From left, parents Jessica Seawright and Brooke Wampole talk with Sen. Tammy Baldwin about their concerns over the impact of Medicaid cuts on families with children such as theirs who have disabilities. (Screenshot/Zoom)

As members of Congress continue to debate the Republican budget reconciliation bill that includes hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid, Jessica Seawright ponders what that could mean for her young son.

Seawright is a social worker in Southeast Wisconsin. She’s also the mother of a 9-year-old boy with complex medical needs resulting from a genetic condition.

She and her husband — a college professor — have medical coverage through work, but with her son’s condition, which includes cerebral palsy, their health plans could never cover the degree of care he requires.

Medicaid has made the difference, Seawright said Wednesday. It’s helped through the Katie Beckett  program, which enables children with disabilities to have Medicaid coverage while living at home instead of being in an institution; the Medicaid children’s long-term support coverage; and Medicaid support that public schools receive to cover certain services that students with disabilities require.

Her son has been able to thrive living with her and her husband, Seawright said — but worry clouds the future.

“We look toward his adulthood, knowing that disability and aging programs that would support him staying in the community — where we, our family and our community, know he belongs — are being dismantled and defunded,” Seawright said. “Forcing us and others like us into medical bankruptcy is not a solution.”

Seawright was one of two parents who said Wednesday that their lives and their children’s lives could be profoundly upended by the Medicaid reductions that are included in the budget reconciliation proposal.

They spoke during a webinar conducted by Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin), who has been an outspoken critic of the budget bill’s Medicaid cuts.

“Our neighbors, our friends and our colleagues at work who rely on Medicaid and are scared, really scared,” Baldwin said. She cited estimates produced by Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee that with cuts to Medicaid as well as to the Affordable Care Act, the legislation could reduce health care for nearly  14 million Americans, including almost 230,000 Wisconsin residents.

The money saved, she added, would be used to extend and expand tax cuts enacted in 2017, during the first Trump administration. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has said the tax cuts primarily favor the wealthy and corporations.

“It’s giveaways for their wealthy friends at the cost of Americans’ health and lives,” Baldwin said. “That’s the deal.”

Baldwin said the choice that U.S. House Republicans made to advance the bill in committee in the early hours of Wednesday morning was a sign that “Republicans know what they’re doing is deeply unpopular.”

She dismissed claims that the objective of the bill’s authors was to address waste, fraud or abuse in Medicaid and other safety net programs.

“I would be happy to come to the table to write a bill that truly gets at fraud and abuse,” Baldwin said. “We want that out of Medicaid. We want that out of Medicare. But that is not what this bill does. This bill terminates health care for Wisconsin families.”

Besides being a mother of a child who has been helped by Medicaid’s programs, Seawright has experienced Medicaid through two other lenses.

When she and her sister were growing up, their mother was relying on Medicaid for the family’s health care. That helped give the family stability so that her mom could go to community college, become a medical assistant and get full-time work in health care with insurance through her employer, Seawright said.

In her own job as a social worker, she added, some of the clients she works with have Medicaid.

Both her childhood experience and her role as a mental health provider have made her critical of proposals to cut Medicaid, Seawright said — especially one to add work requirements as a condition for adults considered “able-bodied” to enroll in Medicaid.  

“Creating more barriers for people to access the care they need … individuals losing their primary care providers and their specialists, from my perspective, is just a cruel response that is steeped in distrust of those of us who are doing the work day to day,” Seawright said.

Also on the webinar was Brooke Wampole, who lives in northern Wisconsin. She and her husband have a 4-year-old son who was found to have long delays in his development.

About two years ago he was screened and qualified for services and therapies covered by Medicaid programs for children with disabilities, and over time, his clinicians helped him first to “exist, to self-regulate, to see the world around him and not find it to be a threat,” Wampole said.

The family’s regular health insurance “could never cover the cost” those treatments required. “ Medicaid programs “have been absolutely instrumental in our lives.”

In the last year, her son has begun speaking one-syllable words. “My favorites or Mommy and Dada,” Wampole said, then added with a smile, “however, he is pretty partial to talking about trapezoids. And raisins.”

The thought of losing Medicaid coverage “is terrifying,” Wampole said — both because of the loss of services for her son, but also because of its impact on other families.

