Wisconsin May be the Dairy State, but Best Beware of the Federal Moo-lah

Democrats to the Rescue

This week, Democrats in Wisconsin, still despondent over the election, still harrumphing about, declaring they will never ever again set foot in the same room with a Trump voter, much less breathe the same air, somehow these on-the-ledge progressives managed to find a ray of sunshine coming out of Washington.

Nope, it wasn’t the pardon of Hunter Biden. That unsettled even some Democrats because issuing the pardon underscored Joe Biden’s life as a serial liar, even as he obliviously accused his own Department of Justice of complete corruption, a charge that is true enough, though not for the reasons Biden alleged.

Rather, the real reason for Democrat joy in Madison last week was a lot less sexy than rub-a-dub-dub, three Bidens in a hot tub but a lot more telling about the state of Wisconsin and of the United States. Rising from the election rubble, or maybe even from a hot tub, Gov. Tony Evers announced that the Wisconsin Department of Transportation (DOT) had received a nearly $32-million federal grant to create a program that will “promote transportation improvement projects that incorporate materials that reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

Sounds boring, but you could just imagine the squeals of joy in the land of liberals: “You mean, really, big government bureaucracy is still alive? You’re not kidding, right? Spending money in Wisconsin to fight climate change and telling us how we have to build roads at the same time! The elites live on! Oh how blessed it is to be alive.”

And really, who could argue with using sustainable transportation material for our roads?

Well, I can. Seems there’s always joy in Mudville, or Madison, when Democrats can spend millions of dollars to increase control over your life and tighten the noose around the neck of liberty, all without accomplishing anything positive.

No Need to Read the Fine Print

The grant program is called, straightforwardly enough, the U.S. Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration’s Low-Carbon Transportation Materials (LCTM) Grants Program, a $1.2-billion giveaway to states funded through the Biden administration’s hilariously named Inflation Reduction Act. It’s loaded with woke policy and nonsensical conditions and federal control, and all you have to do is sign on the dotted line.

It might not be sexy, but such strings of bureaucratic authority do add up, and this grant program is the latest example of all that is wrong with government—it’s not actually run by you and me, at least most of it isn’t. It’s ruled by bureaucrats and there are myriad ways they exercise their control.

One of the most pernicious of those ways is through vertical integration of state and federal bureaucracies. It works like this: Federal money flows to the states, mainly through grants, and virtually all of the grants contain conditions.

Yup, there’s strings attached. You want money for a local road project? Well, then, you have to build a roundabout in the middle of the rural countryside, or a bike path to Starbucks, or a sidewalk to nowhere. You have to set the speed limit at the speed the feds dictate. And you have to have a minimum drinking age? Say what?

Through such mechanisms, the federal bureaucracy takes control of public policy. They tether the state bureaucracy to their money rope, and together the integrated collectives chain local communities to their wishes. Meanwhile, elected officials stand by, inconscient or too scared to stop it. After all, who is going to endanger their constituents’ roadway improvements—and court their anger—by daring to question a federally funded non-motorized route to an Iced Brown Sugar Oat Milk Shaken Espresso.

Still, shouldn’t local communities make those transportation decisions, not the federal government and its junior state partner?

All the while state bureaucrats never resist. More than anything, their goal is to rise through the bureaucratic ranks, maybe one day making it all the way to the federal government’s Senior Executive Service, which is the bureaucratic equivalent of the Politburo. Besides, a condition is a condition, so what can you do? Heck, often enough the federal government throws in the salary of the bureaucrat who will oversee all the red tape. Life is good.

It’s not just transportation, of course, it’s all across the landscape that is big government, but this week’s DOT grant announcement provides a quick and good look into the way vertical integration works, ultimately enshrining a parallel but unelected government that controls most executive employees and most of the federal dollars.

Your Unelected International Government at Work

Specifically, in the LCTM program, the $32-million grant is designed to promote low-carbon transportation materials, and so projects that prioritize the use of such materials—be it concrete, asphalt, glass, or steel—get the money. Just to be clear, there’s nothing inherently wrong with low-carbon construction or transportation materials. What’s wrong is the decision-making process by which the projects are funded and the conditions placed on that funding.

Most of all, low-carbon transportation construction by fiat rather than through competitive bidding and local community deliberation removes communities from the decision-making process. The grant does so first and foremost by its very existence—if communities don’t agree to use the required low-carbon materials, there’s no federal funding for the project. And likely no state funding, either, since federal grants drive state decision-making. Right off the bat, the government is picking winners and losers.

