EDITORIAL: Where to look for better government

Inspired by the performance of Elon Musk on the federal stage, Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos created a GOAT to follow Musk’s DOGE in rooting out waste, inefficiency and anything resembling DEI in state government.

The Government Operations Accountability and Transparency committee started its work last week by questioning people who work at the Department of Public Instruction, the University of Wisconsin System and other state agencies.

Vos described GOAT’s mission as trying to find “ways to make government do a better job.”

Universal applause is warranted. Wisconsin needs its government to do a better job.

In their eagerness to get after those inefficient bureaucrats, however, Vos and his committee seem to have missed a more pressing need for better Wisconsin state government. They should have started by investigating themselves—the Legislature.

Lawmakers have been coming to work in the Capitol more regularly than several years ago when the Wisconsin Legislature was ranked the least productive legislature in the nation, but much of their effort has been spent preventing action on important government policies rather than enacting needed legislation.

Some of this was the result of a strong Republican legislative majority reflexively thwarting a Democratic governor. That is not unexpected, but too often it has been accompanied by the Legislature’s leaders refusing to do the hard work of compromise.

This obstructionism combined with inertia has left legislation vital to the people of Wisconsin languishing.

Since 2014, the GOP majority has blocked legislation that would have allowed the state to accept federal aid for Medicaid expansion, resulting in a loss to Wisconsin taxpayers that will reach $4 billion by the end of the current budget cycle, while depriving an estimated 20,000 uninsured state residents of coverage through Medicaid.

A policy to regulate PFAS pollution in drinking water proposed by Gov. Tony Evers has been rejected repeatedly by the Legislature, even as the threat to human health has been documented by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

Outstanding among legislative failures is another involving Medicaid, one that is so indefensible, not to mention embarrassing, that it is hard to believe it is happening in Wisconsin. A sensible and necessary budget provision to extend Medicaid coverage for low-income mothers from the current two months after giving birth to a year has been blocked by GOP leaders in the past two legislative sessions.

This is a genuine headscratcher, an impossible-to-explain act exposed as harmful nonsense by these obvious facts:

Physicians, health care experts and most thinking people know that health threats to postpartum women, and the need for basic health insurance, don’t magically end two months after birth. A third of pregnancy-related deaths in Wisconsin from 2020 to 2022 occurred after two months, according to the state Department of Health Services.

Legislators in 48 states understand this. Wisconsin is the only state besides Arkansas to deny the coverage.

Most Wisconsin legislators from both parties understand it too. In a striking example of bipartisanship in a usually polarized Legislature, almost all of the members, Republicans and Democrats alike, indicated their support for a bill introduced by Republicans to offer a year of Medicaid coverage to women after giving birth. Last year, a Senate bill to extend the coverage passed by a 32-1 vote. In the Assembly, the bill was supported with a bipartisan majority of co-sponsors. That didn’t deter Vos from refusing to let the bill come to a vote.

In one attempt to explain this, he was quoted in news reports as saying “we give away too much free stuff.” He recently said it was “unlikely” he would allow a vote on the postpartum coverage in the current session.

The attitude might be summed up as how not to make government do a better job.

Speaking of GOAT, the “A” and the “T” stand for the accountability and transparency the committee expects to find lacking in state agencies. For expertise in these areas, the GOAT investigators could consult with members of the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee who killed previously approved state Stewardship funding for Ozaukee County’s Clay Bluffs Cedar Gorge Nature Preserve. In what could be a case study of avoidance of accountability and transparency, they did it in a closed meeting and kept the identity of the member who vetoed the grant secret.