Sen. Tammy Baldwin toured La Follette High School in Madison on Tuesday. (Photo by Baylor Spears/ Wisconsin Examiner)
Opposition to the Trump administration’s efforts to close the U.S. Department of Education is gaining momentum, Sen. Tammy Baldwin said Tuesday during a visit to La Follette High School in Madison.
Baldwin visited the school, part of the state’s second largest school district, as new educators met for an orientation ahead of the start of the school year on September 3.
“[New educators are] coming or returning to teaching at a time where we have seen this administration doing devastating things to education and education funding,” Baldwin, a Wisconsin Democrat, told reporters after a tour of the school. “It has proposed the abolition of the Education Department. He wants to dismantle it. He’s called for the end to it, but he also knows that there are some constraints because the Education Department was set up by Congress and it’s funded by Congress.”
President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March ordering Education Sec. Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities while ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.” McMahon has said she is “dead serious” about putting herself out of a job.
In June, schools across the country were thrown into uncertainty when the Trump administration withheld over $6 billion in federal funds meant to support English language learners, migrants, low-income children, adult learners, after-school programs and more. The frozen funds included $70 million for Wisconsin. The administration decided to reverse course and release the funds in late July after Republican and Democratic Senators both called on the administration to do so.
Principal Mathew Thompson said the “City Center” houses school social workers and provides resources to students who need it, including a washer and dryer and an area for personal care. (Photo by Baylor Spears/ Wisconsin Examiner)
Madison Metropolitan School District Superintendent Joe Gothard said that, as of Tuesday, the district had expected $3.4 million and is “still waiting for direct language to ensure that we are going to be reimbursed for the cost that we plan to incur this school year.”
Without that money, “students would not receive the services they deserve, and that could be by way of reading interventions, it could be some of the outreach we’re able to do with communities, with families,” Gothard said. “$3.4 million out of $6 billion may not seem like a lot, but those are targeted funds at students who need it most.”
“I’m grateful that we’ve had support for the unfreezing of these funds,” Gothard said, adding that uncertainty of funding “undermines public education and who it’s for.” The lack of certainty is leading the district to rely more heavily on the local community and government for the support the district needs.
“I’ve got a range of students,” Thompson said, adding that the City Center allows for students to “come in and get what they need.”
Baldwin also got to see the school’s music room, library, gymnasium and technical education spaces, including an autoshop.
“One of my most popular classes is our cooking classes, right, and kids get to learn basic life skills, and then, they actually do cooking for the school,” Thompson said.
“And nutrition and all that stuff,” Baldwin added.
“Yeah, you know, everything kids don’t want to hear,” Thompson joked.
“One of my most popular classes is our cooking classes, right, and kids get to learn basic life skills, and then, they actually do cooking for the school,” Principal Mathew Thompson told Baldwin before entering one of the classrooms. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)
The Trump administration’s efforts to close the Education Department comes even as some Republican lawmakers are balking at the idea. Politico reported that Republican lawmakers looking to fulfill Trump’s agenda are considering breaking the process down into smaller bills given the opposition to shutting down the department, especially from those in school districts that have benefited from funding and those that rely on the agency for guidance.
When it comes to challenging the ongoing federal uncertainty, Baldwin pointed to a recent bill that came out of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health, and Human Services, and Education and was recently approved by the full committee.
“We have seen him propose to put some of the career and technical education programs in the Labor Department rather than keeping them in the Education Department,” Baldwin said. “He’s talked about putting the IDEA program” — which serves students with disabilities under the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act — “into the Department of Health and Human Services, where it would not be suited, and he is defunding programs left and right, so we’re fighting back.”
According to Baldwin’s office, the bill would provide $79 billion in discretionary funding for the Department of Education and would put measures into place to limit the ability to downsize the department’s role. The bill includes a requirement to make formula grants available on time and maintain the staff necessary to ensure the department carries out its statutory responsibilities and carries out programs and activities funded in the bill in a timely manner.
Baldwin said the bill is “wildly bipartisan,” noting it passed the committee on a 26-3 vote at the end of July.
“We have more work to do. It has to go through the whole process and end up on the president’s desk before its law,” Baldwin said. “I feel like we have momentum in standing up against this president’s plans with education, so when we return to session the day after Labor Day, we’re going to continue to press to restore all funding, and fight back against this idea of abolishing the Department of Education.”
While the immediate future remains uncertain on federal emissions regulations and funding, school bus OEMs say they are prepared with varied solutions going forward to meet the needs of every customer, no matter the fuel or where they operate.
That was the key takeaway from a July 13 panel at STN EXPO West in Reno, Nevada. The OEM representatives on stage were Francisco Lagunas, general manager of North America Bus for Cummins; Jim Crowcroft, general sales manager for Thomas Built Buses; Katie Stok, product marketing and commercial readiness for IC Bus; Frank Girardot, the PR, marketing and government relations leader at RIDE; and Brad Beauchamp, EV product segment leader for Blue Bird. The session attempted to provide some clarity to the ever-changing funding and fuel landscape.
“The only certainty is that everything is so uncertain,” Lagunas punctuated during the “The Engines & Emissions Pathway Forward” session, facilitated by School Transportation News Editor-in-Chief Ryan Gray.
Lagunas added that Cummins is seeing an increased demand in diesel, confirming that the new B6.7 octane engine will be available in January. Though, he noted that investments in electric batteries and drive systems have not slowed down. Accelera, the zero-emissions division of Cummins, is a member of a joint venture with Daimler Truck North America and Paccar to create a U.S.-based battery cell manufacturer, Amplify Cell Technologies.
Crowcroft agreed, adding that one year has made a huge difference in industry focus. Several of the same panelists sat on a similar panel last year at STN EXPO, where he said EV was the focus of the industry.
“Now, it’s been a complete 180 [degree turn] this year,” he shared, adding that the industry has spent too much time talking about EVs and not enough time talking about the other offerings.
This year has been about being diverse, being nimble and ready to adapt to change when necessary. “What is the most practical plan?” he asked, noting that diesel technology has advanced and EV fatigue is setting in.
He shared that Thomas is not telling customers what fuel or energy type to use but instead empowering them to choose what works best for their fleets. Noting the Trump administration’s relaxation of a federal push for zero-emission vehicles, Crowcroft said there has been a sigh of relief from customers for not feeling like they have to purchase electric school buses.
He noted that with all the changes and technologies, it puts more pressure on the OEMs to keep up. He said Thomas is committed to investing in quality, citing that ahead of the 2027 GHG Phase 3 regulations targeting lower NOx (the EPA currently has it on hold pending a proposal to remove GHG regulations), school districts might want to pre-buy within the next 12 months to avoid cost increases tied to the new technology.
Beauchamp said Blue Bird has always focused on a fuel-agnostic path for its customers, and the company plans on continuing with propane being a low emission source. While he said Blue Bird had yet to see EV order cancellations as of last month, he anticipates those orders will flatten. Regardless, Blue Bird is committed to EV, noting an $80 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy last year (and double that amount in company matching funds) to build a new Type D electric school bus plant.
He noted that while the supply chain has improved coming out of COVID-19, “We’re not out of the words on it, yet,” he said.
Stok noted that the industry conversation should not be about low costs but having a supplier that delivers good quality on time. She noted that, like the other OEMs, EV is still very much part of the IC Bus product portfolio, as is diesel. However, she said the change in federal regulations will usher in changing order preferences across the industry, noting that IC is reintroducing its own gasoline school bus with the upcoming Cummins engine.
For the remainder of 2025, she said IC Bus is on track to have the highest production output from its Tulsa, Oklahoma plant. Communication is key right now, she added, and the manufacturer is working with its dealer network to listen to the customers and continue to improve.
Meanwhile, Girardot said it’s too early to predict what the future holds but BYD electric school bus company RIDE believes it holds a promise to furthering the deployment of EVs and enhancing the capabilities of vehicle to grid technology. He noted that V2G holds value and is something that communities need to consider. He highlighted success stories of V2G, such as in the Oakland Unified School District in California.
Girardot added that technician training on electric school buses is a must.
Additionally, RIDE announced a range extension on its blade battery, which took home the Best Green Technology, as judged by attendees at the STN EXPO West Trade Show Innovation Awards. Girardot added RIDE, too, received a competitive grant to expand its manufacturing facility.
Anne Chapman (with the microphone), research director for the Wisconsin Association of School Business Officials Association, called the lack of funding “unprecedented" during a panel discussion. From left, WPEN Executive Director Heather DuBois Bourenane moderated the panel with Chapman, Julie Underwood, and Chris Thiel. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)
GREEN BAY — After putting in a significant amount of time advocating for school funding during the most recent state budget cycle, public education advocates are looking towards their next effort — helping local communities show how much private school vouchers cost taxpayers.
Advocates met at Preble High School, the state’s fourth largest high school, for the Wisconsin Public Education Network’s annual summit last week, an opportunity to connect and discuss the state of school funding and an array of other issues schools face. Denise Gaumer Hutchison, northeast regional organizer for the network and mother of two Green Bay students, told the Wisconsin Examiner that the importance of advocacy and working together is “at an all time high.”
“It’s not just one type of people that are understanding that we have to have high quality public schools and we have to advocate for it now,” said Hutchison, a member of a variety of advocacy groups including Citizen Action and the League of Women Voters. “The Wisconsin State Legislature showed us that they are not advocates for public schools.”
Wisconsin Superintendent of Public Instruction Jill Underly told attendees in a video message she was grateful for the partnership with WPEN and advocates during the budget cycle that concluded in early July, when Gov. Tony Evers signed the 2025-27 state budget.
“You are without question the strongest and most consistent advocates for public schools in our state. You are the link between policy and practice. You lift up what’s working and you fight for what’s needed,” Underly said. “Your voices have been loud, clear and grounded in what matters most kids, and you’ve reminded Wisconsin that public education isn’t just a line item. It’s a promise.”
Advocates met at Preble High School, the state’s fourth largest high school, for the Wisconsin Public Education Network’s annual summit last week, an opportunity to connect and discuss the state of school funding and an array of other issues schools face. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)
The budget set state aid for districts for the next two years. To the disappointment of many, however, it included no general aid increases. Increases to the special education reimbursement rate didn’t reach the goal advocates had set.
“This is the gas you put in the tank,” Milwaukee Public Schools Legislative Policy Manager Chris Thiel said about the lack of general state aid during a panel discussion. “You can’t say the funding system is broken, if you didn’t fund it.”