Second, even if the community acquiesces and embraces “low-carbon” concrete and other materials, just who is deciding what actually qualifies as low carbon? It’s not the local community for sure, and it’s not the state DOT, either, and not even the federal bureaucrats. Turns out it’s international bureaucrats.

Indeed, the LCTM program requires that the materials or products meet a “substantially lower” embodied carbon threshold for Global Warming Potential, or GWP. And who sets that GWP threshold?

That would be the EPA technically, the condition setters tell you, but really it’s the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): “The EPA considers the GWP estimates presented in the most recent IPCC scientific assessment to reflect the state of the science,” the EPA writes in its “Understanding Global Warming Potentials.”

This from an international panel of bureaucrats that has been so consistently wrong that their models make Ann Selzer’s Iowa polling this year look accurate (she missed by 16 points). So the people telling you what transportation material you have to use to save the planet are the same brand of doomsday “scientists” who told us that children in 2000 wouldn’t know what snow was, that the polar ice cap would disappear by 2014, and the Arctic would be ice free by 2015.

Then, too, who is to say that the certification for sustainable construction and transportation products won’t meet the same fate as the globalists’ Forest Stewardship Council, which certifies “sustainable” wood. Even such groups as Greenpeace now recognize the latter for the fake certification it is, a colossal effort that has failed to curb deforestation and served as a convenient vehicle for trafficking illegal timber. In fact, Greenpeace writes, “certification fails to tackle the core issues they claim to address.”

Whitewashing the Greenwashing

It’s called greenwashing the products, and what are the safeguards against it here? I don’t see any—a big red flag given the IPCC is the decision-maker and given that many if not most progressive schemes fail to tackle the issues they claim to address—so there’s no telling whether DOT certified products will be really sustainable or that they will work even if they are.

But wait! the cronies yell. What does it matter if these products might not really save the Earth? So what if it’s all for show?

Well, a lot so what. First, the price of these products is higher, much higher, driving up the costs of construction projects, accelerating inflation, and upping the amount of local match required. Projects that require high strength or thermal performance often are not suitable for the materials—they put that in the fine print—and there are wide discrepancies in settings standards for the products themselves, leading to inconsistent performance and durability. Studies also show that selection of low-carbon materials might not by themselves serve to reduce a project’s carbon footprint, depending how such design elements as “space density, passive design strategies and increased renewable energy-use” are addressed.

Again, none of this means projects using low-carbon materials shouldn’t be pursued or won’t be beneficial; some would be and still others might entail a roll of the dice. But it does mean that such projects should not be rammed down the throats of local communities seeking highway improvement dollars without community deliberation and decision-making, which the grant dollars don’t allow.

Offering communities a choice between no road improvement and road improvements driven by a partisan political agenda—and that is exactly what the LCTM is—is no choice at all. Those are deliberations that must be had at the local and state level, not the globalist level.

Highway Engineers or Social Engineers?

Perhaps most important, there are hidden political agendas buried in the grant conditions. Not only does the federal government and now the Wisconsin DOT want you to bet the bank on still new and relatively untested building materials that might or might not have a decent shelf life, and thus might or might not be safe, they want to dictate the kinds of roads communities build and who should use them.

Which is to say, multi-passenger commuter lanes are in, and lanes for single occupant cars are out. That’s right, the program declares that “LCTM funds shall not be used for projects that result in additional through travel lanes for single occupant passenger vehicles.”

Ah, the penny drops. Our social engineers at the DOT don’t just want to utilize sustainable building materials, they want to mandate what they consider to be sustainable driving practices and behavior. If low-carbon concrete doesn’t do the trick, then carpooling certainly will.

Never mind that that’s exactly the kinds of lanes small rural communities might need in areas where communal commuting is neither needed nor practical because of low-density residential patterns. So they get to build lanes that will sit empty most of the time. Or, more likely, these communities will simply be shut out of any highway dollars because they don’t meet the globalists’ high-density standards and mandates.

It might just be one pot of money but the other pots of money carry their own conditions; what’s more, these kinds of program conditions are literally repeated hundreds and hundreds of times in agency after agency.

