reference Bureau for finalization and publication.”

The motion distributed to JCLO members Thursday takes direct aim at the assertion in Evers’ memo.

The motion states that “the Legislative Reference Bureau (LRB) shall neither finalize nor publish any rules or proposed rules that failed to comply with the standing committee statutory requirements of s. 227.19 (2) to (4), Stats., including rules or proposed rules that have already been submitted to the LRB.”

Those statutes require that when administrative rules are in final draft form, the Legislature must be notified, a detailed report on the rule must be submitted, and the rule must be reviewed by a standing committee of the Legislature.

There are 27 administrative rules submitted to the Legislative Reference Bureau currently awaiting publication in the Administrative Register.

The bureau director, Rick Champagne, told the Wisconsin Examiner on Thursday that 13 of those rules have not yet completed standing committee review. Those have been classified as not to be published.

“Evers v. Marklein II did not address the constitutionality of standing committee review of proposed administrative rules,” Champagne wrote in an email message.

Among the rules held up pending review are one addressing the state’s policy on gray wolf management and one on surface water degradation. 

The remaining 14 rules have completed the standing committee review and are before the Joint Committee for the Review of Administrative Rules or have completed that process, according to Champagne.  

“I believe these are ready for publication under Evers v. Marklein II,” Champagne told the Examiner.

“JCLO has the authority to direct the manner in which the LRB will carry out its statutory duties,” Champagne added.  “The Wisconsin Supreme Court, in Evers v. Marklein II, did not eliminate standing committee review of proposed administrative rules.  If JCLO so directs, the LRB will not finalize or publish any proposed administrative rules that have not completed standing committee review.”

The paper ballot votes on the motion are due Friday and results are expected to be posted by the end of the day. The motion is expected to pass given the committee’s GOP majority.

The committee’s Republican co-chairs, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Senate President Mary Felzkowski, issued a press release Thursday calling Evers’ action to sidestep submitting rules to the Legislature for committee review a “direct contradiction” of the Court’s ruling.

“In Evers v. Marklein, the Wisconsin Supreme Court clearly stated that the Legislature ‘alone maintains the ability to amend, expand, or limit the breadth of administrative rulemaking in other branches” of government, the press release said. “Governor Tony Evers is attempting to circumvent statutory requirements that are part of the rule-making process and that no court has held to be invalid in any respect.”

“We are following the law and maintaining the fundamental checks and balances of lawmaking,” Vos and Felzkowski said in a joint statement. “The governor is flagrantly disregarding the rule of law and egregiously abusing the power of his office.”

Evers’ communications director, Britt Cudaback, countered with a charge that the Republican lawmakers were defying the law. 

“Republicans are reaching new levels of lawlessness, whether it’s President Trump trying to take over Washington DC, Republicans in Texas trying to rig maps and elections in their favor, or Republicans in Wisconsin who appear poised to disobey decisions made by our state’s highest court,” Cudaback wrote in an email message. “Republicans are not above the law — they should follow the law like everyone else is expected to.”

An electric car charging station. The National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program to build out the capacity for charging electric vehicles has been restarted after being suspended by the Trump administration early this year. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

A suspended federally funded program to expand the nation’s electric vehicle charging capacity has been jolted back to life.

Prospective developers seeking to build stations in Wisconsin and share in the state’s federal grant have until Sept. 5 to submit their proposals, according to the Wisconsin Department of Transportation.

Wisconsin was one of the first states to take part in the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) project, part of the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law.

“Our state DOT was incredibly proactive” in participating in the program, Amy Barilleaux, communications director for Clean Wisconsin, told the Wisconsin Examiner.

The state’s allotment was $78 million and 53 projects were awarded with the funds in May 2024, a state DOT spokesperson said. The department signed 39 agreements accounting for $16 million before the program was frozen earlier this year; eight projects have been completed and five are under construction.

Countermanding the push to reduce reliance on fossil fuels that have been associated with worsening climate change, President Donald Trump issued executive orders promoting fossil fuels and attempting to block measures to promote renewable energy that were enacted during former President Joe Biden’s administration.

One of Trump’s first such orders, on the day he took office, froze NEVI funding that had not been committed to projects by then.

“It should have never been paused in the first place,” Barrilleaux said. “This was money that was allocated by Congress that was ours to spend under this program.”

Wisconsin along with more than a dozen other states and the District of Columbia sued to restore the NEVI grants. A federal judge in June blocked the Trump administration from freezing the grants or withholding the money from the 14 states and D.C. that joined the lawsuit.

Barrilleaux noted that by joining the lawsuit, Wisconsin was able to benefit from the ruling that released the money.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy issued new guidance for the grants Aug. 11. The new guidance eliminates various provisions in the original federal program, including specifications that emphasized using renewable energy, required consumer protections and required engagement with rural, underserved and disadvantaged communities.

“While I don’t agree with subsidizing green energy, we will respect Congress’ will and make sure this program uses federal resources efficiently,” Duffy wrote in a statement.

“It’s good that we’re getting back to building out this infrastructure,” said Ben Behlke, clean technology programs manager for Renew Wisconsin. “This is a great opportunity for us to solve ‘the chicken or the egg’ issue as it relates to making charging available as adoption of electric vehicles becomes more prevalent. Beyond making this technology more accessible, electrifying our transportation is a necessary part of our effort to create a clean energy economy.”

Democrat Gage Stills, right, meets with voters and a recent event for his 1st Congressional District campaign. (Stills Congressional Campaign photo)

The number of Democrats hoping to represent the party in the 2026 race for Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District has grown to three, all from Racine County and all positioning themselves as working-class candidates who contrast sharply with the incumbent.

Gage Stills, a 25-year-old community activist, said he comes to the race with “a strong working-class perspective on things, and I know what a lot of these families are going through — I’ve lived it.”

Stills said Friday that he launched his campaign in mid-July, running “under the radar” without a mass media announcement but with a campaign website and a Tik-Tok account to which he posts videos once a week.

That made him the second entry into the Democratic field for the 1st District, following Randy Bryce, who ran and lost in 2018 and announced May 20 he would try again. A third Democrat, nurse Mitchell Berman, entered the race August 12.

Each of the three are seeking the Democratic nomination to run against U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Janesville), the incumbent now in his fourth term.

In an interview, Stills described his upbringing as one of a family “living paycheck to paycheck and not entirely certain where the next meal is going to come from.”

Even in those circumstances, however, he added, “My parents, they took good care of me and they raised me right and they raised me to care about the world and care about people.”

Stills said that “a big factor” in his decision to run was “the One Big Beautiful Bill and how much it does to hurt the working class and how much it does to hurt folks who are in the lower middle class.”

The “One Big, Beautiful Bill” is what Trump and the legislation’s GOP backers dubbed the mega-bill that extended tax cuts enacted during Trump’s first term in 2017. The legislation, which Trump signed on July 4, also made significant cuts to Medicaid and federal food assistance and rolled back clean energy tax breaks that Congress and then-President Joe Biden enacted in 2022, among a number of other provisions.

