Legislation introduced in the U.S. Senate would order the U.S. Department of Agriculture to resume frozen payments to farmers on contracts that have already been signed. (Photo by Gregory Conniff for the Wisconsin Examiner)
A group of U.S. Senate Democrats introduced legislation Monday that would order the agriculture department to resume paying farmers on contracts already signed.
“Donald Trump and Elon Musk are stiffing our farmers and processors — taking away resources these folks were guaranteed, threatening small businesses’ ability to stay open and people’s livelihoods,” said Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin), one of 17 cosponsors.
In addition to 15 Democrats, two independent senators who caucus with them, Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine, signed on to the bill.
Sen. Tammy Baldwin (Wisconsin Examiner, 2024 photo)
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has stopped reimbursing farmers and farm organizations for money they’ve spent, despite contracts they have already signed with the agency. The contracts call for farmers to be reimbursed for expenses they incur under the contracts.
Honor Farmer Contracts Act, introduced by Sen. Cory Booker (D-New Jersey), would require USDA “to release illegally withheld funding for all contracts and agreements previously entered into by the U.S. Department of Agriculture,” Baldwin’s office said in a statement announcing the legislation.
Under President Donald Trump, “USDA has refused to make reimbursement payments to fulfill signed contracts, without any indication of when or whether farmers will be paid the money they paid out and are owed,” Baldwin’s office said.
Farmers and organizations serving them contract with the USDA for various programs to connect with local markets and improve their productivity. The department then pays farmers back for the expenses they incur under those contracts. The department’s failure to pay strains finances both for the individual farmers and for the organizations that work with them under the programs, Baldwin’s office said.
Thelegislation would require USDA to unfreeze all signed agreements and make all past due payments as quickly as possible. It would also bar the department from canceling agreements or contracts unless there has been a failure to comply with their terms and conditions.
The bill would prohibit the department from closing county offices, field offices or centers of the Farm Service Agency, the Natural Resources Conservation Service or the Rural Development Service without notification at least 60 days in advance and justifying the closing to Congress.
On March 7, Baldwin said the USDA had resumed another previously stalled stream of funding, $6.5 million in grants for dairy businesses to diversify and market their products.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of Health and Human Services, testifies during his Senate Finance Committee confirmation hearing at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Jan. 29, 2025, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration announced a sweeping plan Thursday to restructure the Department of Health and Human Services by cutting an additional 10,000 workers and closing down half of its 10 regional offices.
The overhaul will affect many of the agencies that make up HHS, including the Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. HHS overall will be downsized from a full-time workforce of 82,000 to 62,000, including those who took early retirement or a buyout offer.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. released a written statement along with the announcement, saying the changes would benefit Americans.
“We aren’t just reducing bureaucratic sprawl. We are realigning the organization with its core mission and our new priorities in reversing the chronic disease epidemic,” Kennedy said. “This Department will do more — a lot more — at a lower cost to the taxpayer.”
The U.S. Senate voted to confirm Kennedy as the nation’s top public health official in mid-February.
Democrats immediately reacted with deep concern.
Senate Appropriations Committee ranking member Patty Murray, D-Wash., said that she was “stunned at the lack of thought about what they are doing to the American public and their health.”
Murray said the committee, which controls about one-third of all federal spending, “absolutely” has an oversight role to play in tracking HHS actions.
Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin, the top Democrat on the Appropriations subcommittee that funds HHS, said she believes HHS has overstepped its authority and expects the panel will look into its actions.
“These individuals who are going to be terminated under this plan play vital roles in the health of Wisconsinites and people nationally,” Baldwin said. “And I believe that they do not have the authority, the Trump administration does not have the authority to do this wholesale reorganization without working with Congress.”
Maryland Democratic Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, whose constituents in suburban Washington likely hold many of the jobs in question, wrote in a statement the HHS’ restructuring plans are “dangerous and deadly.”
“I warned America that confirming RFK Jr. would be a mistake,” Alsobrooks wrote. “His blatant distrust of science and disregard for research and advancement makes him completely unqualified.”
Cuts across department
The announcement says reorganizing HHS will cut its $1.7 trillion annual budget by about $1.8 billion, in part, by lowering overall staff levels.