“I worry what our world looks like without Medicaid,” Wampole said. “Other families, they could be way worse off … and cutting Medicaid could hurt them even more than my family. I don’t want to be part of a system that contributes to that.”

A protester holds a sign in support of funding for public media during a May 1, 2025, rally at the Kansas Statehouse in Topeka as part of a 50501 national day of action. (Photo by Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector)

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump urged Congress to eliminate funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting during his first term, but was largely unsuccessful.

Now, in his second go-around, Trump is once again asking lawmakers to scrap federal spending on the private, nonprofit corporation that Congress established in the 1960s.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting allocates funding to National Public Radio, or NPR, and the Public Broadcasting Service, or PBS, as well as more than 1,500 local radio and television stations throughout the country.

Trump’s renewed focus on public media — in his budget proposal, an executive order and an expected rescissions request — has led the organizations that benefit from the CPB to start talking more than they have in recent years about their funding and their journalism.

Katherine Maher, president and CEO of NPR, rejected the idea that ending funding for the CPB would have a significant impact on the federal ledger, since the “appropriation for public broadcasting, including NPR and PBS, represents less than 0.0001% of the federal budget.”

Maher also opposed what she viewed as the Trump administration seeking to influence journalists and news organizations.

“The President’s order is an affront to the First Amendment rights of NPR and locally owned and operated stations throughout America to produce and air programming that meets the needs of their communities,” Maher wrote in a statement. “It is also an affront to the First Amendment rights of station listeners and donors who support independent news and information.”

Paula Kerger, CEO and president at PBS, also defended the CBP as well as the news programs that receive its funding.

“There’s nothing more American than PBS, and our work is only possible because of the bipartisan support we have always received from Congress,” Kerger said. “This public-private partnership allows us to help prepare millions of children for success in school and in life and also supports enriching and inspiring programs of the highest quality.”

NPR receives about 1% of its direct funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, while PBS receives about 15%. Those numbers fluctuate for the local stations, which tend to get more, but not all, of their operating budgets from CPB funding.

Senate likely to balk

House Republicans, who have sought to zero out funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in recent appropriations bills, are likely to get on board. But senators, who write broadly bipartisan bills, haven’t taken that step and appear unlikely to do so this year — possibly helping public media resist Trump’s cutback attempts, as it did during his first term.

The differences between the House and Senate will lead to heated debate for months to come about future spending on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as well as the dozens of other programs Trump told lawmakers to stop funding in his budget request.

Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin, ranking member on the panel that funds CPB, told States Newsroom during a brief interview she hopes lawmakers “can effectively fight back against that proposed budget.”

“I find that some of my Republican colleagues, especially those from rural states, hear from their constituents that they are reliant on public broadcasting, especially radio for local information, news, etcetera,” Baldwin said. “And there’s not a lot of other radio resources out there. But I think the same can be said about the public television offerings.”

Opinions among Republicans vary, though.

Louisiana Republican Sen. John Kennedy, who sits on the spending panel, said funding for CPB “may have made sense at one time, but the American taxpayer has no business spending half a billion dollars a year subsidizing media.”

Kennedy said he doesn’t expect rural residents will lose access to local television and radio programming should Congress eliminate the funding.

“Rural communities have the same access as everybody else to cable, to streaming, to getting their news off of this thing,” Kennedy said, pointing to his cell phone. “It’s just an argument by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to hold on to a government subsidy.”

Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a senior member of the Appropriations Committee, pushed back against defunding.

She wrote in an op-ed published in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner that while she shares “the desire to reduce government spending, defunding the CPB, and particularly the essential reporting it allows locally owned radio and television stations to provide in Alaska, is not the place to start.”

Alaska’s local stations received $12 million last year from CPB, which made up between 30% and 70% of their total budget, in addition to individual donation and state funding, according to the op-ed.

“Not only would a large portion of Alaska communities lose their local programming, but warning systems for natural disasters, power outages, boil water advisories, and other alerts would be severely hampered,” Murkowski wrote. “What may seem like a frivolous expense to some has proven to be an invaluable resource that saves lives in Alaska.”

CPB has a state-by-state breakdown on its website detailing how much it provided during each of the past six years. The individual profiles show what portion of each state’s funding went to different programs, like the Next Generation Warning System, radio programming, Ready to Learn and Television Community Service Grants.

