Browsing: Federalism

A state Department of Health Services decision to take a year to remove ineligible people from Wisconsin’s Medicaid rolls — much slower than many other states — will cost federal and state taxpayers an estimated $745 million.

The city of Milwaukee announced it is building a new line for the $128 million streetcar known as The Hop. Unanswered anywhere in the strangely incurious media is why the city would open that line now.

Wisconsin doesn’t have to send back a single dime of the federal aid it has already received, budget experts told the Badger Institute.

Many SNAP recipients avoid healthy foods and spend a large percentage of their benefits on sugary beverages and prepared desserts, according to Angela Rachidi, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and visiting fellow at the Badger Institute.

As the Wisconsin Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee begins budget deliberations, Gov. Tony Evers is pushing for a $31.6 billion budget for Medicaid over the next two years, a $4.2 billion biennial increase. The $27.4 billion being spent on Medicaid in the current two-year cycle already represents nearly 30% of all state spending.

Wisconsin’s FoodShare is supposed to be a short-term safety net program. But redistributionists have used the pandemic as an excuse to grow government involvement in one of the most basic aspects of human life — how individuals feed themselves — in an upward trajectory detached from meaningful metrics on need or economics.

Gov. Tony Evers has asked that Wisconsin spend another $750 million to expand broadband in the state without knowing the current status of nearly $100 million in broadband projects paid for with federal pandemic funds.

For decades, the federal government has assumed a larger role in funding and running safety net programs, leaving states with little ability to address flaws such as employment and marriage disincentives and little power to make changes. State leaders must work to change this.

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers has added the $500 million to his 2023-25 budget to address a “burgeoning crisis” in mental and behavioral health, particularly among Wisconsin children, created by the impact of the pandemic. In his State of the State address, he declared 2023 the Year of Mental Health.

The Legislative Audit Bureau criticized the state Department of Administration for its lack of openness in how it is deploying $5.7 billion in federal health emergency funds granted to Wisconsin.

The audit report, released Wednesday, comes months after the Badger Institute first called for a comprehensive audit of all state spending of funds provided through the CARES Act, American Rescue Plan Act and the Investment and Jobs Act.

Using billions of emergency pandemic bill dollars to plug gaping holes in their budgets, local governments across Wisconsin and the country are setting themselves up to ask for tax increases or slash services as basic as police and fire protection when the federal funding runs out. 

Twenty months after Congress passed a bill that rained $2.53 billion down on Wisconsin, the governor’s office in sole charge of administering the funding, as well as  legislative audit and budget officials, have almost no idea of how all that money is being spent.

Flummoxed by a staggering amount of money and by guidelines for how to spend it, Wisconsin counties and cities are spending tens of millions of dollars of American Rescue Plan Act funds to try to administer American Rescue Plan Act funds.

Approximately 30% of the revenue in Wisconsin’s current two-year budget comes from the federal government — and that doesn’t include billions and billions of dollars sent to the Badger State to ostensibly get us through the pandemic.

Even before the pandemic, U.S. entitlement spending was on an unsustainable path, the growth in means-tested safety net programs far outstripping inflation.

Turns out, as it always does when you look at where federal tax dollars end up in this country, Wisconsin is bringing up the tail end in the scramble for COVID cash.
January 13, 2022

Reforms would expand oversight of federal funds, school and health care options, increase workforce participation.

On February 1, 2022, Badger Institute President Mike Nichols testified in favor of AJR 112 before the members of the Assembly Committee on Constitution and Ethics.

Local governments, awash in federal cash, still trying to spend down millions from the CARES Act 

Progressives ignore past failures, and have no idea how to pay for a ‘greater society’