Rachel LaCasse-Ford, right talks to Sen. Tammy Baldwin about her use of the Affordable Care Act marketplace to buy insurance during a meeting Baldwin held with small business owners and others in Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, on Sept. 25. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Matt Raboin owns Brix Cider, a farm-to-table restaurant, and brews apple cider in the Dane County village of Mount Horeb.

His wife’s full-time job with benefits provides the family with health insurance, but for Raboin, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has made an important difference for some of his employees.

“We don’t offer insurance ourselves,” Raboin said during a recent round table discussion set up by Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin). “A lot of small businesses in small towns aren’t in a financial place to do that.”

Like Raboin, some of his employees get their coverage through a spouse or because they also work another full-time job that provides benefits. But over the years, the ACA and the HealthCare.gov marketplace created under the law have been a critical source of health coverage for many of his employees, Raboin said.

Recently he polled a number of them. One memorable response came from a part-time employee who also has a part-time job with a local church. She buys her health insurance on HealthCare.gov. Thanks to an increase enacted in 2021 in tax credit subsidies, she’s been able to afford the premiums, Raboin said she told him.

“So without it, she’s like, ‘I can’t keep working for you. And I don’t think I keep working for my church. I think I have to find a different job,’” Raboin recalled.

The ACA and HealthCare.gov have made it possible for millions more Americans and thousands more Wisconsin residents to obtain health insurance.

But less visibly, the health care marketplace that the ACA created has also helped support many small businesses. If the enhanced tax credit subsidies that lowered the cost of health insurance for millions over the last three years aren’t renewed, small business owners and employees say they could be especially hard hit.

Nearly half of people who get their health insurance through the HealthCare.gov marketplace are self-employed or small business owners, or else work for small businesses, according to KFF, an independent nonprofit that researches and reports on health policy.

To expand access to health care, the ACA created the HealthCare.gov marketplace to make buying health insurance easier for people whose jobs don’t provide coverage and who don’t qualify for government programs such as Medicaid.

To make coverage more affordable, the law provides tax credit subsidies for people with incomes up to 400% of the federal poverty guideline. Those subsidies were increased in 2021 and expanded to people with higher incomes.

The enhanced subsidies will expire at the end of 2025 unless Congress extends them — driving up the cost of health insurance for millions.

The enhanced subsidy “saves more than 230,000 Wisconsinites an average of $500 every single month,” Baldwin said during a Zoom press conference Tuesday.

For Chrysa Ostenso and her late husband, the enhanced subsidies lowered their premiums from nearly $2,000 a month to about $300 a month, Ostenso said.

Ostenso lives in Ladysmith, Wisconsin, where she and her husband operated an optometry clinic for more than three decades, raising four children along the way.

“We always struggled to afford health insurance but of course we had to buy it,” Ostenso said in an interview. “As a family of four kids with a small business, you can’t go without health insurance.”

The family’s high deductible plans required them to pay $6,000 a year out of pocket before insurance would cover their health care. By 2020, when the children were grown and the health plan just covered Ostenso and her husband, they were paying $1,979 a month, she said.

They hadn’t qualified for the original ACA subsidies. When the enhanced subsidies were enacted in 2021, however, Ostenso said their premiums went down to $300 a month, increasing to $500 a month in subsequent years.

“It actually meant freedom to go to the doctor, because we were spending so much money on our premiums [previously] that we actually couldn’t afford to go to the doctor,” she said.

Standoff over extending subsidies

In the weeks leading up to Tuesday night’s federal shutdown, Democrats in Congress demanded that Republicans rescind sweeping changes to Medicaid that were part of the major tax- and spending-cuts megabill that President Donald Trump signed July 4.

They also demanded an extension of the enhanced ACA subsidies.

Baldwin has coauthored legislation that would make the enhanced subsidies permanent. She spent part of the just-concluded congressional recess traveling Wisconsin and meeting with people who expect to see their health costs go up sharply if the increased subsidies end.

During Tuesday’s press conference, Baldwin related a conversation with a  bakery owner who worried about how she and her family will afford health insurance, “but also that increased costs on the [HealthCare.gov] exchange will mean that her employees at her bakery may have to quit to work for big companies that offer insurance.”

During Baldwin’s press conference, Gigi Gastevich, an artist who owns a retail space in Stoughton, said the ACA and the enhanced subsidies had made it possible for her to launch and grow her business.

Gastevich is a 15-year cancer survivor. When starting her business, she qualified for BadgerCare — Wisconsin’s main Medicaid program — which covered the ongoing medical monitoring she requires as a cancer survivor.

In 2025, with her income above the limit for BadgerCare, she found an insurance plan on HealthCare.gov that included her existing health care professionals in its network and had an affordable deductible.

The plan’s premium was $481 a month, Gastevich said, but the enhanced subsidy  brought it down to about $100 a month.

Without the subsidy, she said, she will have to switch plans — possibly losing her long-standing group of providers if they aren’t in the network. She said her choices include taking a high-deductible plan that would put some of the regular care she’s been recommended as a cancer survivor out of reach financially; or closing down her business. 

“[That] would mean not only abandoning my dream of entrepreneurship and being a self-employed artist, but taking away an income source for the dozens of artists and artisans whose American-made work I sell here,” Gastevich said.

It would also forestall her plans to scale up her business to sell her own line of textiles and employ others. “I won’t be able to do that if my health and well-being is tied to being on an employer-based health care plan,” she added.

Uncertain future

During her tour of the state, Baldwin stopped in Mount Horeb on Thursday, Sept. 25, where she spoke with Brix owner Matt Raboin and four other business owners as well as local health care providers.

The round table took place at the Upland Hills Health Mount Horeb clinic. The urgent care clinic is part of a broader system that includes a hospital in Dodgeville and clinics in surrounding communities.

Dr. Mark Thompson, Upland Hills CEO, said system executives expect to see about $400,000 a year in additional uncompensated care based on projections of people leaving the insurance rolls because they don’t think they can afford the new ACA premiums.

Jay Goninen sat in as a board member of the Upland Hills system, but he’s also an employer for whom the ACA has made it possible to provide health benefits.

Goninen owns a business that helps connect the auto repair industry with high schools and technical schools. For the last few years, he’s opted to have employees of the firm purchase health insurance on the ACA.