Stills said Trump’s policies that ramped up the deployment of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers with arrests that have swept up immigrants, a number of whom were legally authorized to be in the U.S., were an additional factor in his decision.

“I have a lot of family who are Hispanic,” Stills said. “Some of my family members have married immigrants, and they came here legally, but you know, that’s not entirely guaranteed protection these days.”

He said his upbringing led him to believe “that it doesn’t make sense to complain if I’m not going to get in there and try to do the work.”

Stills said he as a cybersecurity analyst after working for about five months as a state corrections officer and before that in retail sales. He said he was active in Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Racine in 2020 and has volunteered with local environmental organizations and at a community homeless shelter.

The race for Congress is his first time running for a political office. While he acknowledged some voters might be wary, he said that he has “no political ties to anybody. I don’t owe anything to any corporation” — making him a fresh face that voters would appreciate.

“I think for too long we’ve seen politicians that, sure they’ve held political office, but they don’t use that office to help the people,” Stills said.

Steil is a corporate lawyer who previously worked as an aide to former U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, the Janesville Republican who represented the 1st District for 20 years after he was first elected in 1998.

Steil won his first term in 2018, defeating Bryce by a 12-point margin, and won subsequent races with a similar spread.

Stills said he believes he can overcome that gap. “I plan on speaking to the people’s needs,” he said.

While he didn’t attend a listening session that Steil held July 31 at which many constituents directed angry comments to the congressman, Stills said he followed news accounts of the event.

The people who attended “raised valuable concerns that it seemed that he just tried to brush off, or blame on Biden, which doesn’t work anymore,” Stills said.

“We know the votes that he’s casting,” he said of Steil. “We know that they’re not for us. And I think that the people are waking up to that.”

Stills said he wants to aim his message to people all across the political spectrum — left, center and right alike.

“I think that more and more people are going to look for an alternative,” he said. “I think that alternative should be a voice that speaks for them, that comes from the same place as them, a working class perspective.”

Mural depicting workers painted on windows of the Madison-Kipp Corp. by Goodman Community Center students and Madison-Kipp employees with Dane Arts Mural Arts. (Photo by Erik Gunn /Wisconsin Examiner)

Wisconsin’s jobs and employment numbers showed a slightly softening economy in July, following national trends, the state labor department reported Thursday.

“The Wisconsin labor market has cooled a bit along with the national economy. Unemployment remains historically low,” said Scott Hodek, section chief in the office of economic advisors for the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development (DWD), in a briefing on the July numbers.

Private-sector jobs dropped slightly in July from June, DWD reported. Employment and labor force participation edged down slightly, too, as did the state’s unemployment rate.

“What we’re seeing is that Wisconsin seems to be following the national trend,” Hodek told the Wisconsin Examiner. While the economy is cooling down, “we’re actually still seeing historically low unemployment rates,” Hodek said. “So you’ve got kind of a mix of up and down indicators.”

He pointed to national economic uncertainty as well as the longstanding challenge of Wisconsinites aging out of the workforce faster than younger residents are entering it as likely contributors to the economic cooling. 

DWD pegged the number of Wisconsinites working in July at 3.05 million, a drop of 4,500 from June and down 32,500 from July 2024.

The number of people who were unemployed in July was projected at 98,600 — down 2,200 from June, but up 5,400 from July 2024. The unemployment rate for July was 3.1%.

The labor force shrank in July to just under 3.15 million, a decline of 6,700 from June and a decline of 27,000 from July 2024. The labor force is defined as people 16 or older who are working or seeking work, excluding people in the military or who are in institutions such as nursing homes or prisons.

Wisconsin’s labor force participation rate was 65% of the state’s population 16 or older in July — down 0.1% from June and down just under 1% from July a year ago. Labor force participation remains ahead of the U.S. as a whole, while unemployment is lower, DWD reported.

Employment and labor force participation numbers are projected from a monthly survey of households. A separate survey, polling employers, produces data on the number of jobs in the state.

Wisconsin counted just under 3.06 million nonfarm jobs — an increase of 1,800 over June and 20,200 over July a year ago. Private sector jobs in July totaled more than 2.6 million, a decrease of 3,800 from June but still 15,100 ahead of July 2024.

Construction jobs fell by 500 from June, Hodek said, but remained 3,100 ahead of July 2024. Manufacturing jobs fell by 500, and are down 1,800 from a year ago.

Rosier picture in Wisconsin than broader U.S.

Wisconsin’s jobs report Thursday lacked the drama of the national jobs numbers reported two weeks ago that prompted President Donald Trump to fire the nation’s chief statistician.

On Friday, Aug. 1, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported the U.S. gained 73,000 jobs in July, below analysts’ estimates. The BLS also updated national job numbers for May and June, dramatically reducing both: in June, a gain of 14,000 jobs instead of previously reported 147,000, and in May, an increase of 19,000 instead of the previously reported 125,000.

The national unemployment rate of 4.2% was in line with economic forecasts, CNBC reported. Other indicators nationally added up to “a slow but persistent cooling trend,” the North America regional president at Manpower Group, Ger Doyle, told CNBC.

Trump took to his social media platform, Truth Social, to declare without evidence that the numbers were “RIGGED.” He summarily fired the director of the BLS, replacing her this week with an economist from the far-right Heritage Foundation who has called for a broad overhaul of the agency.

Hodek told the Wisconsin Examiner Thursday that DWD has not received any communications about changes in procedure from the BLS.

“We’ve certainly seen the news and we’re monitoring the situation, of course,” Hodek said. “But we do have confidence in our data and we can’t really speculate on what could possibly happen. We’ll just need to wait and see what the Bureau of Labor Statistics actually does down the road.”

Hodek said that revisions of previous months’ reports are “a normal part of the data process.” The first round of data isn’t inaccurate, but “as you take more time, the data become more accurate,” he said.

“Ideally you want a combination of both —  something that kind of gives you the current edge of where you’re headed, and then as more and better data come in, you get a better sense of what has been happening,” Hodek said.

For example, a quarterly collection of information from the unemployment insurance system “actually covers most employers and it’s very solid data,” he said. “But it lags by half a year.”

Information from that report can be used to further refine the calculations and assumptions that go into the state’s monthly reports.

The monthly numbers for the nation as a whole and for each state go through different calculations and formulas, Hodek said, so it’s not possible to draw direct connections between the state jobs numbers and the national jobs numbers.

It’s also too soon to explain the seemingly dramatic differences between the national jobs picture and Wisconsin’s, he added: “We’ve only got a couple of data points where we saw those large revisions, so that doesn’t really make a trend necessarily yet.”

Hodek doesn’t think Wisconsin is somehow “diverging from the national economy,” however, he said. “In fact, it’s fairly unlikely in general, just because what happens to the national economy and the global economy is going to impact us as well. We tend to follow the national and global trends.”

