U.S. Reps. Mark Pocan and Gwen Moore toured Wisconsin's only the ICE detention facility and demanded answers about the people being targeted for deportation in the state | Official photos

U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore contacted the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Friday to ask the agency to remove a statement from the top of its website describing Milwaukee resident Ramón Morales Reyes as “this illegal alien who threatened to assassinate President Trump.” 

The bizarre accusation that Morales Reyes wrote a letter threatening to kill the president has been disproven, and the man who tried to frame him has confessed to forging the letter.

Yet, on Friday, when Moore visited the ICE detention center in Dodge County, Morales Reyes was still there. And the lurid accusation against him is still prominently featured at the top of the Homeland Security website. In the featured statement, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem thanks the ICE officers who arrested Morales Reyes, promotes the idea that he is a dangerous criminal who poses a grave threat, and promises, “He will remain in ICE custody at Dodge County Jail in Juneau, Wisconsin, pending his removal proceedings.”

Moore held a Zoom press conference after her visit. She described Morales Reyes as a humble, religious man who, incredibly, bears no ill will toward Demetric Scott, the man who has been charged with stabbing and robbing him and who then tried to get him deported so he couldn’t testify as a victim in Scott’s upcoming trial. 

It’s very important that the U.S. government stop spreading misinformation about Morales Reyes and afford him due process, Moore said, not just because of the outrageous injustice of his particular case, but because of what it means more broadly. Morales Reyes is an applicant for a U visa — a type of nonimmigrant status set aside for crime victims who have suffered mental or physical abuse and are cooperating with law enforcement or the government in the investigation and prosecution of crimes.

Scott, the man charged with stabbing Morales Reyes and who has admitted forging the letter that led to his arrest, was trying to short-circuit that cooperation ahead of his trial for a violent armed robbery.

If the government deports Morales Reyes, “it will embolden criminals,” Moore said. It’s critical that the U.S. government protect immigrants who are victims of crimes, like Morales Reyes, because if we don’t, we are abetting the criminals. “That’s the message that we’ll be sending if we deport these individuals,” Moore said. “If you’re some pimp out there, some trafficker, some drug pusher, and you want to find someone to abuse, all you’ve got to do is find an immigrant.”

Coincidentally, on the same Friday afternoon Moore visited Morales Reyes and began her campaign to get the government to stop spreading misinformation about him, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that Trump administration officials were finally bringing back Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man they wrongly deported to El Salvador. But, Bondi said, the government is charging Abrego Garcia with a slew of serious crimes including being “a smuggler of humans and women and children.”

We don’t know yet if the federal case against Abrego Garcia will include another ham-fisted attempt to pass off obviously doctored photos of his hands with photoshopped “MS-13”gang tattoos. But the administration that continues to push the discredited claim that Morales Reyes penned a letter threatening to assassinate the president inspires zero trust. 

What a relief, in this awful political climate, to see Moore sticking up for immigrants who are being targeted and terrorized, demanding answers from ICE and doing her best to uphold the rule of law. Moore has also been championing Yessenia Ruano, the beloved Milwaukee teacher’s aid who has a pending application for a T visa as a victim of human trafficking, and has been ordered to self-deport back to El Salvador, where she was victimized. Going back would place her in serious danger and leave her young daughters without a mother. 

“She’s an exceptional asset to the school district where she works, not a threat at all to the community,” Moore said.

A week before her visit with Morales Reyes, Moore was joined by her fellow Wisconsin Democrat, U.S. Rep Mark Pocan, on an unannounced inspection visit to the Dodge County jail, Wisconsin’s only ICE detention facility. Moore went back again Friday because she was initially refused an interview with Morales Reyes.

“We have congressional prerogative to do an unannounced visit” to see what’s going on in ICE detention, Pocan said. “In fact,” he added, “I think [it’s] a requirement, really, morally, to do an unannounced visit to these facilities.” 

When they got to the jail, Pocan and Moore had to explain their oversight prerogative. They presented a letter from the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, and waited an hour to get inside. They expressed appreciation for the sheriff, who let them come in and tour the facility, though they weren’t permitted to talk to any detainees. 