The company pays a portion of the cost. Goninen likens the arrangement to a common practice of employers who offer a group health plan and split the cost with their employees.

“I do really worry about just the individual person and their ability to afford to live right now, in general,” he told Baldwin. “It is tough.”

In addition to worrying about what will happen to employees who bought coverage at HealthCare.gov if they lose their subsidies, Raboin said he’s also concerned about the broader ripple effect in the community.

“Our clients aren’t rich,” Raboin said. “Not everybody can go out to eat all the time, and if you start taking away that expendable income, that’s less people coming out to eat. So I think it would depress the whole economy.”

Rachel LaCasse-Ford owns a campground with her husband and also heads the Mount Horeb Chamber of Commerce.

“I’ve never really had a job that offers health care,” LaCasse-Ford told Baldwin. “I’ve always worked in small business, so we have always used health care from the ACA.”

The enhanced tax credits “definitely benefited” the couple, she said. “And if those go away, that will make our budgets tighter, and it will make things more challenging for us.”

With every new job, LaCasse-Ford said, she considers its impact on their health coverage and whether she can stay with a nonprofit employer such as the chamber, work for a small business, “or if I need to look for a larger employer that offers benefits.”

Former WEDC CEO Missy Hughes launched her campaign Monday to seek the Democratic nomination for Wisconsin governor. (Hughes campaign photo)

Missy Hughes, Wisconsin’s former top economic development official, says she offers a distinctive choice in the 2026 Democratic primary for governor — an effective non-politician with a strong economic track record.

“Listen, I’m not a politician. I’m different than other folks you’ve seen run for governor. That’s the point,” Hughes says in her launch video released Monday morning.

Hughes, a lawyer who served as Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. (WEDC) CEO and secretary for six years, becomes the seventh Democrat to join the field for the party’s nomination after Gov. Tony Evers announced in July that he will not seek a third term in 2026.

“I think right now, there’s a moment where we’re looking for a Democrat who understands the economy, who understands how to build the economy, who understands how to move Wisconsin forward, and so I happen to have the chance to meet that moment,” Hughes told the Wisconsin Examiner in an interview Monday. 

“As governor, I’ll create a Main Street economy that includes you and works for you,” Hughes says in the launch video. “Where we strengthen our Main Streets, make sure Wisconsinites have higher wages and housing they can afford, our families have child care and health care that doesn’t break the bank, and our public schools prepare our kids for the future.”

Hughes was an executive for 17 years at Organic Valley before Evers appointed her to lead the WEDC. In her campaign video, she says that the cooperative, which markets organic dairy products sourced from more than 1,800 farms across the U.S., topped $1 billion in revenue during her tenure.

She took the reins at the WEDC Oct. 1, 2019, where she headed Wisconsin’s negotiations with major employers expanding their operations or relocating to the state. She resigned Sept. 19, 10 days before launching her campaign.

During her tenure at the agency, “major companies like Milwaukee Tool, Microsoft, Eli Lilly, Kikkoman and more committed to invest over $10 billion and create 45,000 good-paying jobs across Wisconsin,” the Hughes campaign stated in a debut email.

Hughes also raised the department’s profile in small business and local community economic development. The WEDC oversaw many of the state’s COVID-19 relief programs, which focused heavily on small business recovery from the short but sharp economic hit brought on by the pandemic.

Among the highest profile efforts was the Main Street Bounceback, which directed $10,000 grants to more than 9,500 small businesses across Wisconsin.

The WEDC is also the lead state agency involved in Wisconsin’s successful application for federal support to establish a technology hub centered on the state’s biohealth sector.

Hughes is the second Democrat with an Evers administration background to seek the party’s nomination in the August 2026 primary. Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez was the first to enter the race, declaring her candidacy less than 24 hours after Evers announced he was not running.

Other declared hopefuls are Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, state Sen. Kelda Roys (D-Madison) and state Rep. Francesca Hong (D-Madison). Milwaukee factory worker and baseball stadium beer vendor Ryan Strnad and former state Rep. Brett Hulsey are also seeking the nomination.

Hughes told the Wisconsin Examiner that economic concerns and how she’s addressed them in her career are central to her case. 

“I think the economy is something that Wisconsinites think about day to day,” Hughes said. “No matter what, we know that folks are going to be thinking about those issues, those kitchen table issues that are really important to how they live their lives every day.”

Her campaign message that she’s “not a politician” aims to convey “that I’m in it to serve the people of Wisconsin and to support them as they go through their daily lives trying to make ends meet and have a little bit of fun at the same time,” Hughes said.

“I’m not someone who has spent a career working in politics and working to shout louder than the person standing next to me,” she said. From working with farmers to community economic development projects, “my job has always been about having economic impact and helping people to succeed.”

While centering an economic message, her campaign has also nodded broadly to themes of personal freedom and democracy that have been the foremost concerns of some voters. 

In the video, over shots of the White House and then a gleaming urban office tower, Hughes says, “I’m not going to go looking for a fight, but I’ll stand up to anyone, from the White House to Wall Street, who comes after your rights or tries to make your life harder.”

Hughes reiterated that message in the interview, adding that she  believes it’s possible to cut through political  polarization. 

“Certainly, folks are talking about what rights are on the table, how we’re interacting with each other and either supporting our rights or taking them away,” she said. 

From her home community near Viroqua in Southwestern Wisconsin to her  travels around the state, Hughes said people are yearning for greater harmony. 

“Everyone is just so exhausted by the division and the ongoing fighting and they want someone who says, ‘Let’s come to the table. Let’s find common ground,’” Hughes said. 

“I feel like there’s a complete path to victory that involves making sure that we’re building a strong economy, and at the same time, we’re bringing people together so they can talk about their differences, and they can work on projects and have an impact together.”

This report has been updated.

The offices of the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development, in Madison. The department administers the state unemployment insurance program. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)

A change to unemployment compensation that would penalize people who receive federal disability payments has made it into a draft bill to revise Wisconsin’s unemployment insurance law — despite vocal opposition from Democrats in the state Legislature.

For people who receive Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) income, the change would sharply reduce their jobless pay if they lose work. For many, it could wipe out their unemployment compensation entirely, according to Victor Forberger, a veteran unemployment insurance lawyer.

The SSDI provision is part of the agreed-upon draft legislation that was approved Wednesday by the Unemployment Insurance Advisory Council.