Staffing cuts will be spread out over HHS and several of the agencies it oversees. The restructuring plans to eliminate 3,500 full-time workers at the FDA, 2,400 employees at the CDC, 1,200 staff at the NIH and 300 workers at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
The Hubert H. Humphrey Building, the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, D.C., as seen on Nov. 23, 2023. (Photo by Jane Norman/States Newsroom)
“The consolidation and cuts are designed not only to save money, but to make the organization more efficient and more responsive to Americans’ needs, and to implement the Make America Healthy Again goal of ending the chronic disease epidemic,” according to a fact sheet.
Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, or HELP, Committee Chairman Bill Cassidy, R-La., wrote in a statement that he looks “forward to hearing how this reorganization furthers these goals.”
“I am interested in HHS working better, such as lifesaving drug approval more rapidly, and Medicare service improved,” Cassidy wrote.
Regional offices, divisions affected
HHS did not immediately respond to a request from States Newsroom about which five of its 10 regional offices would shutter or when those closures would take effect.
Its website shows the offices are located in Boston; New York City; Philadelphia; Atlanta; Chicago; Dallas; Kansas City, Missouri; Denver; San Francisco; and Seattle.
HHS plans to reduce its divisions from 28 to 15 while also establishing the Administration for a Healthy America, or AHA.
That new entity will combine the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health, Health Resources and Services Administration, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry and National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
That change will “improve coordination of health resources for low-income Americans and will focus on areas including, Primary Care, Maternal and Child Health, Mental Health, Environmental Health, HIV/AIDS, and Workforce development. Transferring SAMHSA to AHA will increase operational efficiency and assure programs are carried out because it will break down artificial divisions between similar programs,” according to the announcement.
HHS will roll the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response into the CDC.
The department plans to create a new assistant secretary for enforcement, who will be responsible for work within the Departmental Appeals Board, Office of Medicare Hearings and Appeals and Office for Civil Rights.
House speaker says HHS is ‘bloated’
U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., posted on social media that he fully backed the changes in store for HHS.
”HHS is one of the most bureaucratic and bloated government agencies,” Johnson wrote. “@SecKennedy is bringing new, much-needed ideas to the department by returning HHS to its core mission while maintaining the critical programs it provides Americans.”
Advocates shared Democrats’ concern about the staff cutbacks.
Stella Dantas, president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, released a statement saying the organization was “alarmed by the sudden termination of thousands of dedicated HHS employees, whose absence compounds the loss of thousands of fellow employees who have already been forced to leave U.S. health agencies.”
“Thanks to collaboration with HHS, ACOG has been able to contribute to advances in the provision of maternal health care, broadened coverage of critical preventive care, increased adoption of vaccines, raised awareness of fetal alcohol syndrome, strengthened STI prevention efforts, and more,” Dantas wrote. “This attack on public health—and HHS’ ability to advance it—will hurt people across the United States every single day.”
Dr. Sterling Johnson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison speaks at a forum on NIH funding cuts conducted by U.S. Senate Democrats on Wednesday. (Photo courtesy of Sen. Tammy Baldwin's office)
Drastic funding cuts at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have disrupted biomedical research, potentially setting back projects that could advance treatment and prevention efforts for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and other major causes of illness and death, researchers and patients told Democratic Senators Wednesday.
“We are hearing from researchers, research institutions, and patients about the ongoing attacks on NIH,” said Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin), at the start of a two-and-a-half hour forum she chaired as the ranking Democrat on a Senate subcommittee that oversees NIH.
“Understandably, most are reluctant to publicly speak out because the Trump administration is actively extorting institutions of all types, including major research universities,” Baldwin said. “This administration is seeking to dismantle the NIH and destroy the hopes of millions of Americans who are counting on life-saving treatments and cures.”
Witnesses who testified Wednesday warned that with projects being canceled in midstream, years of research data would likely be wasted and the role of the NIH as the world’s leading funder of biomedical research was at risk of being displaced.
NIH-funded advances have contributed to reductions in death rates from cancer, heart attacks and stroke in the U.S., said Dr. Monica Bertagnolli, who was director of NIH in the Biden administration and stepped down in January.
“This progress would not have happened without taxpayer support,” Bertagnolli said.