But, hey, let’s stick with the DOT. In particular, let’s look at a new rule proposed this past February for the Highway Safety Improvement Program (HSIP). The program funds highway safety projects ostensibly at sites with a high crash history, though that’s suspect, but the mission is to fund stand-alone safety projects designed to reduce the number and severity of crashes on all streets and highways, state and local. A 10-percent match is required from state or local governments.

In 2023, there were 75 projects with HSIP funds in Wisconsin totaling slightly more than $50 million in federal funds.

Safe but not Necessarily Free

The new rule would be sweeping because it incorporates the use of the so-called Safe System approach in HSIP programs. The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) defines the Safe System approach this way: “The Safe System Approach is a worldwide movement that has been in place for more than 30 years, and it involves a paradigm shift in how road safety is addressed. Whereas traditional road safety strives to modify human behavior and prevent all crashes, the Safe System Approach refocuses transportation system design and operation on anticipating human mistakes and lessening impact forces on the human body to reduce crash severity and save lives. It is based on a shared responsibility . . .”

Let me translate because I speak perfect bureaucratese. This means that an approach that globalist bureaucrats have been drooling over for 30 years is finally being implemented under the Biden administration. The emphasis will no longer be on driver education and personal accountability and enforcing the rules of the road—deplorables are simply too stupid to learn safe driving behaviors and don’t care about safety anyway—so the experts are going to impose costly, one-size-fits-all design and performance standards, with a rigid regulatory scheme, no matter what.

Looking at the recommendations made by groups that developed Safe System, including the notorious Johns Hopkins Center for Injury Research and Policy (JHCIRP) and the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE), we can begin to see what would likely be coming down the pike, so to speak, under the proposed rule: The state will provide a “safety net” by anticipating user error. Wherever possible, projects will mandate that physical barriers separate pedestrians and bicyclists from vehicular traffic through dedicated sections of highway rights of way. Rumble strips and roundabouts will be everywhere. Intersections will be “day lighted” by removing parking near intersection corners.

Of course, the safety net demands government surveillance and control of the driver through the use of alcohol detection and ignition interlock systems, not to mention “in-vehicle systems that help prevent use of cell phones while the vehicle is moving to minimize distraction.” Practically speaking, down the road, accepting these dollars will likely require adoption by communities of the mandated use of such equipment.

At least that’s the bureaucratic vision. But remember, your movement and behavior while driving is not being controlled by the government: You are “sharing responsibility” for safety with your government partner. As ITE says on its website: the Safe System approach may “limit the range of behavioral choices for users. However, such decisions are part of responsible system stewardship.”

OK, then. Oh, and HSIP funding is also tied to equity goals because every problem or concern in the Obama-Biden era of government is a public health emergency, including highway safety, according to the proposed rule:

“FHWA proposes to revise the definition of ‘safety stakeholder’ to include representatives from public health agencies and underserved communities. The FHWA proposes to include public health agencies to emphasize that road traffic crashes are not only a traffic safety problem, but also a public health problem. … The FHWA also proposes to include representatives from underserved communities to ensure that the needs of all road users are represented in the planning, implementation, and evaluation of the HSIP, where appropriate. As described in the National Roadway Safety Strategy, underserved communities such as racial minorities and communities with higher poverty rates suffer from disproportionately higher rates of roadway fatalities compared to the overall population.”

That last claim about minority fatalities is indisputably true, in Wisconsin as well as nationally. But it’s also true that fatalities have risen dramatically in urban areas such as Milwaukee where more minorities live, while declining in the rural areas of the state. That begs the question of whether the fatality rate disparity is race-based or geographically based—and thus whether the focus on equity for “underserved communities” is useful in this situation—and whether the urban-rural divide really calls for the same kinds of restrictive and costly designs as in urban areas.

The Escalating Decline of State Sovereignty

All of which brings us back to the problem in toto. For decades experts in various federal agencies have concocted utopian programs built in bureaucratic laboratories and fitted with rigid regulations that most often fail to consider real-world applications and real-life unintended consequences, and then implemented through state agencies with little or no elected official oversight.

In this piece, I have considered just two examples from the Department of Transportation, but that one Wisconsin agency received $1 billion in federal financial assistance last year. Just imagine the conditions they are piling up on that stack of dollar bills, as high as a quadruple scoop of ice cream on a waffle cone.

But hardly as tasty and not really what the customer ordered.