The council includes an equal number of management and labor representatives and was established in 1932 to give labor and management an equal voice in shaping the state’s unemployment insurance (UI) program. The council’s members negotiate and draft changes to the state’s UI laws every two years.

On Wednesday Forberger called the council’s 2025 draft bill “a terrible deal for workers.”

Less than a week ago, the Department of Workforce Development (DWD) walked back an earlier proposal to penalize SSDI recipients who apply for jobless pay. The return of a similar provision in the draft bill caught critics by surprise.

“I was pretty shocked when I heard about it this morning,” said state Rep. Christine Sinicki (D-Milwaukee), a vocal critic of the earlier proposal. “I thought it was put to rest.”

The SSDI unemployment pay ban

Since 2013, under a law enacted in then-Gov. Scott Walker’s first term, people who receive SSDI income are automatically disqualified from collecting unemployment insurance — despite the fact that many SSDI recipients hold part-time jobs and would otherwise qualify for jobless pay if they get laid off.

In July 2024 a federal judge ruled that 2013 law violated two federal laws: the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act. The ruling came in a lawsuit that a team of lawyers including Forberger filed on behalf of SSDI recipients who were denied unemployment compensation when they were thrown out of work.

This summer, the judge, William Conley, ordered DWD to stop disqualifying unemployment compensation applications simply because an applicant also receives SSDI.

In August, Conley ordered the department to reconsider the applications of people denied UI because of the ban since 2015 and to award them the jobless pay they would have qualified for without the ban. Conley also ordered DWD to repay applicants who had originally received jobless pay, then had it clawed back after the department belatedly found that they were also SSDI recipients.

Also in August, the joint labor-management advisory committee reviewed a dozen proposed changes in state unemployment insurance law requested by DWD.

One of those proposals was to repeal the 2013 state ban on unemployment pay for people on SSDI. The memo noted the court’s ruling invalidating the ban.

But that proposal also called for offsetting an SSDI recipient’s weekly unemployment pay by the weekly value of the SSDI income. The memo acknowledged that the proposal would probably eliminate unemployment compensation for most SSDI recipients who applied.

“In 2024, the average SSDI payment in Wisconsin was $1,500 per month,” the DWD proposal memo stated. “The average weekly SSDI payment for UI purposes is calculated at $346.20 per week. This weekly amount will in many cases fully reduce the UI benefit a SSDI recipient can receive.”

The memo concluded, “In summary, most SSDI claimants will not be able to receive UI benefits. While some may be able to receive UI benefits, it is expected that the weekly UI payment would be small.”

Offset proposal walked back — then returns

The proposal sparked backlash from Forberger and Democratic lawmakers. On Sept. 18, DWD submitted an amended version of the proposal to the advisory council.

The revision removed the offset provision entirely and called for simply repealing the ban on jobless pay for SSDI recipients.

The department noted in its amendment memo that the process of paying past unemployment insurance applicants under the court order had begun, and that those payments were being made without a deduction for SSDI income.

“The Department is amending its proposal to repeal the SSDI disqualification provision and remove the offset provision,” the Sept. 18 memo stated. “This will align with the effect of the court’s order that is now allowing claimants who receive SSDI to be eligible for the full amount of their weekly benefit without a reduction for any SSDI received.”

At the Unemployment Insurance Advisory Council’s meeting on Wednesday morning, the body approved a draft bill for updates to Wisconsin’s UI law on a unanimous vote.

The draft includes a repeal of the SSDI unemployment compensation ban. Despite DWD’s Sept. 18 memo, however, the draft includes language that claws back some of an SSDI recipient’s jobless pay.

“If a monthly social security disability insurance payment is issued to a claimant, the department shall reduce benefits otherwise payable to the claimant for a given week by one-half of the amount [of a] security disability insurance payment that is allocated for that week,” the draft bill states.

While the offset in the draft bill is half what the original DWD proposal called for, Forberger said Wednesday that even the 50% offset would likely mean no unemployment pay for many SSDI recipients.

Sinicki and state Sen. Kristin Dassler-Alfheim (D-Appleton) introduced a bill of their own earlier this month to repeal the ban.

“Receiving SSDI should not prevent working Wisconsinites from receiving unemployment insurance if they’re laid off,” Dassler-Alfheim told the Wisconsin Examiner on Wednesday. “That’s why Rep. Sinicki and I have proposed legislation to remove that ban from state statute, and I’m really hoping that we can see it across the finish line and put this problem to rest once and for all.”

The draft bill is the product of provisions worked out by each caucus — management and labor — in separate closed sessions. The Wisconsin Examiner contacted two senior representatives in the labor caucus of the council for comment Wednesday on the process, but received no response.

“I’m looking forward to finding out how this language got in there,” Sinicki told the Wisconsin Examiner Wednesday afternoon.

“If that language is in there, it is in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act and you know the courts have already said that. I’ve already said that,” Sinicki said. “And now they’re just going to end up right back in court with this. It makes no sense to me.”

Sinicki has long championed the advisory councils for unemployment insurance as well as for workers comp for negotiating legislation that represents the interests of both labor and management. She’s often chided Republican lawmakers who have authored and passed bills affecting either of those systems without going through the councils.

This time, “I’m struggling with it — I’ll be honest — because it is the agreed-upon bill,” Sinicki said of the unemployment insurance draft. “But first of all, as a Democrat and as somebody who prides herself in the fact that we take care of our most needy, I can’t vote for this.”

Sinicki said the legislation after it’s introduced is subject to being amended like any other bill, and that she would expect an amendment removing the offset proposal.

By tradition, the bill that comes from the advisory council is introduced under the names of the committee chair and the minority party ranking member on the Assembly’s labor committee — which is Sinicki.

Unless the draft is changed, however, “I will not be putting my name on this bill,” she said.

Megan Hufton, seen here with her sons AJ, left, and Asher, center, is education and training specialist with the Autism Society of South Central Wisconsin. (Photo courtesy of Megan Hufton)

Megan Hufton’s two sons, AJ and Asher, both have been diagnosed with autism. Neither speaks.

But she doesn’t see autism as the “horrible, horrible crisis,” President Donald Trump described at a Washington, D.C., press conference Monday. 

Nor does she agree with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who said at an April press conference that “autism destroys families” and is an “individual tragedy as well.”

