Madison Police Acting Chief John Patterson speaks at a press conference Thursday about the arrest of Jeffrey Rupnow on charges that he illegally gave his daughter two handguns, including one that she used in the school shooting Dec. 16 at a Madison private school. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

The father of the teenager who shot and killed two people at a Madison private school and took her own life five months ago was arrested Thursday and charged with three felony counts in connection with the December shootings.

Jeffrey Rupnow, 42, was charged with two counts of intentionally giving a dangerous weapon to a person under the age of 18 and one count of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. All are Class H felonies under Wisconsin law, subject to a fine of up to $10,000 or a prison sentence of up to six years, or both.

Rupnow was booked into the Dane County jail just before 5:30 a.m. Thursday, according to the jail’s online records.

He is the father of Natalie Rupnow, the 15-year-old student at Abundant Life Christian School on Madison’s east side who entered the school in the middle of the morning on Dec. 16, 2024, shot and killed a teacher and a student, wounded six other people and then took her own life, all within a matter of minutes.

According to the criminal complaint, which was unsealed Thursday after Rupnow’s early morning arrest, Rupnow purchased two guns for his daughter: a 22-caliber handgun and later a Glock 9 mm pistol — the weapon that was used in the shooting. He said Natalie helped pay for the Glock and he purchased it for her from a gun store, the complaint states.

“All of these weapons, including [a third] one that was about to be gifted to the same teen, were purchased legally,” Madison Police Department Acting Chief John Patterson said at a Thursday afternoon press conference.

“There was a gun safe in the home. Based on our investigation, it did not stop the teenager from having regular access” to the contents,  he said.

Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said the case “is a call and an action to hold parents accountable … if their children can access their firearms.”

Rhodes-Conway said she wanted to see the Legislature take up “a number of really common sense proposals that have been around for years” to reduce gun violence. Those include measures such as universal background checks before people can purchase a gun as well as “red flag” laws that empower the courts to remove guns from owners who may represent a credible threat to others.

“The other piece of this is really making sure that responsible gun owners are doing everything they can to make sure that those guns do not fall into the hands of people who should not have them,” she said.

Patterson said Rupnow has been cooperative with police throughout the investigation.

In interviews with police, Natalie’s parents as well as two friends described her behavior as depressed and sometimes angry at her parents, who are divorced.

“Why would a 15-year-old open fire in her school and murder a teacher, classmates, and injure six others? We may never fully understand that horror,” Patterson said. “We do know the teenager had a fascination with weapons and school shootings.”

The complaint states that in June 2022 Madison police officers told Jeffrey Rupnow “of high-risk behavior that [Natalie] was engaging in via the internet.” The complaint does not elaborate further on that report. “I can’t speak further to the follow-up that was done” at that time, Patterson said.

Patterson said the investigation remains open in the case. He declined to comment about reports that people in other states were in touch with Natalie Rupnow online.

According to the complaint, Jeffrey Rupnow told police he had 11 guns, including two that were considered Natalie’s. He told police his daughter became interested in guns after he took her to a friend’s farm to shoot guns about two years ago and that they would occasionally go to a shooting range.

Because of her interest, Rupnow told police he bought her a 22-caliber handgun and later the Glock, according to the complaint.

The complaint states that Rupnow described occasional comments by his daughter about wanting to kill herself, but that he generally viewed those remarks as attention-seeking behavior.

Rupnow told police he had a gun safe where he kept all of the guns, including those he had purchased for his daughter. The safe was locked with a security code. He told police he had not told his daughter the code itself, but that he had told her that it was his Social Security number backwards, in case she needed to get into it.

The complaint states that police found maps of the school and a cardboard mockup that appeared to be of the school building among Natalie Rupnow’s things at home.

Police also found notebooks and what Patterson called a “manifesto” — a six-page document titled “War Against Humanity.” That and other documents suggested a fascination with other mass shootings, including one in 2007 by an 18-year-old in Finland, which she noted in one of her writings took place two years after she was born.

In addition, police found and reviewed 30 sets of camcorder videos, some of them with Natalie handling weapons and some depicting what appeared to be animal mutilation, according to the complaint.

According to the complaint, Natalie took both of her handguns to the school on Dec. 16, the day of the shooting, but apparently used only the Glock.

The complaint states she arrived at the school just before 10:40 a.m. and entered a classroom just before 10:50 a.m.

A student in the classroom, a study hall, told police that once in the classroom,  Natalie held the gun with both hands and aimed it at the teacher who was sitting at her desk in the front of the room. The student said he heard gunshots and ran to the back of the room, where he hid behind a beanbag chair.

After the shooting stopped, the student, who was wounded in the leg, saw Natalie Rupnow lying on the floor on her back, with the gun in her hand. The student told police he removed the gun from her hand and put it in a drawer “because he wanted to make sure that no one else got a hold of it,” the complaint states. The police later retrieved the gun from the drawer.

The teacher, Erin Michelle West, and one student, Rubi Bergara, were both killed, according to the Dane County Medical Examiner’s office. Six other students were wounded. One remains hospitalized, Patterson said.

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An electric car charges up at a charging station in New York. Wisconsin has joined 14 other states and the District of Columbia in a lawsuit against the Trump administration for cutting off federal funds that had been approved for states to build up their electric vehicle charging networks. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

A group of states, including Wisconsin, that were promised federal funds to establish electric vehicle charging station networks sued the Trump administration and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy this week for cutting off the promised grants.

“The Trump Administration and Secretary Duffy are singlehandedly trying to block Wisconsin from receiving the investments we were promised,” Gov. Tony Evers said in a statement Thursday. “It’s bad for the people of Wisconsin, it’s bad for our infrastructure, it’s bad for our economy, and it’s illegal.”

The lawsuit alleges that President Donald Trump’s executive order blocking electric vehicle charging station grants was illegal.

The lawsuit was filed late Wednesday in federal court in the state of Washington, which is the lead plaintiff among the suit’s 15 states and the District of Columbia.

Trump’s order “Unleashing American Energy,” signed the day he was inaugurated, told federal agencies to pause the distribution of funds that were appropriated during the Biden administration as part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act or the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law.

The order said the pause was “including but not limited to funds for electric vehicle charging stations made available through the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program.” The National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, or NEVI, is part of the 2021 infrastructure law.

Wisconsin has been approved for $62.65 million in funding under the program for 15 EV infrastructure projects that were held up after Trump’s order. The governor’s office said several projects were “located in the congressional district that now-Secretary Duffy used to represent in the U.S. Congress.”

Trump’s order stated that it was written to eliminate an “electric vehicle (EV) mandate.” No such mandate exists, the lawsuit points out.

“But in the name of eliminating this fictional mandate, the Executive Order directs the Federal Highway Administration … to usurp the legislative and spending powers reserved to Congress by withholding congressionally appropriated funding for electric vehicle (“EV”) charging infrastructure required by statute to be distributed to States,” the lawsuit states.

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Antwon King got help for his trucking business from the Minority Business Development Agency center in Milwaukee. On Tuesday, a federal judge issued an injuction that blocked a Trump administration executive order to close down the MBDA's operations. (Photo courtesy of Antwon King)

A federal judge in Rhode Island issued a preliminary injunction Tuesday, blocking a Trump administration executive order from effectively closing three federal agencies that support museums and libraries, promote labor peace and assist minority-owned businesses.

The agencies involved are the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS), the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). They were among the agencies that President Donald Trump listed in a March 14 executive order to be effectively shut down.

The order violates the federal Administrative Procedures Act “in the arbitrary and capricious way it was carried out,” wrote Judge John J. McConnell of the U.S. District Court for Rhode Island.

“It also disregards the fundamental constitutional role of each of the branches of our federal government; specifically, it ignores the unshakable principles that Congress makes the law and appropriates funds, and the Executive implements the law Congress enacted and spends the funds Congress appropriated,” McConnell wrote.

The lawsuit against the order was brought by 21 states, including Wisconsin, with attorneys general in Rhode Island, Hawaii and New York leading the litigation.

“Today’s preliminary injunction is a critical win for the public interest,” said Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha in a statement. “When the Trump Administration attempts to dismantle these agencies, it is making a targeted, concerted effort to prohibit everyday people from accessing their full potential.” 

Trump’s order named seven agencies — including the three involved in Tuesday’s court ruling — and directed them to eliminate their “non-statutory components and functions . . . to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” It also directed them to “reduce the performance of their statutory function and associated personnel to the minimum presence and function required by law.”

McConnell wrote that the day after issuing the order, Trump signed a continuing appropriations bill “in which Congress funded IMLS, MBDA, and FMCS through Sept. 30, 2025 at the same level it funded these agencies in fiscal year 2024.”

Despite that, in the aftermath of the order, the three agencies “are rescinding or deferring appropriated funds and do not plan to spend them,” McConnell wrote.

The FMCS provides mediation in labor negotiations between employers and unions and was established under the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. The IMLS, established in the 1990s, provides grants to museums and libraries while also providing research and policy analysis for museums, libraries and information services.

Help for minority-owned business

The MBDA, part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, was launched in 1969 by President Richard Nixon and was given its present name 10 years later.

Over its lifetime “it’s gotten bipartisan support,” Henry Childs, who served as the agency’s national director from 2018 to 2020, the last three years of Trump’s first term, told the Wisconsin Examiner.

In 2021, the bipartisan infrastructure law enacted under President Joe Biden made the MBDA a permanent federal agency — the result of an amendment to the legislation promoted by Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin) with support from members of both parties. Baldwin went on to advocate for an MBDA center in Milwaukee, which was established in 2022.

After Trump returned to the White House this year, Department of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said at his January confirmation hearing that he did not support dismantling MBDA.

Last month, however, Milwaukee’s MBDA center abruptly closed when the federal grant that supported the program was canceled.

Carolyn Mosby, interim president of the North Central Minority Supplier Development Council, a nonprofit that had the federal contract to operate the center, said she received notice April 17 of the grant’s cancellation. The Milwaukee center was one of more than 40 across the country that were closed, she said.