Mitchell Berman is seeking the 2026 Democratic nomination to run for the U.S. House of Representatives in Wisconsin's 1st Congressional District. (Berman for Congress photo)

Mitchell Berman, a Racine County nurse, announced Tuesday he will seek the Democratic nod to run for Congress in Wisconsin’s 1st District against fourth-term incumbent U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Janesville).

Berman is the most recent candidate to officially announce he is entering the Democratic primary race for the seat. Randy Bryce, who lost to Steil in 2018 in one of the nation’s most closely watched congressional contests, announced May 20 that he would try again. Gage Stills, a third Democratic hopeful for the seat, launched a campaign in mid-July. 

Berman introduced his candidacy Tuesday with a video shot on a mobile phone that stresses his working class background and rural Wisconsin upbringing.

“I’m running for Congress because Bryan Steil isn’t looking out for families like mine,” Berman says in the video. “We deserve a government that works for us, not the elite.”

Berman worked as a nurse at the Milwaukee VA hospital for 10 years and in the video highlights his service to military veterans.

He told the Wisconsin Examiner on Tuesday that he left the job when he decided to run for Congress because the federal Hatch Act bars federal employees from running for partisan  office.

The father of two and a 15-year resident of the 1st Congressional District, Berman said concern for his daughters “about whether or not they have the ability to make their own health care decisions” motivated his run for the seat.

“Seeing the cuts to the VA and just the overall gutting of Medicaid in general has also prompted me to get into this race,” he said. Cuts to Medicaid and the SNAP federal nutrition aid program were part of the Republican budget reconciliation bill that Steil voted for and President Donald Trump signed on July 4.

“These things were made for tax cuts for billionaires,” Berman said, adding that in the process, Congress added $3.5 trillion to the federal budget deficit instead of  reducing it.

“I think the No. 1  issue that we need to focus on is affordability,” Berman said. “And I think that umbrella covers many different issues … decreasing the cost of child care, decreasing the cost of health care, decreasing the cost at the grocery store.”

As of July 30, the Cook Political Report rated the 1st District a likely Republican win in 2026 with a 2-point edge for the incumbent, Steil. Cook defines seats rated “likely” for one or the other party as “not considered competitive at this point” but adds that they “have the potential to become engaged.”

Berman said he believes his life experiences will attract voters.

“I’ve lived paycheck to paycheck. I had to work three jobs in college,” Berman said. “I was a first-generation college student. I graduated with student loan debt. My wife and I, we struggled with fertility issues and our children are a blessing of IVF [in vitro fertilization]. So a lot of these kitchen table concerns for people, a lot of these things that people care about close to home, are things that I’ve experienced.”

Berman said he followed news accounts of Steil’s July 31 public event in Elkhorn, where the congressman was met with an angry, noisy crowd and questioners who loudly pushed back on many of his comments.

“I think that’s a good representation of people’s dismay and how upset they are in how Bryan Steil … his lack of representation for the district.”

A first-time political candidate, Berman said he’s been active in local politics as a volunteer, including filing a successful lawsuit that charged the Town of Raymond School District violated the state open meetings law in holding a school board retreat in 2022. The suit was settled in December 2024.

The school district was also embroiled in a dispute among parents over its  social-emotional learning curriculum and the firing of a popular principal. Berman was a leader in a campaign to recall two board members who opposed the curriculum. One of the board members resigned before the recall vote was held, while the other survived the recall election.

“Everyone in my community, everyone I’ve talked to about this opportunity, has been very encouraging,” Berman said.

A reliably Democratic seat in the 1970s and ‘80s, the 1st District has remained in GOP hands since 1994, despite recurring attempts by Democrats to unseat Republican incumbents. The seat was held for two decades by former Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Janesville), who rose to become U.S. House speaker before leaving office at the end of 2018.

Steil, a corporate lawyer who previously worked as Ryan’s aide, won his first term against Bryce with more than 54% of the vote to Bryce’s 42%. He won his two most recent races by similar margins. He beat former state Department of Revenue Secretary Peter Barca 54-44 in 2024 and Ann Roe, now a Wisconsin state representative from Janesville, 54-45 in 2022.

This report was updated 8/18/2025 to clarify that Berman, originally identified here as the “second Democrat” in the race, was preceded by another candidate, Gage Stills. 

Percy Brown stands outside the church where he grew up, Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Madison. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

For more than two decades, Percy Brown has worked as an educator, his core priority striving to address gaps in achievement between Black and white students.

There’s no single cause for those gaps, Brown says. Poor teaching methods are one factor, in his view. He points to changes in how reading is taught, for example, that have been shown to improve reading proficiency among white and Black students alike.

But, he contends, that’s only part of the answer. A legacy of discrimination through the generations demands more careful attention to making sure every student is fully welcome at the schoolhouse door and gets the opportunity to learn and thrive, he says, in the classroom and out.

Brown pursued that goal as the director of equity and student achievement in the Middleton School District, west of Madison, and more recently as a trainer and consultant on diversity and equity in education as well as a speaker on other education-related topics.

Biases about Black students’ inherent academic abilities persist, Brown contends — influencing not only white teachers but Black students as well.

“We’ve dealt with racial inferiority being placed on us and embedded in the psyche of all of America for a very, very long time,” Brown says. “And while we might have egalitarian beliefs, those stereotypes and biases are still there.”

Concern about that legacy drove Brown to write “Strength Through Generations” — a combination memoir, thumbnail sketch of Black history and call to action.

The book has more than one audience, Brown says. 

One audience is fellow educators — “to reach teachers, to help them be more culturally responsive in the classroom,” Brown says.

“I also wrote it for high school students that are African-American, so that they can learn more about their history, with the hope that that inspires them,” he says. “To know thyself is so key to what you’ll be able to do in life.”

DEI under attack

The book comes at a time when organized programs to address racial diversity, promote equity to overcome centuries of discrimination and subjugation, and promote inclusion of the broad range of people into national life and institutions are under fierce attack.

Starting on his first day in office President Donald Trump has issued a series of executive orders aimed at ending diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs in federal government and education while also condemning inclusive policies in the private sector.

Brown has critiqued some of the ways DEI has been carried out. When he read an audit of Universities of Wisconsin DEI programs conducted by the Legislative Audit Bureau on behalf of the Legislature, he was struck that there seemed to be no consistent definition throughout the system for DEI.

But he also considers the anti-DEI wave a backlash to the protests in 2020 after the police killing of George Floyd. “That woke up the world,” Brown says. “There was a coming together, and it wasn’t even politicized like that.”

Right-wing influencers began attacking critical race theory — a complex, academic concept — and subsequently DEI, he observes, deploying “the anti-woke rhetoric to really scare people.”

Six years earlier, however, in Middleton, “I was able to collaborate and get support from people on the right side of the aisle to try to make things better for historically disenfranchised students,” Brown says. “It wasn’t a boogie man.”

The book’s publication is especially timely, he believes.

“There’s a lot going on that I would say is just anti-‘We the people’ — unless you’re talking about ‘We the People’ in its original intent for this nation to be a nation for white people — and then nobody else,” Brown says.