Hufton said Monday that the message she hears in such statements is that “it’s going to be a horrible, horrible tragedy” if a family member is autistic. “It’s not the way I describe our family or our lives at all.”

People with autism, their family members and advocates said the messages coming from the Trump administration are harmful and wrong. 

”People with autism are being identified as [a] population of people whose existence the government seeks to prevent or change into people who are more ‘normal,’” said Beth Swedeen, executive director of the Wisconsin Board for People with Developmental Disabilities (BPDD), in a statement Monday. “Autistic Americans have the same unalienable rights as all Americans, the right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. We all find different ways to achieve these things, and it is the individual, not the government, who decides our own worth.”

“People with autism have always existed,” said BPDD Chair Sydney Badeau. “We are part of what humanity looks like, and we are amazing.”

In interviews, four Wisconsin residents with autistic family members and an adult autistic self-advocate expressed similar views.

After years in which attitudes towards autism and understanding of people with autism have been improving, “this is taking everything back,” said Heather Murray, a Waunakee child care provider whose 20-year-old son has grown up with autism.

“It’s frustrating to hear it still being called a disease,” Murray said. Autism encompasses a broad spectrum of behaviors that might come with mild or severe disabilities for some people, she said, but it’s not a disease that can be cured.

“It is a way of being,” Murray said. “It is who they are. You can’t take the autism away from them.”

Jenny Price of Madison has a 16-year-old son who is autistic. An active volunteer in advocating for Wisconsin parents whose children have disabilities, Price said she’s been paying attention to how Kennedy has talked about autism since he took office at HHS.

Kennedy has said “that autism is something to be feared, it is epidemic, it steals our children, it ruins families — which are all things we know are not true and I just find it pretty unhelpful,” Price said.

At the Monday press conference Trump and Kennedy focused on claims that linked the use of Tylenol (acetaminophen) during pregnancy to autism. Medical experts said the evidence does not support those claims.

“Current research shows an association, but it is limited and inconclusive,” said Rechelle Chaffee, executive director of Autism United of Wisconsin, based in the Milwaukee suburb of Wauwatosa. “Autism we know is not caused by a  single factor. It’s caused by multiple variables.”

In addition to being the parent of two autistic teens, Hufton is the education and training specialist for the Autism Society of South Central Wisconsin.

“Some of the strongest scientific evidence that we’ve seen shows that there is no causal link” between acetaminophen and autism, Hufton said. “We support scientific based research, but also we want to make sure that research is grounded in science, it’s grounded in compassion and respect for these individuals, and really just making sure that we’re promoting inclusion.”

Trump also made references to debunked claims linking vaccines to autism.

“We’ve studied vaccines,” Hufton said. “They’ve been studied for decades and the research doesn’t support this claim. So it definitely makes us concerned about this messaging that is once again just kind of implying that there’s this single cause of autism and the fear behind it.”

Chaffee said that while $418 million was spent in 2020 on autism research, just 8% of that went to research on improving the quality of support and services for people with autism and their families.

“That’s not a significant amount of money going to improve the lives of people,” she said. “That is a missed opportunity to say the least.”

Price doesn’t expect that to improve in the current administration.

“Are they doing research into what supports or what types of programs make the lives of people with autism better? It’s pretty clear they’re not,” Price said. “Are they going to look for ways to support kids with autism or other learning disabilities in school? No, they’re going to remove anything with the word inclusion from the Department of Education grants.”

Erin Miller, 40, is a resident of Milwaukee’s south suburbs and has lived with autism her whole life. 

“I’m really growing weary of all of the speculation around what causes it.” Miller said.

She wants to see more research on how to help people who have autism and are trying to live full lives now. Those include research on subjects that range from accommodations for autistic women in nursing homes, to research on sleep to improving education services and employment practices that recognize the needs of autistic people.

“I would like to see more practical services that improve our life today,” Miller said. 

Lumber stacked for milling in northern Wisconsin. Lawmakers are proposing state support for a plant that would turn wood debris into aviation fuel. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)

Lawmakers from northern and north-central Wisconsin are circulating a bill supporting Johnson Timber Corp. in Hayward to build a processing plant for aviation fuel made from logging debris to establish a processing plant in Wisconsin.

The legislation would reward the company with a $60 million tax credit and access to $150 million in borrowing through Wisconsin’s bonding authority.

Republican lawmakers wrote in a memo circulated Monday seeking cosponsors that the proposal would create 150 jobs and generate $1.2 billion a year in income after three years of operation.

The processing plant in Hayward would be built by Johnson Timber Corp., in partnership with a German company, Sen. Mary Felzkowski (R-Tomahawk) said at a press conference in the state Capitol Monday morning. The German partner is Synthec Fuels, according to Felzkowski’s office.

Wisconsin along with Michigan and Minnesota are all vying for the project, Felzkowski said, “and the state that helps will be the first state” to get the facility and probably the headquarters for the overall processing operation.

She said the process of converting logging waste into aviation fuel was comparable to how corn is grown for and converted into ethanol.

“We will be taking that wood product and turning it into a carbon offsetting and reduction scheme for international aviation,” Felzkowski said.

As drafted, the bill would authorize the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. (WEDC) to create a manufacturing zone for aviation biofuel derived from wood matter and to issue up to $60 million in tax credits for a business operating in the zone.

The bill requires the business to source 80% or more of the wood used from Wisconsin and invest at least $1.5 billion in the project.

The bill also provides for the business to borrow up to $150 million for the project using Wisconsin’s tax-free bonding authority.

At the press conference, lawmakers, Sawyer County officials and a timber industry representative billed legislation as a “forestry revitalization” measure.

Paper and pulp plants in Wisconsin Rapids, Park Falls and Duluth, Minnesota, have all gone out of business in the last five years, accounting for about 30% of the pulp produced by Wisconsin’s timber industry, said Henry Sheinebeck, executive director of the Great Lakes Timber Professionals Association.

“We’re growing at a minimum two times more [timber] than we’re harvesting,” Sheinebeck said.  Enabling the timber industry to cut down and make use of more trees would preserve and improve the health of forests in the state, he said.

The association and the paper industry are the joint recipients of an unrelated $1 million grant in the state 2025-27 budget to draw up a statewide forestry industry strategic plan.