“The MBDA and other programs are not about exclusion, they’re about inclusion,” Mosby told the Wisconsin Examiner. “These initiatives were created to address long-standing, well-documented disparities when it comes to access to capital and contracts and opportunities that have disproportionately affected minority businesses across this country.”

Antwon King started his Milwaukee-based trucking business in 2020 with a simple cargo van. He graduated to a semi-trailer cab unit and found his niche hauling loads on flatbed trailers across the country — everything from pipes to wire coils to farm equipment and heavy construction machinery.

Along the way, he needed help at times, primarily with access to capital, advice on business planning and connections with large corporations that had programs to encourage minority-owned suppliers.

Through coaching at the Milwaukee MBDA center, he got guidance on funding sources for new equipment and learned how to pursue opportunities targeted to minority owned businesses.

“Those resources were extremely valuable,” King said. “I was kind of shocked to hear they were shutting down. There were some things I was still working on.”

Democrats on the Senate Commerce, Science & Transportation committee have written three times to the Department of Commerce demanding that Lutnick protect the agency from Trump’s order.

The third letter, sent April 30, quotes the closing notice that centers received stating they are “unfortunately no longer consistent with the agency’s priorities and no longer serves the interests of the United States and the MBDA Program.” The termination notice also stated that “MBDA is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President’s agenda.”

The letter demands an explanation of what types of funded activities would be “consistent with the agency’s priorities” and would serve its interests. It also demands a “detailed explanation” of how MBDA will repurpose its funding.

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Wisconsin has joined a federal lawsuit to block cuts at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. | The Hubert H. Humphrey Building, the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, D.C., as seen on Nov. 23, 2023. (Photo by Jane Norman/States Newsroom)

Wisconsin has joined 18 states and the District of Columbia in a lawsuit to block cuts and consolidations at the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that are part of the Trump administration’s objective to dismantle the department.

In Wisconsin, federal actions at HHS have cut off funding to address lead poisoning in Milwaukee schools, monitor and reduce maternal death and discourage young people from using tobacco, Kaul’s office said in announcing the lawsuit.

The lawsuit describes wholesale firings and department closings, many carried out under the auspices of “DOGE” — the Trump administration operation headed by Elon Musk that has gone into numerous government agencies, cutting staff and canceling funding. “DOGE” stands for “Department of Government Efficiency,” but it is not an official federal department.

The office of Gov. Tony Evers said Monday that in Wisconsin, those reductions are halting testing and oversight for bird flu; disrupting Head Start early education and child care programs; ending a program to offset high utility bills; and defunding substance abuse and mental health assistance programs.

“These devastating decisions will jeopardize the health and safety of Wisconsinites and our communities, all so Republicans can help pay for tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires,” Evers said in a statement, adding that they were part of a plan to “undermine the constitutional checks and balances in our system that help ensure no one has the sole power to make decisions like this unchecked.”

Attorney General Josh Kaul said that a “dangerous mix of conspiracy theories and the extreme ideology reflected by DOGE are causing a staggering amount of damage to the extraordinarily important work of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, resulting in increased and unnecessary risk to people’s health and wellbeing.”

The federal actions were carried out under a directive issued March 27, the lawsuit says. It charges that through those actions, “the administration is seeking to dismantle HHS and its agencies, first by firing their staff and then by fully eliminating the funding” to a series of HHS programs.

“The terminations and reorganizations happened quickly, but the consequences are severe, complicated, and potentially irreversible,” the lawsuit states. “Plaintiff States are already suffering consequences of these terminations and reorganizations.”

The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Rhode Island. It charges those actions are illegal for blocking spending already appropriated by Congress.

“Congress created HHS and has invested enormous sums into it every year without interruption, and the congressional mandates remain in place today,” the lawsuit charges. “Much of that investment was lost in a day through the massive firings of HHS’s leaders and staff. More will be lost if nothing is done.”

The lawsuit asserts that the March 27 directive violates the U.S. Constitution. It asks the court to declare the directive unlawful, to vacate it, and to block the administration from carrying it out.

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From left, Megan Hufton, Laurel Burns and Abigail Tessman take part in a roundtable discussion about Medicaid with Sen. Tammy Baldwin, right. The discussion was held Friday, May 2, 2025, at Common Threads, a Madison agency that provides Medicaid-supported services for people with autism and people with disabilities. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Update: GOP leaders in Congress have postponed the release of their proposals for Medicaid, originally scheduled for the week of May 5. 

Ahead of action on Congressional legislation that could provide the first hard details on proposed cuts to Medicaid, Wisconsin lawmakers are urging constituents to push back against cutting health care coverage.

“One of the most powerful things we can do right now is to elevate stories and talk about how compelling a need there is for robust investment in the Medicaid program,” Sen. Tammy Baldwin told a group of Medicaid recipients at a roundtable discussion in Madison on Friday.

Republicans in Congress are trying to extend federal tax cuts enacted in 2017, during President Donald Trump’s first term. Unless renewed, the 2017 tax cuts will expire at the end of 2025.

Congressional Republicans want to offset $4.5 trillion that extending the 2017 tax cuts will add to the federal deficit over 10 years. Based on their original blueprint, Medicaid has been in the spotlight as a likely target, and this week GOP leaders in the U.S. House are expected to release their first concrete proposals.

Medicaid covers about 1.3 million Wisconsin residents — roughly one in five people in the state, according to the state Department of Health Services (DHS). Those include nearly 900,000 low-income people who have primary health care and hospital services though BadgerCare Plus.

More than 260,000 people who are elderly, blind, or have other disabilities have coverage through Medicaid, including for long-term care in nursing homes or in their own homes or the community. And another 244,000 Wisconsinites have Medicaid coverage through a variety of other special programs.

Extending the 2017 tax cuts will benefit the richest 1% of the population most, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) found.

“In order to give tax breaks for the rich, what do they want to cut? Medicaid. It’s one of the biggest targets,” Baldwin, a Democrat, told participants in the Madison roundtable. “So from the folks who are most vulnerable, to transfer money to those who are billionaires and millionaires and multi-millionaires — it is criminal in my mind. It’s immoral.”

Baldwin’s event was one of two held Friday to highlight Medicaid’s importance in Wisconsin. In Eau Claire, state Rep. Jodi Emerson (D-Eau Claire) convened a discussion that included providers and Medicaid recipients.

Emerson’s discussion was joined via Zoom by Chiquita Brooks-LaSure administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) under former President Joe Biden

“These attacks on the Medicaid program can be devastating if they go through,” Brooks-LaSure told the Wisconsin Examiner in a phone interview. “Not just for the millions of low-income people who need help, not just for the millions of middle-class families who depend on Medicaid — particularly for nursing home care, care in the home to keep you out of the nursing home, and children with special needs, whether it be autism services, whether it be developmental disabilities or physical disabilities.”

The existence of Medicaid helps the overall health care economy in the long run, Brooks-LaSure said.

Under federal law, hospitals must ensure that patients who show up in their emergency rooms are stable before they leave. But if a person’s care isn’t covered, “the entire health care system pays for that.”

Medicaid recipients who met with Baldwin described their anxiety over the prospect of losing coverage.

For Laurel Burns, who was born with no arms, Medicaid has enabled her to have health care for herself and for her two sons, now teens, whom she’s raised as a single mother after their father left.

“Being disabled has been a struggle my whole life. It’s like every twist and turn is up a steep hill,” Burns told Baldwin. Medicaid support, however, has enabled her to have health care at home, including needed assistance with grocery shopping and housekeeping.

She has been able to get a college degree and landed a part-time job working for an insurance agent.

“I would love to work full time, but the job market and being disabled is really difficult to navigate,” Burns said. “With all these cuts and threats to the program, it’s really scary for somebody like me who doesn’t have a large family.”

Megan Hufton, the single mother of two teenage boys who have autism and don’t speak, said that in addition to the support Medicaid has provided her sons as part of the program’s disability services, schools get Medicaid support to help pay for services such as occupational therapy. “I’m very nervous about the future,” Hufton said.

Baldwin’s discussion was held at Common Threads, a Medicaid-funded agency in Madison that provides mental health, rehab and alternative education services.

Liv Lacayo, who works with Common Threads clients and their families, said Medicaid enables them to get routine care so they don’t have to use emergency services as they might have to otherwise.

Without Medicaid, she said, she worries that families would be struggling for support.

Brett Maki, who must use a motorized wheelchair to get around, said Medicaid has made it possible for him to live independently, getting daily help with cooking, cleaning and laundry — “all of the basic necessities that I would need to live my life to the fullest.”

Without that, “I don’t even want to think about what that means,” he said.

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An engineer works at a cargo port storage yard. Tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump have generated uncertainty about the economy for many businesses and consumers, according to economic forecasters. (Photo by Vithun Khamsong/Getty Images)

Over a buffet lunch Wednesday, a roomful of bankers got a mixed picture of the national economy in the short term. For Wisconsin, the longer term outlook appears more certain, although there may be little comfort from that.

Speaking at an economic forecast luncheon hosted by the Wisconsin Bankers Association and the news outlet WisBusiness, part of WisPolitcs.com, Dale Knapp, director of research at Forward Analytics, reviewed the persistent demographic slump that has put Wisconsin on a troubling trajectory for the coming decades.

That trajectory has been evident already for some 20 years, Knapp said, and it centers on the population bulge from baby boomers — people born between 1946 and 1964. That generation was 65% more numerous than the group born in the previous 19-year period, he said. And the subsequent generations have been about 20% smaller in number or even less.

The baby boom produced an explosion of demand for everything from toys to homes to schools and universities, Knapp observed. Now the last of that generation is passing into retirement, and with smaller populations in the generations that follow there are “worker shortages all across the state,” Knapp said.

Between 2020 and 2040, the working age population, ages 18 to 64, is projected to fall by 15% on average in all but six Wisconsin counties, Knapp said. Automation may pick up the slack in some industries, including manufacturing and possibly fast food service, he suggested.

Immigration is another remedy, Knapp said — but also “a challenge given what’s going on in the White House now.”

“We need to fix the border problem to a degree,” Knapp said. “If you do that, then maybe you can get the two parties in Washington together and say, ‘OK, we need to fix legal immigration by expanding it.'”

