For over a decade, Wisconsin has heard the same message from Republicans regarding full Medicaid expansion: Accepting 90% federal reimbursement to cover more low-income people will only set Wisconsin up for failure if the federal government abandons its part of the deal.
At first glance, President Donald Trump’s recently signed big bill appears to validate that argument. The 40 states that have fully expanded are now expected to lose billions of dollars in federal aid while getting tagged with additional administrative costs to create work requirements and eligibility assessments required in the bill.
But it turns out Wisconsin is still going to be subject to the new federal mandates without the higher federal reimbursement rate that expansion states will continue to receive. In other words, at a time when the Republican-controlled federal government is supposedly pulling out the rug from expansion states, Wisconsin is still left holding the bag.
A look back
Back in 2014, then-Gov. Scott Walker and Wisconsin Republicans made the controversial decision not to accept full Medicaid expansion.
At the time, Walker explained his goal “is to get more people out into the workplace, more people covered when it comes to health care and fewer people dependent on the government, not because we’ve kicked them out, but we’ve empowered them to take control of their own destiny.”
But he also argued that the federal government would eventually pull back on its commitment to fund Medicaid at 90%.
“That commitment is not going to be there and taxpayers all across America will be on the hook,” Walker said. “They are not going to be on the hook in Wisconsin.”
At the time, Wisconsin was one of 25 states not accepting expansion. Now, the state is one of the 10 remaining holdouts, with most of the others in the deep red South. Even reliably red states, like Arkansas and Louisiana, have accepted full expansion.
Instead of accepting full expansion, Wisconsin chose to cover individuals through BadgerCare, the state’s Medicaid-supported health insurance program for low-income residents set up by former Gov. Tommy Thompson, a Republican.
Walker and Republicans lowered Medicaid coverage to 100% of the federal poverty line from the previous 200% and eliminated the waiting list for childless adults. Those above the poverty line without employer-sponsored insurance could purchase it through the Affordable Care Act marketplace using federal subsidies, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum.
But Wisconsin taxpayers are paying more to cover individuals below the poverty line: 39.3% of costs rather than 10% under full Medicaid expansion. In 2023, Medicaid accounted for 15.7% of state taxpayer spending, according to the policy forum.
Under its approach, Wisconsin doesn’t have an eligibility gap like some states, something Republicans highlight as a reason the state doesn’t need to expand.
But that has come with a loss of federal funds. Over the past decade, Wisconsin’s Department of Health Services estimates, the state has spent about $2.6 billion more to cover the costs of a partial expansion compared with the projected cost under a federal expansion.
Under an expansion, more individuals would be able to access Medicaid. But the Wisconsin Policy Forum found it would have a somewhat modest impact on coverage levels — the percentage change in Medicaid enrollees would be 7.2%, compared with nearly 30% or more in other non-expansion states.
Work requirements still in effect under Trump bill
With the recent federal bill, Walker and other Republicans still argue Wisconsin was right not to accept federal expansion. The state is going to experience the impacts to a lesser extent than fully expanded states.
But because Wisconsin receives federal waivers for its Medicaid program, the state is still subject to some provisions under the new law, including the work requirements, eligibility determinations and provider taxes.
Under the new work requirements, individuals covered by Medicaid are required to prove they are working 80 hours per month — parents with dependent children or people who are medically frail are exempted.
As a result, some 230,000 Wisconsin residents could lose coverage while the state incurs administrative costs to account for the new requirements, according to an estimate from U.S. Senate Democrats based on data from the Congressional Budget Office.
The work requirements don’t stop at individuals covered by Medicaid alone; it also extends to coverage through marketplace subsidies, affecting over 200,000 Wisconsin residents.
Work requirements used to be required for Wisconsin residents to access coverage through federal waivers, but in 2021 then-President Joe Biden removed the work requirement.
The labor force participation rate has dipped from about 68% in 2017 to a little over 65% as of May 2025 but has remained higher than the national average, which is about 62%. Some reports suggest that decline is due to the aging workforce in the state.
Work requirements have also been found to increase the uninsured rate.
The Wisconsin Policy Forum reports that one of the main reasons work requirements may lead to higher uninsured rates is that they are confusing and time-consuming. Some people may choose to get rid of coverage altogether to avoid unnecessary paperwork.
What could happen with the federal bill?
The Kaiser Family Foundation also found that implementing work requirements will be costly for states, costing anywhere from $10 million to over $270 million, depending on the size of the state. DHS estimates the state will pay $6 million annually to implement work requirements, while receiving a lower federal match rate than fully expanded states to reimburse for administrative costs.
With a lower federal match rate, Wisconsin has increased Medicaid funding through hospital taxes, which the new state budget just increased from 1.8% to the federal maximum of 6% for the 2025-27 biennium budget.
Republican lawmakers in the state were quick to approve the hospital tax increase, despite their previous opposition to Medicaid expansion as a means for drawing down additional federal funding. If they hadn’t, the state’s 1.8% tax would have been frozen under Trump’s big bill. The increase will raise some $1 billion more annually in federal matching funds that the state can use to pay hospitals for care they provide Medicaid patients.
States that expanded will not lose the 90% federal match rate, but those like Wisconsin that didn’t will now miss out on an additional incentive to expand created during the Biden administration.
The incentive would have raised the federal match rate to 95% for two years, but was eliminated by Trump’s big bill. Instead Wisconsin will remain at about 60% reimbursement, while still facing the same bureaucratic requirements as expansion states.
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Child care provider Corrine Hendrickson addresses a rally in front of the state Capitol Friday demanding a re-do on the state budget to increase child care funding. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)
While Gov. Tony Evers has touted the new state budget’s child care funds as a compromise victory, some providers say they’re deeply disappointed.
“This was not a win,” said Bloomer child care provider Caitlin Mitchell at a rally outside the Capitol Friday morning organized by Wisconsin Early Childhood Action Needed (WECAN). “It was a temporary fix with long-term consequences.”
A press release from Evers’ office after he signed the budget early on July 3 said the document contains “Over $360 million to support Wisconsin’s child care industry and help lower child care costs for working families, a third of which is in direct payments to providers.”
A majority of Democratic lawmakers voted against the budget, citing shortcomings in funding for public schools as well as for child care. Assembly and Senate Democrats who voted in favor of the plan described it as a compromise.
“I really really wish that the governor and the Democrats had just admitted that this was the best that they could do and that it’s still not good,” Corrine Hendrickson, a child care provider and WECAN co-founder, told reporters at the Friday morning rally.
“Everything we’re being told about the budget absolutely does not help children in our state at all,” said WECAN’s other co-founder, Brooke Legler. “The only compromise was the children’s safety. And this isn’t OK.”
WECAN members say that the budget’s child care funding is well short of what they need, and that regulatory changes are bad for providers, families and children.
A pilot program increases Wisconsin Shares payments by up to $200 a month if providers agree to higher ratios of four children to one teacher for children 18 months or younger, and seven children to one teacher for children 18 months to 2½ years old. Wisconsin Shares subsidizes child care for low-income families.
According to Hendrickson, the ratio increase lowers the quality of care, and tying it to the subsidy program treats the poorer children differently than the rest of the children in care.
“Those children deserve to have more time and attention,” she said in her address to the rally. “Their parents are loving, their parents are caring, but their parents are stressed because they’re in poverty and that affects those kids.”
Child care providers should refuse to participate in that pilot, she said.
Another provision lowers the minimum age for an assistant child care teacher to 16 from 18, while retaining the education requirements for the position.
“Sixteen-year-olds are wonderful human beings but they are not teachers of young children,” said Hendrickson.
“Those exact same policies were presented two years ago through the normal process of creating a bill. And we as a state overwhelmingly said no,” said Legler. “It did not even make it out of committee.”
In addition to $110 million in direct payments to providers, the child care total’s other big ticket items include $123 million to increase reimbursements that providers get for children in the Wisconsin Shares subsidy program and $65 million for providers who participate in a new “school readiness” program similar to 4-year-old kindergarten.
The $110 million direct payments, which would end after the budget’s first year, amount to about one-fourth of the $480 million that Evers originally sought. His budget proposal aimed to continue the state’s Child Care Counts program, funded by federal pandemic relief money.
At its height, Child Care Counts paid out $20 million a month and was credited with helping providers boost wages for child care teachers without raising tuition for parents. Two years ago the Evers administration dialed the program back to $10 million a month to stretch out its payments. The federal funds have now run out.
So, no, tuition prices will not be lowering; in fact, they will be going up next month to cover this loss, or providers will be closing their doors, especially in rural areas.
– Letter from child care providers group WECAN to Gov. Tony Evers, criticizing the state budget's child care funding.
In a survey of child care providers earlier this year the University of Wisconsin Institute for Research on Poverty reported that about one in four said they could close without continued payments. Evers cited the survey during the spring while campaigning for his original $480 million child care proposal.
WECAN leaders sent Evers a statement Friday, calling on him to order a special session of the Legislature and seek the full amount of child care support that he originally submitted for the 2025-27 state budget.
“We’re asking Gov. Evers to finish what’s been started,” Mitchell said in her rally speech. “Temporary funding and weakened standards are not enough. We need a comprehensive long-term investment in child care.”
After the 2023-25 budget was enacted without the child care investment that Evers sought, the governor called a special session and introduced a bill that included funding for child care, education and other priorities. The Legislature’s Republican majority rewrote the bill, replacing his provisions with tax cut measures that Evers vetoed.
Hendrickson acknowledged the outcome of the special session call two years ago, but said in an interview that Evers should pursue effort anyway.
“This is the only thing that we can do to keep this in front of everybody, to keep it top of mind,” she said.
“The $110 million over the next 11 months is around 20% less than we are currently receiving,” WECAN’s letter to the governor states. “So, no, tuition prices will not be lowering; in fact, they will be going up next month to cover this loss, or providers will be closing their doors, especially in rural areas.”
The WECAN statement tells Evers that his public assertion that the child care provisions will lower costs “creates confusion and parents will blame us; disrupting our important relationship due to the distrust your words have sown.”
Legler told the Wisconsin Examiner later Friday that when the WECAN group delivered the letter and spoke with Evers’ communications director, Britt Cudaback, the conversation didn’t go well from her perspective.
“We felt very minimized, unheard and condescended to,” Legler said.
Evers’ office has not responded to requests for comment.
Gov. Tony Evers signed the budget, now 2025 Wisconsin Act 15, at 1:32 a.m. in his office Thursday, less than an hour after the Assembly passed it. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)
The budget that Gov. Tony Evers recently signed was a missed opportunity for Wisconsin. It’s also a cautionary tale about the consequences of a Democratic leadership style that cedes power and demobilizes the public in the face of an increasingly authoritarian opponent.
Protesters in Milwaukee march as part of the No Kings Day protests nationwide. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)
During the budget process, Wisconsin Democrats had more leverage than they have had since the 2000s, holding the governorship and, due to fairer maps and GOP divisions, the deciding votes in the state Senate. Combined with an unusual state budget surplus made possible by Biden-era policies, and the striking unpopularity of the GOP’s budget stands on the big issues, this was a golden opportunity to start to undo the damage wrought by Republicans during the administration of former Gov. Scott Walker. This budget could have begun to reverse Wisconsin’s long term disinvestment in public education and local government services, expand BadgerCare, start to address the affordability crisis in child care, housing, home energy, and health care, and build a buffer against a coming tsunami of slashing cuts from President Donald Trump’s Big Ugly Bill.
But rather than marshalling all the power at his disposal to achieve progress on at least some of these objectives, the governor gave away his leverage by not bringing Senate Democrats into negotiations until the very end, and then signing off on a concessionary bargain without a public fight, even whipping Democratic votes to support the disappointing deal.
Despite improved leverage, Evers followed the script of his first three budgets. In 2019, facing a gerrymandered supermajority, Evers appeared to have a fighting spirit. I was there with dozens of Citizen Action members when he seemed to throw down the gauntlet, memorably declaring days after Republicans removed BadgerCare Expansion from the budget: “I’m going to fight like hell.” Democratic legislators and advocacy groups were blindsided when he suddenly backed down.
The governor and his team are spinning the latest deal as the kind of bipartisan compromise necessary under divided rule in a purple state, hoping that voters will not read the fine print. Republicans were right to brag during the floor debate that the one-sided deal was much closer to their priorities than the ultra moderate blueprint Evers proposed.
Evers also rewards his opposition for the damage they are willing to inflict on the body politic, wrapping appeasement in the tinsel of a mythic bipartisanship which borders on delusional in the face of an increasingly authoritarian GOP.
Child care providers and parents listen to speakers at a Wisconsin State Capitol rally on Wednesday, April 16, 2025. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)
The budget lowlights include the first $0 increase in general school aid in decades. (after inflation, that amounts to a real dollar cut in state support for public schools contrasted with yet another large increase for unaccountable voucher schools); a cut in support for child care in the midst of an affordability and access crisis; a $0 increase for mass transit at a time the state’s largest transit system is facing service cuts; and $1.5 billion on regressive tax giveaway which, according to a Kids Forward analysis of the original legislation, funnels nearly 60% of the benefit to the wealthiest households, and a miniscule proportion to Black and Latino families. It contains a huge giveaway to the hospital industry, the Capitol’s most powerful lobby, with no requirements to reduce cost and increase access for patients, or keep facilities open in underserved areas, while missing yet another opportunity to expand BadgerCare in the last year Wisconsin can secure the full financial benefit of 95% federal funding.
After Evers’ second budget surrender in 2021, I wrote a column for the Wisconsin Examiner arguing that hand-wringing over the leadership of establishment Democrats like Evers is counterproductive because it deflects responsibilities away from grassroots progressives for not building enough power to force their hand. As Shakespeare put it in Julius Caesar: “The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
Joyce Frohn speaks to Wisconsin Poor People’s Campaign activists about her family’s need for continued Medicaid coverage. (Erik Gunn | Wisconsin Examiner)
This year, the reaction from the organized grassroots was dramatically different. For the first time organizing groups and education unions, representing tens of thousands of Wisconsinites, publicly campaigned for the governor to fight by wielding his potent veto power and appealing over the heads of the Legislature to the public. As Ruth Conniff reported for the Wisconsin Examiner, at a joint lobby day in late May a raucous crowd filled the hallway at the State Capitol leading to the governor’s office to deliver a letter demanding that he veto any budget that did not meet minimum standards on education, health care, child care and criminal justice. In the weeks leading up to the deal, grassroots leaders kept the pressure on.
The governor’s concessionary bargain also divided his own party. Dozens of rank and file Democrats at the party convention wore stickers urging Evers to veto a bad budget. A striking number of progressive state legislators spoke out against the budget deal, and despite the administration using the power and resources of the governor’s office to whip votes, 80% of Democratic legislators rejected a budget Evers touts as a victory.
The reaction against Evers’ refusal to fight is parallel to the growing frustration with the failure of national Democratic leaders to adjust their leadership to the authoritarian situation. The critique of establishment Democrats focuses on two dimensions: their willingness to cede power to authoritarians, and their lack of appreciation of the increasingly important role of mass public organization and mobilization as traditional inside levers of power lose their effectiveness.
The Republicans began shredding the 20th century governing norms well before the rise of Trump. The national GOP has steadily devolved from the conservatism of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan to the Newt Gingrich insurgency, the Tea Party, Mitch McConnell’s power grabs during the administration of President Barack Obama, and finally MAGA, into an authoritarian populist movement seeking to totalize its grip on power by erasing what remains of the checks and balances of the liberal constitutional order.
Wisconsin’s GOP has followed a parallel path towards authoritarianism, including voter suppression laws targeting Democratic constituencies, the scuttling of settled law by a former Republican-backed majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court to legally sanitize Walker’s gross violations of campaign finance laws, a lame duck session stripping Evers of powers, and the unprecedented refusal to confirm the governor’s appointments to cabinet positions and state boards so they can be fired at will by the Legislature. Wisconsin did not meet the accepted political science definitions of democracy in its lawmaking branch of government from 2012-2024 because of a partisan gerrymander so severe that, as in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, one party was guaranteed victory.