When they tried to contact ICE it was another story. There were no ICE agents present — they only show up to bring in detainees every three weeks, the sheriff told them. When they tried to call the Milwaukee ICE field office, the phone was disconnected. They left messages at the Chicago office that were not returned. Of the roughly 100 immigrant detainees at Dodge, who come from all over the country, they couldn’t find out how many have been arrested in Wisconsin. 

“This is the problem, right?” said Pocan. “ICE treats us all like we don’t deserve to get information, even though we have oversight authority.” 

Part of what bothered Pocan, he said, is “the arrogance that we’ve seen from ICE so far this year.” 

“ICE is acting like they are somehow above the law,” he said, “above lawmakers.” 

It has become abundantly clear that the Trump administration’s rhetoric about targeting dangerous criminals for deportation is utter bunk.

Neither Morales Reyes nor Yessenia Ruano nor Abrego Garcia poses a threat to community safety. The real threat is coming from masked ICE agents terrorizing immigrants and local communities.

We desperately need leaders who will stand up to these terror tactics. That takes guts, as the arrest of Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan showed, as did the Homeland Security agents barging into a congressional office and roughly handcuffing a staffer they accused of letting protesters hide there.

I’m grateful for the courage of Moore and Pocan. 

As they said, if we don’t stand up for the people the Trump administration is targeting now, we will be next.

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Sen. Ron Johnson at the Newsroom Pub on Wednesday, May 28, 2025 | Photo by Ruth Conniff/Wisconsin Examiner

You have to hand it to Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson. As Republicans across the country run in fear from their constituents, refusing to hold town halls lest they be asked to answer for brutal federal budget cuts and threats to health care, nutrition assistance and Social Security, Johnson showed up at a Milwaukee Press Club event Wednesday and appeared cheerfully unperturbed as he took questions from journalists and a skeptical crowd. Not that his answers made sense.

People sitting in front of the podium at the Newsroom Pub luncheon crossed their arms and furrowed their brows as Johnson explained his alternative views on everything from global warming to COVID-19 to the benefits of bringing the federal budget more in line with the spending levels of 1930 — i.e. the beginning of the Great Depression, before FDR instituted New Deal programs Johnson described as “outside [the president’s] constitutionally enumerated powers.”

A handful of protesters chanted in the rain outside the Newsroom Pub, but overall, the event was cordial and reactions muted. In part, this was attributable to Johnson’s Teflon cockiness and the barrage of misinformation he happily unleashed, which had a numbing effect on his audience. 

Johnson fancies himself a “numbers guy.” In that way he’s a little like former House Speaker Paul Ryan, his fellow Wisconsin Republican who was once considered the boy genius of the GOP. Ryan made it safe to talk about privatizing Medicare by touring the country with a PowerPoint presentation full of charts and graphs, selling optimistic projections of the benefits of trickle-down economics, corporate tax cuts and the magic of the private market. But Ryan couldn’t stomach Trump and he’s been exiled from the party. Johnson is the MAGA version. While he doesn’t dazzle anyone with his brilliance, he does a good job of baffling his opponents with a barrage of B.S. that leaves even seasoned journalists scrambling to figure out what question to ask. Where do you begin?

Back in 2021, YouTube removed a video of Johnson’s Milwaukee Press Club appearance because he violated the platform’s community standards by spreading dangerous lies about COVID, the alleged harm caused by vaccines and the supposed benefits of dubious remedies. 

But this week he was back, proudly endorsing DHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr.’s decision to eliminate federal COVID vaccine recommendations for pregnant women and healthy children. While he hopes Kennedy goes further in rolling back vaccinations, he said, “at least we’re not going to subject our children to them anymore.”

A woman in the audience who identified herself as a local business owner seeking “common ground” thanked Johnson for saying “we don’t want to mortgage our children’s future,” but expressed her concern that besides the deficit spending Johnson rails against, there’s also the risk that we’re mortgaging the future by destroying the planet.