Anne Chapman, research director for the Wisconsin Association of School Business Officials, called the lack of funding “unprecedented.” School districts have a $325 per pupil revenue limit increase, but without state funding, school districts will have to raise property taxes to benefit from it.
Chapman noted that the state did significantly increase the special education reimbursement rate, but said the actual reimbursement would likely fall below the estimated rate of 42% in the first year and 45% in the second year.
“When you hear the governor and others say that this budget provides $1.4 billion in spendable resources for schools, that is not state money,” Chapman said. “About $577 million of that is state money. The rest is mostly going to be borne by property taxpayers.”
Thiel noted that a recent Wisconsin Policy Forum report found that the state’s national ranking for school funding has fallen from 11th place in 2002 to 26th place now.
“Were it not for local communities lifting their school districts up against these cuts from the state, we conceivably will be worse than 26th,” Thiel said, noting that increased local property taxes made the difference. “We didn’t get into this to do referenda every year, and we’ve got a really concerning situation.”
Green Bay Area Public School Board Vice President James Lyerly said at the conference that without general aid and without a 60% special education reimbursement rate from the state budget, the district will have to go to referendum again. The district currently gets funding through a 10-year operating referendum that voters approved in 2017.
“It ensures that the district will once again need to seek voter support for a referendum to replace our current $16.5 million dollar per year non-recurring operational referendum that ends in 2027,” Lyerly said. The district’s current operational and recent building referendums, including one in November 2024, have ensured “our students are able to attend schools that meet their instructional needs and provide for safe learning spaces,” he said.
“The continued underfunding of public education at the same time that there is an increased funding and expansion of unaccountable choice schools, not only creates these budget challenges, but it widens the opportunity gaps for students who rely on the comprehensive support systems that public schools provide,” Lyerly said.
The new state budget did include increases in per-pupil funding for voucher schools in Wisconsin, along with a $325 annual per-pupil revenue limit adjustment to keep parity with public schools.
Publicizing voucher programs’ cost
Advocates are turning to transparency on the cost of the voucher schools programs as the next item on their agenda.
Green Bay recently became the first municipality in the state to add the cost of private voucher schools as a line on residents’ property tax bills.
Private school vouchers are paid out of school districts’ general state aid, and school districts have the option of raising property taxes to make up for the lost revenue. Property tax bills currently include information on the money going towards the town, the county, the technical college and local public school districts, but costs for private voucher schools are lumped in with public school costs.
A handful of Wisconsin municipalities have added inserts about voucher costs to their tax bills, but Hutchison said having it on the tax bill will be more effective at informing people, who often throw inserts away.
“[People] were totally appalled that they didn’t know that their taxes were going to support private schools and it wasn’t so much that they objected to supporting private schools, it was the lack of transparency and the knowledge they didn’t have the knowledge of where their tax dollars were going,” Hutchison said.
The proposal to add a printed line on private voucher costs was introduced by Ald. Alyssa Proffitt. The city council voted 6-6 in April, with Green Bay Mayor Eric Genrich breaking the tie to approve it. The council worked with the school district administrative staff, the school board, Brown County, the Wisconsin Department of Revenue and the City Legal department to determine the legality and feasibility of adding another line to the printed city tax bill.
Genrich said at the conference that Green Bay residents will have a better understanding of how much they are paying for private schools, and he hopes the practice spreads.
“We really believe that we’ve created a template that other communities across the state of Wisconsin can use and adopt,” Green Bay Mayor Eric Genrich said at the conference about private school voucher transparency. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)
“We really believe that we’ve created a template that other communities across the state of Wisconsin can use and adopt,” Genrich said at the conference. “I’ve been a supporter of this at the state level for some time. That is what we’re hoping to build towards, so we create some momentum within municipalities across the state of Wisconsin and actually get it done at the state level hopefully here in the near future.”
Genrich, a former state representative, supported a similar policy in the Wisconsin Assembly, but a bill authored by former Democratic Rep. Dana Wachs never received a public hearing. Similar bills have faced the same fate in recent years under the Republican-led Legislature.
WPEN is planning to launch an effort in the fall to help communities interested in going through a similar process.
“If the Legislature won’t support transparency on tax bills for communities, then the communities are going to support transparency on their tax bills, and it’s going to go municipality by municipality by municipality,” Hutchison, the network’s Northeast regional organizer, said in an interview. “We’re not going to wait any longer, because this has been needed for a very long time, and we have some momentum now.”
Transparency on voucher costs is essential, she said, especially as public school districts continue to rely on property taxes for funding and must seek increases by referendum.
“We have a constitutional responsibility to fund our public schools, and people think in their communities that they’re doing that,” Hutchison said. “They’ve been misled, because the private school dollars are hidden inside of the tax bill, and all we’re asking for is to be transparent so that people can make informed decisions.”
She said it can be difficult to ask taxpayers to vote to increase taxes if they don’t understand their tax bills.
“If you’re going to somebody’s door saying, ‘Hey, the Green Bay Area public school district or XYZ school district is going to referenda to help pay their bills because there’s no new money from the state of Wisconsin… and they say, ‘Look at my tax bill. Look how much money I’m paying in taxes to support schools.’ That’s not really the whole story,” Hutchison said.
“It’s a challenging conversation to have at somebody’s door. If I now can go to somebody’s door and say, ‘Did you see your latest tax bill? Did you see what percentage is being taken out and what dollar amount is being taken out of that amount to go to private schools?’ you may get somebody to say yes to increase their taxes because now they have a clearer picture of what’s really happening.”
Hutchison said WPEN has a tool kit with resources on the issue. Changing the tax bill information has to start with a resolution from the school board asking the city or the township to support the effort, she said, and it then has to get approval from the city or local government.
“We’re doing it district by district, community by community, and we’re having conversations with people that have come to us to see what we’ve done in other communities,” Hutchison said. “So we’re going to support them in how they approach this.”
Hutchison said she has been having early conversations with some communities, including having three communities reach out following the summit. One superintendent, Amy Starzecki of Superior Public Schools, thanked the Green Bay community for its work around voucher transparency at the conference, saying Superior would be looking into the issue.
The effort to publicize private voucher costs comes as caps on Wisconsin’s school voucher programs are set to lift in the 2026-27 school year. Since 2017, the cap, which limits the percentage of students in a district who can participate, has been increasing by 1% until it hit 9% this year.
“Next year, there will be no limit. Those caps come off,” said Julie Mead, a professor emerita in UW-Madison’s department of educational leadership and policy analysis, during a session titled “It’s just not fair: Unpacking Fairness from Special Education to Funding-by-Referendum to Privatization.”
Eliminating the caps could make it hard for districts to plan, Mead said.
“The ability of Green Bay superintendent to predict what’s going to happen next year in terms of the money coming in and going on and what their membership will be is going to be really, really difficult,” she said, “and it means our school districts are frankly going to be in a world of hurt.”
The third round of funding through the $4.2 billion Clean Water, Clean Air and Green Jobs Environmental Bond Act of 2022 is now available for zero-emission school buses in the state of New York.
Gov. Kathy Hochul announced July 22 an additional $200 million distributed through the New York School Bus Incentive Program (NYSBIP). The second installment of $200 million was made available a year ago, while the first round of $100 million was announced in October 2022.
The funding covers everything from the purchase of the electric school buses to the charging infrastructure and fleet electrification planning.
“New York State is leaning into our Environmental Bond Act commitment to provide public schools with the funding and resources to make electric school buses more affordable,” Hochul said in a statement. “We are leaving no school behind as we reduce pollution from vehicles so every student can benefit from clean air while building healthier, more sustainable communities for New Yorkers across the state.”
The program is administered by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), while NYSBIP provides incentives to eligible school bus fleet operators, including school districts and private contractors, that purchase zero-emission buses.
The funding is available on a first-come, first-served basis with funding amounts covering up to 100 percent of the incremental cost of a new or repowered electric school bus. Priority districts identified as high-need school districts and disadvantaged communities are available to receive larger funding amounts.
The deadline to purchase zero-emission school buses in the state nears amid the latest funding round. All new school buses purchased statewide as of Jan. 1, 2027, must be zero emissions and all school district and contractor fleets must be 100 percent zero emissions by 2035. The recently passed state budget extended a deferment until 2029 for school districts that demonstrate their challenges with meeting the mandate.
The NYSBIP defines zero emissions as electric or hydrogen fuel cell school buses, though only the latter are currently available.
Federal law prohibits students in the country without authorization from receiving federal financial aid.
Two Clinton-era laws — the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act — require all students to provide a valid Social Security number or otherwise demonstrate lawful-presence status to receive federal aid.
The Federal Student Aid website confirms that unauthorized students — including DACA recipients — are ineligible for federal student aid. However, it notes that unauthorized immigrants can still seek financial support through other channels, such as state grant programs, institutional aid, and private scholarships.
The American Journal of Economics and Sociology points out that although there are alternative avenues, they are often limited and inconsistent. Even when available, it is last-dollar aid, covering only remaining costs after all other aid is applied. As a result, this rarely meets the total cost of tuition, fees, and living expenses.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
Middle income Wisconsinites got a $180 tax cut and lost services worth much more than that. | 3D illustration rendering by Getty Images Creative
Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers and state legislators cut taxes by $1.3 billion in the new state budget, paying out a quarter of the state’s $4.6 billion surplus so that Wisconsinites who earn up to $200,000 can get a tax break worth an average of $180 per year.
That’s not a lot of money to trade for losing access to child care, reducing services that help veterans find jobs and housing, and cutting programs at schools. But somehow cutting taxes has become an agreed-upon, bipartisan top priority, even as the defunding of everything begins to take a major toll on our quality of life.
As Baylor Spears reports, more than 65% of Wisconsin school districts will face a reduction in funds under the new state budget. Many will go to local property taxpayers to ask for more – to the annoyance of citizens who are getting tired of the constant begging from schools that no longer receive adequate funding from the state. Local residents were willing to say yes to a record number of school funding referenda in 2024. But there are signs their patience is wearing thin.
Republican legislators are tapping into that annoyance with a bill to repeal the results of Evers’ partial veto of the last budget, which extended a temporary increase in the cap on revenue school districts could raise for the next 400 years. Evers’ maneuver outraged Republicans, who challenged the veto before the Wisconsin Supreme Court and lost. The new bill would undo the veto’s effect on school revenue caps (and the bill itself will also, presumably, be vetoed by Evers).
