National News

Wisconsin schools spent 41% of the $1.49 billion in pandemic recovery federal funding on permanent salaries rather than temporary learning recovery solutions while allocating the funding slowly and without transparency, according to a new report.
The funding came as the state’s public schools added 2,141 staff while losing 47,092 students from 2019-2020 to 2024-2025, according to the in-depth spending analysis from the Institute for Reforming Government.
“It was a lack of guidance issue,” IRG Senior Research Director Quinton Klabon told TCS. “… It was a free-for-all, you could do mostly what you wanted to do and, as a result, districts backfilled expenses they wanted to have that they couldn’t afford with all the students leaving and that’s how we ended up with this situation.”
The result is that Wisconsin public schools had the most employees in state history in 2024-2025 while educating the fewest students it had since 1991-1992.
The IRG report analyzed 17,830 school district allocations from the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund to evaluate the areas the additional pandemic funding was spent because the state and the Department of Public Instruction did not provide that information in a dashboard like many other states did, instead updating the spending in a long series of PDFs that were not meaningfully categorized, the analysis showed.
“Some states had very transparent live dashboards where every month they update the numbers and here’s a pie chart showing what we did on our website,” Klabon said. “DPI did not do that. They created just a webpage with 450 PDFs. They didn’t say which one was updated, so you wouldn’t know if it was updated if you didn’t know what to look for. There were over 18,000 line items of allocations that district had.”
The IRG numbers are available in a searchable district-based report.
The state’s schools had two years to allocate the funding, with districts accepting an extra $1,745.98 per public-school student over two years. Districts had allocated just 34% of the funding in the first six months of the program and 79% through the first 17 months in a program intended to combat pandemic learning loss.
A Harvard study showed Wisconsin schools ranked 30th in reading recovery and 16th in math.
Specific allocation examples included Milwaukee spending $193 million on construction projects, including athletics facilities and renovations at schools likely to close.
IRG said that the funding should have been used for one-time needs such as curriculum purchases, technology upgrades, deferred renovations and short-burst tutoring rather than spending it on permanent staffing increases.
“I think, when you add an employee or two every year and it adds up to 10 or 20 over the decade or, when you lose students and you don’t realize you have more adults per student than you’ve ever had in Wisconsin history, by a long shot, I just don’t think they think of that historical understanding,” Klabon said. “So they look at their budgets and they’re running out of money … A lot more districts need to understand that this is the result of choices that have added up over the years.”

Lawsuit abuse and judicial bias are two of the main reasons why Los Angeles was identified as the worst “judicial hellhole” in the country, according to a national report released Tuesday by the American Tort Reform Foundation.
The report is issued every year by the foundation to analyze personal injury and wrongful death lawsuit verdicts, causes of those verdicts and real-world implications.
Report author Tiger Joyce found three civil lawsuits pushed Los Angeles to the top of the judicial hellholes list. One of those involved the family of an 88-year-old woman who was diagnosed with mesothelioma before her death. That family was awarded $1 billion by the defendant, Johnson & Johnson, after the court issued a decision that held the company liable for manufacturing a baby powder that the woman had used since the 1930s.
“We believe the award was certainly excessive, but beyond that, it was driven by what we call ‘junk science,’ ” Joyce told The Center Square Tuesday. “That award really jumped out at us.”
Other cases that resulted in excessive amounts of money being awarded to plaintiffs, which the ATR Foundation called “nuclear verdicts,” were also detailed in the report that puts Los Angeles at the top of the “judicial hellhole” list. “Nuclear verdicts,” or verdicts in lawsuits where the plaintiffs are awarded $10 million or more, included one case where a plaintiff was awarded $50 million after he was said to have spilled coffee on his lap when picking up an order at a Starbucks drive-through window.
According to the ATR Foundation, Starbucks will likely pay that plaintiff closer to $61 million once prejudgement interest and other costs are included. That plaintiff will be paid $1 million a year for the rest of his life, the foundation said on the report’s website.
Another case between Ford Motor Co. and Knight Law Firm alleged fraud on the part of the law firm. Officials with Ford in that case accused lawyers at Knight Law Firm of falsifying time sheets, according to the ATR Foundation.
The foundation’s annual report is important, Joyce said, because court problems affects affordability both nationally and in communities with a judicial hellhole.
“So there’s a variety of matters building on a significant number of broader issues that were violated over the years, but that’s what drove us to put Los Angeles at the top of the hellhole list this year,” Joyce told The Center Square. “It’s not just an academic or legal issue. Lawsuit abuse is something that affects the cost of everyday activity for all Americans, but particularly in a judicial hellhole.”
The report also noted California and Florida together are tied for producing the most nuclear verdicts in the country between 2013 and 2022. The two states are followed in the report by New York and Texas.

