U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Black Earth) addresses union members at a weekend rally in support of federal workers whose jobs are on the line under the administration of President Donald Trump. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Moves by the Trump administration to cut the federal workforce have caused chaos and fear inside agencies ranging from the U.S. Forest Service to the Social Security Administration, advocates for federal employees say.

Some two dozen Forest Service employees in Wisconsin returned to work Monday, five weeks after receiving termination notices and being walked out, as a result of a court order March 13 holding the termination notices issued on Valentine’s Day were illegal.

Wisconsin is home to some 18,000 federal workers, U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Black Earth) said at a rally in Madison Saturday — workers whose jobs are on the line under orders from Washington, D.C.

“I am getting record numbers of calls in our office, literally thousands of calls every single week,” Pocan said. “People are pissed. They’re upset about cuts to the Veterans Administration. They’re upset about what’s happening with the Social Security Administration. They’re upset about Medicare and Medicaid potential cuts. They’re upset about cuts to agriculture and education.”

At the Social Security Administration, the acting Social Security commissioner has announced plans to close regional offices and cut 7,000 jobs “through buyouts, layoffs, resignations and terminations,” said Jessica LaPointe, president of American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Council 220, who joined the Saturday rally at the headquarters of the South Central Federation of Labor. The council represents Social Security field office employees.

Social Security operations have been “historically understaffed,” LaPointe said, and the planned reductions “will lead to longer service delays, systems failures, and even inevitably benefit disruptions.”

In an interview with the Wisconsin Examiner during a Wisconsin visit in October, Martin O’Malley, Social Security commissioner at the time, said staff at the agency’s Madison field office has dropped by 40% since 2019. O’Malley said he told members of Congress they should increase staffing at the agency to restore “at least an adequate level of customer service.”

The cuts the agency has announced are “exacerbating the chaos, confusion and anxiety felt by workers under siege,” LaPointe said Saturday. She added that the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s project to slash operations across the federal government “are destroying the public’s ability to access timely and effective service from the Social Security Administration, with the intent — let’s be real about their intent — of turning the American people against Social Security.”

William Townsend, president of the AFGE local at the Department of Veterans Affairs VA hospital in Madison, said the department’s plan to cut 80,000 or more positions nationwide would be detrimental to the health care of veterans counting on the agency.

AFGE also represents employees at the Transportation Security Administration. The union and the Biden administration signed a new contract in 2024, but Trump administration TSA leaders told the union last month they were canceling the contract and would no longer recognize the union.

Nevertheless, said TSA worker and AFGE Local 777 president Darrell English, the union will continue to stand up for its members’ rights while conducting a legal battle to restore their union contract. “We know it’s going to be a long fight, but we’re here,” English said at Saturday’s rally.

At the U.S. Forest Service, 24 Wisconsin employees were fired on Feb. 14 — part of a wave of thousands of “probationary” employees let go, said Carl Houtman, a union official.

Houtman works at the Forest Service Products Laboratory in Madison and is president of the National Federation of Federal Employees union local there. He is also the national negotiation chair for the union’s Forest Service Council. In an interview Monday, he stipulated he was speaking strictly as a union leader, not as a Forest Service representative.

About 170 of the Forest Service’s 672 Wisconsin employees work at the laboratory, researching the use of wood as a building material and wood chemistry for papermaking and in a variety of new applications. Most of the other Forest Service employees in the state are associated with the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest in northern Wisconsin.

After a series of legal challenges, a federal judge in California ordered the Trump administration to reinstate the fired probationary workers, ruling that Trump administration officials hadn’t followed required procedures.  

The fired workers returned Monday, said Houtman, including a colleague who was among those who had been dismissed.

“It’s crazy the inefficiency that has caused,” he said Monday. “They walked her out the door, took her computer and her door card, and they basically had to hire her back. In this intervening month she could have been reasonably doing her job, but the agency was forced” by the federal Office of Personnel Management, now under the Trump administration’s control, “to fire these people.”

The federal judge’s ruling requires the administration to follow the legal procedures for reducing the federal workforce. Houtman said federal workers and their unions involved in the February firing expect to learn more about the administration’s intentions in the next month.