“The pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock 402 years before this veto,” the Republican sponsors of the bill write. “It is hard to justify locking in a funding increase for just as long into the future.”
But like the 180 bucks a year in “tax relief” Republican legislators are touting as a major victory for middle class Wisconsinites, Evers’ 400 year veto amounts to less than meets the eye. For one thing, it doesn’t lock in an increase — it just allows districts to raise an additional $325 per pupil through a combination of local property taxes and state aid. Individual school boards must still vote to pass any property tax increase. And the state could head off those property tax increases by putting more money into schools. Instead, Republican legislators insisted on no increase at all in general school aid in the budget. The same legislative Republicans who are howling about property tax increases created the problem, refusing to fund education and then blaming districts that turn to the only other source of funding they can tap.
Overall, the Wisconsin Policy Forum reports, Wisconsin has slipped from one of the top states for education spending into the bottom half over the last 25 years. Tax-cutting replaced education as the state’s top priority. While most other states increased spending on education after the pandemic, in Wisconsin spending on schools went down. And we spend far less as a share of personal income on education now than we did in the early 2000s, and less than the national average.
Behind all of this budget math is the sad reality that, if we don’t agree to shoulder some expenses as a society, a lot of the elements of a decent life are out of reach for most people. Not paying for things through taxes doesn’t make expenses go away. It just makes them more burdensome on the smaller group that has to pay. It takes a bigger bite out of local property tax payers to pick up the cost of their schools than if the cost is spread across the state in the form of income taxes, and it’s even more expensive for individual families to pay the full cost of educating their kids. In the early 2000s, Wisconsin had the best school system in the Midwest at a cost of about 5% of personal income for taxpayers, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum. That’s about $2,500 of a $50,000 income. Try to find full-time private education for less than that.
Not just schools but a clean environment, public safety, good roads and reliable services and infrastructure that doesn’t fail are things we’ve long taken for granted. Those things are all threatened now.
When I was a high school exchange student in Quito, Ecuador, I learned that running water in the affluent suburb where I lived was not guaranteed. Sometimes the water would go out when you were taking a shower. Keeping a bucket of water in the bathroom just in case was normal. Then a well known government official moved into the neighborhood and the problem, temporarily, cleared up.
We are moving toward that sort of social setup now in the U.S.
The assumption that drives tax-cutting mania at the state and national level is that we shouldn’t have to spend money toward collective, public goods. We should all pay our own way. That’s fine if you can hire your own private security firm, send your kids to private academies, and avoid contact with an increasingly desperate populace. For most people, it’s a terrible bargain.
It’s both cheaper and better for all of us, as individuals, to support a decent society for all. It only becomes unaffordable when we start pulling apart the fabric of society, convincing people they’ll be better off going it alone, after liquidating our collective wealth.
Undermining confidence in public institutions and cutting taxes so those institutions are underfunded and strained are part of the same push to increase the wealth of the already wealthy, and help them shirk any responsibility to contribute to society
Why should poor people have health care? Why should the elderly and disabled be protected from being thrown out on the street? Why should little kids have nutritious meals? If you weren’t clever enough to be born rich, you deserve nothing. That’s not exactly how the Trump administration puts it, or the Republicans in the state Legislature who have been insisting for years on frittering away the state’s budget surplus on tax cuts worth very little to anyone who doesn’t already make a ton of money. But it’s the basic, underlying idea.
This argument is compelling only to people who don’t understand the math.
Elon Musk, whose $400 billion fortune is more than the wealth owned by one-half of all U.S. citizens combined, doesn’t want to pay what for him is a pittance to help maintain the health and wellbeing of our country.
Wisconsin Republicans were unwilling to spend $4 million — .004% of the total state budget — to maintain veterans’ services to keep military vets from becoming homeless.
Efficiency, cost savings — these are the alleged goals of the federal and state austerity programs. But the real goal is to make you forget what it was like to live in a functional society, one where kids had enough to eat and people didn’t die of preventable diseases, the environment was clean and Wisconsin children could get a great, free education, afford to go to college and dream of owning a home.
What the anti-government tax-cutters want is a society riven by resentment and anger, where people are divided against each other and the dysfunction makes it easy to “divide and conquer” as our last Republican governor memorably put it.
Down with education, down with clean water, down with health care and nutrition for poor kids. Up with lurid crime stories and hateful, divisive rhetoric.
When society falls apart, it’s much easier for greedy charlatans to plunder and steal the wealth of the state. And after we’ve codified irresponsibility — spent down the treasury and starved society and made permanent the arrangement whereby the richest people in society are not obligated to contribute, well then it becomes much harder to make the rich pay their fair share.
Try to remember what it was like to have a decent, functional Wisconsin. Try not to give in to the politics of distraction and division. Because $180 is a pathetic bribe to give up stability, security and the opportunity for the kids of today to grow up with hope that they can still have a decent life.
Corrine Hendrickson addresses a gathering of parents and child care providers outside the state Capitol on Friday, May 16, 2025. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)
For 18 years Corrine Hendrickson has been taking care of young children in her New Glarus home.
At the end of August she’ll send the last of those children home, shut the doors of “Corrine’s Little Explorers” and clean up for a final time. She hadn’t planned for it to be this way.
“It’s really difficult,” Hendrickson says. “I’m not closing on my terms. I’m not closing because I was ready to close. I’m closing because it’s the decision that I need to make for myself and my family.”
It’s a decision, she says, forced by what the 2025-27 state budget didn’t do for child care.
“It will affect our community as a whole,” says Devon Kammerud, whose children were among the first that Hendrickson had in child care when she began the business. “I knew a few of my friends who were having babies they were hoping to go there. Now they won’t have that.”
Hendrickson says that even with provisions that were hailed as an unprecedented state investment in care, the budget fell short of what would have been required for her to afford to stay in business.
In the months leading up to the budget’s passage, Hendrickson was one of the leading voices for a substantial state investment in child care. As a co-founder of Wisconsin Early Childhood Action Needed (WECAN), she helped lead rallies and round tables to call on lawmakers to set aside nearly half-a-billion dollars to send directly to child care providers across Wisconsin.
Ongoing state investment
Providers and advocates have been seeking an ongoing state budget line item for child care for years. Without that continuing outside support, they argue, it will either be impossible to pay child care teachers adequately or impossible for anyone beside affluent families to afford quality child care.
Child care wages have been historically low. A 2023 report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum found that in Milwaukee, lead teachers’ pay averaged between $12 and less than $15 per hour — less than retail employees at big box stores or warehouse workers.
Parents, the policy forum report found, were paying in Milwaukee County more than $16,000 a year for infant care and more than $12,000 a year for a 4-year-old. Providers, teachers and families are all “struggling at the same time,” according to the report.
Elliot Haspel, a fellow at Capita, a family policy think tank, contends that child care should be considered a public good. He compares it to public schools, libraries, fire departments and park systems, because “the benefits are so widespread they go beyond the users of the service.”
In addition to providing children with early education opportunities, the availability of child care has benefits “for the overall health of families and the ability of families to stay in communities,” Haspel told the Wisconsin Examiner in aninterview in May.
Pandemic relief and financial stability
The COVID-19 pandemic gave Wisconsin an opportunity for proof of concept for a state investment. Federal pandemic relief funds “gave us the most financial security we’ve ever had,” Hendrickson says.
From left, Corrine Hendrickson and Brooke Legler take part in a panel discussion on child care and the 2025-27 Wisconsin state budget in the state Capitol on Thursday, Jan. 23, 2025. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)
She and Brooke Legler, who owns a group child care center in New Glarus, started WECAN about the same time. They had been traveling Wisconsin, hosting showings of thedocumentary “No Small Matter” about the importance of early childhood education. They started WECAN to bring activist muscle to advocating on behalf of providers and parents and increase respect and funding for child care.
Congress enacted the first COVID-19 pandemic relief funding programs in 2020. They culminated with the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), enacted in March 2021, shortly after President Joe Biden took office. ARPA made it possible for Wisconsin to send $20 million a month to child care providers across the state for two years under the Child Care Counts program instituted by the Department of Children and Families under Gov. Tony Evers.
“We really pushed hard to get that funding to come to our state,” Hendrickson says. “And then we also pushed hard to make sure that our state did allocate it directly to all of us [providers] that were regulated.”
The monthly payments made it possible for providers to raise wages for child care teachers without having to further increase the fees parents were already paying.
After failing to persuade the Republican majority in the Wisconsin Legislature to extend Child Care Counts with state funds in 2023, the Evers administration extended the program with repurposed federal money for another two years, reducing the monthly payout to $10 million. The money ran out early this month.
When Evers introduced the 2025-27 budget in February, he once again proposed extending Child Care Counts, asking for $480 million over two years. A survey of providers found that as many as 25% said they could close without continued support.
The only way to stabilize the child care sector, providers and their allies argued, was to provide a sustained, substantial state investment. Hendrickson and countless other advocates — the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association, Democratic lawmakers, innumerable providers and some business leaders as well — spent most of the first half of this year advancing that message.
Weighing the odds
The odds looked steep from the start. The Republican majority on the Legislature’s budget-writing Joint Finance Committee pulled Gov. Tony Evers’ $480 million line item for child care along with more than 600 provisions from the draft budget at the committee’s first budget meeting in the spring.
As the budget debates dragged on, advocates kept up their demands. During that time, Hendrickson was weighing her own future. She asked herself, she says, “what were the odds of us getting what we needed in this budget, and what I would need to get put in the budget in order for me to be able to operate and not outprice my parents?”
Hendrickson almost closed her child care service in the fall of 2024, when three of the eight openings for kids were unfilled until the end of September. “And I didn’t want to have to go through that again this next year — and the prices were only going to be higher,” she says.
By June, it wasn’t looking good. Initially Hendrickson expected her program to have no openings in the fall. Then three families told her they would be dropping out.
One was a mom who qualified for the Wisconsin Shares subsidy program for low-income families. The subsidy is supposed to cover 75% of the cost of care, but as child care fees have increased Wisconsin Shares has not been able to keep up. The mother said she could no longer afford her part of the bill.
The woman moved with her child to another county, and Hendrickson said she’s heard from her that she’s “trying to work from home with her 2-year-old also there at all times, because she just can’t afford her child care anymore.”
Another family was moving out of state at the end of the summer — but then changed their plans and left in June.
