Evers’ DHS Terminates Senior Employment Program Without Warning

Local officials are scrambling after an abrupt and unilateral decision by the Evers Administration to end the decades-old Wisconsin Senior Employment Program (WISE) outside of the official budget process.

The Southwest Wisconsin Workforce Development Board (SWWDB) says that DHS just notified it that the funding will end on June 30^th, the last day of the state’s fiscal year, which is also the last day of the federal program year.

“If they had just given us a little more notice, we could have found other funding sources to keep it going,” Harold Luther, a program coordinator at SWWDB, told MacIver News.

The program places low-income senior citizens in temporary government or non-profit jobs, where they can gain basic job skills for the modern workplace, and subsidizes their $7.25 an hour wage for up to 20 hours a week for up to four years. Rhonda Suda, SWWDB’s CEO, told MacIver that the individuals they serve tend to be in desperate situations, otherwise they wouldn’t be working minimum wage jobs well into their 80s. She described a common story where a housewife is widowed and left without any income, savings, or job skills to support herself.

Although it’s a workforce development program, WISE is managed by Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS), Division of Public Health, Bureau of Aging and Disability Resources, Office on Aging. It is administered by the state’s 11 workforce development boards, which are private non-profit organizations, where Luther and Suda work.

Much of the funding comes from the US Department of Labor’s (DOL) Senior Community Services Employment Program (SCSEP), which was authorized by the Older Americans Act (OAA) in 1965. Wisconsin has offered it since at least 1978, although few people know it exists. For all intents and purposes, the Wisconsin Senior Employment Program (WISE) is run off-the-books.

As the MacIver Institute uncovered last year, DHS does not have an internal operating budget, and so it’s easy for small programs like WISE to fly below the radar. Also, because the state legislature uses incremental budgeting to write the state’s biennial budget, it’s possible for programs like WISE to go unnoticed for decades, and yet still receive funding without any oversight.

WISE does not appear anywhere in DHS’ budget request. (Neither does the “Office on Aging” or the “Bureau of Aging and Disability Resources” for that matter). It’s not in the current state budget. It even seems to have escaped the notice of the Legislative Fiscal Bureau, which produces extensive, detailed reports about state operations every two-years.

Just as troubling as the program’s total lack of transparency and accountability is the Evers Administration’s secretive decision-making process that quietly ended the program. The legislature is currently at work on the next state budget, and it has not yet addressed DHS’ portion. Assuming there is a state-required match for the federal funding - and there always is – state lawmakers need to account for those freed up funds when determining DHS’s appropriation for the next biennium.

Program plans should include details on program governance including how decisions are made, how the program plan can be amended, and how to terminate the program. That's important to ensure program managers are considering the impact on all stakeholder groups (such as the senior citizen beneficiaries, the workforce development boards, and taxpayers) before making major decisions.  Evers' program plan for WISE - which he personally signed on January 16, 2024 - does not contain any of those details; a reprehensible lack of foresight. For all anyone knows, this life-shattering decision was made by a low-level manager deep within the Evers bureaucracy.

Luther’s point-of-contact at DHS is Laura Langer. She’s also the US Department of Labor’s point-of-contact, who personally submitted the State of Wisconsin’s funding request for WISE. She was not willing to answer any of MacIver’s questions about the program and forwarded the request to DHS’ communications team, who failed even to acknowledge it.

According to federal government records, the US DOL gave Wisconsin DHS $2 million to serve 210 senior citizens for the current program year. SWWDB got $380,000 from DHS to support 40 senior citizens. Suda told MacIver that the federal funding has been stagnant for years. She believes that DHS made the decision to end the program not because federal funding is going away, but because it is not expected to increase. That raises another red flag given that congress has not yet completed its work on the federal budget, which would make the Evers Administration’s decision premature from that perspective too.

“It’s such a shame,” Harold Luther said. “I have so many people that are going to be facing housing insecurity because of this.”

Despite the program’s vital purpose, it does have its flaws that probably wouldn’t exist if it was funded by anyone other than government. For example, the federal government does not allow participants in the program to be paid more than minimum wage, regardless of where the additional funding might come from. Also, its secretive nature makes it easy for the government to mismanage. 

This situation is a cautionary tale of what happens when you rely on government funding for something that could easily be supported by private charity, especially when someone like Gov. Tony Evers can take it away at a moment’s notice. It also provides a strong case for why lawmakers need to go through the budget line-by-line to determine what other secret programs are buried in the bureaucracy under decades of neglectful fiscal oversight.