Family history and Black history

Brown’s book weaves the stories of his grandfather’s involvement in the civil rights struggles in rural, segregated Mississippi and the lives of his father, aunts and uncles growing up there together with a primer on Black history.

“As a Black male educator with a background in social studies, I know that America’s schools focus heavily on teaching slavery, but this does not address the more significant curricular issue when it comes to the history of Black people,” Brown writes in the book’s introduction. “There’s no mention of ancient African civilizations, such as the Kingdoms of Mali, Songhai, Benin, Kemet, Nubia, Axum and Ethiopia.”

By teaching “a more comprehensive history of Black people,” he writes, educators can appropriately build self-esteem of Black children and also “change the perception of those who are not Black.”

Brown’s father, Percy Sr., and his father’s siblings integrated their local high school in Mississippi in 1965 after the district was forced to admit Black students. Ku Klux Klan members burned a cross at their home and fired gunshots. “The intimidation was real, as real as could be,” Percy Sr. told his son in an interview included in the book.

Finding common ground

His father moved north from Mississippi to attend the University of Wisconsin-Madison, graduating in 1975. Percy Brown Jr. grew up in Madison, and his book reflects on the racial divisions then and now in the state’s capital city despite its progressive image.

When it came time to go to college, Brown attended Delta State University in Mississippi near where his father grew up.

A bout of spring cleaning helped trigger Brown’s idea to write the book. He turned up a paper he had written as an undergraduate in 1997 “about the need to incorporate Black history into the curriculum to help build the self-esteem of Black children,” he recalls. The paper concluded with his declaration that one day he would write a book about Black history to help meet that need.

Not long after finding the paper, he traveled to Egypt in 2023 to learn about the African roots of one of the world’s oldest civilizations — roots that Brown says have long been unappreciated.

“Going to Egypt — that was transformational for me, and in a lot of ways I think I felt more closely connected to the human family,” Brown says.

The final push for the book came from the CEO at a publishing firm that specializes in producing books by entrepreneurs.

While his book focuses on Black experience, Brown says that in his consulting work he sees parallel experiences in places where the population is all white or nearly so.

Conducting a student assembly (about being safe online) in Door County, he got a firsthand look at the way schools there are also under-resourced. “My empathy for them up there is no different than the empathy that I have for the Black kids here in the community,” Brown says.

He worries about polarization and what he calls the tribalism that divides the public.

“The things that we have in common, that’s how you start to build those authentic relationships,” Brown says. “That’s how you start to build community, right? And it’s about our collective shared stories — not shutting down one story.”

Gov. Tony Evers signs AB 257 into law Friday. The bill creates a credential and pathway for advanced practice registered nurses to practice independently. (Photo courtesy of Office of Gov. Evers)

As expected, Gov. Tony Evers signed legislation Friday that clears the way for nurses with advanced training to practice independently.

“Nurses play a critical role in our healthcare workforce, and I’m proud of our work to expand opportunities for nurses to not only grow their career but create a system that allows for more advanced practitioners here in Wisconsin,” Evers said in a statement released Friday announcing his plans to sign AB 257, the advanced practice registered nurses (APRN) legislation, now Wisconsin Act 17.

The bill creates a new license category and a professional pathway for nurses who qualify to practice independently.

Evers vetoed two other closely watched bills — one that would have carved out app-based drivers from protections under state employment laws and one that would require the state Department of Corrections to recommend sending back to prison people charged with a crime while they are on probation, parole or extended supervision.

Altogether the governor signed 16 of the 21 bills that the Legislature formally presented to him on Thursday and vetoed five.

Advanced practice nursing bill wins approval

The Wisconsin state nursing board will oversee the credentialing of advanced practice nurses, a group that includes certified nurse-midwives, certified registered nurse anesthetists, clinical nurse specialists and nurse practitioners.

Advocates said the measure will increase the availability of health care providers, particularly in parts of Wisconsin where doctors are scarce.

Evers vetoed previous versions of the bill in 2022 and 2024. Both times he expressed support for the concept but insisted nurses should meet tighter qualifications before they can practice on their own.

The bill he signed Friday adds those requirements — increasing the amount of supervision that an APRN must have under a physician to 3,840 hours before practicing independently; adding additional supervision requirements for certified registered nurse anesthetists who specialize in pain management; and including language to restrict the titles APRN practitioners use so patients aren’t confused about their credentials.

The Wisconsin Medical Society cited those issues in opposing APRN bills in previous legislative sessions, and with the 2025 revision shifted its stance to neutral.  

In floor votes in June, lawmakers from both parties stressed the bipartisan compromise reflected in the measure that was presented to Evers this week.

In his announcement, Evers thanked lawmakers for their work on the measure, including Republican state Sens. Patrick Testin and Rachael Cabral-Guevara, Republican state Rep. Tony Kurtz and Democratic state Rep. Lisa Subeck.

He also thanked “the many nursing and physician groups that we worked with to get this bipartisan bill across the finish line to help bring more folks into the healthcare profession and ensure that Wisconsinites get the high-quality care they need when they need it while setting our nurses up for success.”

Bill classifying gig drivers vetoed

Evers vetoed AB 269, legislation that would have blocked drivers from app-based rideshare and delivery businesses from being declared employees.  

The legislation would have automatically classified drivers for Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and similar businesses as independent contractors, bypassing current Wisconsin laws that differentiate independent contractors from direct employees. 

It would have categorically excluded app-based drivers from coverage under the state’s unemployment insurance, workers compensation and minimum wage laws. 

“I object to the bill’s definition of independent contractor status in the absence of any guaranteed benefit for workers,” Evers wrote in his veto message.

In a campaign pushed most prominently by DoorDash and other app-based businesses that enlist drivers, advocates focused  on the bill’s provisions that would permit — but not require — those businesses to establish portable benefits for drivers.

Evers acknowledged in his veto message that app-based drivers “are a growing segment of Wisconsin’s workforce.” But he said changing the state’s independent contractor definitions “demands substantive conversations among several parties,” with management and  workers both at the table. 

Evers wrote that while the bill was moving through the Legislature, his staff asked lawmakers and groups with an interest in the measure to allow time for “robust dialogue and engagement to reach consensus and compromise” over the legislation. 

“Unfortunately the Legislature declined to meaningfully provide that opportunity, choosing instead to send this bill to my desk anyway,” he wrote. “My veto today will allow time for these important conversations to occur so Wisconsin can find a path forward.”

The Wisconsin AFL-CIO praised the veto. “Legislation that makes the loss of important worker rights a certainty while holding out the possibility of flexible benefits if and when the employer chooses to provide them is a bad deal for workers,” President Stephanie Bloomingdale said. 

Bill pushing revocation for offenders rejected

Evers vetoed AB 85, legislation that would require the Department of Corrections to recommend automatically returning a person to prison who is charged with a crime while on extended supervision, parole or probation. Evers vetoed a similar bill in 2019.

Evers wrote in his veto message that the legislation was “an unfunded mandate” likely to cost the state more than $330 million in the first two years, according to the fiscal estimate, “and hundreds of millions in unknown, ongoing costs.” 