Knapp’s other proffered solution is to invest funds to offer families $16,000 to move to Wisconsin from out of state. With 3,000 families a year, the money could be repaid with the added income and sales tax revenues, “and we could fund it forever,” he said.

National economic uncertainty

Outlining the current state of the nation’s pocketbook and its near-term forecast, economist Andrea Sorensen of US Bank in Minneapolis said that the economy “is actually doing probably better than most people think.”

That’s despite the uncertainty that has ballooned since President Donald Trump took office in January, she said. That uncertainty also looms over the horizon, however.

The nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) — the broadest measure of the overall economy — has been growing by more than 2% over the last couple of years through the end of 2024.

Data issued Wednesday morning showed GDP shrank 0.3% in the first quarter. Sorensen said that was for an unusual reason, however.

U.S. businesses stocked up on goods from overseas to get ahead of the tariffs Trump imposed after taking office, she said. She attributed the slight first-quarter dip to those imports, because their value is subtracted from GDP.

The GDP estimate released Wednesday is the first of three that will be produced for the quarter, and Sorensen said her economic team believes the next two estimates will be better.

She views other indicators as relatively favorable.

The national labor market remains strong. Month-to-month employment growth has cooled some since the hiring spikes that followed the economic crash from the COVID-19 pandemic.  Still, “we still consider it to be quite healthy,” she said.

“People who have jobs have money to spend,” Sorensen said. “So as long as the labor market is holding up, we think the economy could be OK.”

Consumer spending also remains strong, she said, even though surveys show dramatic declines in both consumer and business confidence.

“We know it means people are not happy and they don’t have high hopes,” Sorensen said. “But if we’re talking recession, that sort of depressed sentiment needs to translate into actual economic activity. And so far, it hasn’t. And we’re not actually sure if it will.”

Tariffs are a wild card

The Trump administration’s tariff policies, however, remain a major wild card.

A broad 10% tax on imports that took effect April 5 remains in place with a few exceptions. Tariffs of up to 50% on about 60 countries are on a 90-day pause. An active tariff remains on goods from China — initially 125% and more recently raised to 145%.

Overall that’s netted out to a U.S. effective tariff rate — the net tariff on all imports from other countries — between 25% and 30%. That’s 10 times the effective tariff rate of 2.5% a year ago.

“This hasn’t happened in over 100 years,” Sorensen said. “The economy is just structurally very different, and we can try to make forecasts and comparisons —  and we do all day every day —  but we don’t know. There is just so much unknown what this will do.”

For that reason, economic uncertainty is “sky high,” she continued. “I don’t think anyone really knows what’s going on.”

Businesses “are kind of paralyzed,” Sorensen said. “How can you make a business investment decision if you have no idea what tariffs are going to be tomorrow, next week, next year?”

Some larger employers have already begun announcing plans to reshore work in the U.S. But Sorensen said in response to one audience member’s question that isn’t an option for many smaller employers.

A company that sources products overseas might gain a temporary advantage by returning production to the U.S., she said.

“They can’t risk making the wrong choice,” however, Sorensen said. “What we’re hearing is they don’t trust that that tariff will remain in place. So, they can’t make the investment decisions to bring production back to the U.S. because they might want to undo it again as soon as policy changes.”

In addition, “our supply chains are so intertwined that everything has some input that’s imported,” she said.

Tariffs will also squeeze low- and middle-income households, where spending takes a larger share of their earnings — “households that were already struggling,” Sorensen said.

Migration presents another pressure point. Policies to reduce immigration and deport immigrants will hurt some states and some sectors of the economy more than others, she said.

Yet an additional unknown is how the escalating trade conflicts with the rest of the world will affect services — where the U.S. has a trade surplus.

“President Trump has never mentioned that, because he probably doesn’t want us to know that, right? It makes trade look a little more fair, but that’s not the story he wants,” Sorensen said.

So far, other countries haven’t targeted U.S. services in retaliation for the tariffs it has imposed.

Nevertheless, “if countries really want to get us economically, they would go after services,” Sorensen said.

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An engineer works at a cargo port storage yard. Tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump have generated uncertainty about the economy for many businesses and consumers, according to economic forecasters. (Photo by Vithun Khamsong/Getty Images)

Over a buffet lunch Wednesday, a roomful of bankers got a mixed picture of the national economy in the short term. For Wisconsin, the longer term outlook appears more certain, although there may be little comfort from that.

Speaking at an economic forecast luncheon hosted by the Wisconsin Bankers Association and the news outlet WisBusiness, part of WisPolitcs.com, Dale Knapp, director of research at Forward Analytics, reviewed the persistent demographic slump that has put Wisconsin on a troubling trajectory for the coming decades.

That trajectory has been evident already for some 20 years, Knapp said, and it centers on the population bulge from baby boomers — people born between 1946 and 1964. That generation was 65% more numerous than the group born in the previous 19-year period, he said. And the subsequent generations have been about 20% smaller in number or even less.

The baby boom produced an explosion of demand for everything from toys to homes to schools and universities, Knapp observed. Now the last of that generation is passing into retirement, and with smaller populations in the generations that follow there are “worker shortages all across the state,” Knapp said.

Between 2020 and 2040, the working age population, ages 18 to 64, is projected to fall by 15% on average in all but six Wisconsin counties, Knapp said. Automation may pick up the slack in some industries, including manufacturing and possibly fast food service, he suggested.

Immigration is another remedy, Knapp said — but also “a challenge given what’s going on in the White House now.”

“We need to fix the border problem to a degree,” Knapp said. “If you do that, then maybe you can get the two parties in Washington together and say, ‘OK, we need to fix legal immigration by expanding it.'”

Knapp’s other proffered solution is to invest funds to offer families $16,000 to move to Wisconsin from out of state. With 3,000 families a year, the money could be repaid with the added income and sales tax revenues, “and we could fund it forever,” he said.

National economic uncertainty

Outlining the current state of the nation’s pocketbook and its near-term forecast, economist Andrea Sorensen of US Bank in Minneapolis said that the economy “is actually doing probably better than most people think.”

That’s despite the uncertainty that has ballooned since President Donald Trump took office in January, she said. That uncertainty also looms over the horizon, however.

The nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) — the broadest measure of the overall economy — has been growing by more than 2% over the last couple of years through the end of 2024.

Data issued Wednesday morning showed GDP shrank 0.3% in the first quarter. Sorensen said that was for an unusual reason, however.

U.S. businesses stocked up on goods from overseas to get ahead of the tariffs Trump imposed after taking office, she said. She attributed the slight first-quarter dip to those imports, because their value is subtracted from GDP.

The GDP estimate released Wednesday is the first of three that will be produced for the quarter, and Sorensen said her economic team believes the next two estimates will be better.

She views other indicators as relatively favorable.

The national labor market remains strong. Month-to-month employment growth has cooled some since the hiring spikes that followed the economic crash from the COVID-19 pandemic.  Still, “we still consider it to be quite healthy,” she said.

“People who have jobs have money to spend,” Sorensen said. “So as long as the labor market is holding up, we think the economy could be OK.”

Consumer spending also remains strong, she said, even though surveys show dramatic declines in both consumer and business confidence.

“We know it means people are not happy and they don’t have high hopes,” Sorensen said. “But if we’re talking recession, that sort of depressed sentiment needs to translate into actual economic activity. And so far, it hasn’t. And we’re not actually sure if it will.”

Tariffs are a wild card

The Trump administration’s tariff policies, however, remain a major wild card.

A broad 10% tax on imports that took effect April 5 remains in place with a few exceptions. Tariffs of up to 50% on about 60 countries are on a 90-day pause. An active tariff remains on goods from China — initially 125% and more recently raised to 145%.

Overall that’s netted out to a U.S. effective tariff rate — the net tariff on all imports from other countries — between 25% and 30%. That’s 10 times the effective tariff rate of 2.5% a year ago.

“This hasn’t happened in over 100 years,” Sorensen said. “The economy is just structurally very different, and we can try to make forecasts and comparisons —  and we do all day every day —  but we don’t know. There is just so much unknown what this will do.”

For that reason, economic uncertainty is “sky high,” she continued. “I don’t think anyone really knows what’s going on.”

Businesses “are kind of paralyzed,” Sorensen said. “How can you make a business investment decision if you have no idea what tariffs are going to be tomorrow, next week, next year?”

Some larger employers have already begun announcing plans to reshore work in the U.S. But Sorensen said in response to one audience member’s question that isn’t an option for many smaller employers.

A company that sources products overseas might gain a temporary advantage by returning production to the U.S., she said.

“They can’t risk making the wrong choice,” however, Sorensen said. “What we’re hearing is they don’t trust that that tariff will remain in place. So, they can’t make the investment decisions to bring production back to the U.S. because they might want to undo it again as soon as policy changes.”

In addition, “our supply chains are so intertwined that everything has some input that’s imported,” she said.

Tariffs will also squeeze low- and middle-income households, where spending takes a larger share of their earnings — “households that were already struggling,” Sorensen said.

Migration presents another pressure point. Policies to reduce immigration and deport immigrants will hurt some states and some sectors of the economy more than others, she said.

Yet an additional unknown is how the escalating trade conflicts with the rest of the world will affect services — where the U.S. has a trade surplus.

“President Trump has never mentioned that, because he probably doesn’t want us to know that, right? It makes trade look a little more fair, but that’s not the story he wants,” Sorensen said.

So far, other countries haven’t targeted U.S. services in retaliation for the tariffs it has imposed.

Nevertheless, “if countries really want to get us economically, they would go after services,” Sorensen said.

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Participants in Western Dairyland Economic Opportunity Council's Fresh Start program build a house, learning construction skills in the process. Program participants enroll in AmeriCorps and are paid an hourly wage for their work. (Photo courtesy of Western Dairyland EOC Inc.)

A coalition of 25 states, including Wisconsin, sued the Trump administration Tuesday to block the cancellation of AmeriCorps programs across the country.

The cancellation has upended plans at more than two dozen organizations in Wisconsin that have engaged AmeriCorps members in community service work, and stranded scores of participants in the midst of one-year stints in the program.