Johnson heartily agreed that everyone wants a “pristine environment.” “I mean, I love the outdoors,” he declared. But then he added, “We shouldn’t spend a dime on climate change. We’ll adapt. We’re very adaptable.” 

He claimed that “something like 1,800 different scientists and business leaders” have signed a statement saying there is no climate crisis. (The overwhelming consensus among scientists is that climate change is real and caused by people and the statement he referred to has been debunked.) “So if it’s climate change you’re talking about, we’re just at cross-purposes,” he added. “I completely disagree.”

Most of Johnson’s talk consisted of a fusillade of hard-to-follow budget numbers and nostrums like “the more the government spends the less free we are.” Charles Benson of TMJ4 News tried to get the senator to focus on what it would take to get him to go along with Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget bill. “So, a lot of numbers out there,” Benson said. “Can you give me a bottom line? Do you want 2 trillion? 3 trillion?”

“Your reaction is the exact same reaction I get from the White House and from my colleagues,” Johnson chided, “too many numbers. It’s a budget process. We’re talking about numbers. We’re talking about mortgaging our kids’ future.” 

Like his alternative beliefs about vaccination and climate science, Johnson’s budget math is extremely fuzzy. He asserted, repeatedly, that Medicaid is rife with “waste, fraud and abuse.” But the Georgetown University School of Public Policy has published a policy analysis dismantling claims that there is rampant waste, fraud and abuse in Medicaid that concluded, “This premise is false, and the thinking is dangerously wrong.”

More broadly, Johnson claims that balancing the budget and reducing the federal deficit is his No. 1 concern. But he’s committed to maintaining historic tax cuts for the super rich. The only way to reduce deficits, in his view, is to enact even deeper cuts than House Republicans passed, increasing hunger, undermining education and rolling back health care — because he’s totally unwilling to increase revenue with even modest tax increases on corporations and the very wealthy. Those cuts, not a deficit that could be resolved by making the rich pay their share of taxes, are the real threat to our children’s future.

“I’m just a guy from Oshkosh who’s trying to save America,” Johnson said at the Press Club event. He recapped, in heroic terms, his lone stand against the 2017 tax cut for America’s top earners, which he blocked until he was able to work in a special loophole that benefitted him personally.

He told the panel of Wisconsin journalists he will also block Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget bill unless he sees deeper cuts, which he insisted would be easy to make. The 40 states that have taken the federal Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act (which Johnson still calls “Obamacare”) are “stealing money from federal taxpayers,” he declared. Slashing Medicaid will be easy, he suggested, since “nobody would be harmed other than the grifters who are sucking down the waste, fraud and abuse.”

Grifters?

Wisconsin has 1.3 million Medicaid recipients. One in three children are on BadgerCare, as Medicaid is called here, along with 45% of adults with disabilities and 55% of seniors living in nursing homes. Our state program faces a $16.8 billion cut over 10 years under the House plan. During the Q&A session, I asked Johnson about this — not just the numbers, but the human cost. I brought up Shaniya Cooper, a college student from Milwaukee and a BadgerCare recipient living with lupus, who spoke at a press conference in the Capitol this week about how scary it was to realize she could lose her Medicaid coverage under congressional Republicans’ budget plan. 

“To me, this is life or death,” she said. She simply cannot afford to pay for her medicine out of pocket. When she first learned about proposed Medicaid cuts, “I cried,” she said. “I felt fear and dread.”

What does Johnson have to say to Cooper and other BadgerCare recipients who are terrified of losing their coverage?

“I’ll go back to my basic point,” Johnson replied. He quoted Elon Musk, whom he said he greatly admires for his DOGE work slashing federal agencies. “If we don’t fix this, we won’t have money for any of this [government in general],” he said Musk told him.

“Nobody wants the truly vulnerable to lose those benefits of Medicaid,” Johnson added. “But again, Obamacare expanded the waste, fraud and abuse of Medicaid, you know, expanding the people on it when, you know, when a lot of these people ought to be really getting a job.”