In addition, he wrote, it would likely require building more prison facilities and would be expected to impose new costs on local governments, while he blamed lawmakers for “significantly underfunding existing operations at the Department of Corrections in the most recent state budget.”

The bill “would move Wisconsin in the wrong direction on criminal justice reform without improving public safety,” Evers wrote. 

Instead, he urged lawmakers, “Wisconsin should be investing in data-driven, evidence-based programming that addresses barriers to reentry, enhances educational and vocational opportunities for individuals who will be released after completing their sentence, and provides treatment for mental health and substance use issues, which will help to reduce recidivism and save taxpayer money while improving public safety.”

In a message posted on Facebook the bill’s author, state Rep. Brent Jacobson (R Mosinee), criticized the veto. “It is unacceptable to give repeat criminals the opportunity to continue to put our families and neighbors at risk again and again without facing consequences,” he wrote.

The bill was opposed by criminal justice reform organizations, including the national prison reform group Dream.Org and Wisconsin-based Ex-incarcerated People Organizing (EXPO).

“This harmful bill would have led to more people being revoked from community supervision and incarcerated, making it harder to build safe and thriving communities in Wisconsin,” Dream.Org posted on Facebook. The organization credited campaigning by advocates and community groups with persuading Evers to veto the measure. 

Primary care medicine measure falls 

Evers vetoed SB 4, legislation that would specify that subscription-based direct primary medical care arrangements are not subject to the state’s insurance laws.

While the legislation had some bipartisan support in concept, it foundered at the governor’s desk on the issue of anti-discrimination language.

Evers listed in his veto message a number of provisions in the legislation that forbid primary care providers from refusing to treat patients. 

Nevertheless, he wrote that he objected to “the Legislature failing to provide sufficient protections for patients receiving care under direct primary care agreements from being discriminated against and potentially losing access to their healthcare.”

Evers did not specify what additional protections he believed the measure should include. “I previously raised similar concerns when I vetoed earlier iterations of this legislation five years ago — concerns the Legislature has declined to satisfactorily address in the bill that is now before me and despite having ample opportunity,” he wrote.

In 2020, when Evers vetoed the version of the legislation on his desk at the time, he wrote that he objected to an amendment in which lawmakers had removed language protecting patients from being refused treatment on the grounds of “genetics, national origin, gender identity, citizenship status, or whether the patient is LGBTQ.”

In his veto message Friday, Evers wrote, “Every Wisconsinite should be able to get the healthcare they need when and where they need it — and without fear of discrimination. I welcome the Legislature revisiting this legislation and the opportunity to enact a version of this bill that sufficiently addresses my concerns.”

The announcement issued by the governor’s office Friday includes a complete list of bills that the governor signed and vetoed, with links to the enacted measures and to Evers’ veto statements.

Workers install solar panels on the roof of a low-income household in California. On Thursday, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers wrote a letter to the EPA urging the Trump administration not to cancel the Solar for All program. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Gov. Tony Evers wrote to the federal Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday, urging the Trump administration not to cancel Wisconsin’s $62.4 million grant to install solar energy systems for low- and moderate-income households.

Evers’ letter to EPA administrator Lee Zeldin followed a New York Times report earlier this week that the agency was preparing to cancel the $7 billion federal “Solar for All” grant program. “Solar for All” was part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act passed by congressional Democrats and signed by then-president Joe Biden.

“To be clear, attempting to terminate Solar for All grants has no legitimate purpose or justification,” Evers wrote. “Beyond that, doing so will also negatively impact Wisconsinites and our state, causing increased energy bills for Wisconsinites and hurting efforts to improve air quality, boost resilience, and create good-paying jobs.”

The Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. has put out a request for proposal seeking an implementer for the state’s program, called “PowerUp Wisconsin.” Bidders were to submit a notice of their intent to bid by this past Monday, Aug. 4, and final proposals are due on Friday, Aug. 29.

According to the WEDC’s work plan for the project, Wisconsin’s grant would add rooftop solar power systems to 1,038 households in single-family homes and 2,200 more households in 24 multifamily homes. The plan also calls for 10 community solar projects that could serve an additional 4,239 households.

Evers told Zeldin in the letter that since Wisconsin’s $62.4 million grant was awarded in April 2024, the WEDC has worked with local governments, solar installers, utilities and housing developers to draw up the state’s program guidelines. The program would reduce Wisconsin’s reliance on out-of-state energy and save households up to $500 a year on their energy bills, Evers wrote.

The governor wrote that lowering costs has been “a top priority” for his administration.

“While the Trump Administration claims to share this priority, terminating Wisconsin’s Solar for All grant would have the exact opposite effect, preventing Wisconsin families and households from seeing the direct savings offered through PowerUp Wisconsin,” Evers wrote.

The Evers administration and the Wisconsin Department of Justice have joined a number of lawsuits to block Trump administration executive orders and unilateral actions to cut funding approved by Congress.

Evers’ letter appeared to leave open the prospect for more litigation. “At a time when energy demand continues to increase, it is unfathomable for the Trump Administration to unnecessarily — and potentially illegally — terminate funding for a program designed to deploy affordable, renewable energy systems,” Evers wrote.

Former state Sen. Dale Schultz, left, listens as former Dane County Sheriff Davd Mahoney speaks in a panel discussion on "fusion voting" in La Crosse Wednesday. (Screenshot/LeaderEthics Wisconsin YouTube channel)

Could letting multiple political parties endorse the same candidate bring political reform to Wisconsin, or the nation?

That’s part of the idea being promoted by a bipartisan pair of retired politicians — former state Sen. Dale Schultz, a Republican, and former Dane County Sheriff Dave Mahoney, a Democrat.

Mohoney and Schultz believe that “fusion voting” — a system that allows multiple parties to endorse the same political candidate — could help remedy the disaffection with politics that they see becoming ever more widespread.

Talking with his two adult sons over the weekend, “both of them told me, ‘I don’t vote. I’m not going to vote because my voice doesn’t matter,’” Mahoney said during a panel discussion in La Crosse on Wednesday. “Unfortunately I hear that all too often.”

In his conversations in the community, “a consistent message was, ‘I’m not being represented by my party,’” Mahoney said.

Schultz and Mahoney have established United Wisconsin — for now, an affinity group, but in the future, they hope, a new political party.

Wednesday’s panel discussion provided a platform for the pair to make their case for fusion voting to a few dozen people at the Black River Beach Neighborhood Center in La Crosse and a broader audience watching on YouTube. It was hosted by LeaderEthics Wisconsin, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that defines its purpose as “promoting ethical leadership among elected officials.”

Making it possible for candidates to run on more than one party line would strengthen the power of third parties and give them “a seat at the table” as candidates and officeholders shape public policy, Schultz said. “We can provide agency so that their voices are heard, that they do have the ability to negotiate.”

As a state lawmaker he sought to work across party lines “in a collaborative way that would best serve all of us,” Schultz said. Disagreements were common, “but we didn’t hate each other. And at the end of the day, we were proud when we could jointly stand up in front of our constituents or the public in general and say we have a solution which we think is worth trying.”