But in the first two months of the Trump administration, she said, more than 300 grants have been terminated and $1.5 billion in funding has been delayed.
In the last year, Bertagnolli told Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington), NIH identified women’s health as “a high priority area” and “launched many new programs to really begin to address the deficiencies that we’ve had in women’s health.” Since the change in administration, however, “nothing new has moved forward.”
Dr. Sterling Johnson, the associate director of the Wisconsin Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and a professor at the University of Wisconsin, said NIH funding over the last two decades helped make it possible to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease through blood tests and brain imaging scans rather than having to wait until after the patient’s death to be certain.
The NIH also funded clinical trials on surgical procedures involving the brain that can slow symptoms of the condition, he said, as well as trials on potential preventive therapies.
“These discoveries are changing the way we diagnose and treat Alzheimer’s and related causes of dementia,” Johnson said, but there is growing concern about how to sustain those gains.
In the last few months, he said, there have been delays in peer review and funding approvals for some projects.
“There are proposed cuts that threaten major ongoing studies, including treatment trials, risking the loss of millions of dollars already invested and setting our patients back,” Johnson said. With cuts threatening to slow down studies, “we will lose ground on hard-won progress.”
Senators as well as witnesses recounted stories of research that was cut off that involved investigations of health disparities.
Poorer counties across the country have “a persistent problem with poorer outcomes for all kinds of health issues,” Bertagnolli said, with maternal and fetal health among the most visible. “And without targeting those particular populations to understand the reasons behind the disparities, how can we ever even begin to overcome them?”
Research that considered members of the LGBTQ+ community and how illness affects racial and ethnic groups differently have been recurring targets in the Trump administration NIH, several said.
Dr. Whitney Wharton, an Alzheimer’s researcher at Emory University, said the Trump administration’s NIH has canceled research projects that she and other colleagues were conducting on Alzheimer’s in racial and ethnic minority groups, including LGBTQ+ people.
Previous research by her lab found Black Americans were 64% more likely than non-Hispanic whites to get Alzheimer’s disease and are living with the disease longer, she said.
“The systematic elimination of these high-risk” groups of patients from research “will only serve to increase the total number of [Alzheimer’s] patients every year,” Wharton said. Understanding those disparities is especially important, she added, because with shifting demographics racial and ethnic minority groups will represent the majority of the population.
“These terminations will have very grave consequences for patients, for families, for communities, and for taxpayers,” Wharton said.
Wharton read from a letter she received Feb. 28 that canceled another project she was in the midst of.
“It cites transgender issues,” Wharton said. “And it says, ‘Research programs based on gender identity are often unscientific, have little identifiable return on investment and do nothing to enhance the health of many Americans. Many such studies ignore rather than seriously examine biological realities. It is a policy of NIH not to prioritize these research programs.’”
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) said the cancelation of grants, such as one on mental health therapies for LGBTQ people and other on LGBTQ cancer survivors, appear to violate a federal court order blocking the NIH from withholding grants that were already in progress.
He urged panelists to let the senators know if funds aren’t released when they’re supposed to be. “We need to know when they’re jammed because you can’t believe anything that the Trump administration tells you about the progress of the funds unless the funds are actually flowing,” Whitehouse said.
Wharton and Johnson both said the turmoil for NIH-funded research was at risk of driving away a generation of researchers.
“These cuts are very, very devastating and they’re very scary for young investigators, for students, whether they’ve been affected or not,” Wharton said. “These young scientists may leave research altogether because they’re nervous.”
U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin and a group of six other Democratic senators representing Great Lakes states sent a letter this week to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) pressing for more information about how staff cuts at the agency will affect programs on the lakes.
The letter, addressed to NOAA Vice Admiral Nancy Hann, asked her to detail the number of people fired at NOAA since she became the agency’s acting administrator, the number of people fired at each Great Lakes-focused NOAA program, the services that will be terminated and her plan to preserve those services.
Baldwin was joined in sending the letter by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), Tina Smith (D-MN), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), and Gary Peters (D-MI).
“We write to express our deep concern over the firing of probationary staff at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the potential impact these firings will have on the Great Lakes,” the senators wrote. “The Great Lakes are among the United States’ greatest natural treasures, strengthening our economy and attracting millions of visitors each year. The Lakes provide drinking water to over 30 million people, generate clean hydropower, and generate $3.1 trillion in gross domestic product. National and regional NOAA programs help protect these lakes and support our constituents who call the Great Lakes home.”