Some of Johnson’s Republican colleagues are worried about withdrawing health care coverage from millions of their constituents. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri called it immoral and “political suicide.” He said he won’t vote for the Medicaid cuts that passed the House because they will put rural hospitals out of business, and because too many hard-working, low-income people rely on the program for health coverage and simply cannot afford to buy insurance on the private market. 

But Johnson remains untroubled. He’s pushing for bigger and more damaging cuts. And when asked what he can tell his constituents who are afraid they’re about to lose life-saving health care, his answer is simple and unapologetic: Get a job.

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Robert Kraig of Citizen Action at the podium in the Senate parlor in the Wisconsin State Capitol on Tuesday, May 27 , surrounded by representatives of other grassroots groups | Ruth Conniff/Wisconsin Examiner

More than 100 citizens from an array of grassroots groups packed the Wisconsin state Senate parlor and marched on Gov. Tony Evers’ office Tuesday, their chants bouncing off the marble walls inside the Capitol. They were there to deliver a letter — which they urged others to sign online — demanding that Evers veto the state budget if it doesn’t include key elements of the governor’s own budget proposal.

“The whole Democratic grassroots is now demanding that national leaders stand and fight,” said Robert Kraig, executive director of Citizen Action of Wisconsin, who helped organize the effort, “and I think that spirit is now being translated down to the state level.” 

Public school advocates, child care providers, teachers’ unions and advocates for criminal justice reform and health care access came to demand that Evers take a stronger stand and threaten to use his significant veto power in negotiations with Republicans. 

“There has been a lot of talk over the last year about whether or not we can get this done as adults, or whether we have to be impolite,” Michael Jones, president of Madison Teachers, Inc., said of state budget negotiations. “Too much gets conceded about being polite,” he added. “Politeness without reciprocal respect is just being a sucker.”

In their letter, the advocates assured Evers that Wisconsinites were behind his original budget proposal — the one Republican legislative leaders threw in the trash. The advocates urged him to “hold the line” and reject any budget that doesn’t accept federal Medicaid expansion money, provide a 60% state reimbursement to schools for special education costs, close the Green Bay Correctional Institution, restore his proposed $480 million for child care and reject the snowballing growth of school vouchers.

Brooke Legler, a child care provider and co-founder of Wisconsin Early Childhood Action Needed (W.E.C.A.N.), has been leading a recent high-profile effort to sound the alarm about the loss of child care funds. “So many of us are going to be closing our doors because we cannot keep going and parents can’t afford to pay what they are paying,” she said during a press conference in the Senate parlor. Treating child care like any other business doesn’t work, she added. Instead, it needs to be seen as a public good. “Gov. Evers declared this the year of the kid,” Legler said, but “it’s not going to be” if Evers signs a budget that leaves out crucial funding for child care. 

Tanya Atkinson of Planned Parenthood Wisconsin spoke at the press conference about congressional Republicans’ effort to cancel Medicaid funding for patient care at Planned Parenthood.

In Wisconsin, 60% of Planned Parenthood’s patients have Medicaid as their form of insurance, she said. Most of them live in rural areas, are low-income, or are women of color who “continue to be further pushed out of our health care system,” Atkinson said. “And it doesn’t have to be that way. It is time for us to take the politics out of sexual reproductive health altogether.”

Atkinson and the other assembled advocates praised Evers’ budget proposal, including the part that would finally allow Wisconsin to join the 40 other states that have accepted the federal Medicaid expansion, making 90,000 more Wisconsinites eligible for Medicaid coverage and bringing about $1.5 billion into the state in the next budget cycle.

Shaniya Cooper, a college student from Milwaukee and a BadgerCare recipient who lives with lupus, talked about how scary it was to realize she could lose her Medicaid coverage under congressional Republicans’ budget plan. “To me, this is life or death,” she said. When she first learned about proposed Medicaid cuts, “I cried,” she said. “I felt fear and dread.”

She described having a flare-up of her lupus, with swelling and fluid around her heart, and then finding out she had to fill out paperwork to reapply for Medicaid, since it was unclear if her treatment would still be covered. 