Eleven Democratic senators, including Wisconsin's Tammy Baldwin, have written Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, shown here at an event in Sioux Falls, South Dakota in July. The senators' letter criticizes Carr for his comments about taking action against ABC Television in response to Jimmy Kimmel's comments about the killing of Charlie Kirk. (Joshua Haiar/South Dakota Searchlight)

Democratic senators including Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin) have written to the chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to criticize the agency’s chairman’s attacks on late night TV host Jimmy Kimmel.

ABC television, part of Disney, suspended Kimmel’s show indefinitely Wednesday after criticism of the comedian’s remarks that FCC Chair Brendan Carr made on a right-wing podcast.

On his program, “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” Monday and Tuesday, Kimmel made several comments about last week’s shooting of Charlie Kirk, including the statement that “many in MAGA land are working very hard to capitalize on the murder of Charlie Kirk.”

The Associated Press reported the suspension was announced after a group of ABC affiliates said they would not air Kimmel’s program and after Carr suggested on the Benny Johnson podcast Wednesday that the FCC was considering taking action against the network.

In a letter Thursday, 11 Democratic senators, including Baldwin, told Carr, “You proceeded to threaten that the FCC ‘can do this the easy way or the hard way,’ and telegraphed that ‘there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead’ unless ABC affiliates ‘find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel . . .’”

“It is not simply unacceptable for the FCC Chairman to threaten a media organization because he does not like the content of its programming — it violates the First Amendment that you claim to champion,” the senators wrote.

“The FCC’s role in overseeing the public airwaves does not give it the power to act as a roving press censor, targeting broadcasters based on their political commentary,” they added. “But under your leadership, the FCC is being weaponized to do precisely that.”

The letter calls Carr’s statements “a betrayal of the FCC’s mission,” suggesting that he was trying to police speech and “force broadcasters to adopt political viewpoints that you favor,” and “requiring them to act in ‘Trump’s interest’” rather than in the public interest, as called for in the Federal Communications Act.

The letter notes that Nextar — which operates 23 ABC affiliates according to the AP and has a merger pending before the FCC — announced it would take Kimmel’s show off the air. Disney then announced it was suspending Kimmel’s show indefinitely.

“This is precisely what government censorship looks like,” the senators wrote.

Carr’s comments were an about-face from a 2022 post on X, when he defended late-night comedians and political satirists and “rightly rejected government censorship as a threat to our First Amendment protections,” the senators wrote. “But as FCC Chairman, you now have apparently forgotten these principles.”

The letter demands that by Sept. 25, Carr answer three questions in writing: about the FCC’s public interest standard and its definitions of political bias; whether the agency has communicated with Disney, ABC or their affiliates about Kimmel and his show; and what he meant by “the hard way” and “the easy way” in his podcast remarks.

The letter was led by Sen. Edward Markey (D-Massachusetts). In addition to Baldwin it was signed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Washington), Ben Ray Lujan (D-New Mexico), Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Delaware), John Hickenlooper (D-Colorado), Gary Peters (D-Michigan), Jacky Rosen (D-Nevada), Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota). 

Unemployment benefits application (photo by Getty Images)

The state labor department has backed away from its controversial proposal to change state unemployment insurance law that critics say would have perpetuated discrimination against people with disabilities.

A newly amended proposal from the state Department of Workforce Development (DWD) calls for repealing Wisconsin’s ban on jobless pay for people who receive Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) income.

The proposal follows a federal court ruling that found the ban violates two federal laws protecting people with disabilities.

Until this week, however, DWD’s proposal to repeal the ban included an additional provision: While a person receiving SSDI payments would be eligible for unemployment insurance after losing a job, disability income would “offset” — cancel out — some or all of the individual’s unemployment compensation.

The SSDI proposal was one of a dozen changes to the state’s unemployment insurance law that DWD submitted to the joint labor-management Unemployment Insurance Advisory Council earlier this year. The council, a long-standing body with equal representation from business and labor, negotiates changes to the state’s unemployment insurance laws every two years.

On Thursday, DWD submitted an amended version of its SSDI proposal. The new version repeals the ban on jobless pay for SSDI recipients and omits the offset provision.

“This is wonderful news for everyone involved and for the state of Wisconsin in general, disabled or non-disabled,” said lawyer Victor Forberger.

Forberger has specialized in representing people whose unemployment insurance claims have been rejected. He was one of the lawyers who sued DWD in federal court in 2021 to overturn the state law banning jobless pay for SSDI recipients.

Jobless pay ban violates federal law

U.S. District Judge William Conley ruled in July 2024 that the jobless pay ban violated the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act.

Even after that ruling, DWD continued to deny unemployment claims made by people on SSDI. This July 14, Conley ordered DWD to stop disqualifying SSDI recipients from unemployment compensation.

In August, the judge ordered DWD to pay jobless benefits to eligible applicants who were denied because they received SSDI payments between Sept. 7, 2015 — when the SSDI-unemployment ban law was last revised — and July 30, 2025. Conley also ordered DWD to pay back people who had collected jobless pay but then ordered to pay back the money because they were on SSDI.

The federal Social Security Administration program allows and encourages disability insurance recipients to work part-time if they are able to.

During the administration of Gov. Scott Walker, however, DWD asserted in a  proposal that disability payment recipients who applied for unemployment insurance were probably “double-dipping” and committing “fraud.” The ban on unemployment pay for SSDI recipients was enacted in 2013, during Walker’s first term, and revised in 2015 during his second term.

DWD proposes unemployment insurance changes

Earlier this year DWD drafted 12 proposed revisions to Wisconsin’s unemployment insurance law for the joint labor-management Unemployment Insurance Advisory Council to consider.

The department’s SSDI proposal called for repealing the ban on jobless pay, but also called for offsetting an SSDI recipient’s unemployment compensation on the basis of the disability income.

When Forberger read the DWD proposal and saw the offset provision, he wrote about it on his blog about unemployment insurance policy and wrote to the labor caucus members of the advisory council urging them not to support it.

The offset provision was still part of DWD’s SSDI repeal recommendation when the department presented its proposals to the advisory council in August.

The offset provision surprised state Rep. Christine Sinicki (D-Milwaukee) when it came to her attention. Sinicki has often scolded lawmakers when they introduce bills to change the unemployment compensation system without sending them through the joint labor-management council.