Among the NOAA programs that the group is seeking information about are the National Weather Service, National Estuarine Research Reserve System, Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research and Midwestern Regional Climate Center.
In Wisconsin, Lakes Michigan and Superior support 50,000 jobs and provide nearly $3 billion to the state’s gross domestic product, according to a 2024 NOAA report. Last month, Baldwin told the Wisconsin Examiner she’d fight to protect the Great Lakes.
“Wisconsin communities, farmers, and businesses rely on our Great Lakes, and I’ll stand up to any efforts that will hurt them and their way of life,” she said.
Juli and Katie McGuire pack apples at Blue Roof Orchard in Belmont, Wisconsin. Blue Roof is among the producers that took part in the Local Food Purchase Assistance Program, now canceled by the Trump administration. (Photo by Sharon Vanorny/Courtesy of Wisconsin Farmers Union)
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has abruptly stopped a program that has helped more than 280 Wisconsin farmers move their products to local food banks around the state, to the consternation of participating farmers.
On Tuesday, Gov. Tony Evers in a press release berated the administration of President Donald Trump for “trying to walk back promises to Wisconsin’s farmers and producers” and urged the administration to restore the 2025 Local Food Purchase Assistance program.
Funding for the program was approved and signed into law “years ago,” Evers said.
Over the past two years, 289 Wisconsin farmers took part in the program, distributing $4 million worth of food products across the state, said Julie Keown-Bomar, executive director of the Wisconsin Farmers Union, and participants were looking forward to continuing for a third season.
“It’s very disturbing that the federal government would renege on a federal contract that was already approved by Congress,” Keown-Bomar said in an interview.
“It was an enormous benefit to the farmers who counted on those purchases,” Keown-Bomar said. The program helped farmers have some certainty about their income, she added, and some hired new employees to handle the added production and distribution of goods.
“It really helped strengthen the food distribution system and create local food networks that were not there before,” she said.
Along with the Local Food Purchase Assistance program, the USDA told school nutritionists on Friday it would end a companion program that connects farmers with local schools. Politico reported Monday on thecancellation of both programs.
Politico quoted a USDA spokesperson who said funding announced in October “is no longer available and those agreements will be terminated following 60-day notification.” The unnamed spokesperson said the programs “no longer effectuate the goals of the agency.”
Evers’ office said the loss of the two programs would cut off farmers nationwide from more than $1 billion in support and would cut “Wisconsin’s promised funding by nearly $6 million.”
“The Trump Administration must stop turning their backs on America’s Dairyland and betraying our farmers, producers, and agricultural industries by trying to gut funding Wisconsin’s farmers and producers were promised,” Evers said.
He also took the administration to task for tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico, now on hold until early April.
“With President Trump’s 25 percent tariff taxes that are going to cause prices to go up on everything from gas to groceries and his escalating trade wars that could affect our farmers’ and producers’ bottom lines, these reckless cuts to critical federal programs couldn’t come at a worse time,” Evers said.
The local food programs marked the second time in less than a month that Wisconsin politicians have pushed back on Trump administration agriculture policies.
On Feb. 26, U.S. Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin wrote to USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins demanding that the department restart suspended grants for dairy farmers under the Dairy Business Innovation initiative. The program, begun in the 2018 Farm Bill, provides aid to dairy farmers to diversify and market products as well as expand their businesses.
“The uncertainty surrounding DBI funding is incredibly alarming because it threatens the future of many dairy businesses that were promised this support to grow and remain competitive,” Baldwin wrote in her letter to Rollins. She added that the “unnecessary and ill-advised disruption could have widespread economic consequences, particularly, for small dairy operations in Wisconsin that drive our rural economies.”
The suspension put 88 Midwestern dairy businesses on hold for $6.5 million in funds that had been appropriated in 2023, Baldwin said, including 30 in Wisconsin.
Evers noted Tuesday that complaints from his office, Baldwin and dairy industry leaders had successfully reversed the suspension, and called on the Trump administration to also reverse its decisions on the food bank and school food programs.