That sense of comity has deteriorated, Schultz said. He believes fusion voting could help restore a stronger spirit of cooperation and re-engage “those who don’t believe anyone is listening to them, those who believe that the only choice they have is … voting for the lesser of two evils, voting for a third party and throwing away their vote, or simply not voting at all.”

Chapter 8 of the Wisconsin statutes has two laws that ban candidates from running on more than one party’s ticket. Statute 8.03(1) states that a candidate’s name may not be listed on the ballot more than once. Statute 8.15(1) bars candidates from running in more than one party’s primary election at the same time.

Changing those laws is at the top of United Wisconsin’s agenda. The organization, along with Schultz and Mahoney and three other people described as potential members of United Wisconsin, are suing in Dane County circuit court to have the two statutes thrown out.

The lawsuit declares that the laws violate rights guaranteed under the Wisconsin Constitution to freedom of association and speech, equal protection under the law, and free government.

The plaintiffs are represented by Law Forward, the nonprofit law firm that focuses on voting rights, democracy and related issues, along with John Franke of Gass Turek. Franke is a former judge who was appointed to the former Government Accountability Board in 2014 by then-Gov. Scott Walker. The board was later dissolved by the Wisconsin Legislature.

“We should not have the dominating party squeeze out the input from the third parties, and we should not have the voters that are inclined to vote in independent ways to also be squeezed out by the two major parties,” said Lee Rasch, executive director of LeaderEthics Wisconsin, as he introduced the discussion. Rasch is one of the other plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

Mahoney said United Wisconsin aims to cool down the increasingly hostile rhetoric between political parties.

“I care what’s important to us as Wisconsinites,” he said. “I care what’s important to us as Americans. We have far more in common than we have separating us.”

Mahoney said he’s alarmed by the increasingly hostile political rhetoric as well as threats and acts of political violence, such as attacks on two state lawmakers in Minnesota and their spouses, killing one of them and her husband.

“I’ve had many calls myself from current lawmakers who want my thoughts on their safety and what they do to protect themselves from a security standpoint being out in the public,” Mahoney said. “That should never happen. That should never happen in our democracy.”

Schultz and Mahoney said if the lawsuit succeeds in throwing out the two statutes United Wisconsin would become a standing political party and work to build a support base. The party would negotiate with candidates to adopt compatible policy positions in return for the party nominating one of the candidates to run on its own ticket.

Mahoney said that having to compete for a block of voters from a third party “might actually bring some common sense into the positions of both major parties and moderate them and certainly the rhetoric that they send out to their members and constituents.”

The spirit of fusion voting has a long and honorable history in Wisconsin, Schultz said, with the Republican Party at its founding in Ripon in 1854 bringing together a collection of splinter political parties united in their opposition to slavery.

The state laws that bar the practice were enacted in 1897. Historian Josh Kluever, a lecturer at Alvernia University in Reading, Pennsylvania, told the Wisconsin Examiner that the law was likely written in reaction to the 1896 presidential election, when both the Populist Party and the Democratic Party endorsed William Jennings Bryan.

Kluever is from Wisconsin and has written about the history of collaborative politics in the state involving the Socialist Party and Robert La Follette’s Progressive Republican wing and later Progressive Party.

While fusion voting was formally outlawed in Wisconsin, the two groups worked to accomplish similar objectives, he said in an interview, allying to pass legislation and refraining from running candidates against each other.

Currently, only New York and Connecticut have any form of fusion voting. Kluever said that it’s “tricky to predict” how more widespread fusion voting might change political dynamics in a state or the country.

Nevertheless, “it is a positive for the small-d democratic process to have people’s voices feel that they’re being heard,” Kluever said. 

This report has been updated with additional information about United Wisconsin’s legal representation in its lawsuit.  

First District U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Janesville) holds an in-person listening session at Elkhorn High School in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, Thursday evening July 31, 2025. (Copyright Mark Hertzberg/for Racine County Eye)

ELKHORN — At a raucous listening session in a high school auditorium Thursday evening, U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Janesville) defended the immigration and tariff policies of  President Donald Trump and the Republican budget reconciliation law that Trump signed on July 4.

From the roars of the crowd, critics of the congressman appeared to account for the majority of the group that filled nearly two-thirds of the 600-seat Elkhorn High School auditorium. But there were also recurring cheers, shouts and applause at key moments from a smaller coterie of supporters in the room.

Steil represents the 1st District in Congress, which covers Southeastern Wisconsin from Janesville and Beloit east to Racine and Kenosha on the shores of Lake Michigan.

Over the last several months, Republican members of Congress have been counseled not to hold in-person events with constituents after publicity about angry crowds turning up at some GOP town halls.

Steil’s constituents have been protesting weekly outside his office in Racine for months, calling on him to hold an in-person meeting rather than telephone ones. 

Taking the stage shortly after 5 p.m. and lasting for about 80 minutes there, Steil stuck with a cheerful, breezy tone. He treated the loud, impassioned and often angry audience cries as mostly a difference of opinion.

When an audience member asked Steil how he might take a stand against other congressional Republicans “who lie to the American public and malign the dignity of 70 million people on Medicaid by suggesting that they are lazy,” Steil lamented the tone of political discourse and vowed not to denigrate anyone. Then he turned the subject back to the boisterous auditorium.

“I’d say the overall majority of people here want to learn and understand my perspective, want to hear the question,” he said. “And then there’s a small group of people that are challenging.”

It was left to the moderator of the session, Janesville radio host Tim Bremel, to lecture the crowd to refrain from shouting over Steil’s answers during a Q&A period.

During one interruption, the radio host scolded, “Ladies and gentlemen, we will never get questions if we can’t keep the auditorium quiet. And please do the person who asked the question the respect of allowing his question to be answered.”

Pledge of Allegiance

Steil kicked off the session with the Pledge of Allegiance, inviting the audience to join him. They did so, some shouting the final words “and justice for all” with vehemence.

He followed with a short talk offering “just kind of an overview of where we’re at in this country to get ourselves back on track” — words that prompted more angry taunts.

Steil said that the nation’s spending is about “$1.8 trillion more than on the revenue side,” a comment that prompted scattered shouts scoffing at “tax breaks.”

He defended the expansion in the budget reconciliation law of work requirements for SNAP food aid, saying the change followed a model that Wisconsin had already instituted for the program in the 1990s.

When he switched to immigration and a graph that Steil said showed “the dramatic drop, the decrease that we have seen in border apprehensions,” a cry of “We are all immigrants!” came up from several rows of seats.

Nine minutes in, Steil made a pitch for his office’s constituent services, then appealed for restraint from the crowd.

“The more civil we are with each other — there’s people that have different views in here, we heard applause and boos on the border security issue, we’ve heard it a couple of times,” he said. “We have people on all sides, it’s great, that’s what makes us so great.”

Tariffs, ICE and deportation

The questions that followed came from members of the audience who filled out forms at tables in the school lobby.