In the face of the onslaught in the second Trump administration, establishment Democrats at the national level are violating historian Timothy Snyder’s well-known first lesson in fighting authoritarianism: Do not freely cede power by obeying in advance. Emblematic was Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s decision to supply the votes needed to keep the government open. Schumer ratified many of Trump’s illegal cancellations of programs without the consent of Congress, arguing that in a shutdown he would have even more power to ransack federal agencies. In effect, Trump and his allies took the government hostage, reaping the rewards of their own lawlessness.
Evers also rewards his opposition for the damage they are willing to inflict on the body politic, wrapping appeasement in the tinsel of a mythic bipartisanship which borders on delusional in the face of an increasingly authoritarian GOP. Evers has long argued that using his power to veto a bad budget, or force an impasse to mobilize public opposition, would empower Republicans to do worse damage by “going back to base.” The “base,” in Wisconsin budget-ese, is the last state budget, which would, factoring inflation, constitute a massive cut in all state programs. By Evers’ logic, a bad deal is better than no deal.
Thousands of protesters gathered at the Wisconsin State Capitol to protest President Donald Trump. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)
The second lesson in an authoritarian situation violated by the likes of Schumer and Evers is the necessity of empowering mass mobilization. There is an overwhelming consensus among democracy scholars that resistance to authoritarians requires the large-scale and sustained marshalling of the power of the public. An impressive body of political science research documents that large scale peaceful nonviolent resistance movements are the most effective vehicles for overturning authoritarian regimes.
This populist orientation is not entirely new. In the early 20th century Wisconsin’s progressive Gov. Fighting Bob La Follette and Progressive Era presidents mobilized the public to break the stranglehold of the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age, winning the power to enact major reform.
The lesson also applies to the liminal status of the U.S., somewhere between healthy democracy and autocracy, where traditional levers of power are losing their effectiveness, and large-scale popular resistance is an essential power to slow and ultimately reverse the authoritarian advance.
In this light, the problem with Evers’ approach to governing is that by making it entirely an inside game of bargaining with the Legislature, he freely gives away power, cutting out civil society groups that want to mobilize on behalf of his agenda and denying the public clear rallying points for exerting pressure on the process. This leadership style also erodes democracy by failing to deliver for average people, building an audience for authoritarian scapegoating of marginalized people and fake solutions.
If Evers had established a clear bottom line in the budget process on popular issues like public education and health care, and used both his veto power and the need for Democratic votes in the Senate to block a budget that did not include them, then he would have been in a position to work with grassroots groups and use his bully pulpit to rally public opinion against his opponents ahead of an election where control of the Legislature is in play, exerting tremendous pressure. Instead the public is left with no clear understanding of why they still can’t afford health care and child care, and why more schools are closing or cutting vital academic programs, as property taxes skyrocket to pay for less and less.
Despite these catastrophic failures in leadership, the future of multiracial democracy does not depend on Evers or other Democrats. It depends on us. Political parties and social movements make leaders, not the other way around. Grassroots organizing groups and education unions made progress this budget cycle, but we need more people to join and commit, and greater investments in organizing, to win a more progressive Wisconsin. The national resistance to Trump, as measured by the number of people coming to rallies, is gaining steam, but that does not mean we are winning. The history of mass resistance shows that large scale mobilizations lose momentum over time unless enough people actively participate in permanent community-rooted organizing groups that demand bold and transformational leadership. The beating heart of democracy is direct personal engagement in cause-driven voluntary groups. In the end, it’s up to all of us.
A summer day on Golden Trout Lake in the Salmon-Challis National Forest, in east-central Idaho. (USDA Forest Service photo)
Members of the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee differed along party lines at a Thursday hearing about how the U.S. Forest Service should partner with states and how the federal wildfire response should be organized.
Senators of both parties emphasized the importance of working with state forest managers. But while Republicans praised the efforts of Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz, a former state forest administrator in Idaho and Montana, to reach out to state governments, Democrats noted that President Donald Trump’s budget request for fiscal 2026 proposed eliminating a key program for state and tribal partnerships.
Democrats on the panel also raised a series of questions about the still-unfinished Forest Service budget request as the next fiscal year approaches in less than three months.
Schultz told the senators the budget proposal was not yet final, but confirmed the agency was telling states to prepare for zero dollars in discretionary spending for the State, Private, and Tribal Forestry program in fiscal 2026.
The program received more than $300 million in discretionary funding in fiscal 2024, plus another roughly $300 million in supplemental funding.
The Trump budget request does include $300 million for supplemental funds to the program that can be used for disaster relief.
Impact of ‘big, beautiful’ law
Ranking Democrat Martin Heinrich of New Mexico noted states are facing tighter budgets after passage of Republicans’ “big, beautiful” budget reconciliation law that includes a host of policy tweaks meant to reduce federal safety net spending while extending tax cuts for high earners.
Under the law, states will be required to pay billions more per year to cover a greater share of major federal-state partnership programs for food assistance and health coverage.
“States need that funding,” Heinrich said of the forestry program. “That is an example of a successful partnership. If we don’t have that funding, that’s not shared responsibility, that’s abdicating our federal responsibility… at a time when (state) budgets are being decimated by Medicaid cuts thanks to the big, whatever bill.”
Schultz said the state foresters had relayed similar concerns, which the administration was considering as it finalized the budget request.
Chairman Mike Lee of Utah said the Forest Service under Schultz had given states greater flexibility to set their own forest management policies.
“I want to thank you, Chief, for giving the states more and more authority, more involvement and more of an ability to set a course for the proper management of these lands,” he said. “I know that Utah is really looking forward to working with you to expand these partnerships and I know my state is not alone in that.”
Funding versus dialogue
Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla of California also blasted the administration for cutting the state forestry spending.
“Every state that I’m aware of is having a tougher budget picture to face,” he told Schultz. “The threat of fires is real. The threat of fires is growing. How does it make sense for the federal government to zero out these programs?”
Schultz answered that the agency would continue “partnering with the states in dialogue and discussion.”
“But you’re zeroing out their resources,” Padilla said.
“That’s correct,” Schultz said. “It’s sharing that responsibility and pushing it to the states.”
Colorado Sen. John Hickenlooper, a former governor and Denver mayor, said the Trump budget request more broadly called for shifting more funding responsibilities to state and local governments.
“I see again and again, throughout all the budgets we’re seeing, is more costs shifted from the federal government to states and local areas that are going through their own budget struggles right now,” he said.
Montana Republican Steve Daines defended the idea of greater state responsibility, saying he had found the Gem State’s approach to land management more effective than the federal government’s.
“If you take a look at the landscapes across Montana and look at federal lands versus state lands, I can tell you the state’s doing a much, much better job in terms of stewardship of public lands than the federal government,” Daines said.
New firefighting service
Schultz said several times the administration had not yet finalized a plan to shift federal firefighting authorities to the Interior Department. The responsibility is currently split between the Forest Service, which is under the Department of Agriculture, and various Interior agencies, primarily the Bureau of Land Management.
Heinrich, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, raised concerns about the lack of a plan.
Heinrich said he was open-minded about the reorganization effort but was concerned that Congress had not yet seen a blueprint.
“I think there are many of us who are more concerned about the adequacy of that plan and would like to see that plan before we start making budgetary decisions about whether it’s a good idea or not,” he said. “I am very open to different ways of organizing how we fight fires on our national forests and our public lands. But I want to see the plan.”
Wyden raised opposition to the idea more broadly, saying the Forest Service should remain involved in firefighting.
“Nobody in my home state… has told me, in effect, ‘Ron we gotta have the Forest Service less involved in fighting fires,’” Wyden said. “But that is the net effect of your organizational plan.”
Schultz said the proposed reorganization would not cut any federal firefighting resources, but move the federal agency responsible for overseeing the issue. The administration would not put the reorganization in place this fire season, he added.
Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Prairie du Chien) speaks at a hearing in the House of Representatives. Van Orden claims to have engineered the Wisconsin State budget deal that mitigated the Medicaid cuts he voted for. | Screenshot via Youtube
Success has many fathers, but U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden is not one of them. Contrary to Van Orden’s triumphant tweets, he did not “secure” $1 billion for rural health care in Wisconsin. He had nothing to do with the bipartisan state budget deal that was drafted and rushed to completion in order to capture those funds — which, by the way, represent just a fraction of the billions the state stands to lose in Medicaid funds under the Republican mega bill Van Orden approved.
What Van Orden did do was vote to cut Medicaid and Affordable Care Act health insurance, with the result that tens of thousands of rural Wisconsinites now face losing their health care coverage and several rural Wisconsin hospitals are in danger of closing. As he prepared to join the narrow, four-vote majority that passed the disastrous federal bill, Van Orden sent some last-minute messages to Gov. Tony Evers urging him to hurry up and sign the deal Evers had already reached with state legislators. Now Van Orden is taking credit for Wisconsin leaders’ work mitigating the harm he caused. It would be laughable if the consequences were not so dire.
For months, Evers and leaders of the Wisconsin Legislature met behind closed doors to hammer out a deal, even as massive federal cuts to Medicaid, food assistance and other programs essential to the wellbeing of Wisconsinites loomed. Among the issues Evers and legislative leaders agreed on was the importance of getting the budget done before the federal mega bill was signed, so the state could still qualify for $1 billion in soon-to-expire Medicaid matching funds.
Evers signed the budget in the nick of time last week, at 1:30 a.m. on July 3, just before the U.S. Congress granted President Donald Trump’s wish and sent him his “big beautiful bill” to sign on July 4.
Van Orden immediately began taking credit for both budgets.
“I just helped secure $1,000,000,000 a year for BadgerCare and $500,000,000 for rural healthcare infrastructure,” Van Orden boasted on X. The $500 million he claimed credit for was added to the bill by U.S. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and other Senate Republicans worried about the bill’s devastating impact on rural hospitals. Van Orden had nothing to do with it. Nor is the money earmarked for Wisconsin — it’s a nationwide program meant to blunt the blow Van Orden and his GOP colleagues have just dealt to rural health care.
But the biggest whopper Van Orden told is that he somehow led the bipartisan budget deal between Evers and the Legislature.
You know, he poured gasoline around the house. He started throwing matches around, and then he said, ‘you better use that extinguisher.'
– U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan
It seemed weird at the time when Van Orden, on the brink of voting for the federal law that will cause so many Wisconsinites to lose their health care, started shouting at Evers on X to hurry up and sign the state budget.
Now it’s clear that he was simultaneously preparing to vote to take health care away from his constituents and planning to take credit for saving them from the effects of his own vote.
After both budgets were signed, Van Orden repeatedly shared a copy of a letter he wrote to Evers on July 2 emphasizing the “importance of signing the proposed state budget into law without delay.” According to Van Orden, the letter and a conversation he claims to have had with Evers caused the governor to sign the deal the next day.
“Not true,” Evers spokesperson Britt Cudaback wrote on X in response to Van Orden’s bragging. “You never personally advocated to @GovEvers or our office to increase the hospital assessment in the bipartisan budget deal until it was already in the deal. And you had zero to do with Gov. Evers deciding to sign the budget before the reconciliation bill was signed.”
What Van Orden did do was to vote for a bill that will push an estimated 30,000 rural Wisconsinites off Medicaid and will take away food assistance from another 90,000 people in the state, 1 in 3 of whom are children.
Van Orden was one of several Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives who expressed concern about the food assistance cuts in the GOP mega-bill — and then voted for the cuts anyway.
Those cuts only got deeper after the bill moved to the U.S. Senate, and the bill’s cost in massive increases to the federal deficit also grew from $2.5 trillion in the House version to $3.4 trillion in the final deal. Still, Van Orden stayed on board, voting for the bill a second time when it came back to the House and sending it to President Donald Trump to sign into law.
Democratic U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan compares Van Orden to an arsonist who takes credit for recommending the residents of the house he torched take steps to put out the fire. “You know, he poured gasoline around the house. He started throwing matches around, and then he said, ‘you better use that extinguisher,’” Pocan said at a press briefing this week.
Van Orden continues to obfuscate. In between doubling down on his preposterous claims and slinging insults at his detractors on social media, the congressman who has been rebuked by Senate leaders of both parties for yelling vulgarities at high school pages claimed to have given Evers a lesson in civility and bipartisanship: “Why did Tony sign the bill at 1:30 am? Because I asked him personally to put politics aside,” he declared this week.
For all his posturing on X, Van Orden still hasn’t been willing to face his constituents in a town hall to stand behind his vote. Pocan decided to hold one for him last month, to explain the details of what he called the worst budget bill he’s seen in 30 years in politics. At a press conference Pocan said, “I think this month I may have to do another visit.”
Universities of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman said in a statement that the state’s universities have become dependent on tuition due to lagging state funding over many years, but the “turnaround” from proposed cuts to the state investing in the budget will help “preserve access and affordability” for students and families. Rothman and UW-Madison Jennifer Mnookin testify in front of the Legislative Audit Committee in April 2025. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)
The announcement comes just days after the state Legislature passed and Gov. Tony Evers signed a state budget that includes increased investments in the system by over $200 million for operational costs and over $800 million for capital projects. While the increases took a different direction from Republican’s proposed cuts, they are nowhere near the $855 million operational budget increase initially requested by the system last year when Rothman warned that tuition increases would be on the table if there wasn’t significant investment.
Rothman said in a statement that the state’s universities have become dependent on tuition due to lagging state funding over many years, but the “turnaround” from proposed cuts to the state investing in the budget will help “preserve access and affordability” for students and families.
“Preserving quality while maintaining our ability to be a leader on tuition affordability in the Midwest is a top priority,” Rothman said. “After a decade of a tuition freeze and lagging state aid, we believe we have struck a balance for students and families with this proposal and the recent state investments in the UWs as part of the 2025-27 biennial budget.”
Rothman will ask the UW Board of Regents to approve a 4% increase at all campuses for the 2025-26 year.
Individual campuses would also have the option under his proposal of implementing an additional 1% increase. All universities except UW-Green Bay plan to adopt that. UW-River Falls is also seeking to increase its tuition even further by 5.8% to support “ student success initiatives.”
Under the proposal, nonresident undergraduate tuition at each campus would increase by the same percentage or dollar amount.
The system noted that most of the increases approved in the state budget are for specific purposes, including virtual mental health services, wage increases and addressing staff recruitment and retention.
State funding today makes up about a fifth of the UW’s total revenue. The UW system’s 2023-25 biennial budget was $13.7 billion with 58% of that coming from program revenue, 24% from the federal government and 18% from general purpose revenue.
According to the UW system, the average increase when segregated fees and room and board costs are included would be 3.8%.
If approved, the increase will be the third consecutive year of tuition increases for UW since the end of a 10-year tuition freeze in 2023. The system said its tuition increased just 7.7% from 2015 to 2025, below the tuition increases for its peers in other states that had increases ranging from 21.7% to 28.8% over the 10 years.
The UW Board of Regents will consider the plan on July 10.
Here are the proposed resident undergraduate tuition costs for 2025-26 at each campus:
Wisconsin lawmakers and Gov. Tony Evers approved a $111 billion state budget early Thursday morning that will increase spending on child care and the Universities of Wisconsin system, while cutting taxes by $1.5 billion.
The budget was the first since Democrats gained 14 seats in both chambers of the Legislature under new legislative maps and reflected a stronger bipartisan compromise than in previous cycles.
Senate Republicans, with only one vote to spare, needed Senate Democrats at the negotiating table to pass the budget after multiple Republican senators indicated their disapproval with the budget. Four Republican state senators voted against the budget, and five Democratic state senators voted for it.
The budget was approved in both chambers on Wednesday evening and signed by Evers after 1 a.m. because lawmakers wanted to finish the state budget before President Donald Trump’s big federal bill passed. The federal bill capped Medicaid reimbursement for state taxes on hospitals at 6% and would have frozen tax rates on states like Wisconsin, which previously was at 1.8%. The move helped Wisconsin secure $1.5 billion in additional federal funds.