The governor’s office also criticized Trump for having “threatened to cut thousands of jobs from USDA,” including firing about 6,000 federal employees who weresubsequently reinstated.
Evers’ 2025-27 budget proposal has been relying on the local food program funding, and includes a request for $770,000 over two years in conjunction with that money. His office said Tuesday that the loss of the program heightens the importance of a $30 million initiative in his budget proposal to help Wisconsin farmers and producers distribute their products across the state, and called on the state Legislature to approve that, among other items.
Elon Musk is rapidly consolidating control over large swaths of the federal government with President Donald Trump ’s blessing, sidelining career officials, gaining access to sensitive databases and dismantling a leading source of humanitarian assistance.
The speed and scope of his work has been nothing short of stunning. In a little more than two weeks since Trump took office, the world’s richest man has created an alternative power structure inside the federal government for the purpose of cutting spending and pushing out employees. None of this is happening with congressional approval, inviting a constitutional clash over the limits of presidential authority.
Trump says Musk is doing his bidding
Musk has been named as a special government employee, which subjects him to less stringent rules on ethics and financial disclosures than other workers. Trump has given Musk office space in the White House complex where he oversees a team of people at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. The team has been dispersed throughout federal agencies to gather information and deliver edicts. Some of them were spotted on Monday at the Department of Education, which Trump has vowed to abolish.
Republicans defend Musk as simply carrying out Trump’s slash-and-burn campaign promises. Trump made no secret of his desire to put Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur behind the electric automaker Tesla and the rocket company SpaceX, in charge of retooling the federal government.
“Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday.
The Republican president also played downs concerns about Musk’s conflict of interests as he flexes his power over the bureaucracy even though his businesses face regulatory scrutiny and have federal contracts.
“Where we think there’s a conflict or there’s a problem, we won’t let him go near it, but he has some very good ideas,” Trump said.
Musk persists in spite of Democrats’ outrage
Democrats, for their part, accused Musk of leading a coup from within the government by amassing unaccountable and illegal power.
The early days of the Trump administration are “looking more like a coup in a transition,” says U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisconsin. She is shown speaking to reporters at a University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Pharmacy tour on Feb. 3, 2025. (Phoebe Petrovic / Wisconsin Watch)
“We will do everything in our power in the Senate and the House to stop this outrage,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland said. “And in the meantime, since we don’t have many Republican colleagues who want to help us, we are doing everything we can with our colleagues through the courts to make sure that we uphold the rule of law.”
Speaking to reporters in Madison, Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisconsin, said the early days of Trump’s new administration are “looking more like a coup than a transition.”
She called on Republicans to join Democrats in pushing back through an “all-hands-on-deck” approach.
The apex of Musk’s work so far came on Monday at the Washington headquarters for the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, where yellow police tape blocked access to the lobby and hundreds of employees were locked out of computer systems. Musk said Trump had agreed to let him shutter the agency.
“It’s not an apple with a worm in it, what we have is just a ball of worms,” Musk said of the world’s largest provider of humanitarian, development and security assistance. “You’ve got to basically get rid of the whole thing. It’s beyond repair.”
Federal workers are in unchartered territory
Musk has also turned his attention to the General Services Administration, or GSA, which manages federal government buildings. An email sent last week from the Washington headquarters instructed regional managers to begin terminating leases on roughly 7,500 federal offices nationwide.
The initiative is being led by Nicole Hollander, according to an agency employee who requested anonymity to discuss internal matters. Hollander describes herself on LinkedIn as an employee at X, Musk’s social media platform.
“This has gone beyond the pale. This is out of control. This is not a normal situation,” said Keya Chatterjee, executive director of Free DC, a local advocacy organization. She participated in a protest on Monday outside the Office of Personnel Management, which is one of the lesser-known federal agencies key to Musk’s agenda.
Musk’s work has unnerved federal employees who are being nudged toward the exits. On Sunday night, concerns swept through the workforce that they could be locked out of internal human resources system, denying them access to their own personnel files that showed pay history, length of service and qualifications. Supervisors in some agencies encouraged employees to download their records, called an SF-50, to personal computers so that they could prove their employment history in the event of disputes.