“I was completely blindsided,” Parker Kuehni told the Wisconsin Examiner on Tuesday. The University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate with a degree in global health was in his second year with AmeriCorps, working at a Madison free health clinic and preparing to start medical school in June when he learned Monday morning that the program was canceled.

Created by Congress in 1993 as the Corporation for National and Community Service, its official name, AmeriCorps has deployed community service workers across the country in the decades since. AmeriCorps members are usually recent college graduates who join the program for a year or two. They teach in schools, assist with disaster relief and take on a host of other roles. 

Wisconsin has 25 AmeriCorps programs that operate at more than 300 locations across the state, according to the office of Gov. Tony Evers. In Wisconsin, AmeriCorps operates through Serve Wisconsin, which administers its Wisconsin contracts and is housed in the Department of Administration.

On April 16, AmeriCorps placed about 75% of its employees on administrative leave with pay, the New York Times reported.

At 6:20 p.m. on Friday, April 25, Jeanne Duffy, the Serve Wisconsin executive director, received an email message that AmeriCorps grants and their recipients in Wisconsin were being terminated immediately “because it has been determined that the award no longer effectuates agency priorities.”

The form letter instructed recipients to notify all organizations and agencies with AmeriCorps-related projects. “You must immediately cease all award activities. This is a final agency action and is not administratively appealable,” the message said.

Lawsuit: Cancellation ‘usurps Congress’s power of the purse’

The lawsuit filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Maryland charges the Trump administration’s cancellation of the program “flouts Congress’s creation of AmeriCorps and assignment of agency duties; usurps Congress’s power of the purse and thereby violates the Constitution’s separation of powers; and arbitrarily and capriciously — without any reasoned analysis — vitiates the agency’s ability to function consistent with its statutory mission and purpose.”

The suit charges that the program’s abrupt end also violates federal law, which states AmeriCorps can make “significant changes to program requirements, service delivery or policy only through public notice and comment rulemaking.”

“The attempt to dismantle AmeriCorps is part of a pattern from the Trump administration of disrespect toward those who serve others,” Attorney General Josh Kaul said in a statement. “That approach is not just shameful — it’s misguided. AmeriCorps volunteers and projects help strengthen communities. AmeriCorps should be thanked for its work, not abruptly dismantled.”

Evers’ office telegraphed Wisconsin’s plan to join the lawsuit late Tuesday morning.

“Once again, the Trump Administration is trying to cut federal funding that Congress already approved and Wisconsin is counting on to help kids, families, and communities across our state — all so they can pay for tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires,” Evers said in a statement. “These latest reckless Trump and Musk cuts will hurt Wisconsin’s kids who are homeless or who need tutors for math and reading, folks who are working to overcome addiction and substance use, stop work on conservation projects, as well as all of the dedicated public servants whose livelihoods are depending on this work.”

Tutoring programs, health care clinics

AmeriCorps’ cancellation affected organizations and agencies all across the state.

In Madison, the United Way of Dane County enlisted 27 AmeriCorps members in two tutoring programs — one in math for high school students and the other in reading and literacy for elementary school children.

AmeriCorps members were placed in schools to help identify students who would benefit from tutoring, United Way officials said. They also screened and conducted background checks for more than 175 community volunteer tutors as well as serving as tutors themselves. More than 1,000 children have received tutoring in the two programs this year.

“And these kids are able to accelerate their academic success, which puts them on track for [higher] graduation rates,” said United Way CEO Renee Moe. “So, this is a really huge loss for us.”

AmeriCorps members were “really key to having successful volunteers support students in literacy,” said Emily Greene, director of Schools of Hope, the elementary program.

In the high school program, Achievement Connections, members have supported and trained other high school students as peer tutors. That helps those students “be engaged in their school in a way that they otherwise wouldn’t be and also gain some skills,” said Karl Johnson, director of Achievement Connections.

“We find that those relationships . . . are some of our strongest when it’s students helping each other out, and our [AmeriCorps] members are a pretty key part of facilitating that,” Johnson said.

The Wisconsin Association of Free and Charitable Clinics has deployed 30 AmeriCorps members throughout Wisconsin this year.

Some assist clinics, local health departments or the state Department of Health Services in administrative tasks, writing grants, collecting and analyzing data and related work, said Domonique Coffee, the association’s AmeriCorps program manager. Others staff clinics in a public health role, taking a patient’s blood pressure or other vital signs, teaching patients about managing their diabetes or hypertension or providing other direct care, she said.

The program allowed “free and charitable clinics to increase their services and capacity for services . . . to those who are underinsured or uninsured,” Coffee said.

It has also helped prepare the AmeriCorps members as future health care providers — “the future physicians and public health leaders of our next generation,” she added.

Fostering skills for careers and life

Parker Kuehni had graduated with a degree in global public health two years ago and was preparing to go to medical school. But he knew he first wanted to get more experience in directly working with patients.

He volunteered as a barbershop health screener for the Perry Family Free Clinic, which serves uninsured, low-income Madison residents. Through the clinic he connected with AmeriCorps and then shifted to helping with patient coordination, communication and scheduling, discussing care plans with patients and managing referrals to specialists.

The experience “built my empathy for people,” he said. The experiences he had “will contribute to me being an overall better future physician.”

While the typical AmeriCorps participant is a college graduate, the Western Dairyland Economic Opportunity Council in Eau Claire took a different approach with the program.

Since the late 1990s Western Dairyland has operated Fresh Start, an education, skills and career program for young adults ages 18 to 25. Participants often have a sparse job history and might not have completed high school.

The program engages up to 15 participants in a year-long house-building project. “We provide them with life skills and job skills and technical education, allowing them to then leave the program and either go on to school or attain full-time employment,” said Dale Karls, Western Dairyland’s communications coordinator.

The participants themselves become AmeriCorps members and earn an hourly wage on the job. Some 600 young people have gone through the program over the last three decades, building 45 homes, Karls said.

All the organizations the Wisconsin Examiner contacted Tuesday said the news of AmeriCorps’ cancellation came too recently  for them to know what they will do if the program isn’t restored.

Coffee said the Wisconsin Free and Charitable Clinics Association is trying to support its AmeriCorps members, “helping them find their footing.”

At United Way of Dane County, “We’ve spoken to our school district partners,” said Moe, the agency’s CEO. “We have reaffirmed with them that tutoring continues to be an important strategy to help with academic success. And so right now we’re trying to be creative around how to best keep really effective tutoring programs going.”

“We’re hoping that the funding will be reinstated,” said Karls of Western Dairyland. In the meantime, he added, “We have a half-constructed house in Strum, Wisconsin. We have to find a way to finish that.”

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Participants in Western Dairyland Economic Opportunity Council's Fresh Start program build a house, learning construction skills in the process. Program participants enroll in AmeriCorps and are paid an hourly wage for their work. (Photo courtesy of Western Dairyland EOC Inc.)

A coalition of 25 states, including Wisconsin, sued the Trump administration Tuesday to block the cancellation of AmeriCorps programs across the country.

The cancellation has upended plans at more than two dozen organizations in Wisconsin that have engaged AmeriCorps members in community service work, and stranded scores of participants in the midst of one-year stints in the program.

“I was completely blindsided,” Parker Kuehni told the Wisconsin Examiner on Tuesday. The University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate with a degree in global health was in his second year with AmeriCorps, working at a Madison free health clinic and preparing to start medical school in June when he learned Monday morning that the program was canceled.

Created by Congress in 1993 as the Corporation for National and Community Service, its official name, AmeriCorps has deployed community service workers across the country in the decades since. AmeriCorps members are usually recent college graduates who join the program for a year or two. They teach in schools, assist with disaster relief and take on a host of other roles. 

Wisconsin has 25 AmeriCorps programs that operate at more than 300 locations across the state, according to the office of Gov. Tony Evers. In Wisconsin, AmeriCorps operates through Serve Wisconsin, which administers its Wisconsin contracts and is housed in the Department of Administration.

On April 16, AmeriCorps placed about 75% of its employees on administrative leave with pay, the New York Times reported.

At 6:20 p.m. on Friday, April 25, Jeanne Duffy, the Serve Wisconsin executive director, received an email message that AmeriCorps grants and their recipients in Wisconsin were being terminated immediately “because it has been determined that the award no longer effectuates agency priorities.”

The form letter instructed recipients to notify all organizations and agencies with AmeriCorps-related projects. “You must immediately cease all award activities. This is a final agency action and is not administratively appealable,” the message said.

Lawsuit: Cancellation ‘usurps Congress’s power of the purse’

The lawsuit filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Maryland charges the Trump administration’s cancellation of the program “flouts Congress’s creation of AmeriCorps and assignment of agency duties; usurps Congress’s power of the purse and thereby violates the Constitution’s separation of powers; and arbitrarily and capriciously — without any reasoned analysis — vitiates the agency’s ability to function consistent with its statutory mission and purpose.”

The suit charges that the program’s abrupt end also violates federal law, which states AmeriCorps can make “significant changes to program requirements, service delivery or policy only through public notice and comment rulemaking.”

“The attempt to dismantle AmeriCorps is part of a pattern from the Trump administration of disrespect toward those who serve others,” Attorney General Josh Kaul said in a statement. “That approach is not just shameful — it’s misguided. AmeriCorps volunteers and projects help strengthen communities. AmeriCorps should be thanked for its work, not abruptly dismantled.”

Evers’ office telegraphed Wisconsin’s plan to join the lawsuit late Tuesday morning.

“Once again, the Trump Administration is trying to cut federal funding that Congress already approved and Wisconsin is counting on to help kids, families, and communities across our state — all so they can pay for tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires,” Evers said in a statement. “These latest reckless Trump and Musk cuts will hurt Wisconsin’s kids who are homeless or who need tutors for math and reading, folks who are working to overcome addiction and substance use, stop work on conservation projects, as well as all of the dedicated public servants whose livelihoods are depending on this work.”

Tutoring programs, health care clinics

AmeriCorps’ cancellation affected organizations and agencies all across the state.