“I’ve always been a stickler for, you vote yes on the agreed-upon bill [from the advisory council] because it was a compromise between both parties,” Sinicki told the Wisconsin Examiner on Thursday. But when she learned of the offset provision, “I made it very clear that I would not vote for any bill that had that in there.”

Sinicki along with Sen. Kristin Dassler-Alfheim (D-Appleton) have authored their own proposal to repeal the SSDI jobless pay ban after the court ordered DWD to stop enforcing it. Both said they opposed DWD’s offset proposal and that they were glad to see that the department scrapped it Thursday.

‘Discrimination. Full stop.’

“What’s happening right now is discrimination. Full stop,” Dassler-Alfheim said in a written statement to the Wisconsin Examiner. “That’s why the federal judge ruled against it, that’s why Representative Sinicki and I have proposed legislation to remove it from state statute, and I’m glad to see that DWD has put forth this amendment” removing the offset.

Three proposed budgets from Gov. Tony Evers included recommendations to end the SSDI jobless pay ban, but with an offset provision as well. Those largely went unnoticed at the time, and were removed along with hundreds of other Evers proposals by the Republican leaders of the Joint Finance Committee during budget deliberations.

It wasn’t clear Thursday what prompted DWD to remove the offset provision from its latest proposal. The department memo to the joint advisory council said that it was already complying with Conley’s order to process benefit claims for SSDI recipients and would do so for previously-denied claims without an offset.

Amending its proposed change in the law to remove the offset provision “will align with the effect of the court’s order that is now allowing claimants who receive SSDI to be eligible for the full amount of their weekly benefit without a reduction for any SSDI received,” the memo states.

Sinicki said that while she was outspoken about her opposition to the offset provision, she had not directly communicated that either to DWD or to members of the advisory council.

A spokesperson for Dassler-Alfheim said she also had not been in direct contact with DWD or the Evers administration about her opposition to the offset.

AFT/Wisconsin President Jon Shelton addresses union leaders from Universities of Wisconsin campuses before the group briefly attended the Board of Regents meeting Thursday. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Universities of Wisconsin faculty and staff employees seeking a voice in UW operations have gained the ears of a number of UW regents, a union leader said Thursday, and want their request for recognition put on the Board of Regents agenda in October.

In March, American Federation of Teachers/Wisconsin leaders had hoped to confront the regents with their campaign to give faculty and staff employees a voice. Their efforts to meet in person then were thwarted.

AFT/Wisconsin’s immediate aim is to gain an agreement from the regents that would enable the union and university management to “meet and confer” over compensation and working conditions for faculty and academic staff in a non-binding process.

AFT/Wisconsin President Jon Shelton said Thursday that “a lot has happened” to advance the union’s goals since the March demonstration.

“We’ve started to have some really productive conversations with a number of individual regents,” Shelton told the Wisconsin Examiner just before a rally outside the University of Wisconsin-Madison building where the regents were meeting Thursday.

“We’d really like to see a meet-and-confer policy on the agenda in the Board of Regents’ October meeting,” said Shelton, a professor at the UW-Green Bay. “We’ve communicated that to the Board of Regents and feel like we’re really making progress.”

The rally preceded a silent demonstration at the start of the regents’ meeting Thursday in the Gordon Dining and Event Center on the UW-Madison campus.

A couple of dozen union members and supporters took seats in the meeting room in the 20 minutes or so before the meeting started at 1 p.m. They sat silently during the opening remarks, which started with an admonition from Board President Amy Bogost that any disruption “will be handled swiftly with responsible individuals subject to disciplinary action and/or citations for the disruption.”

At about 2 minutes into the meeting, the union group stood and silently walked out when Universities of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman spoke to address the regents.

The campaign for union recognition took shape two years ago at a summit by faculty and campus advocates seeking “to do something about the diminishing conditions in the education system,” Shelton said at the rally before the meeting.

“And one of the things that we decided to do that day was to push for union recognition in the education system,” he said. “And for too long our voices as workers had been ignored by administration after administration after administration on campuses across the education system.”

A university system spokesman said Thursday that campuses rely on shared governance for faculty and staff input.

“Leadership at our universities and at the Universities of Wisconsin Administration meet regularly with shared governance groups to consult on a wide range of matters,” said Mark Pitsch, director of media relations for the Universities of Wisconsin. “These shared governance groups are authorized by state statute and regent policy as the official, elected bodies to represent faculty and staff.”

Campus union leaders contend, however, the shared governance system is ineffectual.

Speaking at the rally before the regents’ meeting, Lauren Gantz, an English professor at UW-Stevens Point, said there has been “very little discussion in shared governance” to work out details of a partnership with another college, and “no real concern for the working conditions of our faculty and academic staff” in the arrangement.

Gantz, who is co-president of an AFT faculty and staff union at UW-Stevens Point, said in an interview that among the top issues for faculty and staff seeking union representation was workload.

“We’ve lost a lot of personnel, both faculty and academic and university staff,” Gantz said. “We’ve had repeated discussions about the burnout conditions on our campus, and we’d like to be able to actually take some concrete steps to deal with that rather than slapping a Band-Aid on things.”

A rally speaker, Stephanie Spehar, former president of the faculty and staff union at the UW Oshkosh, said that when the university was confronted with a deficit of $18 million in 2023, “our administration did not consult with any of us workers” about how to address the deficit. “If they had done that, if we had meet and confer, I think we would have had very different outcomes,” she said.

Shelton said in an interview the union’s meet-and-confer proposal includes provisions that would require the union to demonstrate support from 35% of an individual university’s faculty and staff on a petition or a total of 500 people.

“This is not like some small minority of people who are pushing for this,” he said.

The union is asking for meet-and-confer discussion because collective bargaining is currently off limits as a result of the 2011 law known as Act 10, stripping most public employees in Wisconsin of most union rights. Although the law is now the subject of a lawsuit and a Dane County circuit court judge found it unconstitutional, the law remains in effect while the case is appealed.

The meet-and-confer is just a first step, however, Shelton told the rally. “And then next year, it’s flipping the Legislature” from a Republican majority to a Democratic one “and pushing for a collective bargaining bill in the UW system,” he said. “Because every single worker deserves to have a seat at the table and collective bargaining.”