Musk’s penchant for dabbling
Musk has been tinkering with things his entire life, learning to code as a child in South Africa and becoming rich with the online payment company PayPal. He bought the social media platform Twitter a little more than two years ago, renamed it X and slashed its workforce while turning it into his personal political megaphone.
Now Musk is popping open the hood on the federal government like it’s one of his cars or rockets.
“The Silicon Valley playbook to disrupt the status quo — by disregarding and disobeying rules that you don’t like — is in full effect here,” said Rob Lalka, an expert on entrepreneurship and innovation in business at Tulane University.
One of the most significant steps was gaining access to the U.S. Treasury payment system, which is responsible for 1 billion payments per year totaling $5 trillion. It includes sensitive information involving bank accounts and Social Security payments.
“No one outside of the staff doing the work ever asked to have access to the payment files,” said Richard Gregg, who spent four decades working for Treasury and oversaw the payment system as fiscal assistant secretary.
It’s unclear what Musk wants to do with the payment system. He’s claimed that he could trim $1 trillion from the federal deficit “just by addressing waste, fraud and abuse.”
“That’s the biggest data hack ever in the world,” Baldwin said. “I am outraged about it.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent must revoke Musk’s access to the payment system.
“We must halt this unlawful and dangerous power grab,” he said on Capitol Hill.
A group representing retirees and union workers sued Bessent and the Treasury Department on Monday to get them to stop sharing personal and financial information with DOGE.
Trump rewards Musk’s fealty
Musk’s role is partially a reward for his work on behalf of Trump during the campaign. He spent roughly $250 million supporting Trump through America PAC, which included door-to-door canvassing and digital advertising.
Although the PAC has not announced its next plans, Musk has suggested that he could endorse primary challenges to Republican lawmakers who defy Trump’s agenda.
“The more I’ve gotten to know President Trump, the more I like him,” Musk said in a conversation streamed live on X. “Frankly, I love the guy. He’s great.”
Musk also described his work overhauling the federal government in existential terms, making it clear that he would push as hard and as far as he could.
“If it’s not possible now, it will never be possible. This is our shot,” he said. “This is the best hand of cards we’re ever going to have. If we don’t take advantage of this best hand of cards, it’s never going to happen.”
Phoebe Petrovic of Wisconsin Watch contributed reporting.
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)
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.
In the early morning following Election Day in 2020, Claire Woodall, then Milwaukee’s elections chief, mistakenly left behind a USB stick carrying vote totals at the city’s central absentee ballot counting facility. Election conspiracy theorists quickly seized on the mistake, accusing Woodall of rigging the election.
Their claims were baseless, but the mistake increased scrutiny on the city’s election staff and led Woodall to create a checklist to make sure workers at central count didn’t overlook any critical steps in the future.
This year, despite the checklist, Milwaukee election staff at central count made another procedural mistake — and once again left the door open to conspiracy theorists.
Somebody — city officials haven’t said who — overlooked the second step outlined on the checklist and failed to lock and seal the hatch covers on the facility’s 13 tabulators before workers began tabulating ballots. For hours, while counting proceeded, the machines’ on-off switches and USB ports were left exposed.
Results from the large and heavily Democratic city ultimately came in at 4 a.m. on Wednesday, only a few hours later than expected, but a time that conspiracy theorists implied was a suspicious hour for vote totals to change. Their posts echoed claims from 2020 that used sensationalized language like “late-night ballot dumps” to describe the reality that in big cities, absentee ballots take time — yes, sometimes late into the night — to collect, deliver, verify and count accurately.
In fact, the results in Milwaukee couldn’t have arrived much sooner. Under state law, election officials can’t start processing the hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots until the morning of Election Day. This year, they got a late start because of delays in getting workers settled, but were still expecting to be done around 2 or 3 a.m. Then it became clear the midday decision to redo the count would add more time to the process.
But those explanations have done little to curb the false conspiracy theories that have been proliferating on the right, including from losing U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde.
Election officials have for years known that the slightest mistakes, or even perceived errors, can trigger false claims. In this instance, the failure to follow a critical security step occurred in the state’s most scrutinized election facility, despite new procedures meant to reduce such errors.
For people with a conspiratorial mindset, such an oversight can’t be explained away as just a mistake, said Mert Bayar, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. The errors can provide conspiracy theorists a feeling of validation because those errors make a “conspiracy theory more realistic … more believable.”
