Download The Wisconsin State Budget Master Spreadsheet Here

The First Master Spreadsheet of the State Budget

No one in the state legislature had a master spreadsheet of the entire state budget, until the MacIver Institute painstakingly assembled one this week.

Instead, members of the Joint Committee on Finance (JFC) had a pdf listing out all the base appropriations in text tables. Legislative Fiscal Bureau (LFB) has those tables available as Excel files, though they deny any such files exist. Legislative Reference Bureau (LRB), which is responsible for the actual drafting of the budget, provided copies of LFB’s tables to MacIver. MacIver manually converted those tables into a master spreadsheet, line-by-line. (AI couldn’t make sense of the formatting or organizational structure).

MacIver’s spreadsheet presents all the spending contained in substitute amendment 1 to senate bill 45. JFC adopted that amendment on May 8, 2025, the first day of its executive hearings. That amendment completely replaced Gov. Evers’ original $120 billion budget proposal, which was introduced as senate bill 45 on Feb. 18, 2025. The amendment is often referred to as the “base budget.” That means it simply copy-and-pastes the state’s current spending levels from 2025 for the next two years.

The substitute amendment lists all 62 state agencies and spending categories, which contain a total of 157 programs. The total all-funds spending in the amendment is $98.9 billion. That includes $42.8 billion in general purpose revenue (GPR), which is the portion of the budget that comes from state tax collections.

Key to understanding the budget is recognizing the fact that it is not a spending plan. It is a revenue plan that simply shows how much money each agency expects to get and from where. That is why the budget does not refer to “requirements.” Instead, it refers to “purpose.” It is easy to get confused, because sometimes a “requirement” is the “purpose,” but that is not always true. For example, the Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection (DATCP) gets $4.6 million a year from GPR earmarked for the purpose of food inspection, and it also gets $7.3 million a year from the federal government for the purpose of “federal funds.” This would be very confusing if you thought that “purpose” meant “spending requirement,” because “federal funds” is obviously revenue and not an expense.

This revenue-oriented approach means that the state doesn’t exactly know where it spends all our money. It has a good idea of how much funding each program gets, but that’s a very high-level perspective. Each program consists of countless subprograms, projects, and services, which do not appear in the budget. The MacIver Institute has recently highlighted subprograms that have flown below the radar for decades, never appearing on any state budget. Those include the sterilization program and the senior employment program. Even more troubling is the fact that state agencies do not produce their own individual operating budgets, which would capture that information about its subprograms, projects, and other spending requirements.

So, what does this all mean? First, the state only knows where it gets its money from. It doesn’t really know how it spends it. Second, the legislature doesn’t have the basic tools it needs to make informed decisions about the state budget, such as a complete list of spending requirements or a master spreadsheet of the state budget. Third, it doesn’t matter how long this has gone on for, the state’s budget writing methods are completely unacceptable, and it needs to change right now.

The MacIver Institute has already proposed five ways to get the current budget on track, but there also needs to be a long-term plan to completely overhaul the state’s budget writing process. Lawmakers can realistically start this budget over from scratch and assemble it using a zero-based budgeting approach. Future budgets, however, need to be written as spending plans, not revenue plans. That means every agency needs to present lists of all its programs and all its subprograms, projects, and other spending requirements. The ultimate question lawmakers need to ask agencies is “how much do you need?” not “how much can we give you?”