Gov. Tony Evers speaks at a round table discussion on the state budget in February. On Friday, Evers' office said the state will lose $210 million in federal funds for health care previously approved by Congress but part of $12 billion cut this week by the Trump administration. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Wisconsin will lose more than $210 million in federal funds that were to be used for mental health, substance abuse prevention and bolstering emergency medical services, state officials said Friday.

The money involved is Wisconsin’s share of $12 billion to combat infectious disease and other serious health problems that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has summarily cut off, NBC News and the New York Times reported this week.

In Wisconsin, the funds were to be used for suicide prevention; substance abuse prevention; public health departments, programs and laboratories, including EMS services; and the Wisconsin Immunization Registry, the office of Gov. Tony Evers said Friday.

The governor’s office discussed the health funds cutback along with  other programs targeted for reductions or considered vulnerable under the Trump administration, including education funding, farm programs and in the Department of Veterans Affairs. On Thursday, the Trump administration announced it will cut 10,000 employees from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

“Reckless cuts by President Trump and Elon Musk to help pay for tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires are causing devastating consequences for Wisconsin’s kids, families, and communities and services they depend on every day,” Evers said in a statement released Friday.

“With threats to Medicaid and Medicare, cuts to researching cures for Alzheimer’s disease and cancer, efforts to undermine food and drug safety, and continued attacks on the Affordable Care Act, the Trump Administration is jeopardizing health and access to health care in Wisconsin and across our country,” Evers said.

State Rep. Greta Neubauer (D-Racine), the Assembly minority leader, said Friday that the cuts “will be devastating for Wisconsinites who rely on these essential programs.”

“President Trump and Elon Musk are selling out Wisconsin families and communities, threatening our health and safety just to pay for unnecessary tax cuts for their billionaire friends,” said state Rep. Lisa Subeck (D-Madison), the ranking Democrat on the Assembly Health, Aging and Long-Term Care Committee and chair of the Assembly’s Democratic caucus.

“This reckless move by the Trump Administration, coupled with cuts to vital medical research and threats to the future of Medicaid and Medicare, will have a devastating impact on the health of our state,” Subeck said.

Evers said his administration will explore “every legal option available to us” to fight the cuts.

The $12 billion that HHS cut this week was authorized by Congress through COVID-19 relief bills enacted in the first two years of the pandemic. The funds were later allowed for public health needs outside the pandemic, the New York Times reported this week.

The World Health Organization reports that “COVID-19 continues to circulate widely . . . presenting significant challenges to health systems worldwide. Tens of thousands of people are infected or re-infected with SARS-CoV-2 each week.”

The UN-affiliated public health agency emphasizes continued surveillance of the viral pandemic. “It is vital that countries sustain the public health response to COVID-19 amid ongoing illness and death and the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants, adapting it to the requirements based on the current COVID-19 situation and risk,” WHO says. 

The Blatnik Bridge under construction in 1958. (Minnesota Department of Transportation)

Gov. Tony Evers is leaning on U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to release stalled federal highway money along with $78 million in promised funding to build out a network of electric vehicle charging stations in Wisconsin.

The governor’s office on Thursday released a letter Evers sent Duffy last week, urging the former Wisconsin congressman “to take immediate action to end the unlawful and harmful obstructions to federal approvals and federal funding for crucial transportation projects across the nation and here in your home state of Wisconsin.”

Federal delays will slow down projects across the state, Evers wrote, including a railroad bypass in Muskego, outside Milwaukee, that is planned for improved freight movement; a grant for highway improvement in Menominee County that will help forestry shippers; and numerous rural road and bridge projects in Wisconsin.

A pause in the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program — part of the bipartisan infrastructure law enacted during the Biden administration — is “threatening at least 15 already-approved electric vehicle infrastructure projects for private entities, utilizing approximately $7 million in NEVI funding, including multiple projects located in the congressional district you used to represent in the U.S. Congress,” Evers wrote.

Duffy represented Wisconsin’s 7th Congressional District, covering the northwestern part of the state, until he stepped down in late 2019.

“More than $56 million that Wisconsin has been allocated in future rounds of the NEVI program is also at risk due to the uncertainty caused by unnecessary delays at USDOT,” Evers wrote.

“These delays and obstructions hurt Wisconsinites and Wisconsin communities,” he added. “As a fellow Wisconsinite, I urge you to end these obstructions and support states in implementing lawful federal funding and needed approvals.”

Evers’ letter follows one written March 4 from the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials also calling for an end to the delays.

Federal dollars awarded to states according to established federal formulas are “legally binding obligations,” wrote the association’s president, Garrett T. Eucalitto.

The funds go to repay states for expenses they’ve already incurred under the terms set by the federal highway program. That letter demands reimbursement requests “be paid immediately for construction and related costs already incurred.”

After President Donald Trump took office Jan. 20, he issued executive orders halting the distribution of funds as well as other federal administrative actions across a wide range of federal programs. The orders have led to a raft of lawsuits challenging them.

Highway programs are among those caught up in the Trump administration’s freezes. In addition to financial payouts owed the states, the administration has also put a hold on issuing approvals, such as environmental reviews required by law, related to pending projects.

“These interruptions—whether directly or indirectly related to funding—have the effect of freezing essential construction and planning activities including those involving roadway and bridge projects,” wrote Eucalitto, who is also the Connecticut transportation commissioner. “Delays like these leave state DOTs at serious risk of losing the upcoming construction season for many projects. This will not only add to overall costs to the American people but also deprive communities from receiving those economic, safety, and quality of life benefits.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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