Evers called 2025 the “year of the kid,” prioritizing more funding for child care, K-12 education — particularly special education reimbursement — and higher education. While those areas received significant funding increases, and Republicans got their desired tax cut, postpartum Medicaid extension, renewal of the popular Knowles-Nelson public land acquisition fund and several other items, many with bipartisan support, were missing from this budget.
Postpartum Medicaid eligibility not extended to a year
Notably missing from the budget is extending postpartum Medicaid coverage to 12 months — an item that every single senator on the budget committee voted for when it was last brought before the Senate.
“The governor called this budget the ‘year of the kid,’ and the year of the kid really needs to include mothers and parents and their mental health because the first indicator of a child’s well-being is their parents’ mental health, their mother’s mental health,” said Casey White, marketing and communications manager for Moms Mental Health Initiative.
Evers asked for the state to allocate over $24 million to extend postpartum Medicaid eligibility to 12 months. Advocacy groups and women’s health experts say the most risky time for a mother’s health is six to nine months postpartum, but eligible new mothers currently only receive about two months of coverage.
Wisconsin is one of only two states that do not extend eligibility for 12 months, despite the severe maternal morbidity rates rising in the state and increases in perinatal depression diagnoses.
Extending postpartum Medicaid has received bipartisan support in both the Senate and Assembly. In April, the Senate passed a stand-alone bill that would extend postpartum Medicaid coverage. But the bill has stalled in the Assembly.
Former Rep. Donna Rozar, R-Marshfield, told Wisconsin Watch in January she authored the bill because she wanted to support new mothers. Even with bipartisan support in his chamber, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, refused to schedule it for a hearing last session.
This time around, Joint Finance Committee Republicans did not remove Evers’ proposal to extend postpartum Medicaid eligibility from budget consideration, meaning the committee could have introduced and passed a motion including the provision.
But as the committee wrapped its work last Tuesday, the extension was missing. Now, the stand-alone legislation awaits an unlikely hearing in the Assembly.
Child care provisions enough?
Late in the budget process it became clear that one of Evers’ highest priorities was funding a child care program supported by expiring federal pandemic relief dollars. The budget includes more than $361 million to fund direct payments to providers, increase child care subsidies for low-income families and fund an early school readiness program.
While the bipartisan willingness to address the ongoing issue of child care access in the state is a significant step, Ruth Schmidt, executive director of the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association, explained the $110 million in direct payments to providers is far from enough to stabilize the field.
Another critical part of the budget was the early school readiness program. Schmidt said allocating general purpose revenue to this program demonstrates lawmakers trust in the provider community to supply a school readiness curriculum to families around the state.
The third major piece of funding approved this budget cycle is raising the Wisconsin Shares child care program to the 75th percentile of market rates, allowing low-income families to access affordable, quality care.
“I always will argue that we can do more, and we can and other states do more, but for us to be at a place where we are restoring payments to 75% of the market is hugely important,” Schmidt said.
Schmidt noted that not all of the provisions are what is recommended by child care advocates, particularly the ratios of children to caretakers.
The budget would increase the class size for 18- to 30-month-olds by instituting a ratio of one caregiver to seven children rather than the recommended one-to-four. Schmidt said that is not something WECA would stand behind as best practice in the state and is not necessarily the right move for long-term investment into child care.
WECA is preparing to provide additional training to the facilities that take on this pilot program over the biennium.
Environmental advocates look to fall session for stewardship, PFAS fund
Two major environmental initiatives — reauthorization of the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Fund and increased funding for the PFAS trust fund created in the last budget cycle — failed to make it into the final budget.
But Republican lawmakers have shown a willingness to reauthorize the stewardship fund, with a separate bill by Rep. Tony Kurtz, R-Wonewoc, and Sen. Patrick Testin, R-Stevens Point, aiming to fund the stewardship program through 2030. The fund supports land conservation and outdoor recreation through grants to local governments and nonprofits and also allows the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources to purchase and maintain state land.
Sen. Jodi Habush Sinykin, D-Whitefish Bay, shared her disappointment that the budget deal did not reauthorize the stewardship fund and pointed to it as one of the reasons she voted against the budget.
“Beyond the long-time importance of this program to me personally, Knowles-Nelson funding has stood out as the single-most popular issue I have heard from my constituents during my first six months in office – from voters across the political spectrum,” Habush Sinykin said.
The state Supreme Court recently limited the power of the state budget committee to block conservation projects. Although funds for the program are currently set to expire on June 30, 2026, most funds are already awarded, and a lapse in funds could impact planning for land trusts and local governments hoping to access the funds, according to the program.
Paul Heinen, policy director at environmental policy organization Wisconsin Green Fire, and a lobbyist for the first stewardship fund in 1989, said the battle over reauthorization mirrors past debates over the fund.
“The stewardship fund is, could very well be, the single most loved state program,” Heinen said. “But oftentimes it’s leadership who says, no, we’re spending too much money. We’re not going to spend money on this, and then invariably, the other 120 legislators overrule them at some point, and the stewardship fund is reauthorized. That’s where we’re at right now.”
Heinen said he was “99% sure” the fund would be reauthorized in future legislative sessions but was uncertain at what level the fund would be restored. Evers’ budget proposed reauthorizing the fund with $100 million of bonding authority per year through 2036. The Republican bill proposes $28 million per year for the next four years.
UW system funding rebounds with some strings attached
Just two weeks ago, Republican lawmakers floated an $87 million cut to the Universities of Wisconsin budget, yet in the final deal between lawmakers and Evers, the system will see a $256 million increase, the largest increase in over two decades.
Republican lawmakers conditioned their support for additional funding on several things, including a required transfer credit policy between system schools, the continuation of a cap on state-funded positions and workload requirements for faculty.
UW-Madison faculty advocacy group PROFs celebrated the increased funding for the system, but called the updated workload requirements an overreach “that would intrude on the responsibilities of both institutions and their faculty members.”
The budget also specifies certain funding to be directed toward lower-enrollment universities. The funding formula the UW system uses to distribute state aid among schools has been a source of controversy among Republican lawmakers who have argued for more transparency.
Jon Shelton, president of AFT-Wisconsin and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, said he was frustrated faculty and staff were not part of negotiations over work requirements.
“It takes something that otherwise could have been, I think, relatively positive for the UW system and created a poison pill that was unnecessary,” Shelton said.
Although the $256 million increase is a significant boost to the system, the funding is only a fraction of the $856 million that Evers and UW requested.
UW system President Jay Rothman had indicated that if the $856 million request was fulfilled, the remaining two-year branch campuses, several of which have closed in recent years, battling funding shortfalls and enrollment decreases, would stay open, and tuition would not increase. System spokesperson Mark Pitsch did not respond to a request for comment on the potential impacts on branch campuses or tuition.
DAs but no public defenders
Republicans voted to increase assistant district attorneys in Wisconsin counties, notably adding seven ADAs in Brown County, but they didn’t add any public defender positions. Without filling these positions, the American Civil Liberties Union reports current public defenders are overburdened and cannot conduct thorough investigations into a case.
Brown County already faces a backlog of cases, with reports saying there has been an increase of over 2,000 open criminal cases in the past decade. While adding ADAs may allow the prosecutors to bring more cases to the courts, failing to add public defenders will not address the backlog of criminal cases.
That means as more cases are presented by ADAs, there might not be enough public defenders to actually represent the individuals, so those accused of a crime may spend more time in jails as they await an attorney.
Republicans also added 12.5 ADA positions in Milwaukee County.
Milwaukee has been addressing backlogs but still faces challenges. By adding more ADAs to bring cases forth, while ignoring a shortage of public defenders, backlog challenges could be exacerbated.
Pelican River area in Wisconsin (Jay Brittain | Courtesy of the photographer)
When Gov. Tony Evers made his 2025-27 budget proposal in February, it included an annual $100 million appropriation to fund the broadly popular Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Grant program for another 10 years. The budget he signed after 1 a.m. Thursday included zero money for the program, which is set to lapse next summer.
While a separate piece of legislation to re-authorize the program has been introduced by Rep. Tony Kurtz (R-Wonewoc) and Sen. Patrick Testin (R-Stevens Point), the failure to provide added money in the budget has raised concerns that the program — which allows the state Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to provide grant funding to acquire, conserve and maintain public lands — could fail to survive the political tumult of divided government and die.
Even though the conservation of public lands is widely popular among both Democratic and Republican voters in the state, a handful of Republican legislators have grown increasingly hostile to the program, particularly since the state Supreme Court ruled last year that the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Finance doesn’t have the authority to hold up grants issued by the DNR through the program. Republicans complain that the acquisition of public land takes parcels off the property tax roles and prevents development projects.
The Kurtz and Testin proposal aims to reach a compromise by re-authorizing the program while adding more legislative oversight by requiring that any land purchases over $1 million be approved through legislation.
“While I recognize all that has gone into reaching this compromise budget, I must share that I am deeply disappointed that Republican leaders would not agree to reauthorize the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program — even for just one more year through 2027,” Sen. Jodi Habush Sinykin (D-Whitefish Bay) said in a statement. “Here’s the situation now: Knowles-Nelson reauthorization expires on June 20, 2026, giving the Legislature one year to take action before the deadline, and Republicans have indicated they will bring this back to the agenda this fall. Trust that I will keep up the pressure on Republicans and hold them to their word. I will continue to be a strong advocate for this long-standing bipartisan promise.”
The lack of stewardship program funds in the final state budget led Evers to use his partial veto authority to prevent spending money on five individual public lands projects that legislators had earmarked in the bill.
“I object to providing an earmark for a natural resources project when the Legislature has abandoned its responsibility to reauthorize and ensure the continuation of the immensely popular Warren Knowles-Gaylord Nelson Stewardship program,” Evers stated in his veto message. “Instead of renewing the program and helping the many, the Legislature has opted to benefit the politically connected few. The Legislature must do its job and renew the Warren Knowles-Gaylord Nelson Stewardship program.”
Timber strategic plan
The DNR budget also includes funds for a $1 million grant to the Great Lakes Timber Professionals Association (GLTPA) and the Wisconsin Paper Council to craft a Forestry Industrywide Strategic Plan.
This provision was included by the Joint Committee on Finance in its late night session last Friday and has raised concerns from some environmental groups that it is a giveaway to industry groups to push for increased extraction of resources from the state’s forest lands.
“Taxpayers should not be made to underwrite private industry studies with no public benefit or input. Would they decide how to manage local, state, and federal forests in this study? Would it be published?” Andy Olsen, senior policy advocate at the Environmental Law and Policy Center, said. “One million dollars is very generous with taxpayer dollars for a sketchy study with no public benefit.”
The GLTPA has been involved in efforts in Wisconsin’s Northwoods to oppose conservation projects and move local land use policies to be more pro-extraction by encouraging increased logging and the expansion of the state’s mining industry.
The association’s director, Henry Schienebeck, has been influential in Oneida County’s effort to rewrite its comprehensive plan to be friendlier to industry and worked with American Stewards of Liberty, a Texas-based right-wing anti-conservation group, to oppose land conservation such as the Pelican River Forest.
DNR spokesperson Andrea Sedlacek said the department is “monitoring this and all other relevant DNR budget motions as the process plays out” but did not yet have information on what the development of the strategic plan would look like or if other people or groups would be involved in its development.
But despite the grant being given only to industry groups, some environmental advocates say it’s a win.
Fred Clark, former executive director of Wisconsin Green Fire, said the development of such a plan is something the organization has been advocating for over the past several years. Clark pointed to a study of the health of the state’s forests Green Fire published last year and said that because the state’s paper mills have largely been shuttered, there are fewer places for the state’s foresters to bring their timber, destabilizing the industry.
Without a plan to find new uses for the state’s timber, the economics of Wisconsin’s working forest lands could change, resulting in land sales and development that results in forests being cut down to use the land for other purposes — ultimately harming the health of Wisconsin’s forests.
“The focus that we would like to see there is not necessarily on producing more timber, because we already grow a lot more timber than we harvest,” Clark said. “What we really think the state needs is a strategic focus on developing new forest products and helping expand and refine forest products markets so that we’ve got places for our wood to go.”
Clark said he foresees the development of the plan working through the state’s Council on Forestry, which includes members representing industry, environmental groups, state and federal agencies, legislators and landowners. He added that for the project to succeed it needs input from all those groups, including those with records such as the GLTPA.
“We need everybody at the table for this, and there’s a wide range of points of view in the forestry community,” Clark said. “Great Lakes Timber Professionals have been an active member of the Council on Forestry almost since day one. We won’t succeed if we don’t have a pretty strong consensus all the way from the environmental groups to groups like Great Lakes Timber Professionals. So I think there’s a lot of common ground there. The most important next step for us is to see that there’s a really broad based committee within the Council on forestry that’s helping guide this work.”
Federal authorities detain a man after attending a court hearing at immigration court at the Jacob K. Javitz Federal Building on July 1, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s massive tax and spending cut bill cleared Thursday has as its centerpiece $170 billion for the administration’s immigration crackdown, helping fulfill the president’s 2024 campaign promise of mass deportations of people without permanent legal status.
The measure, passed by the House 218-214, would fulfill several of Trump’s key immigration priorities, such as bolstering border security, increasing immigration detention capacity and adding fees to legal pathways for immigration, among other things. Thousands more Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers are slated to be hired.
While most of the immigration-related provisions in the massive bill would vastly expand immigration enforcement, it also aims to limit benefits currently extended to some immigrants with legal status.
Immigrants with a lawful status, including asylum, under the bill would be ineligible to receive food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Immigrants without legal status or authorization to be in the country are already ineligible for SNAP benefits, which roughly 42 million people rely on.
The bill could also cut off tax benefits from mixed-status families, in which family members have different immigration statuses.
For example, while Republicans would raise the child tax credit to $2,200 per eligible child, the bill would exclude that benefit to U.S. citizen children who are born to immigrant parents without legal status. The proposal would require that the parent applying for the child tax credit also have a Social Security number.
The 870-page megabill was passed by the Senate 51-50 on Tuesday, with Vice President JD Vance casting a tie-breaking vote.
Here’s an overview of what else the bill will do:
Immigration enforcement
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement would be the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the country, at nearly $30 billion through September 2029.
Those funds would go toward hiring 10,000 ICE officers within five years. The money would also pay for retention bonuses, transportation of immigrants, upgrades of ICE facilities, detainment of families, and the hiring of ICE immigration lawyers for enforcement and removal proceedings in immigration court.
An ICE signing bonus would be given to those hired after the bill is signed into law, and as a retention bonus if an ICE agent has five years of service specifically dealing with immigration enforcement. The bill does not specify how much a signing bonus or retention bonus should be.
The Senate’s version provides ICE with added flexibility in which areas to allocate the nearly $30 billion.
DOD funding
Separately from ICE, the bill would include $1 billion for the Department of Defense to deploy military personnel for border-related operations, construction and temporary detention on military installations.
Trump in April directed several agencies to start militarizing a stretch of the southern border as he continues to intertwine the U.S. military with his administration’s immigration crackdown.
Created was a military buffer zone along the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona, California and New Mexico. It means that any migrant crossing into the United States would be trespassing on a military base, and therefore allows active-duty troops to hold them until U.S. Border Patrol agents arrive.
National and military experts have raised concerns that militarizing that strip of land could violate the Posse Comitatus Act, an 1878 law that generally prohibits the military from being used in domestic law enforcement.
The bill sets aside $45 billion for building new centers to detain immigrants, from single individuals to families. It’s a more than 300% increase from ICE’s fiscal year 2024 budget for detaining immigrants, which was about $9 billion.
Building new detention centers takes time, so private prison companies such as CoreCivic and GEO Group are likely to enter into more contracts with ICE.
Those companies have begun expanding detention capacity. CoreCivic last month acquired a 736-bed facility in Virginia and GEO this month purchased a 770-bed facility in western California.