In Madison, the United Way of Dane County enlisted 27 AmeriCorps members in two tutoring programs — one in math for high school students and the other in reading and literacy for elementary school children.

AmeriCorps members were placed in schools to help identify students who would benefit from tutoring, United Way officials said. They also screened and conducted background checks for more than 175 community volunteer tutors as well as serving as tutors themselves. More than 1,000 children have received tutoring in the two programs this year.

“And these kids are able to accelerate their academic success, which puts them on track for [higher] graduation rates,” said United Way CEO Renee Moe. “So, this is a really huge loss for us.”

AmeriCorps members were “really key to having successful volunteers support students in literacy,” said Emily Greene, director of Schools of Hope, the elementary program.

In the high school program, Achievement Connections, members have supported and trained other high school students as peer tutors. That helps those students “be engaged in their school in a way that they otherwise wouldn’t be and also gain some skills,” said Karl Johnson, director of Achievement Connections.

“We find that those relationships . . . are some of our strongest when it’s students helping each other out, and our [AmeriCorps] members are a pretty key part of facilitating that,” Johnson said.

The Wisconsin Association of Free and Charitable Clinics has deployed 30 AmeriCorps members throughout Wisconsin this year.

Some assist clinics, local health departments or the state Department of Health Services in administrative tasks, writing grants, collecting and analyzing data and related work, said Domonique Coffee, the association’s AmeriCorps program manager. Others staff clinics in a public health role, taking a patient’s blood pressure or other vital signs, teaching patients about managing their diabetes or hypertension or providing other direct care, she said.

The program allowed “free and charitable clinics to increase their services and capacity for services . . . to those who are underinsured or uninsured,” Coffee said.

It has also helped prepare the AmeriCorps members as future health care providers — “the future physicians and public health leaders of our next generation,” she added.

Fostering skills for careers and life

Parker Kuehni had graduated with a degree in global public health two years ago and was preparing to go to medical school. But he knew he first wanted to get more experience in directly working with patients.

He volunteered as a barbershop health screener for the Perry Family Free Clinic, which serves uninsured, low-income Madison residents. Through the clinic he connected with AmeriCorps and then shifted to helping with patient coordination, communication and scheduling, discussing care plans with patients and managing referrals to specialists.

The experience “built my empathy for people,” he said. The experiences he had “will contribute to me being an overall better future physician.”

While the typical AmeriCorps participant is a college graduate, the Western Dairyland Economic Opportunity Council in Eau Claire took a different approach with the program.

Since the late 1990s Western Dairyland has operated Fresh Start, an education, skills and career program for young adults ages 18 to 25. Participants often have a sparse job history and might not have completed high school.

The program engages up to 15 participants in a year-long house-building project. “We provide them with life skills and job skills and technical education, allowing them to then leave the program and either go on to school or attain full-time employment,” said Dale Karls, Western Dairyland’s communications coordinator.

The participants themselves become AmeriCorps members and earn an hourly wage on the job. Some 600 young people have gone through the program over the last three decades, building 45 homes, Karls said.

All the organizations the Wisconsin Examiner contacted Tuesday said the news of AmeriCorps’ cancellation came too recently  for them to know what they will do if the program isn’t restored.

Coffee said the Wisconsin Free and Charitable Clinics Association is trying to support its AmeriCorps members, “helping them find their footing.”

At United Way of Dane County, “We’ve spoken to our school district partners,” said Moe, the agency’s CEO. “We have reaffirmed with them that tutoring continues to be an important strategy to help with academic success. And so right now we’re trying to be creative around how to best keep really effective tutoring programs going.”

“We’re hoping that the funding will be reinstated,” said Karls of Western Dairyland. In the meantime, he added, “We have a half-constructed house in Strum, Wisconsin. We have to find a way to finish that.”

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Major cuts to Medicaid under discussion in Congress would harm patients, the health care system and the economy in Wisconsin, the state health department said in a report Monday, likely increasing health care costs in the long run rather than saving money.

Depending on what route the federal budget takes to reduce spending on the program, it could cost the state up to $16.8 billion over 10 years, according to the report from the Department of Health Services (DHS).

Medicaid — jointly  funded by the federal and state governments — provides health care coverage for low-income Wisconsinites as well as long-term care for elderly people and people with disabilities.

GOP leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives are looking for ways to cut $880 billion from programs under the supervision of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The budget plan hasn’t taken formal shape. Because Medicaid is the single largest program in the committee’s budget portfolio, however, “substantial impacts to Medicaid and other health programs are unavoidable,” the report states.

In Wisconsin Medicaid covers about 1 million Wisconsin residents up to the age of 65 for primary health care through BadgerCare Plus. It also covers long-term care for people with disabilities and the elderly under a variety of different programs. Medicaid covers 20% of state residents and 40% of births, along with 38% of Wisconsin children and 60% of state residents in nursing homes.

“Medicaid is an important part of our health care infrastructure,” said Wisconsin Medicaid Director Bill Hanna at a DHS press conference Monday.

One possibility the report considers is a cap on federal coverage for each Medicaid patient.

Currently the federal share is 60% of the health care costs incurred by Wisconsin Medicaid recipients, with the state paying the remaining 40%. “This arrangement allows state budgets to cope with unforeseen circumstances, such as economic downturns or faster-than-expected medical cost growth,” the DHS report states.

The report states that a per-person ceiling on Medicaid costs, which Congress is reportedly considering, “would squeeze state budgets and put Wisconsin taxpayers on the hook if medical costs rise quickly, with cuts to benefits and cuts to provider payments.”

Hanna said that there remains “a lot of unknowns” in how Congress might structure a payment system with a ceiling. The report considers various scenarios under a cap, including low, medium and high increases in health care costs.

Over 10 years, Wisconsin could lose anywhere from $6.4 billion to $16.8 billion, DHS projects.

Other Congressional proposals include adding higher barriers to Medicaid coverage — primarily through a work requirement.

Work requirements have long been found to eliminate eligible people from Medicaid because of the additional burden to demonstrate that they are eligible.

“Adding an additional burden for this population will certainly result in fewer people making it through, even if they are working, just struggling with the paperwork pieces,” Hanna said.

According to the report, Wisconsin Medicaid enrolled about 191,000 childless adults per month in late 2024. Nearly half of them would be exempt from a work requirement.

“It is unknown how many people would lose coverage simply because it would be difficult to report their hours or wages,” the report states. It calculates that about 52,000 people “would be at the highest risk for losing eligibility.”

Reducing the Medicaid rolls through a work requirement, however, will carry other costs, the report argues.

“It’s not like these people disappear,” Hanna said.  “They still need care that now they just won’t have the insurance [to cover]. Meaning hospitals again will be picking up additional costs, which gets passed on to all health care consumers.”

A third approach Congress is said to be considering would reduce the federal government’s share of the cost to run Medicaid programs. That could cost Wisconsin up to $93 million, the report finds.

While congressional leaders have pointed to data on “improper payments” in Medicaid in defense of cuts and say they’re targeting “waste, fraud and abuse,” Hanna said members of Congress are  conflating two sharply different issues.

“Improper payments are not fraud, waste and abuse,” Hanna said. “Improper payments are often documentation errors that can be for any number of reasons.”

Wisconsin’s last Medicaid audit — required every three years — found an improper payment rate of 0.5%, which was due to clerical errors.

“In Wisconsin, you’re definitely not going to find significant savings” in the form of ineligible people getting covered, he said. “We have a very robust system in Wisconsin with very few errors.”

Facing substantial federal reductions, the state has four policy options, Hanna said: putting in more state funds to keep the program the same; restricting eligibility, so there are fewer Wisconsinites covered; cutting some services that Medicaid now pays for; or cutting what Medicaid pays to doctors, hospitals and other providers.

If the state pays more, then it will have to raise taxes or divert funds from other priorities. But each of the alternatives has other consequences, Hanna said.

Cutting provider rates “would have major impacts on our state’s health care system,” the DHS report states, with hospitals offsetting those by charging other payers more.

If fewer people are eligible for Medicaid, the rate of uninsured people in Wisconsin will increase, potentially driving up health care costs as well.

“Uninsured rates going up means more uncompensated care” for hospitals and other health care providers, Hanna said.

Reducing the services that Medicaid covers, however, would likely mean that people put off getting health care until an illness or condition gets worse, he said — “which ultimately means we end up spending more.”

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Major cuts to Medicaid under discussion in Congress would harm patients, the health care system and the economy in Wisconsin, the state health department said in a report Monday, likely increasing health care costs in the long run rather than saving money.

Depending on what route the federal budget takes to reduce spending on the program, it could cost the state up to $16.8 billion over 10 years, according to the report from the Department of Health Services (DHS).

Medicaid — jointly  funded by the federal and state governments — provides health care coverage for low-income Wisconsinites as well as long-term care for elderly people and people with disabilities.

GOP leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives are looking for ways to cut $880 billion from programs under the supervision of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The budget plan hasn’t taken formal shape. Because Medicaid is the single largest program in the committee’s budget portfolio, however, “substantial impacts to Medicaid and other health programs are unavoidable,” the report states.

In Wisconsin Medicaid covers about 1 million Wisconsin residents up to the age of 65 for primary health care through BadgerCare Plus. It also covers long-term care for people with disabilities and the elderly under a variety of different programs. Medicaid covers 20% of state residents and 40% of births, along with 38% of Wisconsin children and 60% of state residents in nursing homes.

“Medicaid is an important part of our health care infrastructure,” said Wisconsin Medicaid Director Bill Hanna at a DHS press conference Monday.

One possibility the report considers is a cap on federal coverage for each Medicaid patient.

Currently the federal share is 60% of the health care costs incurred by Wisconsin Medicaid recipients, with the state paying the remaining 40%. “This arrangement allows state budgets to cope with unforeseen circumstances, such as economic downturns or faster-than-expected medical cost growth,” the DHS report states.

The report states that a per-person ceiling on Medicaid costs, which Congress is reportedly considering, “would squeeze state budgets and put Wisconsin taxpayers on the hook if medical costs rise quickly, with cuts to benefits and cuts to provider payments.”