Weeks before the budget negotiations concluded, Hendrickson had gotten word that a direct funding program was still possible, but that insiders thought it would get only about $100 million, less than one-fourth of what providers and Evers had been seeking.
With that in mind, Hendrickson calculated a rate increase and gave that estimate to a third family. They had been driving every day from Madison to New Glarus because her center was a good fit for their child and because her rates were lower.
The new rates were closer to what they would expect to pay in Madison, the family told her, and they decided to look closer to home.
The tipping point
Subsequent inquiries for care came from families who were expecting a child or who had a child under 2 years old. But Hendrickson was already at her limit for that age group under the terms of her family child care license and couldn’t add more.
On July 1, Evers announced a budget deal with funding for child care, including $110 million that would be distributed to providers along the same lines as Child Care Counts — not as a long-term program, but as a bridge to an undefined future. “A bridge to nowhere,” says Sarah Kazell, a child care teacher and advocate who has worked with Hendrickson.
Child care provider Corrine Hendrickson addresses a rally in front of the state Capitol Friday, July 11, demanding a re-do on the state budget to increase child care funding. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)
Kazell says the failure of lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle to follow through on the message throughout the last six months for child care funding has left her “deeply disappointed and angry.”
It’s not just the absence of funding, she says, but also the last minute addition of a pilot program to increase the ratio of children to providers, but only in the low-income subsidized part of the child care system. “It just seems specifically harmful to the kids that are most vulnerable,” Kazell says.
Hendrickson had already privately calculated that she could get by if the lawmakers approved about $240 million — half what Evers had sought originally. But with a single year at a still smaller amount, increasing her rates by $60 a week “just wasn’t going to work,” she says.
Taking into account the cost for property taxes, liability insurance, homeowner’s insurance and utility rate increases, “I just couldn’t continue to justify keeping my business open while struggling and hurting my own family,” Hendrickson says.
And she knew she would need to decide sooner rather than later, so families would have time to find a new provider.
“I didn’t want the families in my care to have to worry about where their kids would go if I continued to try and struggle — and then what would happen to those kids, and where would they go?” Hendrickson says. “And I didn’t want to feel guilty and have to stay open while also bankrupting myself.”
Corrine’s Little Explorers will remain open through the end of August. Working with Legler, Hendrickson arranged for the children to be able to transfer to Legler’s center, The Growing Tree, starting in September if their parents want that.
From provider to advocate
Hendrickson graduated from University of Wisconsin-Whitewater in 2001 with a degree in early childhood education, but in the recession after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks there were no jobs, especially in early education, she says.
She went to work at a Bath & Body Works store, working her way up to store manager. After her oldest son was born in 2006, “I had three very pregnant friends who were talking about how they couldn’t find care and how they were trying to figure out who would have to quit their job,” Hendrickson says.
Chatting during a weekly get-together, she brought up her college degree. “I said, ‘What if I quit my job and I opened up a child care?’” she recalls.
“That was a way I could meet the needs of my community, use my teaching degree, and start a small business,” Hendrickson says. “How hard could it be? This can’t be that bad, right? Yeah, I was naive.”
She had been paying for child care herself and “saw how much I was paying,” she says — not understanding the costs that providers have to bear.
Children play at Corrine’s Little Explorers family child care in 2011. (Photo courtesy of Corrine Hendrickson)
She started with the infants of two friends and her own son, 10 months old at the time. Three months later another infant joined the group. Wisconsin allows child care providers who are caring for three children unrelated to them to operate without a license.
In the midst of the Great Recession of 2008, her husband, Kevin got laid off from his job at a landscape contracting company. “We were trying to figure out how do I stay open,” Hendrickson recalls. “We went on food stamps. We went on BadgerCare … We did everything we could to keep my business floating and him trying to find a part-time job.”
A volunteer firefighter for New Glarus, her husband was able to take a part-time firefighting job in Verona and has since risen first to a full-time position and more recently to fire chief.
Within a couple of years, Hendrickson got licensed from the state as a family child care provider. “We weren’t really making a lot, but it was what I loved,” she says.
The couple renovated their home, adding a lower level that opens to the outdoors and serves as the child care space. Hendrickson qualified for the state’s highest quality rating, five stars, in 2012 and has maintained that since.
When she encountered a child with special needs, Hendrickson asked about help from state officials in the administration of then-Gov. Scott Walker. She recalls one who told her that she could turn away the child. “I didn’t think that was right,” Hendrickson says.
‘We need people … that actually care’
All three of Bekah Stauffacher’s children have spent time in care at Corrine’s Little Explorers. “She’s had such a positive impact on all three of them,” Stauffacher says. “We feel so lucky that we got to know her and have our children with her.”
Stauffacher’s middle child, who’s now 12, has severe developmental delays due to a genetic disorder. Hendrickson threw herself into finding some additional support for the girl during her years in child care.
“It was impressive,” Stauffacher says of Hendrickson’s advocacy on behalf of her daughter. “It was more than we could have handled ourselves — we were grateful that she took it on.”
For a special needs child covered under the Wisconsin Shares subsidy program, a care provider can get additional funding for an aide, special materials or training. She got to know Democratic state Sen. Jon Erpenbach, who later introduced legislation that would have expanded that additional funding for all special needs children in child care, whether they were part of Wisconsin Shares or not.
Although the bill died in committee, “going through that process really empowered me, and helped me understand what your representatives are supposed to do,” Hendrickson says.
Kazell has spent the last few years subbing for Hendrickson in the child care program when Hendrickson has gone on the road to press the case for child care support or lead workshops on advocacy. She’s also been active in WECAN’s advocacy and organizing work.
“She’s a mentor to me, and I think the most meaningful and most important mentor in my life,” Kazell says — both in early childhood teaching and in the work of organizing for change.
“She definitely was that person that helped me gain such a deep appreciation for the need for actual activism and organizing,” Kazell says — critical, she adds, to bring about the cultural change to elevate society’s value for child care and the political change to translate that value into concrete policy.
“She can talk a mile a minute and she knows a lot of stuff, but she’s also the type of person who’s keyed into where the other person is coming from,” Kazell says.
As she considers what she’ll do next, Hendrickson expects to stay involved in advocacy work, providing training in grass-roots organizing. It’s something she’s been doing already for several years.
She’s also contemplating whether to run for the state Legislature.
“We need people in there that actually care and understand the consequences of their inaction or their action,” Hendrickson said. “Taxes aren’t necessarily bad. It’s just we need to use them in ways that the people paying them feel that they’re getting something back for it.”
Corrine Hendrickson describes the challenges of being a child care provider during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the importance of government support to the survival of her business, during a Congressional hearing Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2023. (Screenshot via YouTube)
With a new law cutting Medicaid funding to certain clinics, Planned Parenthood estimated 200 of its clinics in 24 states are at risk of closure with the cuts, and nearly all of those clinics — 90% — are in states where abortion is legal. (Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images)
Planned Parenthood had already begun the arduous task of closing some clinics and curtailing services immediately after Congress passed the massive budget reconciliation bill that included a new law cutting Medicaid funding to certain clinics on July 3.
Now that a federal judge only partially blocked the enforcement of the bill, that situation may only get worse in the coming weeks and months.
The provision – which the organization said directly targeted their services for defunding and fulfills a longstanding goal of anti-abortion advocates and many Republican elected officials – prohibits Medicaid funding for clinics that provide abortion care and billed Medicaid more than $800,000 in fiscal year 2023. Federal Medicaid dollars cannot be used for abortion care, except in cases of rape, incest or certain medical conditions, and are instead most often used to provide standard reproductive health care at little to no cost. That includes treatment for sexually transmitted infections, cancer screenings and contraception. Planned Parenthood provides services for about 2 million patients every year, and 64% of clinics are in rural areas or places with health care provider shortages.
Within days of President Donald Trump’s signature on the bill, Planned Parenthood and affiliates in Utah and Massachusetts sued federal authorities, quickly winning a temporary restraining order. But on Monday, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani’s order only blocked enforcement against one of the affiliates that filed the lawsuit, Planned Parenthood Association of Utah, and affiliates “who will not provide abortion services” as of Oct. 1. Clinics that didn’t bill Medicaid more than $800,000 in fiscal year 2023 are also protected from cuts.
On Tuesday afternoon, attorneys for the Trump administration filed a notice of appeal to the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals seeking to reverse the preliminary injunction decision.
Clinic and affiliate leaders say the fallout from the funding measure has already resulted in chaos, and they are still trying to determine what it means for their operations.
Clinics were already hampered by frozen Title X funding
Erica Wilson-Domer, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio, told States Newsroom on Thursday that they temporarily paused Medicaid services after the bill became law, but were back to regular operations under the restraining order. She acknowledged it will vary by state and county, and it’s unclear how the clinics will respond to Monday’s preliminary injunction.
“We have a saying that if you’ve seen one Planned Parenthood, you’ve seen one Planned Parenthood,” Wilson-Domer said. “We sort of all have to independently make a decision based on our financial situation and what’s going on in our states.”
Each affiliate operates as an independent nonprofit organization that can make its own financial and administrative decisions. Similar to the landscape for abortion access after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in 2022, the availability of services for Medicaid patients at Planned Parenthood and other high-volume reproductive health clinics now largely depends on where someone lives.
The national group estimated 200 of its clinics in 24 states are at risk of closure with the cuts, and nearly all of those clinics — 90% — are in states where abortion is legal. In 12 states, approximately 75% of abortion-providing Planned Parenthood health centers are threatened. The entire organization has about 600 clinics in 48 states.
Wilson-Domer said even before the budget bill became law, the clinics limited what contraceptives they could offer after the U.S. Health and Human Services Department froze Title X funds for specific clinics that the agency said provided care to undocumented immigrants and promoted messages of diversity, equity and inclusion. The loss of that funding increased the costs of obtaining contraception such as Nexplanon from $425 to more than $1,200, and no longer made it feasible for the clinics to offer.
Two clinics in rural Ohio that did not provide abortion services will close on Aug. 1, the Planned Parenthood Southwest Ohio Region announced on Thursday. Those clinics provided contraception, cancer screenings, testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections and other wellness services.
“Our challenge isn’t just the federal lawsuit, but we’re in a state … where the state legislature pays no attention to the needs of its community,” said Nan Whaley, president and CEO of the Ohio affiliate, during a press conference on Thursday. She added that Ohio also passed a budget bill that allows the rollback of Medicaid expansion if federal support for the program drops by even 1%.