Public media among multiple Trump targets

Trump’s skinny budget request, released last week, calls on Congress to cease funding the CPB as well as dozens of other organizations, including the National Endowment for Democracy and the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP.

The section on CPB says the request is “consistent with the President’s efforts to decrease the size of the Federal Government to enhance accountability, reduce waste, and reduce unnecessary governmental entities.”

Trump has also signed an executive order directing the CPB Board of Directors as well as executive departments and agencies to halt funding NPR and PBS.

The order stated that the “viewpoints NPR and PBS promote does not matter. What does matter is that neither entity presents a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens.”

Patricia Harrison, president and CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, wrote in a statement responding to the executive order that Trump didn’t have the authority he was trying to wield.

“CPB is not a federal executive agency subject to the President’s authority,” Harrison wrote. “Congress directly authorized and funded CPB to be a private nonprofit corporation wholly independent of the federal government.

“In creating CPB, Congress expressly forbade ‘any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over educational television or radio broadcasting, or over [CPB] or any of its grantees or contractors…’ 47 U.S.C. § 398(c).”

There are also several news reports that the Trump administration will send a rescissions request to Capitol Hill, asking lawmakers to pull back funding already approved for CPB. But the Office of Management and Budget hasn’t yet taken that step.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting received steady funding from Congress starting at its founding, before the last Trump administration asked lawmakers to phase out its appropriation.

The last Trump administration’s first budget request called on lawmakers to “conduct an orderly closeout” by providing $30 million for CPB that would have gone toward salaries, rent and other costs.

The proposal argued that “private fundraising has proven durable, negating the need for continued Federal subsidies.”

“Services such as PBS and NPR, which receive funding from the CPB, could make up the shortfall by increasing revenues from corporate sponsors, foundations, and members. In addition, alternatives to PBS and NPR programming have grown substantially since CPB was first established in 1967, greatly reducing the need for publicly funded programming options.”

Funding increased despite Trump

Congress didn’t go along with the fiscal 2018 budget request for the CPB, and it wouldn’t for the rest of Trump’s first term.

In March 2018, lawmakers approved $445 million, followed by the same amount in the next year’s bill. Congress then lifted spending to $465 million in December 2019 and then again just before Trump left office for a total funding level of $475 million.

Those allocations continued rising during the Biden administration, reaching a $535 million appropriation in March 2024, the last full-year spending law enacted before Trump returned to the Oval Office. 

House Republicans did, however, try to phase out funding for CPB during the second half of President Joe Biden’s term. The House GOP provided a two-year advanced appropriation until 2023, when Republicans announced they wanted “the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to compete with other programs in the bill for annual funding.”

Those efforts didn’t work and the final spending bill, which became law in March 2024, included funding for CPB.

Senate Democrats wrote after negotiating the bipartisan agreement that it “protects funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to support more than 1,500 locally owned TV and radio stations nationwide—rejecting House Republicans’ proposal to zero out funding and weaken Americans’ access to local reporting.

“The bill maintains a critical investment of $60 million for digital interconnection and $535 million as a two-year advance appropriation, of which roughly 70% is provided directly to local public TV and radio stations.”

Final resolution far off

Congress is expected to begin work on its dozen annual appropriations bills sometime this summer, which collectively total about $1.8 trillion and make up about one-third of all federal spending. 

The House Appropriations Committee will likely propose phasing out CPB funding, or at least its advanced appropriation, in its bill.

The Senate Appropriations Committee tends to write more bipartisan bills, so as long as several of the panel’s members advocate for CPB in its funding measure, the program will likely receive its advanced funding in that bill.

Final agreement between the House and Senate is supposed to come before the start of the next fiscal year on Oct. 1. But that rarely happens and lawmakers often use a stopgap spending bill to push off final negotiations until mid-December.

That’s likely the earliest this year the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and those who rely on it will learn if Congress will reduce or eliminate its funding. That is, unless lawmakers fail to reach agreement on that particular funding bill.

Congress would then have to use a stopgap spending bill, which mostly keeps funding levels on autopilot, until it can enact a full-year bill. 