Hanna said that there remains “a lot of unknowns” in how Congress might structure a payment system with a ceiling. The report considers various scenarios under a cap, including low, medium and high increases in health care costs.

Over 10 years, Wisconsin could lose anywhere from $6.4 billion to $16.8 billion, DHS projects.

Other Congressional proposals include adding higher barriers to Medicaid coverage — primarily through a work requirement.

Work requirements have long been found to eliminate eligible people from Medicaid because of the additional burden to demonstrate that they are eligible.

“Adding an additional burden for this population will certainly result in fewer people making it through, even if they are working, just struggling with the paperwork pieces,” Hanna said.

According to the report, Wisconsin Medicaid enrolled about 191,000 childless adults per month in late 2024. Nearly half of them would be exempt from a work requirement.

“It is unknown how many people would lose coverage simply because it would be difficult to report their hours or wages,” the report states. It calculates that about 52,000 people “would be at the highest risk for losing eligibility.”

Reducing the Medicaid rolls through a work requirement, however, will carry other costs, the report argues.

“It’s not like these people disappear,” Hanna said.  “They still need care that now they just won’t have the insurance [to cover]. Meaning hospitals again will be picking up additional costs, which gets passed on to all health care consumers.”

A third approach Congress is said to be considering would reduce the federal government’s share of the cost to run Medicaid programs. That could cost Wisconsin up to $93 million, the report finds.

While congressional leaders have pointed to data on “improper payments” in Medicaid in defense of cuts and say they’re targeting “waste, fraud and abuse,” Hanna said members of Congress are  conflating two sharply different issues.

“Improper payments are not fraud, waste and abuse,” Hanna said. “Improper payments are often documentation errors that can be for any number of reasons.”

Wisconsin’s last Medicaid audit — required every three years — found an improper payment rate of 0.5%, which was due to clerical errors.

“In Wisconsin, you’re definitely not going to find significant savings” in the form of ineligible people getting covered, he said. “We have a very robust system in Wisconsin with very few errors.”

Facing substantial federal reductions, the state has four policy options, Hanna said: putting in more state funds to keep the program the same; restricting eligibility, so there are fewer Wisconsinites covered; cutting some services that Medicaid now pays for; or cutting what Medicaid pays to doctors, hospitals and other providers.

If the state pays more, then it will have to raise taxes or divert funds from other priorities. But each of the alternatives has other consequences, Hanna said.

Cutting provider rates “would have major impacts on our state’s health care system,” the DHS report states, with hospitals offsetting those by charging other payers more.

If fewer people are eligible for Medicaid, the rate of uninsured people in Wisconsin will increase, potentially driving up health care costs as well.

“Uninsured rates going up means more uncompensated care” for hospitals and other health care providers, Hanna said.

Reducing the services that Medicaid covers, however, would likely mean that people put off getting health care until an illness or condition gets worse, he said — “which ultimately means we end up spending more.”

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Simulated gravestones are arrayed in front of the Madison Labor Temple on Monday, April 28, 2025, to commemorate Workers Memorial Day. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Some 112 Wisconsin workers died on the job in 2023, the AFL-CIO reported Monday as labor unions marked Workers Memorial Day to highlight workplace dangers.

“When a union is there at the workplace, injuries go down and lives are saved,” said Kevin Gundlach, president of the South Central Federation of Labor, representing union workers in Dane County and surrounding counties.

Workers Memorial Day serves both to remember those who have lost their lives at work as well as “fighting for the living” to have a safe workplace, Gundlach told the Wisconsin Examiner. The date, April 28, coincides with the anniversary of the date that the federal Occupational Safety and Health Act took effect 54 years ago.

The AFL-CIO’s analysis draws on 2023 job fatality, injury and illness data along with workplace safety regulation enforcement data for the 12 months ending Sept. 30, 2024.

Of the 112 Wisconsin worker deaths in 2023, 15 were from assaults and other violent acts, 37 from transportation incidents, 17 from falls, 19 from exposures to harmful substances or environments, and 23 from “contact with objects or equipment,” according to the AFL-CIO.

“Every worker in Wisconsin has the right to a safe job,” said Wisconsin AFL-CIO President Stephanie Bloomingdale. “We need collective bargaining rights and strong unions for all to best ensure that safety concerns are adequately and timely addressed in the workplace.”

Union groups around Wisconsin held events, including in Madison, Milwaukee, Eau Claire, La Crosse and Wausau.

At the Madison event, people working in health care, construction, education and as state game wardens came out. There was also testimony on behalf of immigrant workers in the construction industry.

“Many of these workers are exploited and don’t have a union,” Gundlach said. Recent attacks on migrants have made some “fearful to speak up for workplace conditions.”

The event also called attention to workplace violence as a danger, and the need for employers to address workplace safety issues.

In its report, the AFL-CIO criticized the administration of President Donald Trump, which marks its first 100 days this week, for “totally decimating the fabric of what makes government protections work for people through attacks on job safety, public health, union rights and the independence of federal agencies.”

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Funding freezes and reported threats to eliminate the Head Start early education program have prompted a letter from Senate Democrats to the Trump administration. (Getty Images)

Senate Democrats and two independents who caucus with them wrote to the Trump administration Monday demanding that officials release Head Start funding, reverse staff cuts and head off reported plans to zero out the early education program for low-income families.

The letter, led by Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin and two colleagues,  follows a funding halt in late January and early February; the closure of Head Start regional offices in April and the termination of those offices’ employees; and a subsequent report that the program has reduced payments in this first half of 2025 compared with a year ago.

“It is abundantly clear that these actions are part of a broader effort to ultimately eliminate the program altogether, as the Administration reportedly plans to do in its fiscal year 2026 budget proposal,” states the letter sent by Baldwin, Sens. Patty Murray (D-Washington) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), and 39 other Senate members.

Head Start has already been appropriated $12.3 billion for 2025 — the same amount as in 2024 — and has a formula for allocating funds, the senators wrote, leaving “no justifiable reason” for funding delays, while there has been no explanation from the administration.

Earlier in April it was reported the Trump administration’s 2026 budget proposal included no funding for Head Start. The senators’ letter notes that the Office of Management and Budget directed the Department of Health and Human Services to set aside funds from the 2025 budget “to close out the program” in budget documents leaked 10 days ago.

“If this explains any of the delay in awarding fiscal year 2025 funding, we want to be clear, no funds were provided in fiscal year 2025 to ‘close out the program,’ and it would be wholly unacceptable and likely illegal if the Department tries to carry out this directive,” the senators wrote.

The letter is directed at U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“You promised ‘radical transparency’ as Secretary, yet it is unclear how these actions will improve Head Start programs, and you and your staff refuse to respond to basic inquiries and requests for information,” the senators wrote.

The letter cites additional Trump administration actions involving the program over the last three months.

The federal Office of Head Start has told local programs that funding would not be approved for “training and technical assistance or other program expenditures that promote or take part in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives,” but the agency hasn’t provided any guidance “for what would be considered ‘DEI,’” the letter states.

Nevertheless, the senators add, that could conflict with requirements for the program under federal law, such as one that programs provide appropriate instruction for English learners.

Programs submitting documentation for payment of expenses that they have incurred and are authorized under their federal grants are now being asked to provide additional justification, which the letter states “creates an illusion of improving oversight but only serves to add unnecessary red tape. “

The five-page letter asks Kennedy to answer a series of questions, including whether HHS will reverse the regional office closures and reinstate fired Head Start personnel, when Head Start agencies will receive confirmation that they can access their additional grant installments for the year and whether the administration will distribute all of Head Start’s funds for the 2025 fiscal year “as required by the Head Start Act.”

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Simulated gravestones are arrayed in front of the Madison Labor Temple on Monday, April 28, 2025, to commemorate Workers Memorial Day. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Some 112 Wisconsin workers died on the job in 2023, the AFL-CIO reported Monday as labor unions marked Workers Memorial Day to highlight workplace dangers.

“When a union is there at the workplace, injuries go down and lives are saved,” said Kevin Gundlach, president of the South Central Federation of Labor, representing union workers in Dane County and surrounding counties.

Workers Memorial Day serves both to remember those who have lost their lives at work as well as “fighting for the living” to have a safe workplace, Gundlach told the Wisconsin Examiner. The date, April 28, coincides with the anniversary of the date that the federal Occupational Safety and Health Act took effect 54 years ago.

The AFL-CIO’s analysis draws on 2023 job fatality, injury and illness data along with workplace safety regulation enforcement data for the 12 months ending Sept. 30, 2024.

Of the 112 Wisconsin worker deaths in 2023, 15 were from assaults and other violent acts, 37 from transportation incidents, 17 from falls, 19 from exposures to harmful substances or environments, and 23 from “contact with objects or equipment,” according to the AFL-CIO.

“Every worker in Wisconsin has the right to a safe job,” said Wisconsin AFL-CIO President Stephanie Bloomingdale. “We need collective bargaining rights and strong unions for all to best ensure that safety concerns are adequately and timely addressed in the workplace.”

Union groups around Wisconsin held events, including in Madison, Milwaukee, Eau Claire, La Crosse and Wausau.

At the Madison event, people working in health care, construction, education and as state game wardens came out. There was also testimony on behalf of immigrant workers in the construction industry.

“Many of these workers are exploited and don’t have a union,” Gundlach said. Recent attacks on migrants have made some “fearful to speak up for workplace conditions.”

The event also called attention to workplace violence as a danger, and the need for employers to address workplace safety issues.

In its report, the AFL-CIO criticized the administration of President Donald Trump, which marks its first 100 days this week, for “totally decimating the fabric of what makes government protections work for people through attacks on job safety, public health, union rights and the independence of federal agencies.”

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Funding freezes and reported threats to eliminate the Head Start early education program have prompted a letter from Senate Democrats to the Trump administration. (Getty Images)

Senate Democrats and two independents who caucus with them wrote to the Trump administration Monday demanding that officials release Head Start funding, reverse staff cuts and head off reported plans to zero out the early education program for low-income families.

The letter, led by Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin and two colleagues,  follows a funding halt in late January and early February; the closure of Head Start regional offices in April and the termination of those offices’ employees; and a subsequent report that the program has reduced payments in this first half of 2025 compared with a year ago.