Bremel told the crowd that the questioners would be chosen at random. Some greeted that claim with loud skeptical scoffs. Over the course of the hour, however, the vast majority of people who were chosen asked questions sharply critical of Steil, Trump, the Republican congressional majority, or all three.

Criticizing Trump’s tariffs, Tom Burke asked Steil “what dire economic circumstances” justified the president’s executive orders to impose them.

“What we need to do is make sure that we’re having other countries treat the United States fairly,” Steil replied, adding that the U.S. should “work collectively with our allies to address the real culprit, which is China.”

Burke wasn’t satisfied with the answer. U.S. allies, “seem to be alienated beyond belief,” he told Steil, adding that until he got a satisfactory answer to his question about their rationale, “I’m going to be totally opposed to these tariffs — period.”

Specifying that her question was about “not politics, but morality,” Jean Henderson of Elkhorn told Steil, “What I see happening to our immigrant population embarrasses me, terrifies me.”

Henderson criticized the deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) personnel, their faces hidden by masks, against immigrants “who are doing the right thing by going to the immigration office,” only to be taken into custody. “It is a trap,” she said. “Why is this happening and why aren’t you stopping it?”

Steil began in reply, “What I view is the moral hazard created by the Biden administration…,” prompting a roar of disapproval from the crowd, then a shout of “Joe Biden sucks!” from someone perhaps more sympathetic to the congressman.

The rest of Steil’s response was largely drowned out.

When it was her turn at the microphone, Kelly Neuens connected the experiences of her grandparents and great aunt and great uncle, who were held in U.S. internment camps during World War II as U.S. citizens of Japanese descent, to the conditions in the El Salvador prison where the Trump administration has sent some immigrants taken into custody.

“President Trump said, ‘Homegrowns are next’ when he was speaking to the El Salvador president,” Neuens told Steil. “My worry is that we are repeating history here.”

A plea for the climate

In his answer, which was repeatedly interrupted, Steil described the World War II internment as “one of the more darker chapters of American history,” then added, “As we look at the engagement that law enforcement is doing now against immigrants who are in the country illegally, I don’t see the  exact parallel.”

Another questioner asked Steil to explain “why you support Linda McMahon and defunding the Department of Education?”

Congress, Steil said, is still “analyzing what the spending will be for the upcoming fiscal year.” He added that the department “has burdened a lot of our local school districts with unnecessary red tape” in the course of distributing funds to the states. “I think what we will see as we negotiate this going forward is a way to make sure that those funds are there” for local schools, he said.

When it was her turn to ask a question, Sharna Ahern of Fontana thanked Steil and his staff “for answering all the contacts I’ve made with you over the years.”

She enumerated a wide range of concerns she has had — about the Department of Education, about the treatment of immigrants, “about the rule of law and civil rights” — and then turned her focus on the environment.

“Extreme weather conditions are happening more frequently as we experience them,” she told Steil. “The EPA is deregulating the standards that are in place to fight climate change, to protect the citizens. Where do you stand on this issue? And how can you be an advocate for us to initiate legislation to restore our safeguards?”

Steil praised Wisconsin as “one of the most beautiful states in the country” and asserted that “making sure that we’re protecting our air and water and soil is absolutely essential.” He said that on the issue of climate change, “what we need to be doing is focused on addressing that global aspect. But again, make sure other countries are doing their fair share of it.”

The crowd largely jeered at the response. When another audience member asked about Trump’s executive orders rolling back Biden administration measures to address climate change, Steil said that action was necessary to “correct … the overreach in the previous administration.”

It was after 6 p.m. when Bremel called for the final question.

A few minutes earlier, someone had shouted a question about “children starving in Gaza,” and the woman whose turn it was asked Steil to address that topic as well as to defend the SNAP cuts.

“I can do them both,” Steil said. He started with SNAP, reiterating his earlier assertion that Wisconsin would not be affected by the program’s changes to work requirements because of policies the state had in place already.

Turning to Gaza, Steil said, “To me the easy answer to address this crisis is for Hamas to surrender and release the hostages. Release them. Israel was unfairly, unjustly attacked.”

His comments gave rise to another brief demonstration, punctuated by repeated chants of “60,000 people are dead!”

By the time the chanting ended, Steil had left the stage. 

The photos accompanying this report are not available for republishing except by agreement with photographer Mark Hertzberg. 

At a news conference Tuesday in the state Capitol, Rachel Smith of New Berlin speaks in favor of a bill that would make app-based drivers independent contractors and allow the businesses they drive for to provide some benefits. The bill was authored by Sen. Julian Bradly, on the right. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Backers of legislation that would block drivers from app-based rideshare and delivery businesses from being declared employees are making a full-court press to persuade Gov. Tony Evers to sign the measure into law.

If enacted, AB 269 would automatically classify drivers for Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and similar businesses as independent contractors — bypassing current Wisconsin laws that differentiate independent contractors from direct employees. It would exclude those drivers from Wisconsin’s unemployment insurance, workers compensation and minimum wage laws.

The bill would also allow those businesses to set up payroll plans to fund benefit programs for drivers, but it would not require them to do so.

Along with other bills that passed both houses after May 8, the Legislature’s calendar requires the independent contractor measure to go to Evers on Thursday, Aug. 7. Evers hasn’t spoken publicly about the bill, but opponents contend it deprives drivers of worker protections in return for meager benefits.

“It just seems to be a PR move to entrench drivers’ status as independent contractors,” said state Rep. Ryan Clancy (D-Milwaukee), who drives for Lyft and who voted against the bill in the Assembly. 

A heavy lobbying campaign for which DoorDash has been the most visible sponsor has put all the attention on the benefits provision. On Tuesday, Chamber for Progress, a tech business lobbying group, organized a press conference in the state Capitol to urge Evers to sign the bill.

State Sen. Julian Bradley (R-New Berlin), the bill’s Senate author, said it would allow the driving-app companies “to voluntarily contribute to portable benefit accounts that travel with the worker and allow them to use the funds for health care, sick time or retirement without stripping workers of their independence.”

Gig workers “want to be independent,” said Ruth Whittaker, of Chamber for Progress. “We should protect their independence and the flexibility of gig work, and we should also give them access to benefits.”

Joe DeRose, a retired state employee, said his work driving for DoorDash provided “flexible income to help with rising costs” without tying him to a fixed schedule.

“I strongly support portable benefits,” DeRose said. “These accounts would let app-based workers save for unforeseen events or retirement without giving up the flexibility that makes this work so appealing.”

Rachel Smith of New Berlin said she delivers for DoorDash while building an online wellness business.

“The reality is, like many entrepreneurs and independent workers, I don’t have access to traditional benefits, so this portable benefits legislation would change that,” Smith said. “Portable benefits would let me plan for my future without giving up the freedom that makes this work possible in the first place.”

“Without this offer, there are no portable benefits,” said state Rep. Sylvia Velez-Ortiz (D-Milwaukee), who cast the only Democratic vote for the bill in the Assembly. “This is something that the platforms are wanting to do on their own, and government should not stand in their way of doing what they know is right.”