Border security
The bill would allocate $46.6 billion for U.S. Customs and Border Protection to construct a wall along the U.S. Mexico border, as well as make any repairs. That would be more than three times what the first Trump administration spent on barriers at the southern border, at roughly $15 billion.
Some of the technology that would be added on the border includes cameras, lights, sensors, and other detection improvements. The funds would be used beginning in fiscal year 2025 until Sept. 30, 2029.
Another $4.1 billion would go toward hiring CBP personnel, until the end of September 2029. Another $2 billion would go toward retention and bonuses for CBP personnel.
The bill would also set aside $855 million for the repair of vehicles that CBP officers use. Republicans included $5 billion for upgrades and repairs at CBP facilities.
Additionally, $6.1 billion would go toward buying nonintrusive equipment to detect illicit narcotics at ports of entry along the southwest, northern and maritime borders.
Also, any immigrant without legal authorization and who is apprehended at a port of entry would be subject to a $5,000 fine.
There is currently a civil fine ranging from $50 to $250. Asylum-seekers typically surrender themselves at ports of entry.
Legal immigration pathways, application fees
The bill would give the Department of Justice roughly $3.3 billion for the Executive Office for Immigration Review to prosecute immigration matters, such as noncitizen voting – something that is extremely rare – and violations of the Alien Registration Act.
In April, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced that immigrants in the country without legal authorization were required to register with the agency or face jail time and a fine of up to $5,000.
The bill would also overhaul immigration fees and application fees for immigrants seeking legal pathways, both permanent and temporary.
For the first time, there would be a fee to apply for asylum, set at $100. There are no fee waivers for nearly every new fee set or increased by the bill, except for applications dealing with unaccompanied minors. All fees would also be subject to adjustment for inflation.
Asylum-seekers who want to apply for initial work permits would also have to pay another fee of $550, something that is currently free.
For an asylum applicant wanting to renew work permits, the bill would lower the cost to $275, where it is currently $470 to renew online and $520 to mail in the paperwork.
For immigrants on Temporary Protected Status, meaning the DHS secretary has deemed the immigrant’s home country too dangerous to return to, the fee to apply would be $500. It’s currently $50.
The fee to apply for humanitarian relief would increase to $1,000, where it is currently $630.
The bill would slightly increase the initial work application fee for TPS holders and those with humanitarian status to $550, up from a $470 fee for submitting online and $520 to mail in the paperwork.
To renew those work permits, the bill would lower the cost to $275, down from $470 for online and $520 for mail.
The nonimmigrant visa, which is currently free and handled by the State Department, would now cost $250 under the bill. This visa is typically used for international students, agricultural workers and other special skilled immigrant labor.
Unaccompanied immigrant children
Some of the $2 billion in funding for DHS would go toward removing unaccompanied children under certain circumstances. That includes if the child is found by a port of entry, is not a victim of human trafficking, and does not fear returning to their home country.
The bill would also provide a $300 million fund for the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which handles unaccompanied children, to conduct background checks and home studies on any potential sponsor of an unaccompanied child.
There would also be funding to check children in ORR custody for their potential criminal and gang history. Those 12 and older would be subject to examinations “for gang-related tattoos and other gang-related markings,” according to the bill.
The special juvenile immigrant visa, which is for immigrant children who are either abandoned or abused by a parent, and allows them to apply for lawful permanent resident status, would now cost $250 under the bill, but the fee could be waived. It’s currently free.
State grants, World Cup and Olympics
The bill would also give some states $450 million for the Operation Stonegarden Grant Program, which gives funding to states and local governments that participate in border enforcement.
The bill would help states that are hosting major sporting events such as the World Cup in 2026 and the Olympics in 2028.
The bill allocates $625 million for security and other costs related to the FIFA World Cup and $1 billion for security and planning costs for the Olympics, which Los Angeles is hosting in 2028.
Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers signed a new two-year budget in the early morning hours Thursday in a race against Congress to ensure the state gets a federal Medicaid match that it would lose under President Trump’s tax and spending cuts package.
In an extraordinarily rapid succession of events, Evers and Republican lawmakers unveiled a compromise budget deal on Tuesday, the Senate passed it Wednesday night, and hours later just before 1 a.m. on Thursday, the Assembly passed it. Evers signed it in his conference room minutes later.
Democrats who voted against the $111 billion spending bill said it didn’t go far enough in meeting their priorities of increasing funding for schools, child care and expanding Medicaid. But Evers, who hasn’t decided on whether he will seek a third term, hailed the compromise as the best deal that could be reached.
“I believe most Wisconsinites would say that compromise is a good thing because that is how government is supposed to work,” Evers said.
Wisconsin’s budget would affect nearly every person in the battleground state. Income taxes would be cut for working people and retirees by $1.4 billion, sales taxes would be eliminated on residential electric bills, and it would cost more to get a driver’s license, buy license plates and title a vehicle.
Unprecedented speed
There was urgency to pass the budget because of one part that increases an assessment on hospitals to help fund the state’s Medicaid program and hospital provider payments. Medicaid cuts up for final approval this week in Congress cap how much states can get from the federal government through those fees.
The budget would increase Wisconsin’s assessment rate from 1.8% to the federal maximum of 6% to access federal matching funds. But if the federal bill is enacted first, Wisconsin could not raise the fee, putting $1.5 billion in funding for rural hospitals at risk.
In the rush to get done, Republicans took the highly unusual move of bringing the budget up for votes on the same day. In at least the past 50 years, the budget has never passed both houses on the same day.
“We need to get this thing done today so we have the opportunity to access federal funding,” Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said at the start of debate just before 8 p.m. Wednesday.
Governors typically take several days to review and sign the budget after it’s passed, but Evers took just minutes.
Bipartisan compromise
In a concession to the Democratic governor, Republicans also agreed to spend more money on special education services in K-12 schools, subsidize child care costs and give the Universities of Wisconsin its biggest increase in nearly two decades. The plan would also likely result in higher property taxes in many school districts due to no increase in general aid to pay for operations.
The budget called for closing a troubled aging prison in Green Bay by 2029, but Evers used his partial veto to strike that provision. He left in $15 million in money to support the closure, but objected to setting a date without a clear plan for how to get it done.
Republicans need Democratic votes
The Senate passed the budget 19-14, with five Democrats joining with 14 Republicans to approve it. Four Republicans joined 10 Democrats in voting no. The Assembly passed it 59-39 with six Democrats in support. One Republican voted against it.
Democratic senators were brought into budget negotiations in the final days to secure enough votes to pass it.
“It’s a bipartisan deal,” Senate Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein said before the vote. “I think everybody left the table wishing it was different, but this is something everyone has agreed on.”
Democrats said newly drawn legislative maps, which helped them pick up seats in November and narrow the Republican majorities, led to greater compromise this year.
“That gave us leverage, that gave us an opportunity to have a conversation,” Democratic Sen. Mark Spreitzer said.
But still, Spreitzer said the budget “fell far short of what was needed on our priorities.” He and other Democrats said it didn’t go far enough to help fund child care, K-12 schools and higher education, in particular.
Evers vetoes prison closure deadline
The budget called for closing a troubled aging prison in Green Bay by 2029, but Evers used his partial veto to strike that provision. He left in $15 million in money to support planning for the closure, but objected to setting a date without a clear plan for how to get it done.
The governor noted in his veto message that the state has “painful experience” with trying to close prisons without a fleshed-out plan, pointing out that the state’s youth prison remains open even though lawmakers passed a bill to close the facility in 2017.
“Green Bay Correctional Institution should close — on that much, the Legislature and I agree,” Evers wrote. “It is simply not responsible or tenable to require doing so by a deadline absent a plan to actually accomplish that goal by the timeline set.”
Jim Rafter, president of the village of Allouez, the suburb where the prison is located, issued a statement Friday saying the veto shows how broken state government has become.
“The time for studying has come and gone,” he said. “The village of Allouez and our community demand action and the certainty they deserve about when this facility will be closed.”
Governor kills grant as payback for ending stewardship
Evers used his partial veto powers to wipe out provisions in the budget that would have handed the town of Norway in southeastern Wisconsin’s Racine County an annual $100,000 grant to control water runoff from State Highway 36. The governor said in his veto message he eliminated the grant because Republicans refused to extend the Warren Knowles-Gaylord Nelson Stewardship Program.
That program provides funding for the state and outside groups to buy land for conservation and recreation. Republicans have complained for years that the program is too expensive and removes too much land from property tax rolls, hurting local municipalities. Funding is set to expire next year. Evers proposed allocating $1 billion to extend the program for another decade, but Republicans eliminated the provision.
Evers accused legislators in his veto message of abandoning their responsibility to continue the program while using the runoff grant to help “the politically connected few.” He did not elaborate.
The town of Norway lies within state Rep. Chuck Wichgers and Sen. Julian Bradley’s districts. Both are Republicans; Bradley sits on the Legislature’s powerful budget-writing committee. Emails to both their offices seeking comment weren’t immediately returned.
Rep. Tony Kurtz and Sen. Pat Testin, both Republicans, introduced a bill last month that would extend the stewardship program through mid-2030, but the measure has yet to get a hearing.
Associated Press writer Todd Richmond contributed to this report.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.
Gov. Tony Evers signed the budget, now 2025 Wisconsin Act 15, at 1:32 a.m. in his office Thursday, less than an hour after the Assembly passed it. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)
Gov. Tony Evers signed the $111 billion two-year state budget bill into law overnight following a marathon day of overlapping Senate and Assembly floor sessions where the bill received bipartisan support from lawmakers. The budget cuts taxes by $1.3 billion, makes investments in the University of Wisconsin system, boosts public schools’ special education reimbursement rate to 45% and allocates about $330 for child care.
Evers signed the budget, now 2025 Wisconsin Act 15, at 1:32 a.m. in his office Thursday, less than an hour after the Assembly passed it. Just before signing it, he thanked legislative leaders for working with him and said the budget reflects the fair legislative maps that he signed into law in 2024 and that were in place during November elections.
“We need to work together,” Evers said.
As the Assembly and Senate prepared to meet for debate Wednesday evening, Evers was outside of the east wing of the Capitol for Concerts on the Square and telling people not to “drop meatballs” on themselves.
“I was actually chatting with people about tonight outside,” he said. “Many of them were saying ‘How about that? Compromise.’ Compare that to what’s going on in Washington, D.C., and it’s significantly different, so I’m very proud to sign it.”
The passage and signing of the state budget comes two days after the end of the fiscal year.
Following months of negotiations and the announcement of a deal between Evers, Republican legislative leaders and Senate Democrats on Tuesday, the Legislature worked for about 15 hours Wednesday to get the bill over the finish line.
Their goal was to get the bill signed by Evers before the federal reconciliation bill made it to President Donald Trump’s desk.
One reason for the rush was a provision in the state budget that increases a Medicaid-related hospital assessment from 1.8% to 6%, the current federal limit, to supplement the state’s Medicaid resources. It’s estimated to result in over $1 billion in additional Medicaid revenue that will go back to Wisconsin hospitals, but the state’s ability to make that change is set to be restricted under the federal bill.
“We want our health care system to be in good shape, and in order to do that, we’re going to need help from the federal government,” Evers said.
Governor uses partial veto
In addition to signing the budget, Evers exercised his partial veto on 23 items . He had agreed not to partially veto any part of the deal that he came to with lawmakers, but other pieces of the legislation were fair game.
Evers vetoed language that set 2029 for closing Green Bay Correctional Institution. He said he supports closing the facility, but said more needs to be done before a date is set.
“We need more compromise on that. We need to get things going before we start taking people out of Green Bay,” Evers told reporters. “Saying that we’re going to do Green Bay by ’29 doesn’t mean a damn thing.”
He also partially vetoed $750,000 in grants to the Lakeland STAR Academy, a Minocqua charter school that specializes in serving students with autism and diverse learning needs; vetoed language excluding two of Wisconsin’s 11 federally-recognized tribes from a grant program; and vetoed $25,000 for a street project in the village of Warrens.
In addition, he vetoed funds for five projects that would go through the Department of Natural Resource.
“I object to providing an earmark for a natural resources project when the Legislature has abandoned its responsibility to reauthorize and ensure the continuation of the immensely popular Warren Knowles-Gaylord Nelson Stewardship program,” Evers stated in his veto message.
Lawmakers said they are still working on legislation to continue the program. “Instead of renewing the program and helping the many, the Legislature has opted to benefit the politically connected few,” Evers wrote. “The Legislature must do its job and renew the Warren Knowles-Gaylord Nelson Stewardship program.”
Evers said if he would change anything about the budget, he would have wanted “more in the area of specificity in child care.” The budget will spend about $330 million on child care including $110 million to extend direct payments to providers for another year, $65 million to a new program for providers serving 4-year-olds and $123 million to increase the reimbursement for child care costs for low-income families under the Wisconsin Shares program.
Evers also rejected the calls of some advocates that he veto the entire budget, noting the uncertainty that could result and the funding that could be put at risk by starting from scratch on a budget.
“Failing to reach consensus and vetoing this budget in its entirety was an untenable option, not just for me, but for the people of our state,” Evers wrote in his budget message.
Evers told reporters he wasn’t caught off guard by the number of Democratic lawmakers who didn’t support the budget.
“They have to do what they think is right, and everybody’s kind of looking for what’s going to happen in a couple years, and so I’m not surprised,” Evers said. “But there’s a whole bunch of Republicans that supported it so God bless them.”
Republican lawmakers also said throughout the day that the prospect of losing hospital funding if the budget wasn’t signed ahead of the federal reconciliation bill moving through Congress played a role in wanting to get the budget done as quickly as possible.
“That’s why we’re working really fast to get it done,” Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu (R-Oostburg) said during a press conference Wednesday morning. “We will get the bill to the governor’s desk prior to the President [Trump] signing the Big Beautiful bill.”
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) said at a mid-afternoon press conference he expected Evers would sign the legislation late Wednesday or early Thursday.
“It’s about a billion dollars that will be able to flow to an awful lot of rural hospitals, people who are taking care of those with urgent needs,” Vos said. “We want to get it done and we want access to those dollars.”
Senate approves budget 19-14
The Senate took action on the bill first, passing it 19-14 shortly after 9 p.m. Five Democratic senators, including Senate Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein (D-Middleton), joined 14 Republicans to pass the bill. Four Republicans, including Senate President Mary Felzkowski (R-Tomahawk), voted with the 10 Democrats against the legislation.
Democrats’ votes were needed to pass the budget bill in the Senate after several Republicans expressed concerns about the legislation. Hesselbein was at the negotiating table as a result.
The hospital funding, which led to lawmakers rushing work to pass the budget in one day, was also the top reason that Felzkowski voted against the budget.
Democrats voting yes, in addition to Hesslebein, were Sens. Kristin Dassler-Alfheim (D- Appleton), Brad Pfaff (D-Onalaska), Jeff Smith (D-Brunswick) and Jamie Wall (D- Green Bay). Republicans voting no, in addition to Felzkowski were Rob Hutton (R- Brookfield), Chris Kapenga (R-Delafield) and Steve Nass (R Whitewater).
Felzkowski said she felt bad because there were good things in the budget, but that she was appalled the budget didn’t address the cost of health care, noting Wisconsin has the fifth highest health care costs in the country.
Felzkowski said that there should be other health care reforms if hospitals were going to get a “windfall” of over $1 billion a year and blamed Evers and hospital lobbyists for opposing those, including additional hospital price transparency measures.
“Gov. Evers, you failed Wisconsin,” Felzkowski said. “You failed constituents. You failed employers.”
Evers rejected the claims, calling them “bulls – – t.”
“The people that work in those hospitals are working real hard,” Evers said. “The last thing we need is to have hospitals going belly up in the middle of the pandemic or something.”
Sen. Rob Hutton (R-Brookfield), who voted no, mentioned Evers’ previous vetoes of Republican tax cuts and said the current budget bill leveraged those vetoes “to hide the 12% increase in spending” as well as a structural deficit.
“In a time of economic uncertainty, when our spending decisions warrant further restraint and discernment, we need a budget that creates proper spending priorities and puts taxpayers first,” Hutton said.
