The News
Wisconsin’s Democratic governor sued several state Republican legislators on Tuesday for obstructing “basic government functions,” including, among other things, refusing to administer salary increases that had already been budgeted for about 35,500 University of Wisconsin system employees. Republican leaders had vowed to withhold the pay increases until the university system agreed to cut all diversity, equity, and inclusion positions.
The Details
In the 2023-25 biennial budget, Gov. Tony Evers proposed an 8-percent raise over two years for state employees. The Republican-controlled legislature proposed a 6-percent raise, which was passed and signed into the budget by the governor. However, the pay adjustments cannot be carried out until they are approved by the Joint Committee on Employment Relations. This phase of the legislative and budgeting process then became a leverage point: While the Republican-led committee approved the raises for all other state employees in October, it declined to grant the wage increases for UW system employees.
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, a co-chair of the Joint Committee on Employment Relations, has demanded that the UW system cut all DEI positions before the committee will release the funding for the raises. “I don’t think that they deserve to have any more resources until they accomplish the goal,” Vos said in an interview with WisPolitics. “Not a nickel. When I say a nickel, that’s what I mean.”
In response, Evers’s lawsuit says that Republicans have undermined the powers of the executive branch by holding the already-approved pay raises “hostage.” The lawsuit also challenges two other recent moves by Republicans to block conservation projects and updates to commercial buildings.
Jay O. Rothman, president of the UW system, said in a statement to The Chronicle that it was “unprecedented” for legislators to withhold pay “as part of a political disagreement between two separate branches of government.”
“Targeting the Universities of Wisconsin employees and their families to compel our universities to eliminate all diversity and inclusion positions, which was vetoed by the governor, left us in an incredible predicament,” Rothman said. “I am deeply troubled by our faculty and staff being stuck in the middle of this dispute. While it is not our lawsuit, it’s time for this whole ordeal that is blocking pay for our employees to come to an end.”
In a statement to The Chronicle, Vos characterized the lawsuit as “an attempt to eliminate the 4-percent raises given to all state employees by the legislature.” Asked for clarification, his spokesperson said the governor’s lawsuit, if successful, could have the effect of “potentially wiping out” those state-employee raises. A spokesperson for Evers denied that claim, Wisconsin Public Radio reported.
In a statement, Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu said the legislature would protect the “constitutionally prescribed duties of the state legislature against the governor’s frivolous attacks.”
The Backdrop
The squabble over pay increases for system employees marks the latest battle about DEI and control over higher education in the state more broadly.
While other states have sought to curtail DEI by using other methods, typically legislation, Wisconsin Republicans took aim last summer at the funding for diversity initiatives. Vos initially proposed cutting about $32 million in spending on the system over the course of the two-year budget, which he said was equal to the amount that would have been spent on DEI-related work. Republicans included a cut of nearly $32-million in their budget proposal, as well as a measure to eliminate 188 DEI positions.
“Make no mistake, Vos and Republicans’ short-sighted move to gut our university system of tens of millions of dollars is about one thing — Republicans’ decades-long war on public higher-education institutions in our state,” Evers wrote in June in response to Republicans’ proposed cuts. “These cuts would be disastrous for our UW system, almost certainly causing cuts to our campuses and critical programs statewide.”
Evers ultimately used his line-item veto to keep all the diversity jobs, but the $32-million cut remained in the budget he signed. That money is slated instead for work-force-development programs on campuses, though Vos has indicated those funds will also be withheld until the state’s public universities eliminate DEI.
At the state’s Republican Party convention, Vos reportedly called DEI — which he said stands for “division, exclusion, and indoctrination” — “the single most important issue” in the country.
The Stakes
Until the dispute between the governor and the legislature is resolved, thousands of UW system employees will continue to go without needed pay raises, said Michael Bernard-Donals, an English professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who leads PROFS, the advocacy arm of the campus’s Faculty Senate, which has weighed in on the issue.
“There’s all kinds of opportunity for blowback here. This is hurting the lower-wage employees more than it’s hurting faculty, frankly,” Bernard-Donals said. “My guess is that Vos’s bone to pick is mainly with UW-Madison. But this hurts everybody.”
The withholding of funds over DEI comes as the UW system faces other budgetary challenges. In mid-October, the system officially closed a two-year campus and ended in-person instruction at two others. Meanwhile, 10 out of the 13 four-year institutions in the system will run deficits this year, and two universities have announced layoffs over the past few weeks.
Though Rothman, the system president, said costs were not the driving factor behind the recent campus closures, he told legislators in June that without more funding, the system would have to look at cutting programs and shutting down campuses.
“The stakes for Wisconsin’s economic future rest on our ability to develop talent all Wisconsinites are counting upon,” Rothman said in his statement to The Chronicle, “and the less we are subject to ongoing political disputes, the better we can do our job.”
