Republican state senator says new audits show need to pare down DEI spending in Wisconsin

The Republican co-chair of the state Legislature’s committee on audits said new reports tracking diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in Wisconsin make lawmakers better equipped to pare down that spending, but he admits doing that will be complicated. 

Republican-ordered audits published last week found that at state agencies and the Universities of Wisconsin, spending on some DEI activities is tied up with other work, making it difficult to track on its own. 

The reports are the latest step in pushback from Republicans over programs they see as wasteful. In the last biennial state budget, the state’s university system agreed to a freeze on positions related to DEI and has since eliminated some of those jobs.

The audits are performed by the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau. Reports on financial monitoring in the K-12 school system, the unemployment insurance program and other areas of state government are also slated to publish this year. 

Republican state Sen. Eric Wimberger of Oconto is co-chair of the Joint Legislative Audit Committee and serves on the Joint Finance Committee. He joined WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” for a discussion about the DEI audit and his priorities in the biennial budget writing process. 

This interview was edited for length and clarity

Kate Archer Kent: Republican state lawmakers have pushed for years to end DEI programs. What does this new audit tell you about DEI activities in Wisconsin higher education?

Eric Wimberger: No one has really defined it in a holistic manner. Each department has their own thing. There’s some nebulous concepts. Because of politics, a lot of money has been shoved into these activities with no clear purpose. And obviously that’s separate from whether they philosophically should be done to begin with.

KAK: What about this audit is actionable to you as a state senator? 

EW: It’s really difficult. They’ll hide it in their normal affirmative action policies that have been around since the 70s. So you’ll have people who do those things, but then for a quarter of the time [they] are supposed to do DEI. At least on the non-UW side, this is related to Executive Order 59, specifically on DEI. The UW system has their own DEI policies with the Board of Regents. But it’s really hard to pin this down because it’s commingled, and the missions are quite separate. 

KAK: UW system President Jay Rothman said the audit numbers are “old and cold,” and that for more than a year, the UW has been taking action to reduce and reorient DEI positions toward individual student success. Is this audit evaluating a previous version of the UW that is not reflective of today?

EW: I don’t know if it’s “old and cold,” but the audit does a snapshot in time. Obviously, it’s not a continuing report. So if you recall a couple years back, [there] was the whole debate over the engineering building and the DEI positions there. So I wouldn’t be totally surprised if there’s some inaccuracy because of a continuing effort to comply with that agreement. But nonetheless, there’s more going on, and we can pare it down. 

KAK: Looking at this other report that came out from the Legislative Audit Bureau on its findings on DEI activities within the Department of Administration: Secretary Kathy Blumenfeld said in a letter to the bureau that most of the costs are tied to programming that is not easily separated from the state’s legal obligations, nor is it easily separated from other human resources best practices. So what does this particular audit illuminate to you?

EW: I don’t think that it can’t be separated or figured out. There’s been a deliberate act to commingle it. In some ways, you can dissect it, in that [if] there is no particular DEI plan for a department, but they are sending people on trips and trainings elsewhere, you can figure out how much those things [cost]. But in other ways, they’re taking their normal non-discrimination people — which is great — but then having them work a quarter time on something that isn’t related to non-discrimination. It’s actually a discriminatory policy. 

The auditors basically said, “If you work a quarter of your time on that, then we’re just going to count a quarter of your salary as what the value of that is.” But obviously we’re not going to necessarily terminate that person because they’re doing things that you do want them to do, as well. So how you figure that out by reduction of staff naturally, or just having them do the tasks that they used to do prior to this Executive Order 59 is going to be the way to go.

KAK: A couple of the audits in progress involve the Department of Public Instruction. One set to release this spring examines how the state education department monitors the financial information of schools. What do you want to learn from this investigation?

EW: This one is really crucial to the largest budgetary expense we have. We spend $15 billion — roughly 15 percent of our entire budget — on K-12 education. The catalyst to this is that for two years, Milwaukee Public Schools were not doing their annual required auditing in order to come up with accurate numbers to plug into the school funding formula. So it got to the point where DPI decided to yank $80 million from them, which was 10 percent of their budget. 

I think that’s astonishing — a 10 percent cut in their budget and no one bats an eye in the public here. But in that mix, before they cut the budget by 10 percent, Milwaukee was induced to pass a $200 million referendum on claims that the schools needed the extra money. So they pass the referendum a month later [and] yank the funding for failure to comply with the method that we use to find out what they need. And that’s a terrible situation. So we’ve got to figure out what DPI is up to in coordinating with or holding school districts to account, to make sure that they’re getting accurate data, and we’re actually giving money to schools in a method that they need.

KAK: We’re in the thick of budget writing season. Given the level of uncertainty in the federal government and the cuts to agencies and programs by President Donald Trump and DOGE, how will that affect the next budget of Wisconsin?

EW: Probably not a whole lot. From what I gather, it’s just going to be block grants administered by the state. We administer a whole lot of federal programming. I think it will all work out just fine. If there’s some problem that happens — people talk about Medicaid cuts and all that — if that were to actually happen, I think we would certainly take action to make sure nothing bad happens to people in Wisconsin. But I really don’t foresee that. 

The biggest problem with the budgeting is the fact that the state Supreme Court changed the rules on how we budget. We would be very content with giving the executive branch $100 million for this or that program, with a caveat that you have to come back to the finance committee with a discernible plan, and then we’ll approve that plan. The Supreme Court said that was a non-delegation issue in the Constitution. OK, but in Wisconsin, we have the line-item veto. If Gov. [Tony] Evers has that power, and we want to put something specific into the budget, he might line item veto that. So we lose the power of the purse.