While Evers hasn’t said whether he’ll sign or veto the bill, its passage with only Republican votes — besides that of Ortiz-Velez — has almost always been a precursor to a veto.

Wisconsin labor laws include a series of tests to determine if a worker is an independent contractor or an employee.

An employee is covered by unemployment insurance, workers compensation insurance and state labor standards that include minimum wage, work hours and overtime regulations. An independent contractor is not.

The worker-business relationship must meet each one of nine qualifications to be exempt from workers comp law. It must meet 6 out of 9 qualifications to be exempt from unemployment insurance. And it must meet all six qualifications to be exempt from the state’s wage and hour laws.

The bill would make the app-based rideshare and delivery companies automatically exempt from all three areas of employment law. 

They could lose the exemption only if they flunked all four parts of a new four-part test — by prescribing when drivers must be logged in; terminating a driver for turning down an assignment; restricting drivers from working for other app-based companies; and restricting drivers from any other lawful job or business.

“This is a dangerous bill for working people,” Stephanie Bloomingdale, president of the Wisconsin AFL-CIO, said Tuesday.

“It is a bill that will carve out our existing tests to determine unemployment, workers’ comp, wage and hour [standards] with a very simplistic four-part test that would forever remove drivers’ ability to access those kind of benefits that we fought for for decades,” Bloomingdale said in an interview.

“They could offer benefits without taking away these tests,” she added. “And what they’re really after is taking away these tests.

Although Bradley described the bill as giving Wisconsin gig drivers “access to benefits like health care, dental and retirement savings,” critics say that those kinds of benefits are unlikely to accrue under the system the law describes. 

In Pennsylvania, DoorDash has established a trial benefits program without a law in place there. A report commissioned for the program found that participants on average were able to save about $400 over the course of a year.

“It’s just a savings account with a very meager contribution from the companies,” said Laura Padin, director of Work Structures at the National Employment Law Project (NELP), who sent a letter to Evers urging him to veto the bill. “Real employment-based benefits are worth so much more than that.”

Michael M. Bell, shown here in a promotional video for a documentary project about his son's death, is asking the Kenosha County district attorney to take a new look at the police shooting that killed his son. (Screenshot/via Michael Bell Facebook page. Used with permission)

The father of Michael E. Bell is asking the new Kenosha County district attorney to open a new investigation of Bell’s 2004 death at the hands of Kenosha police.

In a letter sent this week that arrived at the prosecutor’s office Thursday, Russell Beckman, a retired Kenosha Police Department detective, has asked the DA, Xavier Solis, to meet with Beckman and Bell’s father, Michael M. Bell.

Beckman has been working with the elder Bell for more than a decade to analyze the events on the night of the fatal shooting and challenge the official police account of the incident.

Their research has turned up “credible and well documented issues with the integrity of the investigation,” Beckman wrote. “There are multiple indications of a cover up of the true circumstances of the death by high level Kenosha police and government officials.”

The letter comes after a change in the administration in the DA’s office, and after years of conflict that Bell and Beckman have had with the previous DA, Michael Graveley.

After Graveley opposed an independent investigation of the case — and made claims about some of the evidence that Bell and Beckman disputed — they unsuccessfully sought legal sanctions against Graveley through the state Office of Lawyer Regulation.

Graveley, who served as DA for two terms, did not run for reelection in November 2024. His successor on the Democratic ticket, Carli McNeill, a veteran prosecutor in the DA’s office, lost to Solis, who ran as a Republican.

Michael E. Bell was fatally shot during a confrontation with police in the driveway of the home where he was living on Nov. 9, 2004. A Kenosha Police Department internal investigation exonerated all the officers involved within two days.

Officer Albert Gonzales shot the younger Bell at point-blank range after another officer at the scene shouted that he believed Bell had grabbed his gun.

The elder Bell sued the city, ultimately winning a settlement of $1.75 million in 2010. He subsequently campaigned for a state law requiring that police hand over investigations of deaths in their custody to another agency. The law was enacted in 2014.

Since the settlement of his lawsuit, Bell, with the assistance of Beckman and various technical consultants, has highlighted eyewitness testimony as well as physical evidence that contradict key details in the police department’s account of the events.

Because of those discrepancies, Bell and Beckman contend that the officer who thought his gun had been grabbed was mistaken, and that Gonzales was in a position to realize as much but fired his gun too hastily.

Gonzales, who ran unsuccessfully for sheriff in 2022 and has self-published his own account of the incident, has stood by the official police account.

In his letter to Solis, Beckman wrote, “I feel compelled to state that it is my belief that the actual shooting death of Mr. Bell’s son was legally justified, despite my concerns that it was not necessary.”

Nevertheless, Beckman charged in the letter, Kenosha police and city officials were responsible for “criminal acts committed to conceal the true circumstances of the death. I submit that this cover up started immediately after the shooting and continues to this day.”

Along with the letter, Beckman submitted a 95-page document outlining discrepancies and details that he and Bell have compiled to support their argument against the Kenosha Police Department description of the shooting and their claims of a willful coverup.

One discrepancy that Bell and Beckman found involves where various officers were standing during the confrontation in which Bell’s son was shot.

While the Kenosha Police account placed Gonzales on Bell’s son’s left side, with his gun pointing away from the house, eyewitness testimony and the medical examiner’s report indicated that Gonzales was on the young man’s right side, and his gun pointed toward the house.

That is a key difference that could demonstrate that the other officer who thought his gun was being taken was mistaken, Bell and Beckman contend.

“My son was being accused of trying to violently disarm an officer, and that he was the cause of his own death, according to the Kenosha PD,” Bell said Thursday.

“And that’s not the case. It was an accident,” he added, referring to the shooting. “But instead of coming back and saying it was an accident, they lied about it, and they discredit my son, and they discredit our family, and they discredited the law enforcement system. And so those things are really important to me.”

After Bell retrieved a sample of siding from the house several years later that included an indentation possibly from a bullet, he repeatedly sought the fatal bullet from the city of Kenosha, hoping to compare it to the indentation and support his and Beckman’s scenario of the incident.

As part of that campaign, Bell offered to donate $200,000 to charity and to indemnify the city in return for the bullet. City officials repeatedly rejected his appeal.

This past November, according to Bell and Beckman, they obtained records showing that an officer had signed out the bullet from the evidence material in 2007.

The officer did not document his reasons for doing so and did not disclose he had done so during a deposition in Bell’s lawsuit against the city that was underway at the time, they state in the appendix to the letter to Solis.  

“That’s really a new finding,” Bell told the Wisconsin Examiner, raising additional questions about the police handling of the incident.

The Wisconsin Examiner contacted Solis by email and left a voicemail message Thursday seeking comment on his initial reaction to the letter. The DA has not yet responded.

Bell has begun working with a documentary filmmaker interested in producing a film about his case. He posted a promotional video for the project on Facebook Thursday and later on YouTube as well.