Budget Delay Is an Opportunity for Reform

For those in Madison, a delay in finalizing Wisconsin’s state budget is frustrating. For six months and beyond, I have watched as countless interest groups have sent their lobbyists to ask lawmakers for a piece of the state’s $4.3 billion surplus, often asking for permanent new spending.

Outside of Madison, however, a budget delay is an opportunity. Rather than rush to approve a hastily negotiated agreement, lawmakers should use this moment to take a hard look at how our state spends taxpayer dollars and find ways to better prioritize existing appropriations.

Fortunately, unlike in Washington, Wisconsin doesn’t face government shutdowns. If the fiscal year ends without a signed budget, current funding levels remain in place. State operations continue uninterrupted until a budget is signed, and everything that was funded in the expiring budget remains funded. That gives us the ability to do this budget the right way—not the fast way.

Our state budget process is broken, lending itself to automatic increases every two years. Agencies build requests on top of previous allocations, base budgets grow, and spending continues to climb with almost no scrutiny or meaningful review. This cycle discourages thrift and rewards the status quo. When we treat last biennium’s spending as the floor for the new biennium, we stop asking important questions: Is this program still necessary? What are the program’s outcomes? Could this be done more efficiently?

That lack of scrutiny leads to bloated budgets. Take the UW System, where administrative staff levels ballooned by 21% from 2011 to 2021 at the same time as enrollment declined significantly. That trend has only accelerated—across the 13-campus system, only 15% of employees actually teach, as noted by my colleague Rep. Dan Knodl in a recent Freeman op-ed.

We are spending more money educating fewer students and paying staff who don’t even teach among the System’s highest salaries. But UW System has nonetheless spent the past year campaigning for $855 million in additional ongoing funding. That’s $272.37 per tax filer, and it’s just one agency.

Wisconsin taxpayers are not clamoring for more spending. The latest Marquette Law Poll found that 72% of respondents favor cutting public university funding or keeping it the same. A recent poll by the Institute for Reforming Government found that 59% of voters favor freezing or cutting overall state spending.

UW System is just one example of the need to constantly review spending. In 2015, General Purpose Revenue (GPR) spending—the portion of the state budget drawn from state tax dollars—was $15.6 billion and spending from all funding sources was $34.6 billion. In 2025, GPR spending is $21.4 billion and overall spending is $48.9 billion.

That’s a 37% GPR increase and 42% overall increase in the past ten years. We must make sure taxpayers are getting a fair deal.

We also have a responsibility to return more of the state’s surplus to the taxpayers who created it. Our constituents are dealing with rising costs in nearly every aspect of life. They need relief a lot more than Madison special interests—and we should provide it in the form of significant tax relief and long-term tax reform.

We can find savings in other parts of the budget to provide that meaningful relief and ensure core priorities are funded at appropriate levels. That means identifying efficiencies, reforming outdated programs, and eliminating waste—not simply layering more spending on top every year with the hope that tax revenues will always keep up.

Our constituents expect those they elect to be good managers of tax dollars, not just spend slightly less than those on the other side of the aisle. Lawmakers have an opportunity to get it right and we should take it.