In September of 2023, the U.S. House Committee on the Budget released a report detailing the total amount of federal spending headed to state and local governments, using figures compiled from the White House Office of Management and Budget. Turns out, over the last decade, the federal government has increased the amount of funds provided to state and local governments by an average of 9 percent per year, the report states.

And the growth over time is staggering: “In fiscal year 1946, the federal government provided $819 million to state and local governments, equivalent to 0.4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), but that rose to 1.5 percent of GDP and $410 billion in 1964 to 3.1 percent of GDP and $50 billion in 1975,” the report stated.

By 2019, the year before the pandemic, annual federal grants to state and local governments reached $721 billion (3.4 percent of GDP), the report stated, and then grants spiked during the response to Covid-19, reaching $1.2 trillion in 2022, or 4.8 percent of GDP.

Or, to say all that another way, the committee report stated, under the Biden Administration, 18.3 percent of all federal funds went to state and local governments, up from the Obama administration’s 16.6 percent. Trump slightly reduced that to 16.1 percent of federal funds going to state and local governments.

For Wisconsin, according to the state Legislative Audit Bureau’s 2021-22 audit, state agencies administered $20.2 billion in federal financial assistance, included $17.4 billion in cash assistance, $2.7 billion in non-cash assistance, and $107.8 million in outstanding loan balances. Seven agencies received 94.8 percent of the federal expenditures: the Department of Health Services (DHS), the University of Wisconsin (UW) System; Department of Public Instruction (DPI), Department of Transportation (DOT), DOA, Department of Workforce Development (DWD), and the Department of Children and Families (DCF).

Of those dollars, state agencies reported $5.9 billion in federal expenditures related to the pandemic.

But the flow of strings-attached money to Wisconsin—the steady and stealthy seizure of state government by the federal government—was marching upward prior to the pandemic spending spree. In 2018, according to the Legislative Audit Bureau, and as compiled and reported by the Wisconsin Policy Forum, federal funds spent totaled $11.9 billion in Wisconsin. That notched upward to $12.4 billion in 2019 and then gathered momentum to $16.4 billion in 2020. Through the years, about a third of the state budget has come from the federal government.

As the proportion increases, so does federal control and control by an unelected bureaucracy.

It increases government spending, often wastefully and in ways local communities do not desire. It boosts red tape and bureaucratic costs. It kills local flexibility and entrepreneurship. It often binds state government to financial commitments even after the federal dollars cease to flow, and, not least, the money is difficult to track, making it almost impossible to hold bureaucrats accountable.

Earlier in this piece, it was mentioned that lawmakers often see themselves as powerless, but that’s not always the case. Back in 2018, Republicans, led by then Republican Sen. Dale Kooyenga, introduced a bill that took aim at coercive federal funding, or restrictive conditions attached to so-called ‘free’ federal dollars, by at least establishing a mechanism for transparency to ensure that those conditions were publicized and reviewed.

“Over the last several years, the coercive conditions attached to federal funding has become excessive,” Kooyenga testified at a hearing on the bill. “This bill establishes a framework through which future legislatures can evaluate the conditions for receipt of federal funding and determine whether or not it is in the state’s interest to accept those conditions.”

Regardless of which party is in power, Kooyenga said, the tendency of the federal government to pressure states to act in accordance with the political will of Washington is universal and timeless.

“The unfortunate result is that coercive and onerous requirements have built up and gone unnoticed for decades in state and federal law,” he said. “We have introduced this bill as a means by which to identify, evaluate and, with the assistance of the attorney general, fight back on some of the more egregious infringements on states’ rights.”

The bill would have required the Legislative Fiscal Bureau and the Legislative Council to submit a joint report following each biennial budget to the governor, attorney general, and the Legislature that identified coercive conditions attached to federal funds.

In the end, Kooyenga turned out to be right about “regardless of which party” is in control, even on the state level, because the bill failed, though Republicans controlled the state Assembly and the Senate at the time. Meanwhile, the federal government has continued to increase its hold over Wisconsin through its coercive federalism, and the constitutional encroachment has dramatically accelerated.

Hopefully, with Republicans in charge in Washington, a new day is coming. But beware the “regardless of which party” syndrome. Either way, killing coercive federalism and restoring cooperative federalism, built around coordination between government at all levels, must be a major priority for all conservatives, not to mention Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency.

Let’s get to work and really give the progressives something to harrumph about.