Soon, a handful of very powerful state legislators will sign off on a preliminary two-year budget plan that is supposed to address the $2 billion budget hole created almost entirely by Gov. Scott Walker’s massive tax cuts that heavily favored the wealthy and his failed attempt to create jobs and stimulate the economy through misguided policies of cutting taxes, slashing workers’ pay and handing out corporate welfare.
The 16 members of the Joint Finance Committee (JFC) have spent weeks working through Walker’s proposed budget line by line, and will hand off their budget proposal to both houses of the state Legislature, even though their version of the budget oftentimes bears little resemblance to what Walker, department heads and the public actually want.
So how did this happen? Here’s a short guide to how the state’s budget sausage is made.
The Governor’s Proposed Budget
The real work on the two-year budget begins in earnest in the July of even-numbered years, when the state budget office asks state agencies for their next budget request. Those budget requests are sent to the Department of Administration by Nov. 20 of the even-numbered year and are reviewed by the governor’s staff and budget analysts. The governor and budget staffers use those requests and revenue estimates from the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau to develop his proposed biennial budget, which they’re supposed to finish by the last Tuesday in January of an odd-numbered year, such as this year.
But JFC member Rep. Chris Taylor (D-Madison) told the Shepherd that much of Walker’s proposed budget didn’t come from his agency heads.
“Most of the secretaries will say that they didn’t know about the big budget items,” Taylor said. “Gov. Walker wanted to do what he wanted to do here. He wanted to use this budget document to run for president and show everybody that he’s to the right of the right of the right and he’s going to cut public education and he’s going to disrupt our long-term care system and he’s going to change workers’ comp and all this other stuff. This budget was never about the people of Wisconsin for the governor. It was always about using it as a tool.”
Take public education, for example. The University of Wisconsin System requested an additional $133 million in the next two years, along with the authority to spend another $167 million from additional tuition and other program revenue. No major organizational changes were included in its budget request. Regarding public K-12 education, state Superintendent Tony Evers, an independently elected officer who under the state constitution is responsible for the state’s education policies, included in his budget request the Fair Funding for Our Future plan to fix the state’s broken and highly complex schools funding formula. He also showed little enthusiasm for charter and voucher schools.
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But Walker ignored the UW System’s and Evers’ proposed budgets. Walker proposed a radical reorganization of the UW System. He famously deleted the Wisconsin Idea from the UW’s mission, something he called a “drafting error,” until records showed that his aides deliberately asked for that change. He also cut $300 million from its two-year budget and called for turning the UW System into an independent authority under the direction of the Board of Regents, most of whom are his appointees. None of that was in the UW System’s budget request.
Likewise, instead of following Evers’ lead and fixing the state’s funding formula for public K-12 schools, Walker kept the system in place and slashed $127 million in state aid to local school districts to lower property taxes, cut critical programs such as the Chapter 220 and STEM programs, and lifted the cap on voucher schools statewide. Evers criticized Walker’s proposed budget, calling it “a legacy of less for our kids,” but there was little he could do about it at that point.
16 Legislators Rewrite the Budget
The governor’s proposed budget then goes to the state Legislature and its Joint Finance Committee (JFC), made up of 16 members of both houses. The current JFC is comprised of 12 Republicans and four Democrats; it’s co-chaired by state Sen. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills) and state Rep. John Nygren (R-Marinette).
The JFC is required to hold hearings on the proposed budget. First, they hold information hearings with the top aides of state agencies, who have to explain and defend the governor’s proposal for their agency. For example, the state Department of Natural Resources’ budget request didn’t include halting Stewardship Program land purchases for conservation, firing scientists, selling off naming rights to state parks or doing away with the appointed Natural Resources Board, but in testimony in front of the JFC, DNR Secretary Cathy Stepp defended all of those policy items. Unlike Superintendent Evers, Stepp is a longtime Walker appointee and serves at his pleasure.
The JFC also holds listening sessions for the public, the only time that Wisconsin voters and policy experts can weigh in on the budget. This year and in the previous budget cycle, the Republican-dominated JFC only held four public hearings—one in Milwaukee each time—although Democrats and individual legislators held additional hearings around the state that weren’t condoned by the JFC. In Milwaukee’s public hearing in March, testimony was sharply critical of Walker’s education agenda, as well as his major changes to FamilyCare and SeniorCare and his elimination of the IRIS program for those with disabilities. Walker’s proposals, not surprisingly, would benefit private, for-profit insurance companies.
After hearing from agency heads and the public, the JFC then begins debating each department’s budget and altering it. The Legislative Fiscal Bureau, a nonpartisan institution with professional staff, also releases updated revenue figures, which has an impact on the legislators’ work. This spring, facing blowback from the public, Republican legislators said that they wanted to add more money to K-12 schools and seemed relatively confident that the updated revenue numbers would free up more money for them. But the LFB found that there was no new money for schools, likely because Walker and the Republican-dominated Legislature slashed taxes in the previous budget and failed to stimulate the economy with rising wages and new jobs.