Corrine Hendrickson rolled out her campaign Wednesday for the Democratic nomination in the state Senate 17th District. (Campaign photo courtesy of Hendrickson)

Calling affordability the top issue, child care provider and advocate Corrine Hendrickson launched her bid Wednesday to be the Democratic nominee for the state Senate’s 17th District seat in 2026.

“A lot of people are getting priced out of their homes because property taxes are too high, because our state refuses to invest in the local school districts, the local fire districts, municipalities, highways, counties — and so the local people have to absorb the cost themselves or go without the services,” Hendrickson said in an interview.

“And so communities that are doing OK are increasing their own property taxes, but it’s pricing people out of their houses,” she added. “Other communities can’t do that.”

The 17th District encompasses Crawford, Grant, Green, Iowa and LaFayette counties and the southwestern corner of Dane County. Sen. Howard Marklein (R-Spring Green) currently represents the district.

Hendrickson formally filed to run Sept. 2, but rolled out her campaign Wednesday with an announcement in a local park in her hometown of New Glarus.

Two other Democrats have announced campaigns in the district: State Rep. Jenna Jacobson (D-Oregon) and Lisa White of Potosi, a small business owner.

Hendrickson said most of the counties in the district have lost population — a symptom of unmet needs in rural Wisconsin.

“Something that we really need to look at is the infrastructure of our communities and how do we bring businesses and people back in and how do we make them vibrant again,” she said. “And we really just need to start investing — and that means fair taxation.”

It also means funding services such as quality child care, Hendrickson said, rather than saddling parents with the entire cost.

Hendrickson has been steeped in the child care issue, operating a home-based family child care business for 18 years, and founding with her friend and care provider colleague, Brooke Legler, the advocacy organization WECAN to push for more state child care funding. The name stands for Wisconsin Early Childhood Action Needed.

While the 2025-27 state budget included some direct child care funding for the first time, Hendrickson is among providers who were frustrated that the amount — $110 million for one year — fell short of the nearly $500 million that providers spent months campaigning for. After the budget was signed, she closed her child care operation at the end of August because she felt the state support wasn’t enough to sustain it.

While virtually every Democratic hopeful for the state Legislature has mentioned child care support as a talking point, Hendrickson said she brings to the subject “the personal lived experience” of a care provider.

But she said she has also gained knowledge from care providers and child care experts across the country and studied how states such as Vermont and New Mexico have begun to include broad support for child care in their state budgets.

“I have the opportunity to talk to people within the actual field and bring the ideas to them and say, ‘how does this actually work for you in your business?’” Hendrickson said.

As a candidate her agenda is broader than child care, and as an elected official, she would consult the expertise of others on public policy, she said.

“We shouldn’t have to be experts in everything,” Hendrickson said. “We should know experts in everything that we can then turn to and ask — whether they voted for us or not — like, is this a good idea? Does it solve the problem? Does it create new problems?”

Hendrickson served one term on the New Glarus school board from 2020 to 2023. She also has been involved in her community, leading Cub Scouts, active in parent-teacher organizations and building WECAN with Legler, she said.

In this photo illustration, a pharmacist holds a COVID-19 vaccine. States and clinicians are working on getting correct information on vaccines to vulnerable groups amid shifting federal guidance. (Photo illustration by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

The state health department is recommending COVID-19 vaccines for all Wisconsinites 6 months and older and authorizing pharmacies to give the vaccine without an individual prescription.

In addition, Wisconsin’s insurance regulator issued guidance to health insurance companies that the shots are to be provided without a patient co-payment.

Both department declarations were issued Tuesday following Monday’s executive order from Gov. Tony Evers to protect vaccine access.

At the Department of Health Services (DHS), Dr. Ryan Westergaard, chief medical officer and state epidemiologist for communicable diseases, issued a standing medical order recommending the vaccine for all eligible Wisconsin residents this fall. With the order, no prescription is needed, DHS said.

The health department said its recommendation for the vaccine follows guidance from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the American Academy of Family Physicians.

States, public health organizations and agencies have been stepping in to recommend the vaccines for COVID-19 and for other communicable diseases following a shift at the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) away from vaccine recommendations under the administration of President Donald Trump and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Kennedy, who has long embraced anti-vaccine views, has replaced the members of a CDC committee on vaccination with vaccine skeptics, and the body is expected to consider softening or eliminating some recommendations for the COVID-19 vaccine and some childhood immunizations. 

The Food and Drug Administration has narrowed its recommendations for the COVID-19 vaccine to people 65 or older, while public health advocates have called for maintaining the vaccine schedule for all ages.

The DHS order states it “is also intended to authorize vaccination for other groups for whom professional society guidance supports vaccination — such as children, adolescents, pregnant people, and healthy adults under 65 — even though these uses are considered ‘offlabel.’”

“Everyone in Wisconsin should be able to make the choice to protect themselves and their families against COVID-19, and that choice should be based on the best available science and medical recommendations,” DHS Secretary Kirsten Johnson said in a department statement. “As the federal government limits access to the vaccine, we want to reassure Wisconsinites that recommendations from our nation’s leading medical associations are clear, and we will work every day to support access to care and resources to help families make the best decisions on how to protect themselves from illness and disease.”

The Office of the Commissioner of Insurance (OCI) said in a bulletin that based on “the evidence-based guidance” from DHS and state laws against discrimination in insurance coverage, “the commissioner continues to expect that all governmental self-funded and fully insured group health plans and individual health plans will cover, without cost sharing, all costs associated with administration of COVID-19 vaccinations for all policyholders.”

University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Lingjun Li, left, and Ph.D. candidate Lauren Fields show off some of the crabs used in Fields' research project on how neuropeptides relate to feeding. The NIH, which funded the project, canceled it in April. (Photo courtesy of Lingjun Li)

Lauren Fields was less than four months into a research project funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) when she got an email message from her program officer at the federal agency.

A doctoral candidate in chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Fields has been studying the biochemistry involved in the feeding process of  a common crab species. She and her faculty supervisor believe the project can shed new light on problems such as diabetes and obesity in human beings.

The two-year research project started in early January 2025. But the April NIH message told Fields the funding was being cut off. It didn’t explain why.

“It just said changes to NIH/HSS policies and priorities,” Fields says. NIH operates under the umbrella of the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Fields contacted her program officer on April 9. “I tried to kind of probe further with my program officer and I didn’t get any further than that,” she says.