For those people, he said, election errors are instead perceived as “part of a plot to steal an election.”
Instead of considering the 2024 Milwaukee mistake a simple oversight, Bayar said, conspiracy theorists may think that the tabulator doors “cannot be left unlocked unless they’re trying something tricky, something stealth.”
Genya Coulter, senior director of stakeholder relations at the Open Source Election Technology Institute, said Milwaukee can still fine-tune its processes and checklists.
“I don’t think anybody needs to be demonized,” she said, “but I do think that there needs to be some retraining. That would be helpful.”
Milwaukee error initially drew complaints, but not suspicion
It was an election observer who first noticed the open tabulator doors and alerted election officials. Around 2 p.m., Milwaukee’s current election chief, Paulina Gutiérrez, went from tabulator to tabulator, monitored by Democratic and Republican representatives, to lock all of the doors. Two hours later, she made the call to rerun all ballots through the tabulators.
The tabulators had been in full view of partisan observers and the media, but behind a barrier that only election officials and some designated observers, like representatives for both political parties who accompany election officials during some election processes, can enter. Any tampering would have been evident, Gutiérrez said, and there was no sign of that.
For that reason, some Republicans at central count opposed recounting all the ballots and risking a delay. U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, who went to central count on Election Day to learn more about the error, said he didn’t think anything nefarious happened, though he said the election operation there was “grossly incompetent.”
Coulter said the decision to start the counting over again was “the right call for transparency’s sake.”
Hovde, who lost his Senate race in a state that Donald Trump carried, invoked conspiratorial language to describe what happened.
“The results from election night were disappointing, particularly in light of the last minute absentee ballots that were dropped in Milwaukee at 4 a.m. flipping the outcome,” he said Monday in his concession speech. “There are many troubling issues around these absentee ballots.”
In an earlier video, Hovde criticized Milwaukee’s election operation and spread false claims about the proportion of votes that his opponent, U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, received from absentee ballots. That led to a skyrocketing number of posts baselessly alleging election fraud in Wisconsin.
In a statement, the Milwaukee Election Commission said it “unequivocally refutes Eric Hovde’s baseless claims regarding the integrity of our election process.”
Why Milwaukee’s results were late
There’s no proof of fraud or malfeasance in Milwaukee or anywhere else in Wisconsin on Election Day. But a few key factors combined to delay Milwaukee’s results until 4 a.m.
First, Milwaukee central count workers started processing and tabulating ballots around 9 a.m., long after the 7 a.m. start time allowed under state law. The delay was a matter of getting dozens of central count workers organized and at the right station in the large facility.
The more high-profile one was the failure to close the tabulators, which prompted the decision to count 31,000 absentee ballots all over again.
But both of those slowdowns could have been less consequential had Wisconsin election officials been able to process absentee ballots on the Monday before Election Day, as some other states allow. Such a change could have allowed election officials to review absentee ballot envelopes, verify and check in absentee voters but not count votes. An effort to allow election officials to do so stalled in the state Senate this year.
Checklist change could ‘improve transparency’
Milwaukee election officials may have avoided the situation entirely — and could avoid similar situations in the future — by modifying their central count checklist, said Coulter, from the Open Source Election Technology Institute.
Currently, the checklist states that at the start of Election Day, the tabulator doors should be locked and sealed. It’s not clear why that step was skipped. Gutiérrez didn’t respond to questions for comment about who was in charge of the process or whether that person faced disciplinary action.
But the step likely wouldn’t have been overlooked, Coulter said, if the checklist required the official in charge of locking the tabulators to be accompanied by a representative from each major political party.
“That’s a relatively painless change that … I think it would improve transparency,” Coulter said.
“There needs to be an emphasis on having two people from different political affiliations performing all duties that involve the tabulator,” she said.
Another pre-processing step on the checklist calls for people working at the tabulators to make sure the numbered seals pasted over the tabulator doors are intact. It doesn’t call for checking that the tabulator doors are locked.
To avoid a repeat situation, Coulter said, “they should also check to make sure that the door to the power button is properly locked, and what to do if it isn’t.”
Election officials recognize the scrutiny they face over errors, Coulter said, and they sometimes focus more on avoiding mistakes than running election operations.