Although the affiliate’s four other clinics will remain open, they are no longer accepting or billing Medicaid for services. In an emailed statement, spokesperson Maya McKenzie said the restraining order wasn’t enough.
“For many smaller affiliates, the risk of the federal government requesting back pay if the order or an injunction expires is too great,” McKenzie said.
In a court brief filed by the U.S. Department of Justice on July 14 opposing Planned Parenthood’s request for an injunction, DOJ attorneys said, “an injunction won’t provide the certainty that Planned Parenthood wants, because the government will be able to deny (or claw back) payments if and when it ultimately succeeds.”
Some Pennsylvania clinics limited contraception options
In Pennsylvania, Planned Parenthood Keystone said it temporarily paused Medicaid billing for contraceptive devices such as IUDs, Nexplanon, and Depo Provera, among other services, while it assessed the legal risks of the new law. Instead, sliding scale fees and referrals to other providers were made. After the restraining order, CEO Melissa Reed said they resumed billing.
“That court order is set to expire soon, and the legal landscape remains uncertain,” Reed wrote in an emailed statement. “We’re hopeful for a lasting resolution, but regardless of the outcome, our focus will always be on making sure patients can continue getting the care they need.”
Elsewhere, Planned Parenthood of Western Pennsylvania said they could not share internal protocols but remained committed to protecting access to care for every patient.
Affiliates in the West, including Planned Parenthood Columbia Willamette in Oregon and Washington, said their nine health centers are providing the full scope of usual services. That includes the Ontario Health Center, which is a critical border clinic for patients in western Idaho, which has a near-total abortion ban. Christopher Coburn, the affiliate’s chief of external affairs, said they are not limiting appointments for patients covered by Medicaid either. Planned Parenthood Great Northwest, which has health centers in Idaho, Alaska, Hawaii, Indiana and Kentucky, also said it is not limiting services.
Like many others who provide family planning services, Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio CEO Wilson-Domer said the cuts to Medicaid won’t affect abortion rates, and will likely increase them further by cutting off contraception access.
“What I hope people are really thinking about is that statistic that 1 in 4 women will visit Planned Parenthood in their lifetime, and … preventative care is what’s actually being defunded here,” she said. “If the intention is to reduce abortion, this is the exact opposite of that.”
KUSD's referendum failed in February, and as the state budget process progressed, the district had a $19 million budget gap to fill. A participant at a February rally rolls out a scroll with the names of every school district that has gone to referendum since the last state budget. Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner.
Between the Wisconsin state budget providing no new general aid to schools and the Trump administration withholding federal funds, Kenosha Unified School District (KUSD) Superintendent Jeff Weiss and Chief Financial Officer Tarik Hamdan say school funding has never been so uncertain.
“We really, right now, are at a very unsure, very uncertain time, and it just makes planning extremely difficult,” Weiss told the Wisconsin Examiner in an interview.
The district leaders were among many public school advocates who for months lobbied for large investments in Wisconsin’s K-12 schools during the state budget process that wrapped up earlier this month.
Weiss said state funding for schools that has not kept pace with inflation over the past 16 years has created the difficult financial situation that Kenosha and other districts across the state are facing and are the reason so many have gone to local taxpayers through referendum to ask for more money.
A recent Wisconsin Policy Forum report found the state’s per pupil education spending has fallen below the national average. In the 2023 fiscal year, Wisconsin spent $14,882 per pupil on public education — 9.9% less than the national average of $16,526 per pupil.
KUSD sought a referendum early this year to bring in $23 million annually for five years to help the school district meet its safety improvements, staffing, curriculum, technology and major maintenance costs. The process was controversial in the community, dividing residents and even eliciting boos at a chorus concert.
The referendum failed in February, and as the state budget process progressed, the district had a $19 million budget gap to fill. In April, Weiss asked lawmakers at a public hearing to address the long-term problem so he and the district could spend less time struggling to get local taxpayers to pay more and more time on student learning and improving educational offerings.
“This is not how I want to spend our time in the school district,” Weiss said at the time.
District leaders were hoping for two main changes in the budget: an increase in the state’s share of special education costs to cover 60% and an increase to the state’s general aid to schools of $415 per pupil in year one and $430 per pupil in year two.
“Special education reimbursement at 60%… would have generated about $11 million,” Weiss said. “The additional per pupil increases would have added around $2 million, a little bit less than that, so together, these two items would have generated about $13 million of additional funding for KUSD.”
Ultimately, the bipartisan budget deal approved by lawmakers and Evers provided an increase for special education funding but no general aid increases. Evers has defended the education portions of the budget, saying it helps with school funding in a “significant way.”
“That’s a good thing, because we did exactly what the school districts were asking us to do,” Evers said.
Education advocates haven’t had the same reaction. The Wisconsin Public Education Network called on lawmakers to vote against the budget, and for Evers to veto it. Peggy Wirtz-Olsen, president of Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state’s largest teacher’s union, said the budget was “a complete betrayal of public schools” and schools could not handle the “double-blow” from federal cuts to public education and the state’s inadequate investments.
“Given the ugly truth about this budget, educators are exploring every option to force politicians to bring forward a long-term solution to Wisconsin’s school funding crisis,” Wirtz-Olsen said. “This state can’t keep shattering the foundation of our public schools and expect the professionals who teach them to pick up the pieces.”
For his part, Weiss said he was glad to see some movement from lawmakers, who agreed to raise the special education reimbursement rate to 42% in the first year and 45% in the second year of the budget — a significant jump from the current 30% and the biggest increase in over 30 years. However, the total cost picked up by the state — $207 million in year one and $297 million in year two — still falls short of what districts need.
“The fact that there was movement — I was glad to see that,” Weiss said. “Is it game changing? No, not by any means.”
The district is now trying to plan with the new budget.
District budget planning
Kenosha leaders said they are anticipating the special ed reimbursement rate will fall below the estimated levels. That’s because the pool of money for special education is finite as a “sum certain” allocation, meaning if costs for districts are higher than estimated the state won’t pay more and the percentage of those costs the state covers will go down.
“We’re expecting to get 39[%] just based on some of the historical patterns of sum certain funding,” Weiss said.
Weiss said district officials are expecting about $3 million per year in additional funding from the boost — $10 million per year less than what they initially hoped for from the state budget.
The district has already made significant cuts of about $5 million to help balance its 2025-26 budget. Staffing is the largest expense and most of the cuts came from the elimination of nearly 43 positions. Prior to seeking a referendum, the school district had already closed schools, including five elementary schools and a middle school, and made other cuts to staff and programs.
Salaries and benefits are increasing, driving up costs.
“Health insurance trends have been increasing at about 10 to 13% each year alone. The salary component, when you’re talking about inflationary increases… and movement on salary schedule just in recent times, is somewhere around 4.5%,” Hamdan said. “There’s all these factors that make budget planning… very, very difficult.”
Weiss said the district also put some items on hold, including security upgrades, staff raises and curriculum.
“As we’re able to find funding, we’ll start putting some of those [on] short term holds — trying to fund those,” Weiss said. “We know that we can’t stop buying curriculum materials or fixing our buildings or buying technology.”
Weiss said there is also some pressure on compensation from neighboring school districts, one of which recently succeeded in passing a referendum.
“How do we stay competitive with compensation for our employees?” Weiss said, adding that the state budget money will likely be used for labor costs and other items on short-term hold.
“We’re going to have to find another funding stream for that,” Weiss said. “At this point, we haven’t identified what that funding stream is, so those are some of the things that we have taken into account as we look at the budget.”
Potential property tax increase
Even with the failed referendum, Kenosha’s district leaders are concerned about how property tax changes could appear to residents. School districts will be allowed a $325 per pupil revenue limit increase each year due to a partial veto by Evers in the last budget, but there is no state funding behind it in the 2025-27 budget.
“The state is not going to pay their portion of that. It’s going to be a straight tax increase,” Hamdan said. The last state budget that established the $325 increase paid for it in part through a general aid increase.
The total state general aid to Wisconsin schools is $5.58 billion, the same as 2024. The distribution of the funds is determined by a formula that considers property valuation, student enrollment and shared costs.
The Department of Public Instruction’s July 1 estimate shows that 135 districts — or 32.1% — will get an increase, while 277 districts — or 65.8% — will lose general aid.
In comparison, in 2024 when a general aid increase was budgeted, 68.6% districts were estimated to receive more general aids, while 29.5% of districts were estimated to receive less.
Hamdan compared it to having one pizza at dinner for a family.
“The state budget determines the size of the pizza that all 421 districts are going to eat from that year. Is it a 16-inch pizza? Is it an 18-inch pizza?” Hamdan said. “Depending on how hungry each of our school districts are, some of us are going to eat a bigger portion than the others, but there’s only so much pizza available. When some of the other school districts are passing referendums to increase their spending, they’re changing their position in that formula so their hunger is getting higher. They’re allowed to eat more, and that leaves less for some of the other school districts.”
With its increasing property values, decreasing student enrollment and the failed referendum, KUSD is estimated to lose 4.55% — or about $7 million — in general aid funding for 2025-26.
The decrease doesn’t mean the district loses its ability to bring in revenue, but means the district will have to make it up via property taxes — a worry for school leaders. The school board will be responsible for approving any levy increases meant to fill the loss of state general aid and the $325 per pupil school revenue increase.
“When we lose equalization aid, that does not mean that we get $7 million less budget authority, that means that the state will pay $7 million less towards our revenue limit number,” Hamdan said. “The board then will increase tax levies to make that up and that’s what the kicker is, we end up with a tax increase bump without getting more spending authority.”
Wiess said they are worried about whether community members will understand any property tax raises and the situation schools are in.
“My concern is that the message is going to be: ‘Our taxes were raised and we voted no. What did you do?’” Weiss said. “When you have to dive into the intricacies of the state funding formula, it’s not a quick answer to explain it. It’s very concerning.”
The long-term solution
On a state level, Weiss and Hamdan said part of the issue is that state leaders have yet to address the long-term problem that schools face.
“The whole point is that the state budget doesn’t keep up with our inflationary increases, and this state budget does not do that either,” Hamdan said. “It’s not that we don’t appreciate the movement and the increases, but the point is still being missed, that there’s a problem here, and it’s not being fixed.”
Weiss said the pathway for a long-term solution can be found in the 2019 bipartisan Blue Ribbon Commission report, which included raising the special education reimbursement to 60% and adjusting per pupil funding based on inflation.