“We anticipate about the middle of April getting an idea about what’s going on,” he said. “It’s possible that a large number of people in Wisconsin will get wiped out — we just don’t know.”

Houtman said there are concerns among employees that “this administration wants to wipe out the science arm of the Forest Service” and possibly sell most or all federally owned forest land, harming the nation’s natural resources.

Established in 1910, the forest products lab remains a vital source of research, he said. Its findings help shape codes and standards for building as well as for product manufacturing — such as a project currently underway to develop a consistent test for how recyclable consumer packaging is.

The lab also plays a role in training new scientists, he added.

“Most of the probationary employees were new hires, starting to learn wood science from us,” Houtman said. “You basically have wiped out the next generation of scientists. It’s going to do irreparable harm.”

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An Eau Claire County farm. (Photo by Henry Redman/Wisconsin Examiner)

Seven western Wisconsin Republican lawmakers did not appear at an event hosted by the Wisconsin Farmers Union in Chippewa Falls Friday as farmers from the area said they were concerned about the effect that President Donald Trump’s first month in office is having on their livelihoods. 

Madison-area U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Black Earth), state Sen. Jeff Smith (D-Eau Claire) and state Reps. Jodi Emerson (D-Eau Claire) and Christian Phelps (D-Eau Claire) were in attendance. 

U.S. Reps. Tom Tiffany and Derrick Van Orden, state Reps. Rob Summerfield (R-Bloomer), Treig Pronschinske (R-Mondovi) and Clint Moses (R-Menomonie) and state Sens. Jesse James (R-Thorp) and Rob Stafsholt (R-New Richmond) were all invited but did not attend or send a staff member. 

“All four of us want you to know that there are people in elected office who want to fight for you,” Phelps said. “Because I think there’s a lot of fear that comes from the fact that we’re seeing a lot of noise and action from the people who aren’t and some of the people that didn’t show up to this. So I hope that you will also ask questions of them when you get a chance.” 

Multiple times during the town hall, Pocan joked that Van Orden was “on vacation.” 

Emerson, whose district was recently redrawn to include many of the rural areas east of Eau Claire, told the Wisconsin Examiner she had just been at an event held by the Chippewa County Economic Development Corporation where a Van Orden staff member did attend, so she didn’t understand why they couldn’t hear about how Trump’s policies are harming local farmers. 

“I get that a member of Congress can’t be at every meeting all the time, all throughout their district,” Emerson said. With 19 counties in the 3rd District, “it’s a big area. But I hope that they’re hearing the stories of farmers and farm-adjacent businesses, even if they weren’t here. There’s something different to sit in this room and look out at all the farmers, and when one person’s talking, seeing the tears in everybody else’s eyes, and it wasn’t just the female farmers that were crying, the big tough guys, and I think that talks about how vulnerable they are right now, how scary it is for some of these folks.”

Carolyn Kaiser, a resident of the nearby town of Wheaton, said she’s never seen her congressional representative, Van Orden, out in the community. Despite Van Orden’s position on the House agriculture committee, Kaiser said her town needs help managing nitrates in the local water supply and financial support to rebuild crumbling rural roads that make it more difficult for farmers to transport their products.

“When people don’t come, it’s unfortunate,” Kaiser said. 

Emmet Fisher, who runs a small dairy farm in Hager City, said during the town hall that he was struggling with the freeze that’s been put on federal spending, which affected grants he was set to receive through the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Fisher told the Examiner his farm has participated in a USDA program to encourage better conservation practices on farms and that money has been frozen. He was also set to receive a rural energy assistance grant that would help him install solar panels on the farm — money that has also been held up.

The result, he said, is that he’s facing increased uncertainty in an already uncertain business.

“We get all our income from our farm, young family, young kids, a mortgage on the farm, and so, you know, things are kind of tight, and so we try to take advantage of anything that we can,” he said. “[The] uncertainty seems really unnecessary and unfortunate, and it’s very stressful. You know, basically, we have no idea what we should be planning for. The reality is just that in farming already, you can only plan for so much when the weather and ecology and biology matter so much, and now to have all of these other unknowns, it makes planning pretty much impossible.”