From left, Megan Hufton, Laurel Burns and Abigail Tessman take part in a roundtable discussion about Medicaid with Sen. Tammy Baldwin, right. The discussion was held Friday, May 2, 2025, at Common Threads, a Madison agency that provides Medicaid-supported services for people with autism and people with disabilities. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Update: GOP leaders in Congress have postponed the release of their proposals for Medicaid, originally scheduled for the week of May 5. 

Ahead of action on Congressional legislation that could provide the first hard details on proposed cuts to Medicaid, Wisconsin lawmakers are urging constituents to push back against cutting health care coverage.

“One of the most powerful things we can do right now is to elevate stories and talk about how compelling a need there is for robust investment in the Medicaid program,” Sen. Tammy Baldwin told a group of Medicaid recipients at a roundtable discussion in Madison on Friday.

Republicans in Congress are trying to extend federal tax cuts enacted in 2017, during President Donald Trump’s first term. Unless renewed, the 2017 tax cuts will expire at the end of 2025.

Congressional Republicans want to offset $4.5 trillion that extending the 2017 tax cuts will add to the federal deficit over 10 years. Based on their original blueprint, Medicaid has been in the spotlight as a likely target, and this week GOP leaders in the U.S. House are expected to release their first concrete proposals.

Medicaid covers about 1.3 million Wisconsin residents — roughly one in five people in the state, according to the state Department of Health Services (DHS). Those include nearly 900,000 low-income people who have primary health care and hospital services though BadgerCare Plus.

More than 260,000 people who are elderly, blind, or have other disabilities have coverage through Medicaid, including for long-term care in nursing homes or in their own homes or the community. And another 244,000 Wisconsinites have Medicaid coverage through a variety of other special programs.

Extending the 2017 tax cuts will benefit the richest 1% of the population most, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) found.

“In order to give tax breaks for the rich, what do they want to cut? Medicaid. It’s one of the biggest targets,” Baldwin, a Democrat, told participants in the Madison roundtable. “So from the folks who are most vulnerable, to transfer money to those who are billionaires and millionaires and multi-millionaires — it is criminal in my mind. It’s immoral.”

Baldwin’s event was one of two held Friday to highlight Medicaid’s importance in Wisconsin. In Eau Claire, state Rep. Jodi Emerson (D-Eau Claire) convened a discussion that included providers and Medicaid recipients.

Emerson’s discussion was joined via Zoom by Chiquita Brooks-LaSure administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) under former President Joe Biden

“These attacks on the Medicaid program can be devastating if they go through,” Brooks-LaSure told the Wisconsin Examiner in a phone interview. “Not just for the millions of low-income people who need help, not just for the millions of middle-class families who depend on Medicaid — particularly for nursing home care, care in the home to keep you out of the nursing home, and children with special needs, whether it be autism services, whether it be developmental disabilities or physical disabilities.”

The existence of Medicaid helps the overall health care economy in the long run, Brooks-LaSure said.

Under federal law, hospitals must ensure that patients who show up in their emergency rooms are stable before they leave. But if a person’s care isn’t covered, “the entire health care system pays for that.”

Medicaid recipients who met with Baldwin described their anxiety over the prospect of losing coverage.

For Laurel Burns, who was born with no arms, Medicaid has enabled her to have health care for herself and for her two sons, now teens, whom she’s raised as a single mother after their father left.

“Being disabled has been a struggle my whole life. It’s like every twist and turn is up a steep hill,” Burns told Baldwin. Medicaid support, however, has enabled her to have health care at home, including needed assistance with grocery shopping and housekeeping.

She has been able to get a college degree and landed a part-time job working for an insurance agent.

“I would love to work full time, but the job market and being disabled is really difficult to navigate,” Burns said. “With all these cuts and threats to the program, it’s really scary for somebody like me who doesn’t have a large family.”

Megan Hufton, the single mother of two teenage boys who have autism and don’t speak, said that in addition to the support Medicaid has provided her sons as part of the program’s disability services, schools get Medicaid support to help pay for services such as occupational therapy. “I’m very nervous about the future,” Hufton said.

Baldwin’s discussion was held at Common Threads, a Medicaid-funded agency in Madison that provides mental health, rehab and alternative education services.

Liv Lacayo, who works with Common Threads clients and their families, said Medicaid enables them to get routine care so they don’t have to use emergency services as they might have to otherwise.