“I don’t know why it hasn’t been enacted, but that’s the type of action that’s needed at the state to fix this problem,” Weiss said. “It’s not a two-year budget cycle. It’s a long term plan. It’s not a band aid.”
Trump administration withholds money
In addition to concerns about state funding, Wisconsin school districts are facing uncertainties about federal funding as the Trump administration has pushed ahead with trying to close the U.S. Department of Education and is withholding already approved funding for programs that support English language learners, migrants, low-income children, adult learners and others.
Wisconsin gets about 8% of its funding for schools from the federal government, and over $72 million is being withheld from the state for these programs.
About $1.6 million of that is meant for Kenosha Unified School District.
“We have staff attached to those grants,” Hamdan said. Withholding the funds, he said, “causes us to front that money while we wait for this other stuff to be figured out until we can claim reimbursement on it. The uncertainty is at an all-time high in my 20-year career.”
Wisconsin has joined a multi-state lawsuit against the Trump administration.
The funds were already approved by Congress and signed into law on March 15 and are typically distributed to states by July 1. The Department of Education notified state education agencies across the country on June 30 they would be withholding the funds without any specific explanation. On July 18, the Trump administration confirmed it would release a portion of the $6.8 billion in withheld funds, worth about $1.3 billion, for after-school and summer programs.
Weiss said he thinks the district will eventually receive all the funds, but is still disappointed and worried about federal funding.
“I anticipate we’ll receive it,” Weiss said. “I don’t know when, but it does — moving forward, it makes me wonder what future budgets will look like, and well, what we will do for some of our students who have needs in those areas?”
Kenosha isn’t the only district concerned.
Madison Metropolitan School District Superintendent Joe Gotthard and Verona Area School District Superintendent Tremayne Clardy warned at a press conference on July 9 that school districts will continue to be stuck in a cycle of seeking funding through referendum.
“Although we have community support, public education, including our district, continues to feel the impact of decreased funding from the state and federal level,” Gothard said. “This defunding of public education has to stop.”
Weiss said that even with the federal and state challenges, the school district is going to continue doing “what’s right by our students” and working “to give them the best education we possibly can.”
Hamdan added that he hopes in general people understand that public education is at the core of communities.
“Whether it’s building up the next workforce or creating the citizenry in your own community, your property values and what’s going to attract your businesses, public education is at the core of every single community and it needs to be supported.”
After what felt like the end of the road for the Clean School Bus Program, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency provided an update overview, including the anticipation of additional information regarding the 2024 rebate program.
In an email Monday, the EPA reminded awardees of next steps for the rebate and grant programs, provided program oversight and compliance, and shared resources and news.
For the 2022 CSB Rebate, EPA said it completed review of most school bus projects and Close Out Forms, or COF, submitted by rebate recipients. EPA also said it is actively working with selectees to ensure accuracy and completeness. For those who have not completed their COF, the EPA is working with those selectees to ensure it is submitted in an expedited fashion.
Additionally, EPA said it is performing site visits with all 2022 CSB rebate recipients.
Meanwhile, about 50 percent of the awarded funding under the 2023 CSB rebate program has been disbursed. The EPA is encouraging all selectees to submit their payment request forms (PRF) for those projects. If the PRF has not been submitted, selectees must either submit the form as soon as possible or request an extension via the online portal.
Upon completing the PRF, rebate selectees will receive an official funds disbursement email from the EPA, with the money typically available within seven to 10 days. Once selectees receive the funds they must “email the EPA’s Office of the Chief Financial Officer (EPA-CSB-FinancialReporting@epa.gov) within 10-business days of spending their funds on eligible expenses or passing the rebate funds to a third-party to complete the purchase for eligible expenses,” the EPA stated.
When school buses are deployed and replaced, and infrastructure is installed, the EPA stated that selectees will need to submit their 2023 COF.
EPA also reminded Clean School Bus Program grant recipients of the July 30 deadline for filing semi-annual reports, which cover January through June 2025. The EPA asked that all selectees submit their progress reports to the EPA project officer.
Additional information regarding the 2024 rebate program is forthcoming, EPA said.
The EPA is also hosting various webinars through its Office of Grants and Departments that could be of interest to grant awardees as well as webinars through the Automated Standard Application for Payments.
An unpredictable H1 2025 has shaped new needs for the innovation ecosystem for more carefully curated funding that can withstand potential shocks to...
A Planned Parenthood clinic in Salt Lake City is pictured on Wednesday, July 31, 2024. (Photo by McKenzie Romero/Utah News Dispatch)
This report has been updated.
WASHINGTON — A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction Monday, blocking a provision in Republicans’ “big, beautiful” law that would have barred Medicaid funding from going to Planned Parenthood for one year.
District Court Judge Indira Talwani wrote in a 36-page opinion that Planned Parenthood established “a substantial likelihood of success on their equal protection claim” since the new law “burdens” the organization’s First Amendment rights. But she limited the protections to only certain Planned Parenthood clinics.
“A preliminary injunction maintains Planned Parenthood Members’ ability to seek Medicaid reimbursements—and maintain their status quo level of service to patients,” Talwani wrote. “And an injunction requiring Defendants to continue funding Medicaid reimbursements in accordance with the status quo imposes no additional Medicaid costs on Defendants, where there is no dispute that Medicaid funds will still be provided only for reimbursable healthcare services.”
Congress has barred federal taxpayer dollars from going to abortion services with limited exceptions for decades. But GOP lawmakers used their sweeping tax and spending cuts package to eliminate Medicaid funding from going to Planned Parenthood for other types of health care, like annual physicals and cancer screenings.
The original House version of the bill included a 10-year moratorium on Medicaid reimbursements to Planned Parenthood, but that was changed to a one-year prohibition in the Senate.
Planned Parenthood filed a lawsuit challenging the new law just days after President Donald Trump signed it during a ceremony on the Fourth of July.
Talwani, who was nominated to the bench by former President Barack Obama, issued a temporary restraining order the same day the case was filed, blocking that provision’s implementation.
The Trump administration argued against the court issuing a preliminary injunction, writing in a 58-page motion submitted last week that Planned Parenthood’s “constitutional claims are utterly meritless.”
“All three democratically elected components of the Federal Government collaborated to enact that provision consistent with their electoral mandates from the American people as to how they want their hard-earned taxpayer dollars spent,” the brief states. “But Plaintiffs—Planned Parenthood Federation of America (“PPFA”) and its members (together, “Planned Parenthood”)—now want this Court to reject that judgment and supplant duly enacted legislation with their own policy preferences.”
Talwani wrote in her ruling that it would apply to “Planned Parenthood Association of Utah and other Planned Parenthood Federation of America Members who will not provide abortion services as of October 1, 2025, or for which the total amount of Federal and State expenditures under the Medicaid program under title XIX of the Social Security Act for medical assistance furnished in fiscal year 2023 made directly to them did not exceed $800,000.”
Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts and Planned Parenthood Association of Utah — the three organizations that filed the suit — issued a written statement after the ruling that they were “disappointed that not all members were granted the necessary relief today.”
“Patients across the country should be able to go to their trusted Planned Parenthood provider for birth control, cancer screenings, and STI testing and treatment,” they wrote. “This is about patients and their right to get care — no matter their insurance. The court has not yet ruled on whether it will grant preliminary injunctive relief to other members. We remain hopeful that the court will grant this relief. There will be nothing short of a public health crisis if Planned Parenthood members are allowed to be ‘defunded.’”
The Department of Justice declined to comment whether it would appeal the preliminary injunction, though a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services said it doesn’t agree with the ruling.
“We strongly disagree with the court’s decision,” HHS Director of Communications Andrew Nixon wrote in a statement. “States should not be forced to fund organizations that have chosen political advocacy over patient care. This ruling undermines state flexibility and disregards longstanding concerns about accountability.”
The Trump administration filed a notice later Tuesday it intends to appeal the preliminary injunction to the United States Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit.
Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, speaks at a rally on Friday, March 14, 2025, in Washington, D.C, protesting the U.S. Education Department’s mass layoffs and President Donald Trump’s plans to dismantle the agency. (Photo by Shauneen Miranda/States Newsroom)
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Education has emerged as central in the struggle over control of the power of the purse in the nation’s capital.
Democrats in Congress are pushing back hard on the Trump administration’s freeze of $6.8 billion in funds for after-school programs and more at public schools, some of which open their doors a few weeks from now. California alone lost access to $939 million and every state is seeing millions of dollars frozen.
At the same time, the Supreme Court on Monday slammed the door on judicial orders that blocked the dismantling of the 45-year-old agency that Congress created and funds.
The nation’s highest court cleared the way for the administration to proceed, for now, with mass layoffs and a plan to dramatically downsize the Department of Education that President Donald Trump ordered earlier this year.
In her scathing dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that “the majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naive, but either way the threat to our Constitution’s separation of powers is grave.”
Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, wrote that the president “must take care that the laws are faithfully executed, not set out to dismantle them.”
“That basic rule undergirds our Constitution’s separation of powers,” she wrote. “Yet today, the majority rewards clear defiance of that core principle with emergency relief.”
Just a day after the Supreme Court’s decision, House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters at a Tuesday press conference that while he hasn’t had a chance to digest the Supreme Court’s order, he also knows that “since its creation, the Department of Education has been wielded by the executive branch.”
“I think that was the intent of Congress, as I understood it back then. We have a large say in that, but we’re going to coordinate that with the White House,” the Louisiana Republican said.
“If we see that the separation of powers is being breached in some way, we’ll act, but I haven’t seen that yet,” he added.
Letters from Democrats on frozen funds
Two letters from Senate and House Democrats demanding the administration release the $6.8 billion in federal funds for various education initiatives also depict the Education Department as a key part of the tussle between the executive branch and Congress.
Just a day ahead of the July 1 date when these funds are typically sent out as educators plan for the coming school year, the department informed states that it would be withholding funding for programs, including before- and after-school programs, migrant education, English-language learning and adult education and literacy, among other initiatives.
Thirty-two senators and 150 House Democrats wrote to Education Secretary Linda McMahon and Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought last week asking to immediately unfreeze those dollars they say are being withheld “illegally.”
“It is unacceptable that the administration is picking and choosing what parts of the appropriations law to follow, and you must immediately implement the entire law as Congress intended and as the oaths you swore require you to do,” the senators wrote in their letter.
The respective top Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Committee and its subcommittee overseeing Education Department funding, Sens. Patty Murray of Washington state and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, led the letter, alongside Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.