In this round of budget hearings, the JFC made numerous alterations to Walker’s budget, some big, some small, none of them offered up in a hearing in which the public could participate. Almost all of them passed or failed on party-line votes, with Republicans dominating each vote.
For example, the JFC altered Walker’s budget request for the UW System by deleting his plans to create a UW authority and reducing his cut from $300 million to $250 million, but kept his request to freeze in-state tuition for two years, removed faculty tenure from state law and eliminated funding for some environmental research projects, including the Wisconsin Bioenergy Initiative.
The JFC also addressed K-12 schools. Republicans on the committee offered a 29-page omnibus motion and gave Democrats just an hour to look it over. Not surprisingly, the proposal bears no resemblance to what Superintendent Evers asked for his in budget request. In a statement after the JFC vote, Evers wrote, “I fear the direction we are headed takes us away from Wisconsin’s history of academic success.”
The Republican motion included sweeping changes to Walker’s education funding proposal, including adding $208 million to K-12 schools, although half of that will go to property tax relief and the rest will be split between traditional public schools and charter and voucher schools. Republicans also made huge policy changes that had never been proposed in public, including creating an Opportunity Schools and Partnership Program (OSPP) in Milwaukee, which will give low-performing schools to a commissioner appointed by the Milwaukee County executive so that they can be privatized. Co-chair Darling also added a proposal to allow the UW System, the Waukesha County executive and other entities to charter schools as well.
Although the public had very limited input on budget items, lobbyists certainly have access to state legislators. According to the state Government Accountability Board, 54 lobbyists registered to push their agendas on the DNR, 53 lobbyists worked on the long-term care services portion of the state Department of Health Services budget and 38 lobbyists weighed in on choice, charter and open enrollment portions of the K-12 schools budget, for example.
JFC Co-chair Darling was forced to cancel a fundraiser last week after Common Cause in Wisconsin and others complained that she shouldn’t be shaking down big donors for cash while reviewing the state budget.
Even when average Wisconsinites were able to chime in, the Republicans completely ignored them on many issues. JFC Republicans are folding the IRIS program into FamilyCare, for example, even though individuals with disabilities and their advocates want to keep it as is. Likewise, the 12 Republican legislators created a voucher program for students with special needs even though these students and their families didn’t ask for it and don’t want it.
That said, Schools and Communities United is planning on delivering petitions to Darling expressing their opposition to her plans to further privatize Milwaukee schools under the control of an unelected commissioner.
The Next Steps
As of this writing, the JFC still needs to put its stamp on state aid to local governments, taxes, transportation and the funding mechanism for the proposed Milwaukee Bucks arena, whose current plan looks nothing like the one Walker inserted into his budget and revealed with much fanfare as he launched Our American Revival, the national committee that’s supporting him as he unofficially runs for the Republican presidential nomination.
But the JFC isn’t the final word on the budget, of course. It needs to be passed by both houses of the Legislature. During the next few weeks, the partisan caucuses will go over the budget and individual legislators will be able to introduce and debate budget amendments. In reality, the majority caucuses, in this case both Republican, will rework the budget until they get the needed numbers of votes within their caucus to go out on the floor to pass it—50 in the Assembly and 17 in the Senate. In the previous budget, however, Assembly Democrats offered no amendments as a strategic effort to prevent the Republicans from allowing their vulnerable members to vote for certain amendments so they could go home to their districts and say that they tried to modify some odious parts of the budget despite voting for the complete budget. Whether Democrats will try to amend the budget in the next few weeks, despite being very much in the minority, remains to be seen.
If the state Assembly and Senate pass different versions of the budget, leadership will then appoint a conference committee dominated by members of the majority party from both chambers to hammer out the details and come up with a compromise agreement. The conference committee can add entirely new policies to the budget and when the bill coming out of the conference committee goes back to the Assembly and the Senate, it is unamendable, meaning that it is just a straight up or down vote. Since both houses are controlled by Republicans, whatever comes out of conference committee should easily pass both chambers.
From there, the budget will go back to Walker, who’s been spending most of his time outside of the state campaigning for president. The governor can use his partial veto to cancel out words and dollar amounts he doesn’t like, but he isn’t allowed to use a “Vanna White veto” to slice and dice actual words to leave a letter or two and then create entirely new words and sentences with those letters. The Legislature needs a two-thirds majority in both chambers to override any of his changes.
The new budget is supposed to be finished by July 1. If the budget isn’t finalized by then, the previous budget will remain in effect until the governor and Legislature work out their differences, whether you like it or not.