A number of crop farmers at the event said the looming threat of Trump imposing tariffs on Canadian imports is alarming because a large majority of potash — a nutrient mix used to fertilize crops — used in the United States comes from Canada. Les Danielson, a cash crop and dairy farmer in Cadott, said the tariffs are set to go into effect during planting season.

“How do you offer a price to a farmer? Is it gonna be $400 a ton, or is it gonna be $500 a ton?” he asked. “I’m not even thinking about the fall. I’m just thinking about the spring and the uncertainty. This isn’t cuts to the federal budget, this is just plain chaos and uncertainty that really benefits no one. And I know it’s kind of cool to think we’re just playing this big game of chicken. Everybody’s gonna blink. But when you’re a co-op, or when you’re a farmer trying to figure out how much you can buy, it’s not fine.”

A recent report by the University of Illinois found that a 25% tariff on Canadian imports — the amount proposed by Trump to go into effect in March — would increase fertilizer costs by $100 per ton for farmers.

Throughout the event, speakers said they were concerned that Trump’s efforts to deport workers who are in the United States without authorization  could destroy the local farm labor force, that cuts to programs such as SNAP (commonly known as food stamps) could cause kids to go hungry and prevent farmers from finding markets to sell their products, that cuts to Medicaid could take coverage away from a population of farmers that is aging and relies on government health insurance and that because of all the disruption, an already simmering mental health crisis in Wisconsin’s agricultural community — in rural parts of the state that have seen clinics and hospitals close or consolidate — could come to a boil.

“Rural families, we tend to really need BadgerCare. We need Medicaid. We need those programs, too,” Pam Goodman, a public health nurse and daughter of a farmer, said. “So if you’re talking about the loss of your farming income, that you’re not going to have cash flow, you’re already experiencing significant concerns and issues, and we need the state resources. We need those federal resources. I’ve got families that from young to old, are experiencing significant health issues. We’re not going to be able to go to the hospital. We’re not going to go to the clinic. We already traveled really long distances. We’re talking about the health of all of us, and that is, for me, from my perspective as a nurse, one of my biggest concerns, because it’s all very interrelated.”

Near the end of the event, Phelps said it’s important for farmers in the area to continue sharing how they’re being hurt by Trump’s actions, because that’s how they build political pressure.

“Who benefits from all the chaos and confusion and cuts? Nobody, roughly, but not literally, nobody,” he said. “Because I just want to point out that dividing people and making people confused and uncertain and vulnerable is Donald Trump’s strategy to consolidate his political power.”

“And the people that can withstand the types of cuts that we’re seeing are the people so wealthy that they can withstand them. So they’re in Donald Trump’s orbit, basically,” Phelps said, adding  that there are far more people who will be adversely affected by Trump’s policies than there are people who will benefit.

“And you know that we all do have differences with our neighbors, but we also have a lot of similarities with them, and being in that massive group of people that do not benefit from this kind of chaos and confusion is a pretty big similarity,” he continued. “And so hopefully these types of spaces where we’re sharing our stories and hearing from each other will help us build the kind of community that will result in the kind of political power that really does fight back against it.”

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Democratic U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan talks Wednesday morning about programs in Wisconsin that could be affected by Republican proposals to cut the federal budget. Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer (D-Racine), left, and Senate Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein (D-Middleton), right, also took part in the state Capitol press conference. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

As the Republican majority in Congress begins work on legislation to renew and expand the 2017 federal tax cut, Wisconsin Democrats met with reporters Wednesday to argue that the measure will have a devastating impact on the public.

The U.S. House has begun work on a budget reconciliation bill — complex legislation that will encompass a broad swath of federal programs. President Donald Trump endorsed the effort on X Wednesday.

Senate Democrats at a Washington, D.C., press conference, including Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin, warned of “massive cuts” to Medicaid on the horizon Wednesday if the package is enacted, notwithstanding Trump’s comments this week that Medicare and Medicaid “won’t be touched.”

