It’s Time to Demand Much More Than This

 

This sounds like a joke, but it isn’t. There is nothing funny about it. Governor Tony Evers played a very dirty trick on the people of Wisconsin when the 2023-2025 budget landed on his desk for signature. He used his partial veto to transform the authority for Wisconsin’s public schools to increase spending by $325 per pupil each year for 2 years into a $325 per pupil increase each year for the next four hundred years, lasting until 2425. How did he do it? He took the “2024–25” that was in the original budget to define the second (and last) school year for the increase and removed the 20 and the hyphen to create 2425. Hopes of reversing the veto ended when, in April 2025, the very liberal Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled Evers’ veto was lawful under the Governor’s partial veto authority.

 

Unlike other states which have a “line-item veto,” Wisconsin has a “partial veto.” Implemented in 1930 as a constitutional amendment, 62% of the voters at the time voted in favor of giving the Governor greater control over spending. The citizens wanted to prevent the legislators from bundling unrelated items into large spending bills. The partial veto allows words, numbers, or phrases to be removed from a bill rather than entire items. Over time, it became known as the “Frankenstein” veto, allowing governors to create entirely new policies with the stroke of a pen. There have been some modest restrictions to the Amendment since 1930, but the law as currently written allowed the slap in the face Evers gave to the voters, according to the Supreme Court. How ironic that an amendment the people of Wisconsin passed to strengthen fiscal responsibility has become a pawn in the political games that are played with our money. In 1930, the people of Wisconsin could not have foreseen they were handing this tool to elected officials who would be as deceitful as those we are dealing with today.

 

Funding for the 422 K-12 public school districts in Wisconsin is a complex process. Roughly 46% comes from general state aid and 41% from local property taxes. The remainder, referred to as categorical aid, comes from a variety of other sources for things like mandated services and special education. The state uses a complicated formula to distribute general aid based on the “fiscal capacity” of each district. The property tax base and district enrollment are key determinants of each district’s “fiscal capacity.”

 

In 1993 the state capped the amount of revenue school districts are allowed to raise per student each year from combined general state aid and property taxes. This limit is spelled out in the budget and is the maximum a district can add to annual per student spending without taking a referendum to the voters for approval. For the 2021-22 and 2022-23 school years, the increase was held at zero in the state’s budget. The 2023-25 budget contained the per pupil increase of $325 per year that was manipulated by Evers to extend for four hundred years. If the state does not fund the permitted annual increases by increasing the general state aid, they come entirely out of the pockets of the districts’ property taxpayers. The state did not add any new funding for general aid to cover the $325 increase and, as a result, Wisconsin property owners saw their 2025 K-12 property taxes rise on average 7.8%. The school tax makes up more than half of the property tax residents pay. This was the largest increase in more than 3 decades and is an increase of $476 million. Wisconsin voters also passed a record 169 school district referendums in 2024 authorizing $4.4 billion in new spending. These increases have placed an enormous strain on property owners across the state.

 

There are no operational efficiency or academic performance requirements tied to the endless flow of money. Wisconsin public schools perform poorly in the fundamentals with only 42% of 4th graders and 37% of 8th graders able to do math at grade level, and only 31% of 4th and 8th graders reading at grade level when measured by the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The price of failure keeps going up.

 

Wisconsin had a $4.6 billion surplus for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2025, the sixth consecutive year of multi-billion-dollar surpluses, and has a projected surplus of $2.5 billion for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2027, the result of chronic over taxation of Wisconsin citizens. In addition, Wisconsin has a separate “rainy day” fund of more than $2 billion for real emergencies that may arise.

 

The January 2025–January 2027 legislative session will be adjourned in both Houses by March. Legislators will spend the rest of the year campaigning, trying to persuade the voters to re-elect them in November. They will be unavailable for general business until next January.

 

The Governor, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (who announced last Thursday he will not seek re-election), and Senate Leader Devin LeMahieu were racing against the clock to craft a property tax relief package they agreed on before the Assembly’s scheduled adjournment on February 19. The budget surplus will fund it. On the substance, they are miles apart. The Governor is dug in on keeping the partial veto in place calling it, “doing what’s best for our kids by increasing investments in public schools across our state” and wants the state to sink even more money into the schools. Vos is willing to strike a property tax relief deal without repealing the 400-year veto, remarking “…some of the politics might have to wait until the election’s over”, and LeMahieu is adamant the 400-year veto must be repealed. He suggested one-time tax rebate checks. An agreement struck after the Assembly has adjourned will require members to come back into a special session to approve it. These politicians do not seem to realize they have earned the contempt of Wisconsin voters. Using massive surpluses created by over taxing the hard-working citizens of Wisconsin to put a band-aid on problems they create is not the governance we want.

 

Evers’ abuse of Wisconsin’s partial veto put a spotlight on the dishonesty and incompetence that are devouring good governance at all levels. Donald Trump was swept into his second term promising a return to common sense in government, made necessary by the extremists who are out of the shadows and openly promoting communist ideology, trampling our rights, burying us in taxes, resisting verifiable elections, paralyzing us with regulation, opposing law enforcement, and tolerating outrageous global disadvantages for the American people from trade imbalances to drug prices – just a handful of the endless ways the American people are betrayed every day by those who were elected to represent us.

 

It’s time to demand much more than this from those who seek to govern. Taking our country back is the fight of our lives. It will require major revolt at the ballot box over multiple election cycles, and will only be possible when we secure verifiable elections and start attracting candidates interested in, and capable of, effective governance rather than careers in politics. We the people have had enough.