“It isn’t just about the paperwork. It’s about waking up each day with the fear that the care I might need might be gone tomorrow,” she said, “It’s about knowing that people are quietly suffering mentally and emotionally from the stress and the anxiety that these policies are creating.” Her voice broke and people around her yelled encouragement. “You got this!” someone shouted. “What’s at stake here is humanity,” she continued, “and if we do nothing, we allow these cuts to happen, we are silently endorsing the neglect and slow death of those who cannot afford prime insurance. That is not a civil society. That is not justice.”

“We are here because we will not be pitted against each other to fight for crumbs in a time of plenty,” said Heather DuBois Bourenane of the Wisconsin Public Education Network. “We will not be divided on the issues that matter most where we live, because some people refuse to listen to us.”

DuBois Bourenane derided what she called a “cycle of disinvestment, first of all, but it’s also a cycle of disrespect,” by Republicans who dismissed Evers’ budget proposals despite  overwhelming public support. Increasing funding for schools, expanding Medicaid coverage and reforming the criminal justice system by closing prisons and reducing incarceration are popular measures. “Gov. Evers has the power, with his veto pen, to break [the cycle],” she said, “and we’re calling on him to use the full force, the full power of that pen, to say, enough is enough. It stops with me.”

“There’s a tremendous amount of Democratic leverage in this budget, if you consider both the number of Democratic members in the Senate and the veto,” Kraig said. 

“These are groups with large memberships calling on the governor to stand and fight,” he added.

Evers did not make an appearance or respond to the rowdy group at the Capitol. But it was clear they have no intention of going away quietly,

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Gov. Tony Evers celebrates "historic" tax cuts in the last state budget. Schools are still facing austerity. Photo via Gov. Evers' Facebook page

As Republicans in Congress struggle to deliver President Donald Trump’s massive cuts to Medicaid, food assistance, education, health research and just about every other social good you can think of, in order to clear the way for trillions of dollars in tax cuts to the richest people in the U.S., here in Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers and state lawmakers are working on the next state budget.

The one thing our Democratic governor and Republican legislative leaders seem to agree on is that we need a tax cut.

After throwing away more than 600 items in Evers’ budget proposal, GOP leggies now say they can’t move forward with their own budget plan until  Evers makes good on his promise to meet with them and negotiate the terms for the tax-cutting that both sides agree they want to do. Evers has expressed optimism that the budget will be done on time this summer, and said the tax cuts need to be part of the budget, not a separate, stand-alone bill. Evers wants a more progressive tax system, with cuts targeted to lower-income people. In the last budget, he opposed expanding the second-lowest tax bracket, which would have offered the same benefits to higher earners as the lower middle class.

But what if we don’t need a tax cut at all?

It has long been an article of faith in the Republican Party that tax cuts are a miracle cure for everything. Trickle-down economics is  a proven failure:  The wealthy and corporations tend to bank their tax cuts rather than injecting the extra money into the economy, as tax-cutters say they will. The benefits of the 2017 tax cuts that Congress is struggling to extend went exclusively to corporations and the very wealthy and failed to trickle down on the rest of us. 

 In the second Trump administration, we are in new territory when it comes to tax cutting. The administration and its enablers are hell-bent on destroying everything from the Department of Education to critical health research to food stamps and Medicaid in order to finance massive tax breaks for the very rich. 

If ever there were a good time to reexamine the tax-cutting reflex, it’s now.

Evers has said he is not willing to consider the Republicans’ stand-alone tax-cut legislation, and that, instead, tax cuts should be part of the state budget. That makes sense, since new projections show lower-than-expected tax revenue even without a cut, and state budget-writers have a lot to consider as we brace for the dire effects of federal budget cuts. The least our leaders can do is not blindly give away cash without even assessing future liabilities.

But beyond that, we need to reconsider the knee-jerk idea that we are burdened with excessive taxes and regulations, that our state would be better off if we cut investments in our schools and universities, our roads and bridges, our clean environment, museums, libraries and other shared spaces and stopped keeping a floor under poor kids by providing basic food and health care assistance. 