In Madison, U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Town of Vermont) along with Democratic leaders in the state Legislature gathered in the state Capitol Assembly parlor, where they focused not just on Medicaid but on a host of other programs that they said were important to Wisconsin.

House Republicans are seeking a $1.5 trillion cut in spending over 10 years, Pocan said, while raising the debt ceiling by $4 trillion, with the goal of a $4.5 trillion tax cut over 10 years.

Calculations by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that savings from extending the 2017 tax cuts enacted in Trump’s first term would favor the richest 1% of taxpayers most dramatically.

“So this is about a tax cut for the wealthiest,” Pocan said. “It’s about a transfer of money from programs that affect the middle class and those aspiring to be in the middle class to the wealthiest — so that the rich will get even richer.”

Budget reconciliation bill

Under the budget reconciliation process, Pocan explained, Republicans have assigned spending targets to U.S. House committees for the agencies in their purview. The House Energy and Commerce Committee alone has been instructed to find $880 billion in cuts, Pocan said — and Medicaid is the largest program under the committee’s jurisdiction.

“And you know, really the better way to describe Medicaid is — that’s funding for opioid treatment, that’s funding for mental health, that’s funding for nursing home care, for maternity and infant care, help for people with disabilities, and a whole lot more,” Pocan said. “So it’s really about programs that affect people in Wisconsin.”

Medicaid serves more than 1 million people in Wisconsin, Pocan said, including one-third of Wisconsin children, 45% of working age people living with disabilities and 55% of nursing home residents.

Proposals circulating in Washington would cut $230 billion from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). “That would result in about a 23% cut to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program [SNAP],” Pocan said. Some 702,000 Wisconsinites “benefit from the SNAP program, and it really is at risk.” 

Pocan scoffed at the idea that a project to cut government spending, headed by Elon Musk, was intended to promote government efficiency. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is not an official federal agency.

“DOGE is something that was created to find waste, fraud and abuse in government,” Pocan said. “The reality is, that is a fraud. It is really about finding $4.5 trillion ultimately to have a tax cut.”

Lawmakers hear from anxious voters

Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer (D-Racine) said she and her colleagues in the Legislature are hearing daily from constituents anxious about the prospect of federal cutbacks.

“We are getting calls from concerned Wisconsinites about whether they will lose access to their health care or housing,” Neubauer said. “We hear those stories every day, and we know that the actions that Trump is taking at the federal level have real impacts, and we are going to do everything we can to protect the people of Wisconsin from these attacks.”

Sen. Dianne Hesselbein, the Senate minority leader, said she’s heard from farmers, parents and Medicaid recipients, among others, worried about changes in Washington.

“What happens in Congress over the next few weeks and months matters,” Hesselbein said. She urged Wisconsin voters to let their congressional representatives know about concerns they have.

“Contact Ron Johnson,” the Republican U.S. Senator from Oshkosh, Hesselbein said. “Let them know these real stories and what that’s going to mean to the people in our community. People are upset, they are worried. They’ve had enough, and we need to stop the madness.”

Impoverished students and veterans’ health

Speakers who joined Pocan highlighted the direct impact of other programs that have been targeted for reduction.

Title I funds go to school districts with a large number of children living in poverty, while the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) provides additional aid to schools for teaching students with disabilities. Title I directs about $235 million a year to Wisconsin and IDEA about $271 million, Pocan said, and both have been targeted for reductions.  

“Title I funding is a lifeline to my school right now, and for millions of students across America,” said Elizabeth O’Leary, a special education teacher in Madison. “These funds provide crucial support for instruction in reading, math, as well as special programs, after-school initiatives and summer learning opportunities.”

O’Leary described students with disabilities and students living in extreme poverty.

“Our school team works together to meet the basic needs of our students and also to teach them,” she said, adding that the school where she works has many students facing those and other difficulties.

“And while these students’ lives are difficult, they are so magnificent and they deserve the opportunity to learn and thrive,” O’Leary said. “Simply put, our students would not get the support they need, and staff would lose their jobs, without Title I funding.”

Other Trump administration actions outside the budget bill are also hitting Wisconsin, Pocan said, such as layoffs in the Department of Veterans Affairs health system.