Sen. Steve Nass (R-Whitewater) called the budget an “orgy” of spending in a statement explaining his “no” vote. Implicating fellow Republicans, he criticized lawmakers for spending the state’s $4.3 billion surplus on one-time earmarks and “funding for special interests” instead of larger tax cuts.
Despite the handful of opponents, the majority of Senate Republicans supported the budget, touting the tax cuts that they secured and some of the investments.
LeMahieu called it “a responsible budget that invests in core priorities” and touted the $1.4 billion tax cut.
At the Senate GOP press conference Sen. Howard Marklein (R-Spring Green) singled out some of the University of Wisconsin system funding that will “put the thumb on the scale…to help some of those campuses like UW Platteville that have had declining enrollment over the last decade.” The budget allocates $53 million for UW system funding, distributed through two formulas: one for declining enrollment and another for the number of credit hours undergraduates complete.
The University of Wisconsin system will also get $840 million for capital projects, $94 million for staff wage increases, $54 million for recruitment and retention and $7 million for virtual mental health services.
Sen. Dan Feyen (R-Fond du Lac), who voted yes, said the budget didn’t do everything he wanted it to do and included some things he didn’t support.
“I always have, and always will, advocate for a smaller, smarter state government,” he said in a statement. “I’m glad to see that this budget cuts over 300 vacant positions from state government.”
Feyen highlighted his support for special education funding and child care provisions in the document. He said if people want a more “conservative” budget, then Republicans would need to expand their majority and elect a Republican governor in 2026.
The Senate took action on the bill first, passing it 19-14 shortly after 9 p.m. (Photo by Baylor Spears/WIsconsin Examiner)
Senate Democrats, whether they voted for or against the bill, all had a similar message: it doesn’t do enough.
“What we have on the floor today is better than it would have been if Senate Dems had not been at the table, but let me be clear, it is not perfect,” Hesselbein said at a Wednesday morning press conference. She described the budget as a “bipartisan deal” where “everybody left the table wishing it was different, but this is something that we can agree on trying to move forward.”
Asked about the advocates who called for lawmakers to vote against the budget and Evers to veto it, Hesselbein said she knew some people were upset.
“I’m glad they’re making their voices heard,” she said. “That’s why today, we’re going to be fighting for every single Wisconsinite.”
Day of drama delayed
The Senate convened a little after 10:30 a.m., but didn’t pass the bill until after 9 p.m.
The first several hours of debate centered on Senate Democrats’ 25 proposed amendments that ranged from increasing funding for the UW system, K-12 education and child care to expanding postpartum Medicaid. The body got through about half of those amendments before pausing for several hours to caucus.
During the delays, Republicans were working on a 35-page “technical amendment” with several changes, including an added requirement that the UW system conduct an efficiency study on declining student enrollment and future operations.
When the Senate reconvened around 7 p.m., it tabled the rest of the Democratic amendments and started debate on the full budget bill.
Sen. Mark Spreitzer (D-Beloit) said Democrats helped improve the budget but that it l would not allow people in Wisconsin to thrive.
“We understand the urgency to act. Congress is actively restricting our future funding. This budget must move forward, but that does not make it a good budget,” Spreitzer said.
The budget broke the “rule of 17” — the Senate Republicans’ practice of making sure 17 members support a measure before it’s put on the floor — Spreitzer said, and criticized them for not breaking the rule to pass other measures, including postpartum Medicaid expansion or funding for the Knowles-Nelson Conservation program in a bipartisan way. “Wouldn’t it be easier to just get it done today?” he said.
Spreitzer said the Democratic votes on the budget were not an endorsement, but were rather an acknowledgement that it was better than it would have been without bipartisan negotiations. Asserting that the budget didn’t deserve one more vote than was necessary to pass it, he voted against it.
Chris Larson (D-Milwaukee) said the optimism after Evers introduced his budget in February soon faded and criticized the governor for not fighting harder for his priorities. The result is “grossly” insufficient and “will do more harm than good,” he said
“It’s a ‘failure to fight’ budget,” Larson said. “This budget is cowardice. We all deserve so much better.”
Assembly passes budget 59-39
“We have a guarantee that we’re going to have a transformation budget that works for everyone,” Vos said during the Assembly floor debate. “I assume, like in the state Senate where Democrats and Republicans are going to vote for the budget, we would have the same thing here in the Assembly, if people are serious about saying we want to work together.”
The Assembly concurred in the bill 59-39 at around 12:40 a.m. Seven Democrats voted with Republicans in favor of the bill: Reps. Jill Billings (D-La Crosse), Steve Doyle (D-Onalaska), Jodi Emerson (D-Eau Claire), Maureen McCarville (D- DeForest), Lori Palmeri (D-Oshkosh), Sylvia Ortiz-Velez (D-Milwaukee) and Tara Johnson (D-Town of Shelby).
One Republican — Rep. Scott Allen (R-Waukesha) — voted with Democrats against the bill. Rep. Calvin Callahan (R-Tomahawk) was not voting.
The Assembly concurred in the bill 59-39. Seven Democrats voted with Republicans in favor of the bill: Reps. Jill Billings (D-La Crosse), Steve Doyle (D-Onalaska), Jodi Emerson (D-Eau Claire), Maureen McCarville (D- DeForest), Lori Palmeri (D-Oshkosh), Sylvia Ortiz-Velez (D-Milwaukee) and Tara Johnson (D-Town of Shelby). (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)
Assembly Co-Chair Mark Born (R-Beaver Dam) said the budget process this time was different from any other that he’s worked on. This is his fourth as co-chair of the Joint Finance Committee.
“We did spend more time working with the governor’s office, the governor and Democrats,” Born said, and called the budget “more conservative” than the state’s 2023-25 budget, to his surprise. He noted that the $1.3 billion tax cut will get signed into law, unlike previous tax cuts that Evers has vetoed.
The budget spends the state’s estimated $4 billion budget surplus down to about $800 million, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau. The budget also has a 6% increase in general purpose revenue spending and a 12% increase overall.
While Republicans highlighted the bipartisan nature of the budget and measures included, Democrats throughout the day focused on their critiques and the measures that didn’t make it in.
Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer (D-Racine) said at a press conference Wednesday morning that she was appreciative of Evers and Hesselbein for being at the negotiating table and getting what they could — but it wouldn’t be enough to win her vote.
“This proposal is a far cry from the budget that Assembly Democrats would have written,” said Neubauer. She said she was not at the table when the budget deal was made. With a 54-45 majority, Assembly Republicans had the votes to pass the budget without the Democrats, Assembly Majority Leader Tyler August (R-Walworth) said at a GOP press conference.
Neubauer said that as a consequence, the Assembly Democrats “were not part of those negotiations.”
School districts will get an increase in the special education reimbursement rate from about 32% to 42% in the first year of the biennium and 45% in the second year. It will be the highest that the rate has been in many years, but still lower than the 60% advocates and Democrats wanted.
Democratic lawmakers said that without increases in general aid or schools, districts will have to continue relying on property tax increases to keep up with costs.
“You didn’t set out to stop the cycle of [property tax increase] referendums, you set out to continue it,” Rep. Robyn Vining (D-Wauwatosa) said on the Assembly floor. “When 96 of 99 Assembly districts have gone to referendum recently and the statewide demand for public school funding increases isn’t partisan for our constituents, why are we fighting so hard to get Republicans to adequately fund our schools? This isn’t a Democrat versus Republican issue across the state, and it shouldn’t be a Republican versus Democrat issue in the state Capitol.”
The four-member Wisconsin Legislative Socialist Caucus — including Reps. Ryan Clancy (D-Milwaukee), Darrin Madison (D-Milwaukee), Christian Phelps (D-Eau Claire) and Francesca Hong (D-Madison) — voted against the bill. In a joint statement they called the agreement between Republican lawmakers, Senate Democrats and Evers a “catastrophic failure of leadership that surrenders to Republican austerity.” They cited the lack of a general school aid increase for public schools, the special education reimbursement not meeting 60% and the failure to expand Medicaid.
“This is not a compromise, this is capitulation,” the caucus said.
Assembly Republicans mostly focused on the parts of the state budget they were appreciative of but also took jabs at Democrats for saying they would vote against the bill.
The Agriculture Roads Improvement Program, which was created in 2023 to support local agricultural road improvement projects statewide, will get an infusion of $150 million.
“That’s a big deal in my community and up in the rural part of the northwest,” Rep. Clint Moses (R-Menomonie) said. “It helps our state’s largest industry by improving the quality of our roads to get their products and goods out and inputs and services that farmers need into the field as well.”
Rep. Jessie Rodriguez (R-Oak Creek) said lawmakers committed to providing tax cuts for seniors and Wisconsinites as a whole through the elimination of the utility tax, a policy Evers had advocated for.
“I know that some people on the other side of the aisle said that people are not seeking tax relief,” Rodriguez said. “Yes, they have been. You just haven’t been listening.”
The Office of School Safety, housed in the Department of Justice, will get 13 permanent staff positions and $1.57 million in the budget.
The office provides training and grants to schools for safety and runs the Speak Up, Speak Out tipline where students can anonymously report safety concerns. Funding for the office became a flashpoint of criticism in the 2023-25 budget debate.
Rep. Todd Novak (R-Dodgeville) touted the new budget’s provision for the office and spoke about working with Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul on getting the funding in this year’s budget. He also credited lawmakers on the finance committee for helping to keep the office going.
“The process is ugly, but working together to get something done is a really great thing, so I will defend this budget. I will run on this budget,” Novak said.
Rep. Tony Kurtz (R-Wonewoc) said on the floor that lawmakers who voted against the budget shouldn’t take credit for any of its accomplishments in the budget later or attend groundbreakings for projects it funded.“If you vote against this, do not show your face,” Kurtz said. “You didn’t have the courage to vote yes.”
Spending cuts proposed in President Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill” would not be the largest ever, according to nonpartisan analysts.
The largest-cut claim was made by Republican U.S. Rep. Scott Fitzgerald, who represents part of southeastern Wisconsin, ahead of the House vote. His office cited a $1.7 trillion claim made by the Trump administration.
The House-passed version of the bill nominally would have cut $1.6 trillion in spending over 10 years.
But the bill’s net decreases were $1.2 trillion, after taking spending increases into account, and $680 billion after additional interest payments on the debt.
The heaviest spending reductions don’t begin until around 2031, increasing the chances that they could be changed by future legislation.
A $1.7 trillion net cut would be second to a 2011 law that decreased spending by $2 trillion and would be the third-largest cut as a percentage of gross domestic product, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
Thousands of protesters marched up State Street and past the Wisconsin Forward statue at the state Capitol on Saturday. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)
It was an encouraging week in Wisconsin. The state Supreme Court finally invalidated a cruel 1849 abortion ban, and Gov. Tony Evers declared victory after he and state legislative leaders reached a deal on the state budget he signed in the early morning hours on Thursday that adds back some badly needed support for schools and child care. The budget deal is not what a lot of Democrats and advocates wanted, but it’s better than the brutal austerity Republicans in the Legislature have imposed in the last several budget cycles. Most encouragingly, the end of gerrymandering forced Republicans to negotiate, since they needed Democratic votes in the Senate to get the budget passed.
Some Democrats still refused to vote ‘yes” on the budget. They pointed out that, while it includes a significant boost for special education, it leaves schools struggling with zero general state aid. A majority of school districts will see revenue go down, and most will have to beg local property owners to raise their own taxes. To make matters worse, the Trump administration is freezing billions in promised aid to K-12 schools.
Child care advocates who fought for desperately needed state support got about one-quarter of the aid Evers had originally proposed. Some were relieved, but others told Examiner Deputy Editor Erik Gunn that it’s just not enough to save centers from going out of business and parents from losing access to care.
The health care outlook is also bleak. With the feds poised to make Medicaid cuts that could cause 60,000 Wisconsinites to lose health care, the state budget fails to expand Medicaid and won’t even cover postpartum care — making us one of only two states to refuse health care to low-income mothers of newborns.
The worrisome backdrop to all of this is the federal budget plan President Donald Trump and Republicans are pushing through Congress that simultaneously runs up giant deficits and takes an ax to safety net programs on a scale we’ve never before experienced.
The massive bill that passed the U.S. Senate this week slashes health care and nutrition assistance and will lead to the closure of rural hospitals, decimate green infrastructure projects that have been a boon to Wisconsin and will make life harder and more expensive for most people — all to funnel millions of dollars in tax cuts to the richest Americans and to fund a chilling escalation of a militarized immigration police force.
Our own U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson threatened to vote against the House version of the bill, which was projected to increase the deficit by $2.4 trillion, because, he said, the deficits it created were “mortgaging our children’s future.” But Johnson then voted for the Senate version, which ratchets up the deficit even more, to $3.3 trillion. So much for the self-described “numbers guy.” Kowtowing to Trump and making permanent the tax cuts Johnson personally benefits from was more important to him than his alleged concern about deficits.
It makes sense that much of the news about the Republican budget deal has centered around the devastating health care cuts and the ballooning federal deficit. But the $170 billion in the budget for immigration enforcement is sure to change the landscape of the United States — escalating raids, deportations without due process and a massive new system of private detention centers on the model of the detention camp in a Florida swamp that apparently thrilled Trump when he visited it during congressional budget deliberations.
Brace yourself for the impact of the supercharged ICE budget. Unlike Texas — where terrorized immigrant workers are staying home after raids, causing farmers to fear they’ll go under as their labor force disappears — we haven’t experienced big workplace raids in Wisconsin. If ICE has a lot more manpower, that could change.
I spoke this week with a dairy farmer in the Western part of the state who reported that, despite the terrifying videos circulating online of violent arrests by masked immigration agents, his employees are carrying on as usual, coming to work, going out, not changing their plans. “We haven’t had any raids on dairy farms in Wisconsin,” he pointed out.
It’s eerie how normal life continues to be in rural Wisconsin, where 70% of the labor on dairy farms is performed by immigrant workers, almost all of whom lack legal documents to live and work in this country, because Congress has never created a visa for year-round, low-skilled farmwork. The farmer I spoke with said he had just returned from watching a soccer match among immigrant workers and everyone was in a good mood.
He added that officials in Trump’s agriculture and labor departments have repeatedly reassured an industry group he’s part of that the administration understands how dependent employers are on their immigrant workers and that they don’t want mass deportation to harm them.
Wisconsin dairy farmers and other employers are hoping Trump continues to be influenced by the people in his administration who tell him he shouldn’t destroy the U.S. agriculture, construction and hospitality industries. They felt encouraged by Trump’s recent statement that “we’re going to take care of our farmers and hotel workers,” and his claim that he’s working on deportation exemptions for whole classes of immigrant workers who don’t have authorization, but on whom U.S. industries rely.
But the Stephen Miller wing of the administration doesn’t care about any of that.
The whole narrative promoted by Miller, Trump’s anti-immigrant deputy chief of staff, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Trump himself, that the U.S. is suffering an “invasion” by a large number of immigrants who commit violent crimes is nonsense. Immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than U.S. born citizens. They are an absolutely essential part of the U.S. economy. And they are loved and valued members of our communities. Most of the people the Trump administration has been rounding up have never been convicted of any crime, let alone violent crime. They are landscapers, roofers, farmworkers, students, parents driving home from work — just like the people Trump claims he is going to protect. As the administration ramps up its program to incarcerate and deport them, with a militarized push on a scale our country has never seen, Trump is trying to have it both ways — reassuring employers that he won’t target the “good” immigrants who work for them, while peddling the lie that there are tons of “bad” immigrants who deserve to be kept in cages in an alligator-infested swamp.
The idyllic, peaceful atmosphere in Wisconsin, where we feel far away from violent kidnappings by unidentified, masked federal agents, could change in a dramatically dark fashion once the ICE receives the tens of billions of new dollars in the Republicans’ federal budget plan. We saw the showy arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan and immigrants who, trusting the legal system, showed up for their court dates in Milwaukee. We saw the needlessly cruel forced departure of Milwaukee teacher’s aide Yessenia Ruano and her U.S.-born little girls back to El Salvador — the country Ruano fled after her brother was murdered there by gang members and where she felt her life was threatened.