In the lower chamber, House Democrats wrote that “without these funds, schools are facing difficult and unnecessary decisions on programs for students and teachers.”
“No more excuses — follow the law and release the funding meant for our schools, teachers, and families,” they added.
Georgia’s Rep. Lucy McBath led the letter, along with the respective top Democrats on the House Committee on Education and Workforce, its subcommittee on early childhood, elementary and secondary education and its panel on higher education and workforce development: Reps. Bobby Scott of Virginia, Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon and Alma Adams of North Carolina.
Democratic attorneys general, governors file suit
Meanwhile, a coalition of 24 states and the District of Columbia sued the Trump administration on Monday over those withheld funds, again arguing that Congress has the power to direct funding.
The states suing include: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington state and Wisconsin.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, both Democrats, also signed onto the suit filed in a Rhode Island federal court.
“Not only does Congress require that Defendants make funds available for obligation to the States, Congress, in conjunction with (Education Department) regulations, also directs the timing of when those funds should be made available,” the coalition wrote.
An analysis earlier in July by New America, a left-leaning think tank, found that the top five school districts with the greatest total funding risk per pupil include those in at least two red states: Montana’s Cleveland Elementary School District, Kester Elementary School District and Grant Elementary School District, along with Oregon’s Yoncalla School District 32 and Texas’ Boles Independent School District.
The think tank notes that program finance data was not available for Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York and Wisconsin.
Child care provider Corrine Hendrickson addresses a rally in front of the state Capitol Friday demanding a re-do on the state budget to increase child care funding. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)
While Gov. Tony Evers has touted the new state budget’s child care funds as a compromise victory, some providers say they’re deeply disappointed.
“This was not a win,” said Bloomer child care provider Caitlin Mitchell at a rally outside the Capitol Friday morning organized by Wisconsin Early Childhood Action Needed (WECAN). “It was a temporary fix with long-term consequences.”
A press release from Evers’ office after he signed the budget early on July 3 said the document contains “Over $360 million to support Wisconsin’s child care industry and help lower child care costs for working families, a third of which is in direct payments to providers.”
A majority of Democratic lawmakers voted against the budget, citing shortcomings in funding for public schools as well as for child care. Assembly and Senate Democrats who voted in favor of the plan described it as a compromise.
“I really really wish that the governor and the Democrats had just admitted that this was the best that they could do and that it’s still not good,” Corrine Hendrickson, a child care provider and WECAN co-founder, told reporters at the Friday morning rally.
“Everything we’re being told about the budget absolutely does not help children in our state at all,” said WECAN’s other co-founder, Brooke Legler. “The only compromise was the children’s safety. And this isn’t OK.”
WECAN members say that the budget’s child care funding is well short of what they need, and that regulatory changes are bad for providers, families and children.
A pilot program increases Wisconsin Shares payments by up to $200 a month if providers agree to higher ratios of four children to one teacher for children 18 months or younger, and seven children to one teacher for children 18 months to 2½ years old. Wisconsin Shares subsidizes child care for low-income families.
According to Hendrickson, the ratio increase lowers the quality of care, and tying it to the subsidy program treats the poorer children differently than the rest of the children in care.
“Those children deserve to have more time and attention,” she said in her address to the rally. “Their parents are loving, their parents are caring, but their parents are stressed because they’re in poverty and that affects those kids.”
Child care providers should refuse to participate in that pilot, she said.
Another provision lowers the minimum age for an assistant child care teacher to 16 from 18, while retaining the education requirements for the position.
“Sixteen-year-olds are wonderful human beings but they are not teachers of young children,” said Hendrickson.
“Those exact same policies were presented two years ago through the normal process of creating a bill. And we as a state overwhelmingly said no,” said Legler. “It did not even make it out of committee.”
In addition to $110 million in direct payments to providers, the child care total’s other big ticket items include $123 million to increase reimbursements that providers get for children in the Wisconsin Shares subsidy program and $65 million for providers who participate in a new “school readiness” program similar to 4-year-old kindergarten.
The $110 million direct payments, which would end after the budget’s first year, amount to about one-fourth of the $480 million that Evers originally sought. His budget proposal aimed to continue the state’s Child Care Counts program, funded by federal pandemic relief money.
At its height, Child Care Counts paid out $20 million a month and was credited with helping providers boost wages for child care teachers without raising tuition for parents. Two years ago the Evers administration dialed the program back to $10 million a month to stretch out its payments. The federal funds have now run out.
So, no, tuition prices will not be lowering; in fact, they will be going up next month to cover this loss, or providers will be closing their doors, especially in rural areas.
– Letter from child care providers group WECAN to Gov. Tony Evers, criticizing the state budget's child care funding.
In a survey of child care providers earlier this year the University of Wisconsin Institute for Research on Poverty reported that about one in four said they could close without continued payments. Evers cited the survey during the spring while campaigning for his original $480 million child care proposal.
WECAN leaders sent Evers a statement Friday, calling on him to order a special session of the Legislature and seek the full amount of child care support that he originally submitted for the 2025-27 state budget.
“We’re asking Gov. Evers to finish what’s been started,” Mitchell said in her rally speech. “Temporary funding and weakened standards are not enough. We need a comprehensive long-term investment in child care.”
After the 2023-25 budget was enacted without the child care investment that Evers sought, the governor called a special session and introduced a bill that included funding for child care, education and other priorities. The Legislature’s Republican majority rewrote the bill, replacing his provisions with tax cut measures that Evers vetoed.
Hendrickson acknowledged the outcome of the special session call two years ago, but said in an interview that Evers should pursue effort anyway.
“This is the only thing that we can do to keep this in front of everybody, to keep it top of mind,” she said.
“The $110 million over the next 11 months is around 20% less than we are currently receiving,” WECAN’s letter to the governor states. “So, no, tuition prices will not be lowering; in fact, they will be going up next month to cover this loss, or providers will be closing their doors, especially in rural areas.”
The WECAN statement tells Evers that his public assertion that the child care provisions will lower costs “creates confusion and parents will blame us; disrupting our important relationship due to the distrust your words have sown.”
Legler told the Wisconsin Examiner later Friday that when the WECAN group delivered the letter and spoke with Evers’ communications director, Britt Cudaback, the conversation didn’t go well from her perspective.
“We felt very minimized, unheard and condescended to,” Legler said.
Evers’ office has not responded to requests for comment.
The National Public Radio headquarters in Washington, D.C., is pictured on Tuesday, May 27, 2025. (Photo by Jennifer Shutt/States Newsroom)
WASHINGTON — Congress has just one week left to approve the Trump administration’s request to cancel $9.4 billion in previously approved funding for public media and foreign aid, setting up yet another tight deadline for lawmakers.
The Senate must pass the bill before July 18, otherwise the White House budget office will be required to spend the funding and be barred from sending up the same proposal again for what are called rescissions.
But objections from several GOP senators could stop the legislation in its tracks, or change it substantially, requiring another House vote in a very short time frame. Rejecting the plan would represent a loss for the Trump administration after passage of the “big, beautiful” tax and spending cut law earlier this month.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., appears optimistic he can secure the votes needed to begin debate, though he hasn’t said publicly if he thinks the bill can actually pass.
“We’ll have it up on the floor next week. Hopefully, we get on it and then we’ll have an amendment process,” Thune said during a Wednesday press conference. “And kind of like a budget reconciliation bill, it’s an open amendment process, a vote-a-rama type process, which I’m sure you’re very excited about.”
JD Vance needed again?
At least 50 Republicans must agree to proceed to the legislation amid unified opposition from Democrats. Thune can only lose three GOP senators and still begin debate with Vice President JD Vance’s tie-breaking vote. Rescissions bills are exempt from the Senate’s 60-vote legislative filibuster.
After a maximum of 10 hours of debate, the Senate will begin a marathon amendment voting session that could substantially reshape the measure.
There may be enough Republican votes to completely remove the section rescinding $1.1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds the Public Broadcasting Service, National Public Radio and hundreds of local public media stations.
Senate Appropriations Chairwoman Susan Collins, Nebraska Sen. Deb Fischer, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski and South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds all brought up misgivings during a June hearing about how canceling previously approved funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would impact rural communities and emergency alerts.
Collins, R-Maine, also raised concerns about the Trump administration’s efforts to claw back previously approved funding for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, and is likely to bring an amendment to the floor on that issue, according to her office. PEPFAR is a global initiative to combat HIV/AIDS that was led by President George W. Bush.
Democrats will get to offer as many amendments as they want during the vote-a-rama and could try to remove each section of the bill one by one, forcing Republicans to weigh in publicly on numerous foreign aid programs.
The recommendation asked lawmakers to cancel $8.3 billion in foreign aid funding, including $500 million for certain global health programs at the U.S. Agency for International Development.
“This proposal would not reduce treatment but would eliminate programs that are antithetical to American interests and worsen the lives of women and children, like ‘family planning’ and ‘reproductive health,’ LGBTQI+ activities, and ‘equity’ programs,” the request states. “This rescission proposal aligns with the Administration’s efforts to eliminate wasteful USAID foreign assistance programs.”
The House voted mostly along party lines in mid-June to approve the rescissions request, but the legislation sat around the Senate for weeks as Republicans struggled to pass their “big, beautiful” law.
The Senate can vote to approve the proposal as is, change it, or let it expire, forcing the White House budget office to spend the money, which it’s been able to legally freeze since sending Congress the rescissions request.
Relations with White House
Senators’ decision will impact how Republicans in that chamber, especially Thune and those on the Appropriations Committee, work with White House budget director Russ Vought in the coming months and years.
Congress and the Trump administration must broker some sort of funding agreement before the start of the next fiscal year on Oct. 1 to stave off a shutdown.
Vought has also said he plans to send lawmakers additional rescissions requests, though he hasn’t said exactly when or what programs he’ll include.
Senate Appropriations Committee ranking member Patty Murray, D-Wash., said Thursday as the panel debated three of the full-year government funding bills that the rescissions package is not acceptable and could impede the committee’s traditionally bipartisan work.
“We need to make sure decisions about what to fund and, yes, what to rescind are made here in Congress on a bipartisan basis and within our annual funding process,” Murray said. “We cannot allow bipartisan funding bills with partisan rescission packages. It will not work. And that is why I will repeat my commitment to all of my colleagues that on this side of the dais, we stand ready to discuss rescissions as part of these bipartisan spending bills.”