Yvonne Duesterhoeft, a U.S. Air Force veteran, said the VA health system is a trusted health care provider for thousands of former service members.

“I wish everyone in America could have access to the type of efficient and comprehensive health care that I and many veterans have come to know in recent decades,” Duesterhoeft said.

Decades ago, she acknowledged, the system was underfunded and often indifferent to the needs of returning wartime veterans, but that has changed as Vietnam-era vets campaigned for, and won, important improvements in VA health care quality.

“We must guard against the recent and concerted fast-track effort to make VA health care terrible again,” she said.

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U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Town of Vermont) points to a wall where he has posted printouts listing the budget line items of all the programs reportedly frozen this week after a memo was issued by the Trump administration. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

This week’s drama over a federal funding freeze is the precursor to a battle in April over federal tax cuts that Democrats are bracing for, according to U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan.

The Wisconsin Democrat met with reporters Thursday, with most of the session focusing on the move by President Donald Trump’s administration earlier this week to suspend the disbursement of federal grant and loan funds.

Even with a federal court order that’s supposed to be blocking the suspension, Pocan said his office and those of his congressional colleagues are hearing from constituents who have been locked out of funding or are worried about its impact on them.

“We’re getting these calls right now — lots and lots of calls,” Pocan said, including from nonprofits that worry they might have to shut down and from funding recipients who have been shut out from online portals through which they’re supposed to receive payments.

“Even though we’re told it’s not happening, it is happening, and they can’t get the funds that they’re [expecting],” Pocan said.

Pocan, whose district includes Wisconsin’s capital, prepped for the media session by filling a conference room wall in his Madison office with printouts of budget line items affected by the Trump administration’s suspension. He said he got the list of items from a New York Times report.

“When he said he was going to freeze funding to 2,600 different federal lines, that’s what’s [on] the wall right there,” Pocan said.

“We’re getting calls from university researchers” worried about National Institutes of Health grants being frozen, he said. “And if you disrupt research in the middle of it, you’ve lost all the money that you put into some of that research.”

His office has heard from a wide range of other federal funds recipients.

“We’re getting K-12 schools who are still going to lose money for their lunch programs, worried about what they’re going to do — and this is for kids who often this is the only meal that they’re getting during the day,” Pocan said.

Also on the list, he said, are funds that include rural broadband projects, disaster aid, the Small Business Administration and a USDA dairy innovation project — one that Pocan said had bipartisan support from two Wisconsin lawmakers, Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden.

How the suspension unfolded echoed what Trump said this past summer, “when he talked in the debate about having a concept of a plan of health care,” Pocan said. “I think pretty much that’s how he operates — he doesn’t have plans, but he has concepts of plans, which often don’t execute.”

At the same time, though, he said the details reflected Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation document that circulated last year as a blueprint for a second Trump term, even though Trump disavowed it during the campaign.

“If you have any question of what they might do, I would look at Project 2025,” Pocan said. “It’s very clear that that is the guiding document for much of what they’re doing.”

Beyond the current turmoil, however, Pocan, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, said the episode foreshadows what Democratic congressional leaders expect will be a major budget  bill in April. They foresee legislation that will extend and magnify the tax cuts that Trump and Congress enacted in 2017, during the president’s first term, and the broad swath of programs caught up in the suspension would be the price, he said.

“This is setting up the cuts for getting funding to give a tax break to those who can afford to go to Mar-A-Lago and the billionaires that were attending the inaugural and all the tech folks,” Pocan said.

“Part of it is just this awful idea that you’re going to cut things that help real people to the degree that you need to” to pay for extending the 2017 tax cuts, he added, pegging the estimate at $4 trillion.

“It would take that, plus they’re talking about lowering the corporate tax rate and a whole lot of other things,” Pocan said. “But everything that’s here is affecting people in the district and across the country for the most part.”

He predicted that the impact wouldn’t be limited to people who don’t support the president. “I guarantee there’s a lot of people who are Trump voters who are going to be very negatively impacted by the cuts that he wants to do in order to give Elon Musk a tax break,” he said.