With tens of billions of dollars in new money to spend and quotas to meet for its mass deportation program, ICE could begin rounding up the hardworking immigrants who keep our dairy industry going, in parts of the state that overwhelmingly vote for Republicans.
That spectacle, along with the hideous cuts to health care, education, food assistance and other programs that make life livable in Wisconsin, will surely provoke a backlash against the politicians who enabled it. Let’s hope it’s not too late.
Gov. Tony Evers signed bills into law launching efforts to bring nuclear power to Wisconsin and creating and expanding programs to help children in crisis. Evers talks to reporters in March. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)
Ahead of floor sessions for the Senate and Assembly to vote on the budget, Gov. Tony Evers signed bills into law launching efforts to bring nuclear power to Wisconsin and creating and expanding programs to help children in crisis.
The bills passed the Senate and Assembly in floor sessions in June where debate centered heavily on the lack of funding attached to them. Evers had earlier told lawmakers to include the funding or he would veto the legislation, Democrats agreed the funding should be included, while Republicans said the funding would come in the budget if Evers signed the bills without any changes. State funding for the bills was included in the budget plan approved by the budget committee Tuesday.
One law, 2025 Wisconsin Act 11, will create a Nuclear Power Summit Board in Wisconsin responsible for putting on a summit in Madison to advance nuclear power and fusion energy technology.
The summit must be held within one month after instruction starts at the new engineering building at UW-Madison. Construction on the building, which is estimated to cost $419 million, started in April and is supposed to be finished in 2028. The funding for the building was approved by the Legislature and Evers in 2024.
Evers also signed 2025 Wisconsin Act 12, which requires the Public Service Commission to conduct a study to determine potential sites for a nuclear power plant. The state budget bill includes $2 million to fund the study.
Evers said the bills would help the state pursue an “innovative, clean energy future and bring more clean jobs to our state.”
Wisconsin currently has one active nuclear power plant. The Point Beach Nuclear Plant located in Two Rivers, which first came online in the 1970s, has two tractors and provides about 16% of the state’s energy, according to the conservative think tank the Badger Institute. A Kewaunee nuclear power plant shut down in 2013.
“We can’t afford to choose between mitigating climate change and protecting our environment or creating good-paying jobs and building a strong economy, and by working toward clean energy options Wisconsinites can depend on in the future, we’re doing both,” Evers said. “We must continue our efforts to help lower energy costs and improve energy independence by reducing our reliance on out-of-state energy sources, and these bills are an important step in the right direction.”
Evers also signed Senate Bill 106, now 2025 Wisconsin Act 9, that will create psychiatric residential treatment facilities (PRTFs) in the state. The law is the result of a study committee on the emergency detention and civil commitment of minors and aims to reduce the number of youth in crisis who are sent out of state for care by offering long-term mental health treatment closer to home.
The budget will include $1.79 million for grants to psychiatric residential treatment facilities.
Another law, 2025 Wisconsin Act 10, which is also a result of the study committee, instructs the Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS) to create a statewide portal to facilitate the sharing of safety plans for minors with designated safety plan partners. The budget includes about $819,000 in state funding for the program and the agency will get one staff position to run the portal.
Sen. Jesse James (R-Thorp), who served as chair of the study committee, has championed the legislation this session.
At a press conference ahead of the Senate floor session, James said his focus has been on supporting Wisconsin’s children and that the issues are personal for him as a father and a law enforcement officer.
“I believe there are real positive changes within our reach. It’s about recognizing the opportunities in front of us and taking decisive action when that moment comes,” James said. “This budget is packed with great projects. We increase funding for our child advocacy centers. We take care of our child victims in a safe environment. We establish funding for psychiatric residential treatment facilities to keep children with intense mental health treatment needs closer to home.”
Another law, 2025 Wisconsin Act 13, officially recognizes new child advocacy centers in state statute and expands the number of them that are eligible for the Wisconsin Department of Justice’s child advocacy grant program. The centers work with law enforcement to investigate child abuse and neglect and provide children with resources and support. The budget will include $2 million to support the grants.
The final piece of legislation is 2025 Wisconsin Act 14, to distribute hearing protection devices to state and local law enforcement and firefighters. The budget will include $2.6 million to fund the program.
“This budget has involved an awful lot of compromise, both between the houses as well as with the governor's office,” Joint Finance Committee Co-chair Sen. Howard Marklein (R-Spring Green) said at a press conference ahead of the meeting. “A budget is a compromise and this budget is certainly one of those.” (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)
The Wisconsin Joint Finance Committee advanced the budget deal announced by lawmakers and Gov. Tony Evers Tuesday, with the full Senate and Assembly scheduled to take up the budget Wednesday. The committee also passed a $2.5 billion plan for capital projects, which included a measure to start work on a project that will allow for the closure of the Green Bay Correctional Institution by 2029.
The agreement announced Tuesday morning was negotiated by Evers, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu (R-Oostburg) and Senate Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein over the last several months and will invest over $1 billion in education and child care and cut taxes by about $1.3 billion. The deal also includes funding plans for the Department of Transportation, including funding for roads, and changes to the state’s hospital assessment to help cover Medicaid costs.
The committee’s action comes a day after the end of Wisconsin’s fiscal year. Wisconsin’s government continues to run under the current budget until a new one is signed into law.
Legislators on both sides of the aisle had similar reactions saying the deal did not contain everything they wanted with some signaling support for the bill and others saying they will vote against it.
“This budget has involved an awful lot of compromise, both between the houses as well as with the governor’s office,” Joint Finance Committee Co-chair Sen. Howard Marklein (R-Spring Green) said at a press conference ahead of the meeting. “A budget is a compromise and this budget is certainly one of those.”
The committee voted 13-3 with Sen. LaTonya Johnson (D-Milwaukee) joining Republicans in favor of approving the deal. It also voted 12-4 along party lines to approve the entire budget bill to advance it to the Senate and Assembly floor.
Capital budget includes plan to close Green Bay prison
The over $2.5 billion capital budget plan grants funding for projects at the UW system, within the Department of Corrections, Department of Health Services, Department of Military Affairs and the Department of Natural Resources.
Over $480 million — or about 18% — of the capital projects plan is for projects at campuses across the UW system and was negotiated as part of the budget deal.
The plan also includes $225 million for the Department of Corrections, including $15 million for construction project planning for realignment of facilities and the closure of Green Bay Correctional Institution (GBCI) by 2029.
Marklein said lawmakers were investing across Wisconsin and the DOC plans would help to start to “right-size” the state’s corrections system.
As the state has faced a growing prison population and aging facilities, Evers had proposed a DOC capital budget of over $630 million that included renovating Waupun Correctional Institution and making it a “vocational village” as well as several other prisons. The plan culminates in the closure of the Green Bay facility. GBCI, which was originally opened in 1898, is one of the state’s oldest facilities and houses 381 more people than its intended capacity.
Lawmakers have been interested in closing GBCI for years, but were skeptical of Evers’ plan to make that happen.
Co-chair Rep. Mark Born (R-Beaver Dam) signaled that the action in the budget is just the beginning of a years-long process.
“I think that this stuff will all be figured out over several budgets,” Born said in response to questions about the capacity of the state’s prison and Waupun. “These fiscal capital projects don’t happen in two years, and they won’t in this case, either.”
Lawmakers who represent parts of the Green Bay area said the inclusion of the GBCI closure date in the budget is a major step forward.
“Formalizing a decommissioning date into state law will ensure decisive action is taken to solve this long-standing issue and prevent the bureaucratic delays which have plagued this situation for far too long,” Rep. Benjamin Franklin (R-De Pere) said.
Rep. David Steffen (R-Howard) called GBCI “unsafe, unstable and unsustainable” and said he is thankful for the step forward.
Alluding to Evers’ plan, Rep. Tip McGuire (D-Kenosha), meanwhile, said there is a plan that lawmakers could have moved forward. He said the item in the budget seemed like a plan that was “kicking the can down the road.”
The budget deal also includes $130 million for a Type 1 juvenile facility in Dane County. The planned 32-bed facility is the second one meant to replace youth prisons Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake — old facilities initially scheduled to close by 2021. The Department of Administration has estimated that with full funding ($124 million in bonding authority) the project could be completed by 2029.
Lawmakers, advocates have mixed reaction to deal on K-12, higher education and child care
Evers repeatedly said investing in Wisconsin’s K-12 and higher education systems as well as child care were his top priorities. Republican lawmakers said they were opposed to continuing state payments to child care facilities, supported cutting the UW budget and only supported incremental increases for the state’s public schools. The deal includes investment in each area.
Several Democratic lawmakers, nonetheless, had mixed feelings about the concessions Evers and Senate Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein (D-Middleton) got from the majority party. During committee, Democrats proposed investing over $500 million in the UW system, $200 million in child care grants and expanding postpartum Medicaid coverage, though Republicans rejected those ideas.
Under the deal, the University of Wisconsin system will get a $250 million increase, according to Evers’ office. The motion approved by the committee includes investments for general program operations, mental health, staff recruitment and retention and $94 million for staff wage adjustments.
The increase comes despite threats from Republican legislators to cut the UW system by tens of millions and as federal uncertainty, which has led some campuses to tell departments to prepare cuts
Sen. Kelda Roys (D-Madison) said lawmakers were short-changing the UW system, despite it contributing heavily to the state’s economic successes.
“What they are getting is about 5% of what they said that they needed,” Roys said. Evers and the system proposed an $855 million budget increase over the biennium. “We’re going to continue to see tuition hikes, we’re going to continue to see campus closures. We’re going to continue to see the doors of opportunity closing for our kids here in Wisconsin, and they’re going to have to go out of state or go without access to higher education and I think that’s wrong.”
Roys voted against the budget in committee, saying it would have needed to do more for the state’s kids to get her vote. “Ultimately, I want a Wisconsin, where every child, no matter who you are or where you’re from, have the opportunity to thrive,” Roys told reporters.
Stakeholders in the UW system also reacted to the budget deal on Tuesday.
UW President Jay Rothman said on social media he is grateful for the support of Evers and the Legislature.
“Today’s budget agreement marks the largest overall increase in investment in the UWs over two decades. For generations, Wisconsinites have invested in the UWs to provide affordable and accessible higher education. They should take great pride in what Wisconsin has built,” Rothman said. “With these new investments, the UWs can do more to provide the educational opportunities students deserve and parents expect.”
Public Representation Organization of the Faculty Senate (PROFS), the nonprofit organization of UW-Madison faculty, said it was “heartened” by the funding increase but worried about some of the concessions that Republican lawmakers got.
“We are concerned, however, that the agreement between Republican legislative leaders and the governor includes teaching-load requirements for faculty and instructional staff, which has always been the purview of the universities themselves, not the Legislature,” the organization stated.
Under the agreement, faculty will be required to teach no fewer than 24 credits per academic year. The UW Board of Regents will have to develop a buyout policy for positions not meeting the minimum credit requirements. The budget will also include a similar policy for the Wisconsin Technical College System.
The UW portions of the agreement will also include a cap on the number of positions that the system can have funded through general purpose revenue and program revenue and no institution will be allowed to designate more than 10% of its faculty and 10% of its academic staff to administrative duties.
Born said it was part of the compromise that Assembly Republicans made.
“It is a positive number, and most of our caucus on the Assembly side… is not happy about that because they know that there are major problems in that system that need work,” Born said. “We worked through that compromise and gave them $50 million as opposed to $800 million… to get some of those reforms.”
Child care providers will get a $330 million investment under the deal, including direct payments to continue once the Child Care Counts program lapses. A “Bridge” program will provide $110 million to help child care facilities stay open, though it will only last for a year. It also includes funding to kickstart a state-funded child care program targeted at supporting facilities serving 4-year-olds.
“The reality is this is a small amount of money in terms of the need, and it is only for year one, so all that’s happening here is we’re kicking the can down the road on massive child care closures a year from now… I don’t count that as a huge victory,” Roys said. “To get that money there have been agreements to functionally deregulate child care, to increase ratios, to make it less safe to take away the important protections.”
Sen. Patrick Testin (R-Stevens Point), who said he plans to vote for the budget on the floor, said the investment would help make child care in the state more affordable and increase access.
“While it’s not perfect, this is where we’re at with divided government,” Testin said “Maybe it’s not as far as some would like but it’s a step in the right direction.”
Funding for K-12 education will increase the special education reimbursement rate to 42% in the first year of the budget and 45% in the second year. Republican lawmakers initially approved a maximum increase of 37.5%, while Evers had proposed a 60% increase.
There will be no general aid increase for public schools. School districts will only be able to increase their school revenue annually by $325 per pupil by going to local property taxpayers through the referendum process.
Rep. Tip McGuire (D-Kenosha) said it was a “little sad” Evers “had to drag the Legislature kicking and screaming to a place that is frankly insufficient for our needs.” He said the increase to special education funding likely wouldn’t end school districts’ reliance on raising revenue through property taxes increases.
Some Democratic lawmakers and advocates said Evers needed to negotiate higher increases for schools and said the lack of general aid increase in the deal is a reason to reject it.
Rep. Francesca Hong (D-Madison) said no general aid increases for Wisconsin’s public schools is “unacceptable,” calling the budget “Republican-led” and urging people to call their Democratic legislators and Evers’ office to tell them to vote against it.
“This budget fails to meet the needs of our children and working-class communities,” Hong wrote in all caps on social media. “This budget is guaranteed to raise property taxes and pit students and communities against one another.”
Sen. Chris Larson (D-Milwaukee) said he would vote “no” on the budget for similar reasons.
“The final product falls far short of what our neighbors need and frankly what they have demanded since the beginning of this process,” Larson said, noting the lack of general aid, the school revenue increase that doesn’t keep up with inflation and the special education rate. “For these reasons and many more, I will be voting ‘no,’ unless massive changes are adopted,” Larson said. “Democrats will be offering several amendments in pursuit of a budget that meets this moment.”
The Wisconsin Public Education Network sent out a similar message, and called for people to call Senate lawmakers and urge them to vote against the budget.
“The compromise on the table provides $0 (none, not one pencil’s worth) in new state aid for public schools in both years of the biennium — in exchange for a welcome but inadequate increase to the special education reimbursement rate,” the organization said. “A vote for this budget is a vote for widening our gaps. Public schools will close. We will see another two years of record rates of referenda.”
Asked about advocates’ desire to try to negotiate for a general aid increase for schools, Evers said on Tuesday that there were some policies that just weren’t going to happen. He spoke to the Wisconsin Examiner Tuesday afternoon after attending a Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. event in Middleton to announce a business expansion at Catalent, a bio-health company.
“We have the largest amount of money that we’ve ever sent to our public schools coming to them, and so I know there are people that wanted everything, and when you’re in a situation where you have Republicans and Democrats [who make up] about same size of part of the government, you’re going to you’re going to have to compromise,” Evers said. “I do wish we could have put another $5 billion into it of course, but that wasn’t going to happen.”
Democrats say new maps led to budget deal, pledge to do more in majority
The budget needs 17 votes to pass in the Senate and will likely find it from a bipartisan group of lawmakers. Marklein said he was “confident” that there would be enough votes.
Slim margins in the Senate and several Senate Republicans who said they were inclined to vote against the spending package, even ahead of the announcement of a deal, led to Democratic Minority Leader Hesselbein becoming involved in negotiations, which previously have only involved Republican legislators. Republicans have passed the budget before with only votes from their caucus, but in the Senate this year, the caucus can only afford to lose one vote.
Several Senate Democrats, including several who are serving their first term, said the budget deal was the result of new legislative maps that took effect for the first time in 2024. Under those maps, Democrats in the Senate flipped four seats, trimming the Republican majority from two-thirds to a margin of 18-15.