“It is abundantly clear that these actions are part of a broader effort to ultimately eliminate the program altogether, as the Administration reportedly plans to do in its fiscal year 2026 budget proposal,” states the letter sent by Baldwin, Sens. Patty Murray (D-Washington) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), and 39 other Senate members.

Head Start has already been appropriated $12.3 billion for 2025 — the same amount as in 2024 — and has a formula for allocating funds, the senators wrote, leaving “no justifiable reason” for funding delays, while there has been no explanation from the administration.

Earlier in April it was reported the Trump administration’s 2026 budget proposal included no funding for Head Start. The senators’ letter notes that the Office of Management and Budget directed the Department of Health and Human Services to set aside funds from the 2025 budget “to close out the program” in budget documents leaked 10 days ago.

“If this explains any of the delay in awarding fiscal year 2025 funding, we want to be clear, no funds were provided in fiscal year 2025 to ‘close out the program,’ and it would be wholly unacceptable and likely illegal if the Department tries to carry out this directive,” the senators wrote.

The letter is directed at U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“You promised ‘radical transparency’ as Secretary, yet it is unclear how these actions will improve Head Start programs, and you and your staff refuse to respond to basic inquiries and requests for information,” the senators wrote.

The letter cites additional Trump administration actions involving the program over the last three months.

The federal Office of Head Start has told local programs that funding would not be approved for “training and technical assistance or other program expenditures that promote or take part in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives,” but the agency hasn’t provided any guidance “for what would be considered ‘DEI,’” the letter states.

Nevertheless, the senators add, that could conflict with requirements for the program under federal law, such as one that programs provide appropriate instruction for English learners.

Programs submitting documentation for payment of expenses that they have incurred and are authorized under their federal grants are now being asked to provide additional justification, which the letter states “creates an illusion of improving oversight but only serves to add unnecessary red tape. “

The five-page letter asks Kennedy to answer a series of questions, including whether HHS will reverse the regional office closures and reinstate fired Head Start personnel, when Head Start agencies will receive confirmation that they can access their additional grant installments for the year and whether the administration will distribute all of Head Start’s funds for the 2025 fiscal year “as required by the Head Start Act.”

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A federal judge said that a 2013 Wisconsin law prevening people from collecting unemployment benefits if they are getting Social Security disability benefits violates federal laws protecting people with disabilities. (Getty Images)

Since 2013, a Wisconsin law has blocked workers who lose a job from collecting unemployment insurance if they also receive Social Security disability benefits.

A federal judge ruled in July 2024 that the exclusion violates federal law. Nine months later, however, the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development (DWD) continues to reject unemployment claims from laid-off workers who are also on disability.

The delay in implementing the judge’s ruling frustrates workers such as Judy Fintz of La Crosse. Fintz receives a monthly Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) payment of $1,212. By itself it’s not enough to live on, she says, but she’s able to work part-time at a college dining hall to help make ends meet.

When the dining hall is closed between semesters and during breaks, her income drops — but unlike other employees, she can’t file for unemployment insurance (UI) to tide her over during those periods.

“I work very hard on my job,” Fintz said in a telephone interview. “I shouldn’t have to have all this problem going on.”

The 2013 Wisconsin law that blocks SSDI recipients from collecting unemployment insurance passed the state Legislature with only Republican support and was signed into law by then-Gov. Scott Walker.

It was enacted to “prevent the payment of duplicative government benefits for the replacement of lost earnings or income, regardless of an individual’s ability to work,” in the words of the statute. A proposal in 2012 from the Walker administration claimed that most SSDI recipients didn’t work and therefore, if they collected unemployment pay, they were “double-dipping” and probably committing “fraud.”

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

Victor Forberger, a Madison lawyer who represents people making unemployment insurance claims, says Wisconsin has thousands of SSDI recipients who also work part-time.

Forberger is one of a team of lawyers who sued DWD on behalf of eight plaintiffs in 2021, charging that the state ban on jobless pay for SSDI recipients violated federal laws that protect people with disabilities. Lawyers from Gingras, Thomsen & Wachs and Axley Brynelson were also part of the case.

On July 17, 2024, Judge William Conley ruled on summary judgment that the 2013 law violated two federal laws: the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act. In his decision Conley stated that while Wisconsin law didn’t intentionally discriminate against people with disabilities, it “applies only to individuals with disabilities, meaning that it necessarily has a disparate impact on those with disabilities.”

Conley’s ruling put off a remedy for the plaintiffs. The lawsuit was filed as a class action, and lawyers for the plaintiffs and DWD have conflicting views about who should be included in the class action as well what remedies are appropriate. A hearing is scheduled for later this year to decide what groups of people would qualify for a remedy and what the remedies should be.

Those questions relate to people who made claims in the past however — SSDI recipients whose UI claims were denied, or whose claims were initially accepted, then reversed, and who were required to repay their unemployment compensation.

DWD has not indicated any plans to appeal the judge’s summary judgment finding.

Since the July ruling, however, DWD has continued to reject UI claims from laid-off workers who are  also on SSDI, Forberger said — ignoring Conley’s conclusion that doing so violates federal law.

“There’s no logic that I’m aware of that would indicate why a disabled worker today filing for unemployment benefits should be denied unemployment benefits,” Forberger said.

In response to an inquiry from the Wisconsin Examiner, Lee Sensenbrenner, communications director for DWD, said in an email message, “Due to the ongoing litigation here, we won’t be able to comment.”

Judy Fintz is one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the SSDI restriction. She said she thought after the judge’s ruling was issued that she and other SSDI recipients would now qualify for unemployment benefits.

“If it’s discrimination — and that’s what the judge said — that’s what they should go on,” she said.

Forberger, who participated with Fintz in her telephone interview, pointed out that based on her work history and wage rate, Fintz would have a weekly unemployment insurance payment of $81.

“They’re refusing to pay her $81 a week under this eligibility ban,” he said. “Judy’s not getting rich off anything.”

Another plaintiff in the lawsuit, Cliff Neuman, combines his disability payment from SSDI with part-time work he is able to take on.

Until the beginning of this year, Neuman was working part time at a grocery store. One day, he said, the store stopped scheduling him for shifts. He said he never got an explanation why.

With Forberger’s help he filed unemployment insurance claims each week for the five or six weeks he was out of work before finding a new job as a restaurant dishwasher. “A couple of times we called and people refused to help him because they said he gets SSDI and is not eligible,” Forberger said.

One requirement for UI applicants is to regularly search for new work and to document those searches. Neuman followed through on that requirement, but his UI applications got mired in rejections and appeals.

An administrative law judge found in February that Neuman was eligible, a consequence of the Conley decision in July. After a DWD lawyer asked for reconsideration, however, the administrative law judge set aside his earlier finding.

DWD’s lawyer argued that the July federal court ruling is not final and that since Conley had not issued an injunction against following the 2013 law, Conley’s decision could not be used to overrule the decision to deny Neuman’s UI claim.

Forberger submitted a response arguing that where new claims are concerned, the Conley decision should be treated as final.

The administrative law judge responded by setting aside his own earlier ruling and asking both DWD and Forberger to address additional questions.

Neuman was disappointed by that outcome and his inability to collect UI despite the Conley ruling in July.

Getting jobless pay “shouldn’t matter if I had SSDI or not,” Neuman said. “Once you’re working you should get that.”

The denial of his claims is “not right and fair,” he said. “To me that’s picking on people that have disabilities.”

This report has been updated to correct the monthly SSDI payment Judy Fintz receives.

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

Federal payments to Wisconsin’s Head Start programs in the first three and a half months of 2025 are half what they were a year ago, exacerbating worries about the future of the program that provides child care and early education to low-income families.

The Office of Head Start’s payments to Wisconsin program operators from Jan. 1 through April 15 of this year were down by $35 million from the same period in 2024, Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin) said this week.

Nationwide, Head Start program operators have received $943 million less during that period this year compared with the period a year ago, according to Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington), who published a table of calculations comparing disbursements for every state in a press release. The table shows Wisconsin disbursements of $34.5 million as of April 15, compared with $69.5 million in the 2024 period.

Baldwin contrasted the potential impact with the pledge by the White House and the Republican majority in Congress to extend tax cuts enacted in 2017 during Trump’s first term.

“The idea that the president is actively working to give the biggest corporations and wealthiest Wall Street guys a new tax break while taking away preschool and child care from Wisconsinites is beyond the pale,” said Baldwin, vowing to fight actions of President Donald Trump she described as “defunding Head Start.”

The calculations in Murray’s table are based on Head Start disbursement data that Senate Democrats pulled from the Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) website at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

While most states in Murray’s table had lower disbursements compared with a year ago, Alabama, Delaware, New Jersey, Rhode Island and the District of Columbia all showed increases.

The calculations put the big-picture numbers on funding disruptions that Head Start providers have been experiencing in the last three months, said Jennie Mauer, executive director of the Wisconsin Head Start Association.

Those disruptions first surfaced after Trump took office, with delays of up to two weeks in late January and early February for Head Start programs seeking authorized payment for their expenses.

More recently, the disruptions have continued as providers who have submitted the required documents for payment have been confronted with unexpected demands for “more information” Mauer said Friday.

“The [federal] administration is really messing around, pulling out the foundational blocks of grant operation,” Mauer said.

In order to get approved for a grant, recipients must provide a detailed accounting of how it will be spent, she said. To get payment, providers must submit detailed documentation that the expense it covers has already been incurred. 

“This is a highly regulated system,” Mauer said. “There’s a very rigorous initial grant application process, and then on an ongoing basis grantees are demonstrating, ‘We told you what we’re going to spend the money on. Now based on what I told you, I’m asking for that money.’”

The disclosure of the drop in Head Start funding comes a week after a published report raised the possibility that Head Start will be zeroed out of the next federal budget.

It also comes as some providers wait for information about their upcoming grant replenishments, Mauer said.

Head Start grants are provided under multi-year contracts signed with providers. The money itself, however, does not come to providers in large lump sums but in smaller amounts paid upon the submission of documented expenses, Mauer said.