Congressional Democrats are mapping a three-part response — “litigation, communication — talking about what’s here — and the appropriations process,” Pocan said. “We will probably be doing a lot to highlight this.”

He expects that to be a “the determinative vote for Congress coming up in the Trump administration,” Pocan said. “Because if you vote for a reconciliation bill, it has a giant tax break, and you’re taking that money from lower income folks and people of average income in the district by cutting programs like this.”

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State Sen. Kelda Roys speaks with reporters Tuesday about the Trump administration's memo announcing a suspension of federal funds directed to state and local governments. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Wisconsin joined 21 states and the District of Columbia Tuesday in a lawsuit to stop the Trump administration from cutting off the distribution of budgeted federal funds to states and local governments.

A federal district judge ruled Tuesday the Trump administration must wait until at least next week before it can move forward with pausing federal spending on trillions in grants and loans, though she emphasized the short-term administrative stay might not continue after a Feb. 3 hearing.

District Judge Loren L. AliKhan’s decision temporarily blocks the Office of Management and Budget from moving forward with plans to stop payments on multiple federal programs, which it announced late Monday.

The White House action “would immediately jeopardize critical federal benefits and investments that provide crucial health and childcare services, support public schools, combat hate crimes and violence against women, and provide life-saving disaster relief to states, among other critical programs,” the office of Gov. Tony Evers said in announcing the lawsuit late Tuesday.

Wisconsin expects to receive $28.2 billion in federal funds appropriated for the current 2023-25 two-year budget period, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau.

“This was a sweeping, reckless decision that has caused unnecessary chaos and panic in Wisconsin and across our country,” Evers said in announcing the lawsuit. “Wisconsin’s kids, families, veterans, law enforcement, seniors, and Wisconsinites in every corner of our state depend upon our federal tax dollars to support basic, everyday needs and services.”

Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul said the funding freeze appears to include money for law enforcement, victim services, health programs, infrastructure projects, education and additional purposes.

It “has already resulted in widespread uncertainty and confusion,” Kaul said. “This misguided and unlawful policy must be blocked before it leads to substantial harm to services and programs that are critical for Wisconsinites.”

Reaction to the Trump administration action was widespread, and state as well as federal lawmakers said they were starting to hear from constituents worried about the impact on programs and services they relied on.

“I am already hearing from my constituents who are worried about funding being cut off for cops and firefighters, child care, combatting the fentanyl crisis, food for kids, and so much more,” said Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), vowing to fight action. “Democrats and Republicans passed laws providing this funding for our kids, families, and communities, and ripping it away is an unconstitutional power grab.”

In a brief press conference in her state Capitol office, Sen. Kelda Roys (D-Madison) called the funding suspension an “illegal power grab that the Trump administration is attempting to pull” and warned of “the very real cost that that’s going to have for Wisconsin families and families across America.”

Roys said the action was “a stunt” by Trump. “It’s a way to try to see how far he can go, how much he can get away with, and to test the loyalty of all the GOP politicians that he thinks should bend the knee,” she said. “And that should not distract us from the fact that this is going to have very, very real negative consequences for millions of families in our state, right here and across the country.”

She added the action is also “a very destabilizing move that could have significant ramifications for people’s sense of economic security” and a potential “shock to the economy.”

U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan described the administration’s action as an “unprecedented and unconstitutional stop-payment on Congressionally appropriated funding” and attacked Trump as “the Grifter-in-Chief” who was violating the Constitution by imposing the freeze.

Pocan connected the action with Trump’s proposals for renewing tax cuts enacted in 2017, accusing the president of “working to enrich himself and his billionaire buddies.”

“This reckless move will devastate every community across the country, and Republicans must join with Democrats to make sure Trump does not get away with this unconstitutional theft of American taxpayers’ own money,” Pocan said.

Earlier Tuesday, Evers sent Trump a letter urging him to reverse the plan to cut off federal assistance, warning that it “could have disastrous consequences for the people of Wisconsin and our state.”

He wrote that the freeze would withhold “tax dollars from Wisconsin that were already approved by the U.S. Congress” and thus that they “are the law.”

“I urge you to please follow the law and reconsider this decision,” Evers concluded.