“It’s like a racecar driver … If you focus on the wall, you’re going to wind up hitting that wall,” she said. “You have to train your mind to think about the curve and not the wall, but unfortunately, it’s really hard for election officials to do that, especially in high-pressure jurisdictions.”
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
Milwaukee counts absentee ballots at a central location and reports the totals only when they are finished.
Those results were delayed a few hours this year because election officials in Milwaukee recounted about 30,000 absentee ballots during the night of Nov. 3 into Nov. 4 because doors on the ballot tabulators were not properly sealed.
In a Nov. 11 social media post, user End Wokeness claimed a 3:30 a.m. “ballot dump” lost candidate Eric Hovde the Senate race in Wisconsin. The chart in the post shows no evidence of fraud, just Sen. Tammy Baldwin’s vote total increasing when Milwaukee reported its absentee ballot results.
Baldwin received 82% of votes from the city’s absentee ballots and 78% overall, the Milwaukee Election Commission reported.
Wisconsin law requires clerks to post the number of total outstanding absentee ballots by the close of polls.
Baldwin won with 49.4% of the vote to Hovde’s 48.5% statewide, according to unofficial results.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
Wisconsin Republican Eric Hovde conceded defeat on Monday to Democratic incumbent Tammy Baldwin in their U.S. Senate race, saying he did not want to “add to political strife through a contentious recount” even though he raised debunked election conspiracies.
Hovde, who was backed by President-elect Donald Trump, could have requested a recount because his margin of defeat was less than 1 percentage point, at about 29,000 votes. He would have had to pay for it himself.
Baldwin’s campaign referred requests for comment on Hovde’s concession on Monday to her victory speech. In that address, Baldwin pledged to work with Trump when possible but also vowed to fight him to protect the national health care law and abortion rights.
Hovde, in his concession video, repeated claims he made saying there were “many troubling issues” related to absentee ballots in Milwaukee and when they were reported. Republicans, Democrats and nonpartisan election leaders all refuted the claims of impropriety Hovde made.
“Without a detailed review of all the ballots and their legitimacy, which will be difficult to obtain in the courts, a request for a recount would serve no purpose because you will just be recounting the same ballots regardless of their integrity,” Hovde said Monday.
Although there is no evidence of wrongdoing in the election, many Hovde supporters questioned a surge in votes for Baldwin that were reported by Milwaukee around 4:30 a.m. the morning after the election. Those votes put Baldwin over the top.
The votes were the tabulation of absentee ballots from Milwaukee. Those ballots are counted at a central location and reported all at once, often well after midnight on Election Day. Elections officials for years have made clear that those ballots are reported later than usual because of the sheer number that have to be counted and the fact that state law does not allow for processing them before polls open.
Republicans and Democrats alike, along with state and Milwaukee election leaders, warned in the days and weeks leading up to the election that the Milwaukee absentee ballots would be reported late and cause a huge influx of Democratic votes.
Hovde also repeated his complaint about the candidacy of Thomas Leager, who ran as a member of the America First Party. Leager, a far-right candidate who was recruited by Democratic operatives and donors to run as a conservative, finished a distant fourth.
Republicans supported independent presidential candidates Cornel West and Jill Stein in efforts to take votes away from Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tried to get his name removed from the ballot in Wisconsin and other swing states after he backed Trump.
In the Wisconsin Senate race, Leager got about 400 fewer votes than the margin between Baldwin and Hovde. But Hovde claimed on Monday that he would have won the Senate race if Leager had not been on the ballot.
Baldwin declared victory after The Associated Press called the race for her on Nov. 6. She outperformed Harris, who lost Wisconsin by about as many votes as Baldwin defeated Hovde.
The Baldwin win came in the face of Democratic losses nationwide that allowed Republicans to take control of the Senate.
Her win was the narrowest of her three Senate races. Baldwin won in 2012 by almost 6 percentage points and in 2018 by nearly 11 points.
Hovde, a multimillionaire bank owner and real estate developer, first ran for Senate in 2012 but lost in the Republican primary. He poured millions of dollars of his own money into his losing campaign this year.
Hovde on Monday did not rule out another political campaign in the future. Some Republicans have floated him as a potential candidate for governor in 2026.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.
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