Without Medicaid, she said, she worries that families would be struggling for support.

Brett Maki, who must use a motorized wheelchair to get around, said Medicaid has made it possible for him to live independently, getting daily help with cooking, cleaning and laundry — “all of the basic necessities that I would need to live my life to the fullest.”

Without that, “I don’t even want to think about what that means,” he said.

Funding freezes and reported threats to eliminate the Head Start early education program have prompted a letter from Senate Democrats to the Trump administration. (Getty Images)

Senate Democrats and two independents who caucus with them wrote to the Trump administration Monday demanding that officials release Head Start funding, reverse staff cuts and head off reported plans to zero out the early education program for low-income families.

The letter, led by Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin and two colleagues,  follows a funding halt in late January and early February; the closure of Head Start regional offices in April and the termination of those offices’ employees; and a subsequent report that the program has reduced payments in this first half of 2025 compared with a year ago.

“It is abundantly clear that these actions are part of a broader effort to ultimately eliminate the program altogether, as the Administration reportedly plans to do in its fiscal year 2026 budget proposal,” states the letter sent by Baldwin, Sens. Patty Murray (D-Washington) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), and 39 other Senate members.

Head Start has already been appropriated $12.3 billion for 2025 — the same amount as in 2024 — and has a formula for allocating funds, the senators wrote, leaving “no justifiable reason” for funding delays, while there has been no explanation from the administration.

Earlier in April it was reported the Trump administration’s 2026 budget proposal included no funding for Head Start. The senators’ letter notes that the Office of Management and Budget directed the Department of Health and Human Services to set aside funds from the 2025 budget “to close out the program” in budget documents leaked 10 days ago.

“If this explains any of the delay in awarding fiscal year 2025 funding, we want to be clear, no funds were provided in fiscal year 2025 to ‘close out the program,’ and it would be wholly unacceptable and likely illegal if the Department tries to carry out this directive,” the senators wrote.

The letter is directed at U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“You promised ‘radical transparency’ as Secretary, yet it is unclear how these actions will improve Head Start programs, and you and your staff refuse to respond to basic inquiries and requests for information,” the senators wrote.

The letter cites additional Trump administration actions involving the program over the last three months.

The federal Office of Head Start has told local programs that funding would not be approved for “training and technical assistance or other program expenditures that promote or take part in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives,” but the agency hasn’t provided any guidance “for what would be considered ‘DEI,’” the letter states.

Nevertheless, the senators add, that could conflict with requirements for the program under federal law, such as one that programs provide appropriate instruction for English learners.

Programs submitting documentation for payment of expenses that they have incurred and are authorized under their federal grants are now being asked to provide additional justification, which the letter states “creates an illusion of improving oversight but only serves to add unnecessary red tape. “

The five-page letter asks Kennedy to answer a series of questions, including whether HHS will reverse the regional office closures and reinstate fired Head Start personnel, when Head Start agencies will receive confirmation that they can access their additional grant installments for the year and whether the administration will distribute all of Head Start’s funds for the 2025 fiscal year “as required by the Head Start Act.”

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.

“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.

Elon Musk accesses sensitive data, shutters aid agency in consolidating vast federal power is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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. 

After election officials discovered the lapse, city officials decided to count 31,000 absentee ballots all over again, a choice that led to delays in reporting results.  

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.

One prominent conservative social media account questioned whether the tabulator doors being left open was a case of sabotage. 

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.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

How Milwaukee’s Election Day mistake left the door open to more misinformation is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Wisconsin Watch partners with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. Read our methodology to learn how we check claims.

No.

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.

Sources

• Milwaukee Election Commission: Latest unofficial election results
• Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Editorial: Hovde's election claims are false. He's blaming Milwaukee – without evidence.
• PBS News: ‘Human error’ forces recount of 30,000 absentee ballots in Milwaukee
• The New York Times: Election officials say Wisconsin Republican's claims 'lack any merit'
• USA Today: Nothing improper or surprising in Wisconsin 'ballot dump' | Fact check
• The New York Times: Wisconsin U.S. Senate Election Results

Did a late night ‘ballot dump’ in Milwaukee cost Eric Hovde the US Senate election? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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.

Eric Hovde concedes defeat to Tammy Baldwin in US Senate race in Wisconsin is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.