Major state agencies in Wisconsin are operating without a department-level budget, a MacIver Institute investigation has discovered.
DPI, DHS, DMA, and DOC were all unable to provide anything resembling an operating budget in response to the MacIver Institute’s open records request. Other agencies simply ignored the request.
Every two years, the governor and legislature approve a new biennial budget that appropriates funds, approves programs, and authorizes staffing levels at all state agencies. That document is what’s known in the private sector as a “master budget.” It does not include the level of detail that departments need to run efficiently and effectively at their level. Unfortunately, many of them attempt to do just that, nonetheless.
The MacIver Institute filed open records requests with several of the largest state agencies over the summer. The request was for their operating budget for the current fiscal year, which began on July 1st. None of them were able to provide an actual budget. Some admitted that outright.
Department of Military Affairs (DMA)
“We do not have a document that has that information in a format that simply lays out the budgets,” wrote Cheryl Smith, a paralegal at the Department of Military Affairs, DMA. “However, the agency’s budget for FY25 can be obtained from the Legislative Fiscal Bureau by clicking on the following link.”
The document Smith referenced was actually just an informational packet that the Legislative Fiscal Bureau (LFB) prepared for lawmakers on the Joint Committee on Finance. It is not a budget by any stretch of the imagination. That means DMA, which spends about $205 million from taxpayers a year, is doing so without a budget.
Department of Corrections (DOC)
It’s the same situation at the Department of Corrections (DOC), which spends about $1.7 billion annually. It also provided an informational packet from LFB in response to MacIver’s request for its operating budget. Unlike DMA, it did not offer any explanation, only that it considered the document to be “responsive to your request.” It was not.
Department of Health Services (DHS)
The Department of Health Services (DHS) also struggles with the concept of having a budget. It sent MacIver its “FY 2025 operating budget,” which was really just an elaborate income statement. It contains all of the department’s sources of revenue and shows how those funds are dispersed among six categories of spending.
“This is the level of detail at which the operating budget is maintained,” Sheri Carter, the executive assistant for DHS’s Office of Policy Initiative and Budget (OPIB).
Unfortunately for DHS, an income statement is not an operating budget, and you cannot run an organization using it. Its primary purpose is to demonstrate to investors and regulators that you are financially solvent and that all your funds are accounted for. DHS, by the way, spends about $17 billion a year.
Department of Public Instruction (DPI)
The Department of Public Instruction is another big spender in state government. It gets about $8.9 billion a year. Like DMA, DOC, and DHS, it also does not have an operating budget, although it at least has a document entitled “FY25 Operating Budget.” That document shows how DPI allocates its funds among its various initiatives. It lacks many basic budgeting elements. For example, it does not include labor costs, material costs, or overhead. It does not show how spending compares to previous budgets. However, there’s a much more serious deficiency than that.
DPI’s “operating budget” for this fiscal year only accounts for $153 million of spending (all funds). Again, the agency is getting $8.9 billion this year (all funds). The “FY25 Operating Budget” also only includes 38 initiatives, while there are 96 funded initiatives throughout the department.
DOT, DNR, and the Rest
Those are the only four departments that responded to MacIver’s very straightforward open records request. Others, like the DNR, simply ignored it. The Department of Transportation (DOT) didn’t complete its operating budget for the year until Oct. 18th (nearly four months after the fiscal year began). MacIver requested it right away, and a month later, it is still pending.
Summary and Conclusion
The reason why MacIver requested agency operating budgets using the formal open records request was to ensure it could be confident in the results. If those agencies had an operating budget, they were required by law to hand it over. They are not required to hand over documents that don’t exist. Therefore, we can conclude that DMA, DOC, DHS, and DPI do not, in fact, have operating budgets. Together, they account for over half of the state’s annual spending.
This investigation did not necessarily reveal anything criminal. The agency budget requests received by the governor in September indicate they do track their funding and spending. Most of the information they would need to produce an operating budget is present in their budget requests to the governor, so there’s really no excuse.
This investigation shows that they fail to manage their funds in any acceptable way. It’s something the legislature should consider as it determines those agencies’ level of funding in the next state budget this spring.