Wisconsin Republicans like to tout the list of states produced annually by the Tax Foundation promoting “business friendly” environments that reduce corporate taxes, including Wyoming, South Dakota, Alaska and Florida. They also like to bring up ALEC’s “Rich States, Poor States” report that gave top billing last year to Utah, Idaho and Arizona for low taxes and deregulation. 

What they don’t track when they lift up those states are pollution, low wages and bankrupt public school systems. 

I’m old enough to remember when it was headline news that whole families in the U.S. were living in their cars, when homelessness was a new term, coined during the administration of Ronald Reagan, the father of bogus trickle-down economics and massive cuts to services for the poor. 

Somehow, we got used to the idea that urban parts of the richest nation on Earth resemble the poorest developing countries, with human misery and massive wealth existing side by side in our live-and-let-die economy.

Wisconsin, thanks to its progressive history, managed to remain a less unequal state, with top public schools and a great university system, as well as a clean, beautiful environment and well-maintained infrastructure. But here, too, we have been getting used to our slide to the bottom of the list of states, thanks in large part to the damage done by former Republican Gov. Scott Walker. 

We now rank 44th in the nation for investment in our once-great universities, and the austerity that’s been imposed on higher education is taking a toll across the state. Our consistently highly rated public schools have suffered from a decade and a half of budget cuts that don’t allow districts to keep pace with inflation, and recent state budgets have not made up the gap. 

Now threats to Medicaid, Head Start, AmeriCorps, our excellent library system, UW-Madison research and environmental protections do not bode well for Wisconsin’s future.

In the face of brutal federal cuts, we need to recommit to our shared interest in investing in a decent society, and figure out how to preserve what’s great about our state.

Tax cuts do not make the top of the list of priorities.

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U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden tours Gilbertson's Dairy in Dunn County. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

When he was campaigning for Congress in western Wisconsin, Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden talked about growing up “in abject rural poverty,” raised by a single mom who relied on food stamps. As a result, he has said, he would never go along with cuts to food assistance. 

“He sat down in my office when he first got elected and promised me he wouldn’t ever vote against SNAP because he grew up on it, supposedly,” Democratic U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan said in a phone interview as he was on his way home to Wisconsin from Washington this week.

But as Henry Redman reported, Van Orden voted for the Republican budget blueprint, which proposes more than $200 billion in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in order to make room for tax cuts for the very wealthy.

Still, after that vote, Van Orden issued a public statement warning against reckless cuts to SNAP that place “disproportionate burdens on rural states, where food insecurity is often more widespread,” and saying it is unfair to build a budget “on the backs of some of our most vulnerable populations, including hungry children. Period.”

Van Orden sits on the House Agriculture Committee, which was tasked with drawing up a specific plan to cut $230 billion from food assistance to pay for tax cuts. Van Orden reportedly balked at a cost-sharing plan that shifted 25% of the cost of the program to states, saying it was unfair to Wisconsin.

But then, on Wednesday night, Van Orden voted yes as the committee passed an unprecedented cut in federal funding for SNAP on a 29-25 vote.

Van Orden took credit for the plan, which ties cuts to state error rates in determining eligibility and benefit amounts for food assistance. According to WisPolitics, he declared at a House Ag Committee markup that “states are going to have to accept the fact that if they are not administering this program efficiently, that they’re going to have to pay a portion of the program that is equitable, and it makes sense and it is scaled.” 

But states, including Wisconsin, don’t have money to make up the gap as the federal government, for the first time ever, withdraws hundreds of millions of dollars for nutrition assistance. Instead, they will reduce coverage, kick people off the program and hunger will increase. The ripple effects include a loss of about $30 billion for farmers who supply food for the program, Democrats on the Ag Committee report, and damage to the broader economy, since every $1 in SNAP benefits generates about $1.50 in economic activity. Grocery stores, food manufacturers rural communities will be hit particularly hard. 

Wisconsin will start out with a bill for 5% of the costs of the program in Fiscal Year 2028, according to a bill explanation from the Agriculture Committee. But as error rates vary, that number shifts sharply upward — to 15% when the error rate goes from the current 5% to 6%, to 20% if we exceed an 8% error rate, and so on.  