Every six months, an allotment from the provider’s grant is made available, she said. Those funds are not paid directly to the provider, however. The money is set aside for the provider to draw on after submitting expense documents through the federal online payment system.

Providers’ grant cycles start on the first of the month. In Wisconsin, providers whose grant cycle started Nov. 1 have now received confirmation of their next grant allotment for the six months starting May 1, Mauer said Friday.

But with the previous funding access problems and then the sudden closing three weeks ago of half of Head Start’s national offices, including the Chicago Region 5 office that served Wisconsin and five other states, providers were apprehensive.

“The level of uncertainty and chaos is so dramatic,” Mauer said — in contrast not only to the Biden administration, but also the previous Trump administration. Until this year, “these kinds of questions and uncertainties didn’t exist.”

Three providers whose grant cycle started Dec. 1 are waiting to learn whether their next allotment will become available starting June 1 as scheduled.

Mauer said the Senate Democrats’ calculations appear to be “showing the cumulative effect” of the access to HHS funding streams by the team working for DOGE, an agency directed by billionaire and Trump ally Elon Musk.

DOGE is the acronym for the Department of Government Efficiency, although the office is not a cabinet department, and many of its claims of government savings have been questioned.

The hold-up on information is having “a tremendous negative effect on our programs and it’s alarming,” Mauer said. “When we think of what are the impacts of Region 5 closing and that we continue to have very, very minimal and slow communication from the Office of Head Start — they need to start communicating with grantees in a much more substantive way.”

The Wisconsin Examiner contacted the federal Department of Health and Human Services using the HHS website for journalists’ inquiries and has not yet received a response. This report will be updated when a response is received.

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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)

The economic uncertainty that has sent the stock market and consumer confidence plummeting in the last month hasn’t yet affected employment in Wisconsin, according to the state’s chief economist.

Wisconsin’s job numbers reached another record high in March, and unemployment, although up slightly, is still close to an all-time low, the Department of Workforce Development (DWD) reported Thursday.

Uncertainty over the impact of tariffs imposed by the Trump administration has contributed to falling consumer confidence as well as business confidence, said Dennis Winters, DWD’s chief economist. So far that hasn’t affected the state’s job market, however, he said.

Based on a monthly federal survey of employers, DWD projected Wisconsin had 3.055 million nonfarm jobs in March — an increase of 10,000 from February and 15,000 from a year ago.

From a separate household survey, the department projected Wisconsin’s March unemployment rate at 3.2%. That’s even with February, but a slight increase from the 2.9% calculated for March of 2024.

The job growth was greatest in service industries, which added more than 21,000 jobs over the last 12 months.

Manufacturing jobs have fallen by 7,000 since March 2024 — all of that in durable goods. Winters said that reflects longstanding challenges in the sector more than specific recent developments. 

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Child care providers, parents and advocates arrive at the state Capitol Wednesday, April 16, 2025, for a rally in support of child care funding. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Hundreds of child care providers and parents rallied outside the state Capitol Wednesday, then headed inside to buttonhole lawmakers of both parties, urging support for a $480 million provision in the next state budget for Wisconsin’s child care providers.

“Child care is not a luxury, it’s not a nice-to-have,” said Claire Lindstrom, an Eau Claire parent who addressed the rally. “It is infrastructure.”

“We’re here today because the people who are doing this very important work can no longer afford to hold up a broken system,” said Toshiba Adams, an instructor and instructional chair in early childhood education at Milwaukee Area Technical College.

The rally and afternoon visit with legislators followed a morning gathering of the participants at the nearby Concourse Hotel that included talks by lawmakers, parents and providers. At noon 350 or more people — the largest action by child care advocates in recent memory — marched from the hotel to the rally, with chants of “Kids first, families first, invest in child care now.”

The crowd massed on the Capitol building’s west steps for a half hour of speeches.

Lindstrom broke down the average cost for child care. A single parent paid the minimum wage, $7.25 an hour, “would have to work 43 full-time weeks just to cover one year of infant care,” she said. A family making the median income in Wisconsin — about $75,000 a year — will probably spend 20% of their earnings on care for a single child.

“If they have two kids, an infant and a 4-year-old, they’re spending over a third of their income just to go to work,” Lindstrom said. “This is not a personal budgeting issue. That’s a broken system.”

Gov. Tony Evers has proposed $480 million in the state’s 2025-27 budget that would go to licensed child care providers, replenishing the state’s Child Care Counts program funded from federal pandemic relief. Without that, Child Care Counts will expire for good in June.

At its height between 2021 and 2023, Child Care Counts was credited with stabilizing Wisconsin’s providers, who shared in payments totaling $20 million a month. Providers reported that with the money they were able to raise wages for child care workers while holding down increases in the fees that parents paid.

“Our early childhood educators are trained in how to support brain development, emotional regulation, and school readiness,” Lindstrom said. “We expect them to do this important work and yet we pay them less than workers at Kwik Trip and Culver’s.”

Evers, a Democrat, was unable to persuade the Legislature’s Republican majority to extend the program in the state’s 2023-25 budget. He repurposed other federal funds, and the total payment was reduced to $10 million a month. That will run out in June.

Providers, advocates and early childhood education experts have argued that only with an ongoing investment like Child Care Counts can providers pay child care workers adequately without pricing care out of reach for the average family.

“We need child care for our communities to function,” Lindstrom said. “We can no longer afford to treat this like a personal problem. It’s a public domain. And the solution is clear. We need to fund child care.”

A survey report released April 10 found that up to 25% of Wisconsin providers said they might close without continued support along the lines of Child Care Counts. More than one-third said they might have to reduce the number of children then could serve for lack of staff.

Large majorities said they might have to cut pay and that they expect to have more difficulty recruiting workers. More than half said they expect some employees to quit and that providing high quality care would become more difficult.

“We will see dramatically less care available in virtually every single county in the state,” Ruth Schmidt, executive director of the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association, told the crowd. “Is that acceptable?”

“No!” the crowd roared back in reply.

“Is it acceptable that moms will have to consider leaving the workforce in record numbers because you cannot work if you cannot afford or find child care? Is it acceptable that stressed out parents doing the best they can will have no support from the state to ensure that they can work and contribute to our tax base?”

With each question the rallygoers responded with resounding shouts of “No!”

Sachin Shivaram, CEO of Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry in Manitowoc, told the crowd that businesses should support state funding for child care.

His company pays employees with young children $400 a month toward their child care costs, he said. When the crowd applauded, he thanked them, then added, “but I also feel very embarrassed. … That’s so little, and the cost of child care is, you know, several thousand dollars a month, and this is just barely scratching the surface.”

Shivaram pointed out the state manufacturing tax credit that his company receives, along with all Wisconsin manufacturers.

“And guess what? We have to do absolutely nothing to get that tax credit,” he said. “We don’t have to invest in any capital equipment, we don’t have to train any workers, we don’t have to give back to the community, nothing. You know, how about we make that tax credit contingent on helping the child care situation?”

In an interview after the legislative visits Schmidt of WECA said the hundreds who took part went to almost every state Senate office and about 90% of the Assembly members’ offices as well. WECA organized the event along with Wisconsin Head Start Association and Raising Wisconsin — an advocacy campaign that WECA and allied groups launched in 2022.

“We really wanted this to be nonpartisan,” Schmidt said — “just an opportunity to tell stories and share, from a real perspective, from the heart what’s going on with this industry.”

Some of those conversations — with leaders in the Legislature who advocates have already spoken to about the budget request — were “not necessarily a surprise,” she acknowledged.  

With other lawmakers, she added, including some of the 30 first-term Assembly members elected in November as well as others who have not served on committees where child care has been an agenda item, “there was a lot of interest in just learning,”

The visits were an opportunity for personal testimony to reach lawmakers and their staff, Schmidt said. “The power of having parents tell their stories, and the power of having educators tell their stories about how they’ve been using the public funding when it’s available — it was very compelling.”

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Democratic U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan speaks with reporters Wednesday in his Madison office. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

House Democrats think their most likely strategy to prevent major cuts to Medicaid or other popular federal programs in the current budget reconciliation process will be to win over a few House Republicans.

“We just need three Republicans, basically nationwide, to say no to something,” said U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Black Earth) at a Q-and-A session with reporters Wednesday in his Madison office.

The Republican majorities in both houses of Congress are using the complicated budget reconciliation process to pass a spending plan that will allow them to extend tax cuts enacted in 2017 during President Donald Trump’s first term.

As part of that, House Republicans passed a blueprint calling for $880 billion in cuts to programs overseen by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Medicaid represents the largest expense item in the committee’s purview, and analysts have said Congress could only hit that target by making Medicaid cuts.

Pocan said estimates of the cost of preserving the tax cuts have risen in Washington, from $4.5 trillion in the original House proposal to “more like $7 trillion in tax cuts” in the current proposal combined from House and Senate alternatives.

The objective for House Democrats currently is to make cuts to Medicaid harder for GOP members to go along with, Pocan said. In Wisconsin, about 1.3 million residents are enrolled in Medicaid, including one third of the children in the state and 55% of seniors in nursing homes.

“You know, the more they hear that, at some point they may listen,” Pocan said of Republican members who won swing districts by narrow margins — and, he argues, they could push back against those sorts of cuts.

“I don’t expect them to maybe say it publicly and maybe to hold a town hall and say it, but if they say it privately in their caucus, that’s good enough, as long as three people won’t support something,” Pocan said. “That’s enough to kill something, right? So that’s kind of my goal is to keep facilitating that.”

The focus, though, is not on stopping the tax cuts, but stopping the cuts to Medicaid, SNAP and other federal programs.

“If we could stop that, and we could stop, maybe, some of the education cuts that might otherwise come … funds for low-income [districts], funds for special ed, I think they’re still going to move forward with their tax cut bill,” Pocan said.

He speculated that under those circumstances, the GOP majority would pay for the tax cut with a deficit increase. 

“Is that a good answer? No,” Pocan said. “But is it better than seeing people lose their health care right now or their food assistance through Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program? Yeah. So you know my job is to wake up in the morning and get excited about bad choices rather than the worst choices.”

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