A Planned Parenthood clinic in Salt Lake City, Utah, is pictured on Wednesday, July 31, 2024. (Photo by McKenzie Romero/Utah News Dispatch)
WASHINGTON — The federal government cannot withhold Medicaid funding from Planned Parenthood for at least the next two weeks, after a district court judge issued a temporary restraining order the same day the organization filed a lawsuit.
Republicans included language in their “big, beautiful bill” that would block Medicaid payments from going to Planned Parenthood for the next year, a move that would effectively prevent enrollees in the state-federal health program for lower income people from visiting any of its clinics for routine health care.
The ban began when President Donald Trump signed the bill into law on Friday.
Congress already bars federal funding from going to abortion services with limited exceptions.
The suit alleges Planned Parenthood was singled out “in order to punish them for lawful activity, namely advocating for and providing legal abortion access wholly outside the Medicaid program and without using any federal funds.”
The filing also says more than 1 million Medicaid enrollees go to Planned Parenthood in a given year and that the organization received more than one-third of its total aggregate revenue from Medicaid reimbursement during fiscal year 2023.
District Court Judge Indira Talwani’s brief two-page temporary restraining order called on the Trump administration to file a status update later this week. And she set an in-person hearing later this month to hear from Planned Parenthood and the Trump administration.
Talwani was nominated to the bench by former President Barack Obama.
The Trump administration has yet to file any documents in the case and the Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment from States Newsroom about the judge’s temporary restraining order.
Attorney General Pam Bondi indicated during a Cabinet meeting Tuesday afternoon that the Department of Justice plans to challenge the temporary restraining order.
“Absolutely, yes. We’re on it,” Bondi said.
Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts and Planned Parenthood Association of Utah — the three groups that filed the lawsuit — wrote in a statement they were “grateful that the court acted swiftly to block this unconstitutional law attacking Planned Parenthood providers and patients.
“Already, in states across the country, providers and health center staff have been forced to turn away patients who use Medicaid to get basic sexual and reproductive health care because President Trump and his backers in Congress passed a law to block them from going to Planned Parenthood. There are no other providers who can fill the gap if the ‘defunding’ of Planned Parenthood is allowed to stand. The fight is just beginning, and we look forward to our day in court.”
Representatives from top school bus and powertrain manufacturers will provide insights into the complex landscape of school bus emissions and regulatory challenges facing the industry over the next couple of years during STN EXPO West in Reno, Nevada.
Scheduled for July 13, the panel session will feature representatives from Blue Bird, Cummins, IC Bus, RIDE and Thomas Built Buses.
The panel will explore several pressing topics, including impacts of the Congressional Review Act signed by President Trump early this month, EPA Clean School Bus funding developments, the impact of an ongoing federal review of the EPA Phase 3 Greenhouse Gas regulations, supply chain considerations, workforce development for electric school buses, and more.
With ongoing legal challenges and shifting regulatory environments amid rising tariffs, school districts and transportation professionals need clarity to navigate the uncertain emissions landscape. OEMs face similar challenges. The panelists will offer as many strategic insights as they can, keeping in mind that more changes could still occur, focusing on broader industry trends and challenges.
The discussion promises to be a must-attend event for anyone involved in school transportation, offering an opportunity to hear directly from industry experts about the future of clean transportation.
Don’t miss this session and the entire STN EXPO West experience! Register now for the conference, which starts July 11 and runs through July 16 at the Peppermill Resort in Reno, Nevada.
The Senate confirmed Olivia Trusty to fill out the remaining 13 days of former Federal Communications Commission chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel’s term and join the board for a full five-year term starting July 1.
Rosenworcel resigned from the board and as FCC’s first female chair in January. She served on the board from 2012 to 2017 when she was re-confirmed for another term and then was named chairwoman.
A Democrat, Rosenworcel was a leading proponent of school bus Wi-Fi and advocated for its inclusion in E-Rate funding. Her two fellow Democrats on the board at the time cast the deciding votes in 2023 over the objection of their two Republican counterparts to extend E-Rate discounts on internet equipment, installation and service to school bus Wi-Fi.
While Wi-Fi continues to be an approved use, a case before the U.S. Supreme Court on the applicability of the Universal Service Fund could determine its future. Congressional Republicans have also signaled their intent to introduce legislation that would revisit the issue.
Meanwhile, Trusty was nominated by President Trump in January, and the Senate confirmed her by a vote of 53-45 on May 18. Trusty’s five-year term begins July 1.
Trusty joins FCC after serving as policy director for the Senate commerce, science and transportation committee. She is also a telecommunications policy analyst.
Prior to Trusty’s confirmation, the FCC was down to two commissioners. Republican Chair Brendan Carr, an FCC commissioner since 2017 and prior to that FCC’s general counsel, was confirmed as chairman in January. Carr was joined by Democrat Anna Gomez, who joined the FCC in September 2023.
Democrat Geoffrey Starks announced in January he was also resigning. His last day was June 6, the same day Republican Nathan Simington abruptly resigned. Trusty shifts the FCC to a 2-1 Republican majority.
Rosenworcel also officially retired in January, around the same time Trump tapped Trusty to replace her.
Workers moving equipment and road signs on a highway. (Getty Images)
A Rhode Island federal judge seemed likely Wednesday to block the U.S. Department of Transportation’s move to yank billions in congressional funding for bridges, roads and airport projects if Democrat-led states do not partake in federal immigration enforcement.
U.S. District Judge John James McConnell Jr. during a hearing pressed acting U.S. Attorney Sara Miron Bloom on how the Transportation Department could have power over funding that was approved by Congress, saying federal agencies “only have appropriations power given by Congress.”
“That’s how the Constitution works,” he said. “Where does the secretary get the power and authority to impose immigration conditions on transportation funding?”
The suit brought by 20 Democratic state attorneys general challenges an April directive from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, a former House member from Wisconsin, that requires states to cooperate in federal immigration enforcement in order to receive federal grants already approved by Congress.
“Defendents seek to hold hostage tens of billions of dollars of critical transportation funding in order to force the plaintiff states to become mere arms of the federal government’s immigration enforcement policies,” Delbert Tran of the California Department of Justice, who argued on behalf of the states, said.
Arguing on behalf of the Trump administration, Bloom said that Duffy’s letter simply directs the states to follow federal immigration law.
McConnell, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama in 2011, said that while the states could interpret it that way, the Trump administration has gone after so-called sanctuary cities and targeted them for not taking the same aggressive immigration enforcement as the administration.
The judge said Bloom’s argument expressed a “very different” interpretation of the directive than how the administration has described it publicly. He also noted President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have “railed on … the issues that arise from sanctuary cities.”
Trump this week directed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to target Chicago, Los Angeles and New York — three major Democrat-led cities that have policies to not aid in immigration enforcement.
McConnell said he would make a decision whether to issue a preliminary injunction before Friday. The preliminary injunction would be tailored to the states that brought the suit and would not have a nationwide effect.
The states that brought the suit are California, Illinois, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Maryland, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin.
Undermines Congress
Tran said the Department of Transportation’s directive is not only arbitrary and capricious, but undermines congressional authority because Congress appropriated more than $100 billion for transportation projects to the states.
Cutting off funding would have disastrous consequences, the states have argued.
“More cars, planes, and trains will crash, and more people will die as a result, if Defendants cut off federal funding to Plaintiff States,” according to the brief from the states.
Transportation security and immigration
Bloom defended Duffy’s letter, saying it listed actions that would impede federal law enforcement and justified withholding of funds because “such actions compromise the safety and security of the transportation systems supported by DOT financial assistance.”
McConnell said that didn’t answer his question about the secretary’s authority to withhold congressionally appropriated funding.
“It seems to me that the secretary is saying that a failure to comply with immigration conditions is relevant to the safety and security of the transportation system,” Bloom said.
McConnell seemed skeptical of that argument.
“Under that rationale, does the secretary of the Department of Transportation have the authority to impose a condition on federal highway funds that prohibit a state that has legalized abortion from seeking a federal grant?” he asked.
Bloom said that question was beyond her directive from the Department of Transportation to address in her arguments to the court.
“I understand your question,” she said. “All I think I can say is that here the secretary has, in his statement, set out a rationale for why this is relevant to DOT funding.”
Tran said that the “crux of this case is” that the Trump administration is trying “to enforce other laws that do not apply to these grants,” by requiring states to partake in immigration enforcement.
“It’s beyond their statutory authority,” he argued.
CUMBERLAND, R.I. – Blackstone Valley Prep (BVP) recently celebrated an electrifying milestone – its fleet of electric school buses surpassed 100,000 miles traveled since hitting the roads last winter. Since its introduction to the community, the new fleet of 24 electric vehicles (EV) has been met with revere and praise for their quiet nature and most importantly, the beneficial impact on the futures of their students and community.
In this major milestone for sustainable student transportation, the 100,000 miles Blackstone Valley Prep’s EV fleet has traveled is a distance that marks more than just mileage. The electric buses have prevented approximately 157,198 kgs of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere thus far, which is equivalent to taking around 33 passenger vehicles off the road for an entire year, based on conversion factors from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). As illustrated by the statistics above, it is clear that these EV school buses are creating a healthier and more sustainable future where every mile driven helps reduce harmful emissions and promotes cleaner air in their communities.
Beth Dowd, Director of Operations at Blackstone Valley Prep shared, “We’re so proud to have surpassed 100,000 miles already in the handful of months we’ve been running our electric fleet! We are deeply committed to the well-being of all of our scholars and our entire community, and these numbers are showing us that this effort will make a significant impact over time.”
“Congratulations to BVP for reaching this incredibly impactful milestone. This 100K mile achievement is a testament to the real-world impact electric school buses are having on the environment and the communities they serve,” said Wayne Skinner, Senior Vice President of Fleet & Procurement, Durham School Services. “It is crucial that we recognize these EV milestones and share progress updates and data, which can then be used to support and advocate for state and federal EV funding assistance programs. BVP’s milestone is just one of many more to come, and we hope you’ll join and support us as we continue to advocate for healthier, greener futures for our students and communities.”
About Durham School Services: As an industry-leading student transportation provider, Durham School Services is dedicated to the safety of our students and People. For more than 100 years, we have been committed to Excellence and upholding our mission of getting students to school safely, on time, and ready to learn. Through this mission and a grassroots approach to our operations, Durham School Services has earned recognition as a trusted transportation provider among our Customers and the Communities we serve.
Login