Freshman Sen. Sarah Keyeski (D-Lodi) said the state would be moving in the right direction with the budget agreement and Senate Democrats helped make it “palatable.”
“To be clear, this budget is not ideal, but in the spirit of bipartisanship and forward progress, I am pleased to be a part of what Senate Democrats were able to do on behalf of all Wisconsinites,” Keyeski said.
Sen. Jodi Habush Sinykin (D-Whitefish Bay) said the deal reflects “bipartisanship and progress.”
“I am proud to see it move forward,” said Habush Sinykin, who is also in her first term. “What we are seeing playing out in this budget is the consequence of Wisconsin’s new fairer maps — legislators working together to find compromise and make meaningful progress for the people of Wisconsin.”
Two other Democrats in their first term highlighted local allocations in the budget. Sen. Jamie Wall (D-Green Bay) celebrated $30 million that was included in the budget for a new railroad bridge at Red Maple Road between American Boulevard and Lost Dauphin Road in West De Pere and Sen. Kristin Dassler-Alfheim (D-Appleton) highlighted some of the items in the budget that will help her district, including the $137 million investment for UW-Oshkosh’s Polk Learning Commons.
“The new, fair maps created a balanced government, and this is the result: a government that can work together to reach an agreement where everyone walks away wishing they’d gotten more but no one leaves feeling kicked in the teeth,” Dassler-Alfheim said. “I’m hopeful that we can work together to get this over the finish line and move Wisconsin forward, together.”
Senate Democrats also said they would do more should they win a majority in future elections.
“Because of the negotiations that we had for this budget, the outcomes were a lot better than they would have been had those individuals not been at the table, had our voices not been at the table,” said Sen. LaTonya Johnson (D-Milwaukee). “And I just want to say that going forward for every budget. It should be like that, and don’t worry, when we’re in the majority, it will be like that, which will be in 2026.”
She told reporters she is leaning towards voting for the budget, but added, “we’ll have to see.”
Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer (D-Racine) also said electing more Democratic legislators made a difference.
“I am thankful that Governor Evers and my Senate Democratic colleagues were at the negotiating table on our state budget and have gotten some real wins for the people of Wisconsin,” Neubauer said. “There are critical investments in education, child care and the priorities of Wisconsinites in this budget, but we also know that due to years of underfunding by the GOP majorities, there is a lot that remains to be done.”
Andraca praised the new maps in the committee meeting, saying that a nearly 50-50 split in the Senate and Assembly has spurred conversations in a new way.
“Congratulations on the bipartisanship. I think this budget does a lot of good,” Andraca said, but added, “I’m not sure it does enough to earn my vote at this time.”
Child care providers and parents attend a Wisconsin State Capitol rally on Wednesday, April 16, 2025. Advocates have mixed opinions about child care provisions in the new state budget released Tuesday. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)
The proposed Wisconsin state budget announced Tuesday offers child care advocates less than what they sought, and while some reacted with limited optimism, for others it adds up to little better than nothing.
The final deal will spend $110 million to extend direct payments to providers for another year. Starting in mid-2026 It will direct $65 million to providers who join a proposed “School Readiness Program” — similar to 4-year-old kindergarten (4K) but distinct from current 4K programs.
The deal also will add $123 million to increase the reimbursement for child care costs for low-income families under the Wisconsin Shares program.
The agreement was reached Monday in negotiations involving Gov. Tony Evers, Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu (R-Oostburg), Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) and Senate Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein (D-Middleton).
Kids Forward labeled the child care provisions “significant, but not sufficient, wins for Wisconsin’s working families.” Kids Forward is a policy and advocacy organization for low-income families and families of color.
“This deal doesn’t address the long-term needs of families and providers, but we look forward to working with legislators and the Governor to ensure sustained investment,” said Daithi Wolfe, senior policy analyst for Kids Forward, in a statement Tuesday.
‘Bridge’ payment program
The $110 million in direct payments to providers over the next 12 months will serve as a “bridge” after the end of Child Care Counts, the subsidy program funded with federal pandemic relief money that runs out this month.
Originally paying out $20 million a month, Child Care Counts helped stabilize the child care sector according to research reviewing the program, helping providers increase wages without having to charge parents more.
The money was cut in half two years ago, and since then providers have reported having to raise fees and, in some cases, reduce their capacity because they lacked enough child care workers. A survey report earlier this year found that 25% of providers said they might close if state payments stop.
The new payment program is intended to enable providers to plan and budget between now and July 2026 for the loss of Child Care Counts. It will be funded with interest income on the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds the Evers administration received starting in early 2021.
“The disappointing part is it’s not permanent,” said Ruth Schmidt, executive director of the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association (WECA). WECA has campaigned all year for Gov. Tony Evers’ original proposal, which sought $480 million including for continuing monthly provider subsidies.
“This is not going to be the sort of panacea for child care,” Schmidt said. “We will still see child care programs needing to raise rates. We will likely still see closures throughout the year. But I think we will see them at much lower rates, and I think that’s a really good thing for child care.”
Schmidt praised Evers as a “champion for children” and also credited GOP leaders for being “willing to sit down” and negotiate. “I think bipartisanship has been at play in this,” she said.
A 4K-style program
The new Early School Readiness Program for 4-year-olds is a response to the impact that 4K expansion has had on child care providers. As 4K programs expanded in Wisconsin elementary schools, “that pulled a lot of 4-year-olds out of child care,” Schmidt said.
The new School Readiness Program will set curriculum standards and require child care workers who teach in it to have at least an associate degree. Schmidt said that for child care providers who participate, it will “ensure that child care has more opportunities to continue to serve 4-year-olds.”
Child care providers who take part will for the first time receive direct payments from state funds.
“Child care as an industry has long been very interested in finding out how to continue to do the services that they know are so important for 4-year-olds in their programs, and I think this is a mechanism that will allow for that,” Schmidt said. “This is a net gain of $65 million in state general purpose revenue into child care. That’s a big thing.”
Providers view deal skeptically
For some child care providers, however, the details of the budget deal fall short of what they contend their sector needs.
The $110 million bridge program “is less than we’re getting right now, and we can’t keep teachers and we can’t keep prices down the way it is,” said Corrine Hendrickson, a New Glarus child care provider. She doesn’t expect it to achieve its stated goal of increasing the number of teachers along with accessibility and affordability in child care.
Brooke Legler, another New Glarus provider, said the $480 million that Evers had originally sought translated to keeping child care workers’ wages at $13 an hour on average. “This doesn’t even do that,” she said of the bridge program.
Hendrickson and Legler are cofounders of Wisconsin Early Childhood Action Needed (WECAN), a coalition of parents and providers that also campaigned actively for the original Evers proposal.
Hendrickson said she’s concerned that the School Readiness Program will be perceived by parents as “less academic, less school, less quality than the free option at the public school.”
Legler questions whether the new program as structured will succeed in drawing more families of 4-year-olds who would otherwise send their children to 4K. School districts have expanded their 4K programs to all day schedules in part because of a lack of child care, she said.
“I think that’s such a disservice that we have … closed door negotiations and that we’re not including the people at the table that need to be at the table, especially if we want to have effective and efficient policies that work for Wisconsin,” Legler said.
Both Legler and Hendrickson said they’re also concerned about a provision creating a “large family center” category with up to 12 children. Currently there are family centers with up to eight children and group centers with nine or more children.
Another provision would lower the minimum age for entry-level child care workers to 16. Both the age change and the large family provision were in bills that Republicans introduced in the 2023-24 legislative session and that providers mostly opposed.
“That’s not an answer. That doesn’t do anything financially” to help providers, Legler said.
“We have people making life-altering decisions for many people in Wisconsin, yet they have no experience or expertise on the matter,” she said. “This method does not work.”
Wisconsin Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and Republicans who control the state Legislature announced a deal Tuesday on a new two-year budget that cuts income taxes, increases funding for the Universities of Wisconsin despite a threatened cut and raises fees to pay for transportation projects.
The deal in the battleground state, where Evers and Republicans have a long history of not working together, emerged the day after the deadline for enacting a new budget. However, there is no government shutdown in Wisconsin when the budget is late. The Legislature is scheduled to pass it this week.
Evers called the deal “a pro-kid budget that’s a win for Wisconsin’s kids, families and our future.”
Here is what to know about Wisconsin’s budget deal:
Tax cuts
Evers and Republicans agreed to $1.3 billion in income tax cuts largely targeting the middle class. More than 1.6 million people will have their taxes cut an average of $180 annually.
Republicans pushed for cutting taxes given the state’s roughly $4.6 billion budget surplus.
The deal would expand the state’s second lowest income tax bracket and make the first $24,000 of income for people age 67 and over tax-free. It also eliminates the sales tax on electricity, saving taxpayers about $178 million over two years.
Republican legislative leaders praised the deal as providing meaningful tax relief to the middle class and retirees.
“This budget delivers on our two biggest priorities: tax relief for Wisconsin and reforms to make government more accountable,” Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said in a statement.
And Senate Republican Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu praised it as a compromise that cuts taxes but also stabilizes the state’s child care system and strengthens schools by increasing special education funding.
Higher education
The Universities of Wisconsin would see a $256 million increase over two years, the largest funding increase for the UW system in about two decades. UW Regents had asked for an $855 million overall increase, and Republicans in June floated the possibility of an $87 million cut.
The deal also imposes a faculty minimum workload requirement and calls for an independent study on the system’s future sustainability.
Prison closing
Republicans will be voting on a plan Tuesday to close the 127-year-old Green Bay Correctional Institution by 2029 as Evers proposed. However, it’s not clear what other elements of Evers’ prison overhaul plan Republicans will endorse.
That part of the budget was not under the negotiated deal with Evers, which means he could make changes to it with his powerful partial veto.
Schools, roads and child care get more
There will be $200 million in additional tax revenue to pay for transportation projects, but Evers and Republican leaders did not detail where that money would come from.
The agreement increases funding for child care programs by $330 million over two years, a third of which will be direct payments to providers. The money will replace the Child Care Counts program started during the COVID-19 pandemic. That program, which provides funding to child care providers, expired on Monday. Evers, Democrats and child care advocates have been pushing for additional funding to address child care shortages throughout the state.
Funding for K-12 special education programs will increase by $500 million.
State employees, including at the university, would get a 3% raise this year and a 2% raise next year.
The budget deal was reached after Republicans killed more than 600 Evers proposals in the budget, including legalizing marijuana, expanding Medicaid and raising taxes on millionaires.
Democrats credit redistricting
Democrats said Republicans were forced to compromise because they didn’t have enough votes in the Senate to pass the budget without Democratic support.
Democrats gained seats in November under the new maps drawn by Evers and narrowed the Republican majority in the Senate to 18-15. Two Republican senators said they planned to vote against the budget, resulting in Senate Democrats being brought into the budget negotiations with Evers and Republicans.
“What we are seeing playing out in this budget is the consequence of Wisconsin’s new fairer maps — legislators working together to find compromise and make meaningful progress for the people of Wisconsin,” Democratic Sen. Jodi Habush Sinykin said in a statement.
Republican budget committee co-chair Sen. Howard Marklein said, “This budget has involved an awful lot of compromise.”
What’s next?
The deadline for finishing the budget was Monday, but unlike in other states and the federal government there is no shutdown in Wisconsin. Instead, the previous budget remains in place until a new one is signed into law.
The Legislature’s budget-writing committee was voting on the plan Tuesday. The full Legislature is set to meet starting Wednesday to give it final passage.
Once the budget clears the Legislature, Evers will be able to make changes using his expansive partial veto powers. But his office said Evers would not veto any budget provisions that were part of the deal he reached with Republicans.
Evers, who is midway through his second term, has said he will announce his decision on whether he will seek a third term after he has signed the budget. He has 10 business days to take action on the spending plan once the Legislature passes it.
Associated Press writer Todd Richmond contributed to this story.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.
As the Joint Finance Committee continues to make progress on completing the 2025-27 budget, a recent Marquette Law School poll reveals where voters stand on some of the key sticking points in the budget debate.
JFC plans to meet on the remaining topics, including the UW system, health care and the capital budget, Tuesday morning after delaying Friday’s meeting by 12 hours. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, remains hopeful the budget will be completed this week.
The next budget will not be approved by the July 1 deadline, so current spending levels from the 2023-25 budget will carry over into the next fiscal year.
Republicans are working to make a deal on the state budget that both Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and state senators will support. Senate Republicans have an 18-15 majority, so they can only lose one Republican vote without picking up votes from Democrats. Two Republican senators have voiced discontent with the current budget process.
K-12 funding vs. property taxes
The Marquette poll found 57% of Wisconsin residents would rather see lower property taxes, while 43% support more funding for K-12 schools — a figure that has been trending away from support for public schools over the past decade.
During the last budget cycle, Evers used a creative veto to increase caps on K-12 funding each year. To keep property taxes lower for residents under the so-called 400-year veto, the state would need to increase general state aid for public schools.
But the Republican budget provides no increase to general school aid, which Democrats argue could in turn lead school boards to raise property taxes and continue to rely on referendums to make up for the lack of state funding.
2024 saw a record number of school referendums with over half of all public school districts requesting additional funding to account for inflation and lack of financial support from the state, increasing taxpayers’ property taxes around the state.
Postpartum Medicaid
The poll also found 66% of residents want to see legislation passed to extend Medicaid coverage for new mothers to 12 months, rather than the current coverage of 60 days postpartum.
Evers proposed extending coverage to 12 months in his 2025-27 budget proposal, but JFC has yet to make a decision on this provision. The committee intended to vote Friday but delayed discussion on health services. Co-chair Rep. Mark Born, R-Beaver Dam, said the committee plans to take action on health services, among other programs, at a “later date.”
Evers previously proposed extending coverage to 12 months in his 2021-23 budget request, but Republicans revised the budget to instead request 90 days of postpartum coverage — the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services denied the request, saying it would not approve a waiver for coverage under one year.
While there has been bipartisan support for extending postpartum coverage in the Senate and the Assembly, Vos previously blocked the bill from a hearing. Vos has expressed opposition to expanding welfare in the state.
UW system
Wisconsin voters were divided on support for the Universities of Wisconsin system, with 49% of those surveyed saying the UW system budget should stay the same size, 23% supporting a reduction and 27% supporting an increase.
The UW system has requested a record-high $856 million increase while Republican lawmakers have floated an $87 million cut to the system.
UW system leaders have pointed to Wisconsin’s ranking at 44th in the nation for public funding for universities and the closure of two-year branch campuses. When given this information, 41% supported an increase, while 57% of voters said the UW should still receive the same amount of state funding.
Evers called the potential cut a “nonstarter.”
Other budget-related topics in the poll include:
79% of Wisconsin voters said they were very or somewhat concerned about PFAS contaminating their drinking water, and 33% said the so-called “forever chemicals,” which are found in firefighting foam and nonstick cookware, were the most important issue impacting drinking water. Evers’ budget proposal included $145 million for a PFAS cleanup trust fund — one of 600 items removed by the JFC in early May.
While 71% of voters favor a “major increase” in state funding for special education. JFC increased reimbursement to 35% in year one and 37.5% in year two of the biennium over the current rate of 30%. Evers requested 60% reimbursement.
75% of Wisconsin voters supported comprehensive mental health services in schools. The JFC voted to provide $20 million over the next two years for school mental health programs. Evers proposed $170 million for comprehensive mental health services.
Support for marijuana legalization has continued to increase in the state. The most recent poll shows 67% of residents favor legalizing marijuana; the number of people in favor of legalization has grown nearly 20% since 2013. Evers proposed legalization in his budget, but Republicans removed it from consideration entirely in early May.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
The deal comes after months of negotiations (and multiple breakdowns in communication) among Gov. Tony Evers and Senate and Assembly leaders. Gov. Tony Evers delivers his 2025 state budget address. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)
Gov. Tony Evers and Republican and Democratic legislative leaders have reached a tentative agreement on the 2025-27 state budget, agreeing to invest hundreds of millions in the University of Wisconsin system, to create new grant and payment programs for child care facilities, further boost investment in special education and cut $1.3 billion in taxes.