She and her project supervisor have a working hypothesis, however. Fields’ project was funded under an NIH program to ensure that more researchers come from backgrounds that have been historically under-represented and underserved. She won the award as a native of Appalachia and a first-generation college student. 

This past spring, that program was quietly shelved after an executive order from President Donald Trump on his first day in office put an end to all federal programs involving diversity, equity and inclusion.

Trump’s order called such efforts “radical and wasteful.” But Fields’ supervisor, UW Professor Lingjun Li, says measures to broaden the field of researchers can help ensure higher quality and more useful research findings.

“We believe that different, diverse backgrounds can actually bring unique and different perspectives to make our research enterprise better and stronger,” says Li. Li is on the faculty at the UW School of Pharmacy as well as at the Chemistry Department in the UW-Madison School of Letters and Science.

Feeding crabs to understand human biochemistry

Fields’ project examines the feeding behavior and process in the Jonah Crab, widespread in the coastal waters of North America. She wants to know how neuropeptides — molecules that send signals through the nervous system —  prompt them to start and stop feeding.

“Crabs actually have one of the most well characterized systems to understand feeding behavior in the animal kingdom,” Fields says. That’s why UW has been making use of the species in its research.

Fields says research such as hers is directly relevant for human conditions that relate to eating — “anorexia, obesity, diabetes — conditions like that.”

For example, the medication semaglutide, which includes the high-profile brand Ozempic and is used for diabetes control and to curb obesity, is understood to work by mimicking the neuropeptides involved in the human feeding process.

Thanks to similarities between the neurotransmitters in crabs and the neurotransmitters in mammals, researchers can use what they learn “from our humble crabs to understand feeding behavior in higher order organisms,” she says — including people.

The project as it was designed also made it possible for Fields to track the entire research process instead of it being spread out through several different labs. That’s not always possible, she says.

“So I do feed the crabs,” Fields says. “I do dissect the crabs and prepare the samples from the tissue and all the way through.”

She records mass spectrometer readings that produce relevant information about the neuropeptides at the center of her research, then analyzes the data at the end to make sense of the whole feeding process.

A personal connection

Fields feels a personal connection to the research because of where she grew up. “Appalachia has historically higher rates of diabetes and heart disease, also mental health disorders, and it’s also been kind of really impacted by the opioid epidemic,” she says. “These are things that I grew up with, that’s a very real part of my everyday experience.”

And that background “is something that I keep in the back of my head,” Fields says. “Even on a hard day, it tells me what I’m working towards is helping the people back home overcome these types of things and have new alternative solutions that are maybe more affordable.”

Fields’ project was funded through an NIH fellowship program known as F-31,  directed at pre-Ph.D. researchers, and a specific category within that program set aside as diversity awards.

According to a now-expired NIH description, the F31 Diversity awards were made “to enhance the diversity of the health-related research workforce by supporting the research training of predoctoral students from diverse backgrounds including those from groups that are underrepresented in the biomedical, behavioral, or clinical research workforce.”

In her own research field, examining Alzheimer’s disease, Li says there’s “abundant evidence”  that the condition affects different ethnic groups differently — both in the outcomes it produces and in the biomarkers that are used to track the progression of the illness in a patient.

“The intention is to really help to address some systematic inequities in biomedical research,” Li says.

A more diverse research workforce can elevate the importance of considering a more diverse group of patients, helping researchers “really get a full understanding of the disease,” she says. “And there’s a lot of talk about precision medicine, personalized medicine and certain types of treatment that will be more effective to certain populations than others.”

Fields says that to qualify for the diversity research grant, “you have to jump through several hoops to really illustrate to them that you are somebody that has faced challenges that would warrant the diversity fellowship.”

But the academic qualifications are no less rigorous than what the regular F-31 grants require, she adds. Fields first applied in December 2023 and went through the process of refining the application before it was finally approved. The funding officially began in January 2025.  

“You have to be in the very strict, top percentage of the applications that were submitted to even get funded,” Fields says. The sudden decision to cut her project short leaves “a message that has been kind of hard to swallow.”

A short-term reprieve

Fields did get a short-term consolation: While the project was canceled in April, she was told her funding for the current calendar year, $37,165, remained intact through December. But she was also told that the funds “can be terminated even earlier, which fortunately has not happened,” she says.

She has been able to continue the project, but she’s also had to accelerate it considerably.

“It’s now, OK, we need to hurry up and do the research with the time that we’re allotted,” Fields says — even as she has to watch over her shoulder in case the money is cut off sooner. “You have to move as fast as you can, or as efficiently as you can, because you don’t know when the rug is going to be pulled out from under you.”

The prospect of other funding to make up for the second year loss, also $37,165, is unlikely.

“That was a conversation that we’ve had several times along the way,” says Fields. “When I found out that it was terminated [NIH officials] said, ‘Oh we would love to help you apply for other opportunities,’” she recalls.

Considering how much time elapsed between her original application and the grant’s arrival, however, “it’s a little tricky,” Fields adds. “I think they were really just trying to be supportive, but at the same time, not super practical.”

Private funding seems an unlikely prospect, Fields and Li say, with competition escalating while federal options are being curtailed.

“Research funding in general is a lot more difficult to get,” says Li. “It’s pretty hard to find replacement funding right away.”

In the meantime, Fields’ next step is to seek a post-doctoral fellowship — a task made more challenging because of widespread academic hiring freezes prompted in the wake of federal research funding cancellations.

She still has her eye on a career in academia, where she hopes to pursue research on personalized medicine for people in Appalachia.

Li says Fields is far from alone in her experience. Some colleagues across the country who were awarded fellowships through the diversity program saw their awards canceled “either right before or just a couple of months after when they started,” Li says, and their projects have ended before they even started.

“There are quite a few people. A range of research groups and programs are being affected,” Li says. “This could have even a longer-term impact on our country’s biomedical research.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Our time to stand up’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

High-speed memories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting Republicans on board

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DWD proposal could blunt ruling’s impact

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a statement Tuesday, DWD defended the proposal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Encouraged by conversations’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Avoiding the ‘cliff’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If coverage declines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obamacare and HealthCare.gov

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Program improvements, record enrollments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Navigator cutbacks, mega-bill changes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next: The threat to coverage and widespread consequences

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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