And there are other cuts in the bill, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) points out, including stricter eligibility limits, work requirements that cannot be waived in times of economic hardship and high unemployment, and reductions in benefits that come from eliminating deductions for utility costs. 

More than 900,000 children, adults, and seniors count on Wisconsin’s SNAP program, known as FoodShare, according to an analysis of state health department data by Kids Forward. The same analysis found that covering the costs of just 10% of SNAP benefits would cost Wisconsin $136 million. 

Alaska and Texas have higher error rates than Wisconsin, and so they — and their hungry kids — are stuck with the biggest cuts. Even if you accept that that is somehow just, the people who are going to pay for this bill in all the states, including ours, are, as Van Orden himself put it, “the most vulnerable populations, including hungry children. Period.”

“He says one thing and does another,” Pocan says of Van Orden’s flip-flopping on SNAP. “He’s gone totally Washington.”

That’s too bad for the people left behind in rural Wisconsin, who will take the brunt of these unnecessary cuts. 

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As the Legislature begins working on the Wisconsin State Budget, a dangerous idea to give school vouchers their own separate line item could become a huge drain on resources. | Getty Images Creative

The top issue Wisconsinites brought to legislators’ attention at budget hearings around the state last month was the need to adequately fund public schools.

But now, as the Legislature’s powerful budget committee is beginning to work on the budget in earnest, a low-profile plan that never came up in those public hearings aims to turn school vouchers into a statewide entitlement, sucking up all the resources that might otherwise go to public schools and putting Wisconsin on a path to a full–blown budget crisis. 

The plan, contained in two bills that failed in the last legislative session, would stop funding school vouchers through the same mix of state and local funding that supports regular public schools, and instead pay for school vouchers just out of the state’s general fund. 

“It’s certainly something that I personally support. … I’m sure it will be part of the discussion,” Rep. Mark Born (R-Beaver Dam), co-chair of the powerful Joint Finance Committee, told Lisa Pugh on Wisconsin Eye when she asked about “decoupling” Wisconsin voucher school funding from the rest of the school finance system.

“Decoupling” would pave the way for a big expansion in taxpayer subsidies for private school tuition. While jettisoning the caps on available funds and enrollment in the current school formula, voucher payments would become an entitlement. The state would be obligated to pay for every eligible student to attend private school. It’s worth noting that most participants in Wisconsin’s voucher programs never attended public school, so what we are talking about is setting up a massive private school system with separate funding alongside the public K-12 school system. That’s more than Wisconsin can afford.

Anne Chapman, research director for the Wisconsin Association of School Business Officials (WASBO), has followed the issue closely. “It could come up last-minute, on very short notice,” she warns. 

She worries that Wisconsin is following the same path as other states that have steadily expanded public funding for private schools without accurately assessing what the expansion would cost. In a recent WASBO paper, “The price of parallel systems,” Chapman writes that Wisconsin already ranks third among states with the highest proportion of state education dollars used in private schooling options (9%). The top two states, Florida (22%) and Arizona (12%), she writes, are “cautionary examples.” 

Florida’s universal voucher program will cost the state $3.9 billion this year. The state, which until now has been running budget surpluses, is projecting a $6.9 billion deficit by 2027-28, fueled by the voucher expansion along with tax cuts. Arizona is also facing much bigger than expected costs for its universal voucher program. After projecting it would cost $64 million in 2023-24, the state found that it underestimated the cost of vouchers by more than 650%. The real cost of universal vouchers in Arizona in 2023-24 was  $738 million. The result: a huge budget deficit and significant cuts to public schools.

Wisconsin, which launched the first school voucher program in the nation in Milwaukee 35 ago, has steadily increased both the size and per-pupil expenditures of its system of voucher schools. That’s despite a research consensus that school vouchers have not improved academic outcomes for students and, in fact, have done significant harm.

Testifying recently against a school voucher bill in Texas, University of Michigan professor and school voucher expert Josh Cowen described the “catastrophic” results of vouchers on educational outcomes across the country over the last decade.