The deal comes after months of negotiations (and multiple breakdowns in communication) among Evers and Senate and Assembly leaders. Each leader highlighted pieces of the deal in statements.
Evers focused on the investments in education and child care, saying it is “a pro-kid budget that’s a win for Wisconsin’s kids, families, and our future.”
“What was at stake is no secret — Republican lawmakers had long indicated this budget would not invest in child care providers, would provide no new increases for our K-12 schools, and would cut nearly $90 million from our UW System. But I never stopped believing we could work together to reach consensus and pass a bipartisan budget, and I’m proud of the months of work that went into getting to where we are today,” he said.
Evers thanked Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu (R-Oostburg), Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) and Senate Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein (D-Middleton) for coming to the table to get a deal done.
“The people of Wisconsin expect their leaders to show up, work hard, and operate in good faith to get good things done,” Evers said. “We’ve shown we’ve been able to get good things done for Wisconsin when people put politics aside and decide to work together to do the right thing. I look forward to signing a bipartisan budget that makes these critical investments in our kids, families, and communities across our state,” Evers said.
Evers has also agreed not to utilize his partial veto power — previous uses of which have been both limited and sustained by the state Supreme Court in recent weeks — on parts of the budget included in the deal.
Vos said in a statement that he appreciated Evers’ willingness to work with lawmakers to find a bipartisan agreement.
“This budget delivers on our two biggest priorities: tax relief for Wisconsin and reforms to make government more accountable,” Vos said. “This deal brings those investments and reforms together and creates a Wisconsin that works for everyone.”
JFC co-chair Rep. Mark Born (R-Beaver Dam) said legislators worked hard to find compromise while staying “committed to our core principals.”
“We are proud to have worked diligently to craft this budget, listened to the priorities of our constituents and look forward to sending the bill to [Evers] later this week,” Born said.
LeMahieu and budget committee co-chair Sen. Howard Marklein (R-Spring Green) said in a statement that tax relief for middle-income Wisconsinites has been their top priority during the entire process.
“This compromise will provide meaningful tax relief for retirees and the middle class, stabilize the child care system without making pandemic-era subsidies permanent and strengthen our schools by reimbursing special education at a higher rate,” the Senate leaders said.
Hesselbein said she has “been at the table fighting hard on behalf of Senate Democrats to help hammer out a bipartisan budget agreement.” Her involvement in negotiations comes amid slim margins in the Senate.
“Remember where we were a week ago: Republicans proposing $87 million in cuts to the UW, a mere 5% increase for special education and no direct payments to child care providers. Elections matter: the fact that Democrats gained four Senate seats and are close to taking the majority means that Senate Democrats were able to make this budget agreement better for the people of Wisconsin,” Hesselbein said.
Last session, the state Senate passed the budget bill with only Republican votes even after a couple of Republicans voted against the proposal. This session the Republican Senate caucus would only be able to lose one vote if it were going to pass the bill with only GOP support, yet, even prior to a deal announcement, a handful of Republican members had publicly expressed concerns about the spending in the bill. Among them was Sen. Steve Nass who, in a statement last week, laid out requirements for a budget that he could support, Sen. Rob Hutton who, in a Friday opinion piece, and Sen. Chris Kapenga who, in a post on Monday, drew their own lines in the sand.
It is unclear how many Senate Democrats will vote for the budget when it comes to the floor this week. Sen. LaTonya Johnson (D-Milwaukee) earlier told WISN UpFront that the caucus was sticking together and members were “not willing to be picked off one by one.”
The Joint Finance Committee is scheduled to meet at 9 a.m. Tuesday to vote on the rest of the budget before sending it to the full Assembly and Senate.
Child care funding
Child care providers, who have dealt with staffing shortages, high costs and declining state support, will receive a $300 million investment under the deal.
Evers had proposed spending an additional $480 million to continue funding Child Care Counts, a program that was funded using federal pandemic relief. With that funding running out, Evers had said the state should pick up the costs to continue supporting child care providers, while Republican lawmakers said they were opposed to providing checks to facilities.
Under the deal, the Child Care Counts program will be phased out, but the state will invest $110 million to support direct monthly payments and monthly per-child investments to child care facilities for a bridge program. That will continue helping providers to remain in business, cut child care wait lists and lower costs for families. The money will come out of the state’s federal interest earnings.
The state will also invest $66 million in general purpose revenue for a “Get Kids Ready” initiative, which will be targeted at supporting child care providers serving 4-year-olds. This will be the first child care program in state history to be funded solely by general purpose revenue.
Another agreed-upon budget item creates a $28.6 million pilot program to help support child care capacity for infants and toddlers.
Under the program, providers are to receive $200 per month for every infant under 18 months and $100 per month for every toddler between 18 and 30 months.
Other child care investments include a $123 million increase in the Wisconsin Shares program, $2 million over the biennium for the creation of a competitive grant program aimed at supporting child care facilities seeking to expand their capacity and $2 million in Wisconsin’s Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies to help parents find child care and provide training to providers.
The deal also makes changes inspired by solutions that Republican lawmakers have advocated for including creating “large family care centers” that will be allowed to serve up to 12 children and standardizing the minimum age for an assistant teacher in a child care facility at 16.
No cuts for University of Wisconsin system
The University of Wisconsin system will get an investment of more than $256 million in the state budget under the deal — a significant compromise as Evers and the system had requested an $855 million investment, while Republican leaders in recent weeks were considering an $87 million cut to the system. Evers had threatened to veto the budget if it came to his desk with a cut.
The funding includes $100 million to support UW system campuses statewide. Some of the funding would be distributed to campuses according to a formula. Of this, $15.25 million each year would be distributed to campuses with declining enrollment over the last two years and $11.25 million each year through a formula dependent on the number of credit hours undergraduates complete.
There will also be $7 million across the biennium to provide 24/7 virtual telehealth mental health services across UW system campuses, $54 million to support retainment and recruitment of faculty and staff, $94 million to increase wages by 3% in the first year and 2% in the second year for UW system employees and $1 million for UW-Green Bay’s Rising Phoenix Early College High School Program.
The UW system will also be required to maintain the number of positions funded with general purpose revenue and program revenue at January 2024 levels.
The system will also get over $840 million for capital projects. Other parts of the capital budget, including the Green Bay Correctional Institution, were not addressed in the deal.
$194 million for UW-La Crosse to complete the construction of the Prairie Springs Science Center and to demolish Crowley Hall
$189 million for UW-Milwaukee to renovate the Health Sciences and Northwest Quadrant complex
$137 million for UW-Oshkosh to demolish a library facility, renovate and add a brand-new replacement addition
$10 million for UW-Madison to renovate and build a new addition to Dejope Residence Hall
$98 million for UW-Stevens Point to renovate and build a new addition to Sentry Hall
$800,000 for UW-Milwaukee to plan for renovations at Sandburg Hall East Tower
Nearly $32 million for UW-Stout to renovate and build a new addition at its recreation complex
Nearly $19 million for UW-Madison to renovate the Chadbourne Residence Dining Hall, $5 million to plan for relocation and demolition of the UW-Madison Humanities Building and $160 million for renovation of UW-Madison’s Science Hall
K-12 special education funding up to 45%
The deal also makes changes to the budget that Republican lawmakers on the budget committee passed in mid-June, boosting the special education reimbursement rate to 45% by the second year of the budget.
The state’s special education rate was one of the crucial issues discussed by education advocates with many saying a significant investment would help alleviate some of the financial stress schools have faced and ease districts’ reliance on property taxes.
Some advocates had called for a 90% investment, while Evers proposed a 60% rate. Republican lawmakers had initially approved raising the rate to 35% in the first year of the budget and 37.5% in the second year.
Under the deal, the total investment in the special education reimbursement will be over $500 million. The rate will rise to 42% in the first half of the biennium and 45% in the second. It will remain at a sum certain rate, meaning the amount of money allocated is finite and will not increase based on expanding demand.
The budget deal will also invest $30 million for comprehensive school-based mental health services.
Department of Health Services changes
The deal would also increase the hospital assessment rate to help maintain the state’s Medicaid costs. The Wisconsin Hospital Assessment is a levy from certain hospitals that the Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS) uses to fund hospital access payments, hospital supplemental payments and reinvestment in the Wisconsin Medicaid program.
Wisconsin hospitals currently pay an assessment rate of about 1.8% of their net patient revenue to the DHS. That would rise to 6% under the deal with 30% of the funds being retained in the Medical Assistance Trust Fund, which supports Wisconsin’s Medicaid program. The rest of the funds will be used to invest in hospital provider payments and is estimated to provide over $1.1 billion in additional investments in Wisconsin hospitals.
The changes use federal funding to increase hospital reimbursement while decreasing the amount of general program revenue for the Medicaid program.
Evers’ office noted that federal reconciliation legislation proposals have included provisions that would prohibit or limit the policy change in the future, meaning that this budget could be the last for Wisconsin to make these types of changes.
The state will also fund the current Medicaid program under the deal.
The budget will also increase investments in free and charitable clinics by $1.5 million.
The deal does not include Medicaid expansion, which Evers continued to advocate for in the budget but Republican leaders have fervently opposed. It also doesn’t include the smaller postpartum Medicaid extension, which would allow postpartum mothers to receive Medicaid coverage for up to a year after giving birth.
Wisconsin is one of 10 states not to take the Medicaid expansion and one of two not to take the postpartum expansion.
Roads improvement program gets additional investment
A couple of projects created in the last budget to help with road improvement will get additional funding under the deal
The state will allocate $150 million in the Agricultural Roads Improvement Program, which was created in 2023 to support local agricultural road improvement projects statewide. Of the additional funding, $30 million will go towards improving and repairing deteriorating bridges across the state.
According to Evers’ office, the program has so far funded 92 projects across the state.
The deal would also generate nearly $200 million in additional revenue to improve the sustainability of the transportation fund, allocate $14 million for municipal service payments, invest $50 million to continue the Local Projects Program (also created in the 2023 budget), which supports local communities with construction projects that serve statewide public purpose, allocate $15 million for repairs and modifications to the Echo Lake Dam, invest $5 million for the Browns Lake dredging project and invest $30 million for the De Pere railroad bridge.
Under those changes, more people will qualify for the state’s second tax bracket with a rate of 4.4%. For single filers, the qualifying maximum income will increase from $29,370 to $50,480. For joint filers, the maximum will increase from $39,150 to $67,300 and for married separate filers, the maximum will increase from $19,580 to $33,650.
It’s estimated that this will reduce the state’s revenues by $323 million in 2025-26 and $320 million in 2026-27.
The cut will affect 1.6 million Wisconsin taxpayers and provide an average cut of $180. Under Wisconsin’s tax system, people pay the first-bracket tax rate on the portion of their income that falls into that bracket, the second-bracket rate on their income up to the maximum of the second bracket and so on. Thus even high-income earners will get a tax break through adjustments to the lower bracket rates.
The proposal also included an income tax exclusion for retirees. It is estimated to reduce Wisconsin’s revenues by $395 million in 2025-26 and $300 million in 2026-27. This will allow Wisconsinites 67 and older to exclude up to $24,000 for single-filers and $48,000 for married-joint filers of retirement income payments. Those filers will see an average cut of about $1,000 per filer.
The deal will also include the elimination of the sales tax on household utility bills, which is estimated to cost the state about $178 million over the biennium and create a film tax credit similar to one that Republican lawmakers have been advocating for.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., speaks to reporters as returns to his office from the Senate chamber at the U.S. Capitol Building on June 30, 2025 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Senate launched a marathon amendment voting session Monday during which lawmakers will debate dozens of proposals from Republicans and Democrats that could significantly reshape the “big, beautiful bill” even as a final vote nears.
The vote-a-rama is expected to last throughout Monday and potentially into Tuesday, challenging senators who aren’t accustomed to having to stay on the floor for all hours of the day and night. At the end, the Senate will vote on final passage and if the tax and spending cut bill is successful it will be taken up next in the House, possibly as soon as Wednesday morning.
The first big debate and vote Monday centered around Republicans’ decision to use current policy instead of current law to determine the bill’s fiscal impacts.
Congress has long used current law to determine how much legislation will add or subtract from annual deficits, especially when it comes to the budget reconciliation process that is being used for this bill.
But since Republicans’ 2017 tax law was set to expire at the end of the year, using the current law baseline showed significantly higher deficits than using current policy — which could prove to be a political problem.
The debate, wonky even for the Senate, could have ripple effects in the future, especially if Democrats ever get unified control of government and use the change in process that GOP lawmakers set this time around for their own policy goals.
Budget Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said during brief debate before the vote that using current policy would allow the GOP to make many of the tax levels in the 2017 law permanent, instead of having to sunset them to comply with reconciliation rules.
“What I’m trying to do, and I’m very happy about it, is to make sure the tax cuts don’t expire 10 years from now,” Graham said.
Reconciliation bills cannot increase the deficit after the 10-year budget window ends.
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York spoke out against using current policy over current law, rebuking his Republican colleagues, though his arguments were ultimately unsuccessful.
“Republicans are doing something the Senate has never done before — deploying fake math, accounting gimmicks to hide the true cost of the bill,” Schumer said. “Look, Republicans can use whatever budgetary gimmicks they want to try to make the math work on paper but you can’t paper over the real-life economic consequences of adding tens of trillions to the debt.”
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released its current law score of the bill on Sunday, showing the legislation would add $3.253 trillion to deficits during the next decade.
Senators voted 53-47 along party lines against overruling Graham’s decision to use current policy.
Narrow majority
Senators spent the next few hours debating Democratic changes to the bill that would have addressed Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. But no Democratic proposals had been adopted as of Monday afternoon and Republicans had yet to start voting on their own amendments.
Once both sides exhaust themselves, the Senate will move on to a final passage vote. With a narrow 53-seat majority, GOP leaders can only afford to lose three members and still have the bill pass with Vice President JD Vance breaking the tie.
Two Republican senators — Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Rand Paul of Kentucky — already indicated they’ll oppose the bill when they voted against advancing it late Saturday night. Altering the bill could cause issues for other senators, making the entire process a headache for GOP leadership.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said during a floor speech that the core of the sweeping package is focused on avoiding a cliff created when Republicans approved lower tax rates during President Donald Trump’s first term.
“This is about extending that tax relief so the same people that benefited from it back in 2017 and for the last eight years don’t end up having a colossal, massive tax increase hitting them in the face come January 1,” Thune said.
Schumer sharply criticized the policy changes and spending cuts in the mega-bill, saying they would lead to fewer people being able to access safety-net programs, like Medicaid, which provides health insurance coverage for low-income people and some people with disabilities, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which provides food assistance for low-income people.
“How can any senator go home and tell their constituents, ‘I’m sorry, I took away your health care because I wanted to give tax breaks to billionaires?’” Schumer said. “And yet Republicans are dead set on walking off a cliff by passing a bill they know will be ruinous to their own constituents.”
‘Wraparound amendment’
Depending on how popular an amendment is and exactly what aspects of the legislation it seeks to change, it could increase or decrease the number of GOP senators willing to vote for the final version of the bill.
Republican leaders will want to fend off all Democratic amendments, though if some do get added, Thune can use a procedural tactic called a “wraparound amendment” at the end to cut any problematic changes by wiping out Democratic amendments with a majority vote.
In addition to providing an opportunity for senators to debate nitty gritty policy details, the vote-a-rama serves a political purpose for Democrats, who will try to get at-risk senators to take votes that can then be used during the midterm elections to try to sway voters.
Those amendments will mostly focus on Maine’s Susan Collins after North Carolina’s Tillis announced his retirement Sunday.
While Democrats have more incentive for so-called “gotcha amendments” since they’re trying to flip the Senate from red to blue, GOP leaders may also bring up amendments challenging vulnerable Democratic senators, like Georgia’s Jon Ossoff.
And since the opportunity to put up as many amendments as a senator pleases is rare, both Democrats and Republicans may have an eye on purple-state lawmakers up for reelection in 2028.
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