‘Horrific’ voucher results

Cowen has been evaluating school vouchers since the 1990s, when the first pilot program in Milwaukee had a measurable, positive impact on the 400 low-income kids who used vouchers to attend traditional private schools. As school vouchers expanded to serve tens of thousands of students and “subprime” operators moved in to take advantage of taxpayer dollars, however, the results took a dramatic downturn. Cowen described the “horrific learning loss” he and other researchers have recorded over the last decade among kids who started in public school and then moved to private school using vouchers. He was used to seeing trends in education that simply didn’t work to improve outcomes, he told the Texas legislators, but “it’s very rare to see something that harmed kids academically.” The worst drops in test scores, he said, came in 2014-15 — the same year that states began taking the programs statewide. He concluded that the smaller programs that had paid close attention to students and offered them a lot of support became something entirely different when vouchers were scaled up. Yet despite the abysmal results, more and more states are moving toward universal voucher systems.

Imagine, Cowen told the Texas legislators, if “30 years ago a vaccine showed some positive effects in clinical trials for a few hundred kids.” Then, when the vaccine was approved and used on thousands of children, “the health effects became negative, even atrocious.”

“No one would say, ‘let’s just hang our hat on the pilot and focus on results from 30 years ago,” Cowen said. But that’s exactly what’s happening with school vouchers. The kids vouchers were originally supposed to help — low-income children in underresourced schools — have suffered the most. 

Studies from research teams in Louisiana, Indiana, Ohio and Washington, D.C., show learning losses for kids who left public school to attend voucher programs that surpassed the learning loss experienced by students in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina or by children across the country from the COVID-19 pandemic, Cowen said.

Instead of helping those struggling students, who often attend the “subprime” schools Cowen discussed, the voucher programs in Wisconsin and other states mostly provide a taxpayer-financed benefit to private school families — 70% of whom have never put their kids in public school.

Anti-government ideologues and school choice lobbyists are selling a faulty product with the rapid expansion of school vouchers.

Part of the scam is the effort to hide the true costs from taxpayers. That’s the part Chapman, the school business expert, is worried about. As school districts struggle with lean budgets, under the current system, at least local taxpayers can see how much they are paying to support the voucher schools in their districts. If the Legislature succeeds in moving the cost of school vouchers into the general statewide budget, that transparency will be lost. And, at the same time, the state will open the door to unlimited spending on vouchers, no matter how expensive the program becomes. 

School choice advocates in Wisconsin have long pushed for “a voucher in every backpack” — or universal eligibility for the private school voucher program.

“Eligibility” doesn’t mean the same thing as “access,” however: In Wisconsin voucher schools have a track record of kicking out students who are disabled, challenging to educate, LGBTQ or for any other reason they deem them a bad fit.

Those students go back to the public schools, whose mission is to serve all students. In contrast, private schools in the voucher system can and do discriminate. Yet, Chapman reports, we are now spending about $629 million for Wisconsin’s four voucher programs, which serve 58,623 students. That’s $54 million more than the $574.8 million we are spending on all 126,830 students with disabilities in Wisconsin, as school districts struggle with the cost of special education. 

Federal tax deduction windfall for voucher schools

As if that weren’t enough, at the federal level, the Educational Choice for Children Act of 2025 (ECCA), currently being considered by Congress, would give a 100% tax deduction on donations to nonprofits known as Scholarship Granting Organizations, which give out private K-12 school vouchers.

Normally, donors to nonprofits can expect a tax deduction of 37 cents on the dollar at most. The 100% tax deduction means financial advisers across the country will push clients, whether they are school choice advocates or not, to give money to voucher schools. Under the bill, contributors would also be allowed to give corporate stock and avoid capital gains tax. “This would allow wealthy ‘donors’ to turn a profit, at taxpayer expense, by acting as middlemen in steering federal funding into private K-12 schools,” the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy reports. ITEP estimates that the ECCA would cost the federal government $134 billion in foregone revenue over the next 10 years and would cost states an additional $2.3 billion.

The very least we can do as citizens is to demand accountability and transparency in the state budget process, before we blow all of our money on tax breaks and tuition vouchers for people who don’t need them. 

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