More than three-fourths of American voters believe lawsuit abuse is a serious problem, according to a new poll.
The national survey, released Dec. 9 by Protecting American Consumers Together (PACT) also found that 81% of voters think lawsuit abuse drives up the costs of goods and services for families, making it a “fundamental affordability issue.”
PACT conducted the survey November 13-19 among 1,000 likely voters. GS Strategy Group, a Boise-based survey research firm, conducted the survey for PACT via phone and online responses. It has a margin of error of 3.1%.
“Voters are still feeling the pain of the rising cost of living and need more help from Congress,” GS Strategy Group President Greg Strimple wrote in the polling memo to PACT. “Ending lawsuit abuse by ambulance lawyers who are driving up the cost of insurance is the best place for Congress to start.”
PACT’s executive director agreed.
“American families are concerned about the affordability of daily life, and ending lawsuit abuse will lower the cost of goods and services for everyone,” Lauren Zelt said. “With strong voter support for eliminating the $4,200 lawsuit abuse tax on American families, the time is now for Congress and President Trump to act on this issue.”
Other findings from the survey include:
76% of voters said their cost of living has gone up.75% of voters said that lawsuit abuse is a serious problem in the United States; 37% of those voters said it’s a very serious problem.81% of voters believe that lawsuit abuse drives up the cost of goods and services for American families; 41% of those voters believe the statement strongly.76% of voters support enacting reforms to eliminate the $4,200 hidden tax American families pay due to insurance fraud and lawsuit abuse.79% of voters believe it is very important for President Trump and Congress to eliminate this hidden tax on American consumers.

A federal judge has approved the release of grand jury materials from the case of Ghislaine Maxwell, convicted child sex offender and close associate of Jeffrey Epstein.
U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer’s Tuesday decision grants the Department of Justice’s request that grand jury transcripts, exhibits and investigative materials related to Maxwell’s case be unsealed.
Engelmayer had previously denied the DOJ’s request to unseal materials because the cited “extensive public interest,” he reasoned, did not override legal protective orders.
With the recent enactment of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, however, the situation changed. Engelmayer said the act, which requires the U.S. attorney general to release all documents related to Epstein and Maxwell within 30 days, “implicitly reflects Congress’s intent to overcome grand jury secrecy.”
DOJ has promised to “withhold or redact segregable portions that contain personally identifiable and other victim-related information.”
The Tuesday ruling also requires that before any materials covered by the order are publicly released, “the United States Attorney for this District personally certify that such material has been rigorously reviewed for – and found to be in – compliance with Section 2(c)(1)(A) of the Act, which protects victims against revelations of their identities and invasions of their privacy.”

A new bill in Congress seeks to make public transit systems across the country, including those in California, safer and more affordable.
The Safe and Affordable Transit Act would create new federal grants that would pay for more police officers who patrol public transit systems, according to the summary of the bill. The legislation is also intended to cover transportation infrastructure upgrades.
The ultimate aim is to reduce crime on public transit, cut costs for local agencies and increase rider confidence, said U.S. Rep. Laura Friedman, D-Burbank.
“Safety on transit is often cited by riders as a concern,” the California congresswoman told The Center Square on Monday. “Getting people onto transit, which is convenient and less expensive, makes people’s quality of life better. It gives people choices, and there’s a lot of reasons why making sure people have access to safe, reliable public transit is important.”
The bill would also ensure that the costs of upgrades to transit systems wouldn’t fall on local agencies to fund them, Friedman said. She explained the legislation would bring federal money to pay for police officers and safety upgrades.
“Our agencies are already cash-strapped,” Friedman said. “We don’t fund transit well in this country at all, and we don’t fund it nearly to the level that we fund other types of transportation infrastructure. Agencies always struggle to keep their fares low and still have enough money for operations.”
Approximately $50 million a year would be allocated to funding security and infrastructure upgrades for public transit systems, according to the bill summary. Friedman said it would be funded by general fund dollars.
Friedman told The Center Square the $50 million threshold is a starting point and that more money could be allocated by Congress.
The bill is co-sponsored by Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-New York, giving it the potential to generate bipartisan support. However, there is some skepticism that it will pass, given the political climate in Washington, D.C., according to one of California’s Democratic legislators.
“The likelihood of being able to get it through Congress and signed by the president is not high,” said state Sen. Dave Cortese, D-San Jose and chair of the Senate Transportation Committee.
“But the idea is very sound,” Cortese told The Center Square. “Those kinds of grants are something we can use, especially here in the Bay Area on things like the BART system.”
According to numbers from the Federal Transit Administration, assaults on public transit workers nationwide increased between fiscal year 2014 and fiscal year 2024. Between April 2023 and January 2025, 4.5% of assaults on transit workers were injury-only events, 29.7% were categorized as physical assault events and 65.8% were non-physical assaults.
Lawmakers interviewed by The Center Square on Monday identified the safety of both the public and transit workers as a high priority in public transit legislation.
“There’s an issue of funding, and a lot of times, transit operators don’t have the resources to ensure they’re keeping folks safe and the security’s there,” Assemblymember Lori Wilson, D-Suisun City and chair of the Assembly Transportation Committee, told The Center Square.
Employees of the California Department of Transportation, the California Transportation Commission and the California State Transportation Agency did not respond to requests for comment.
“BART has been tracking Rep. Friedman’s H.R. 6298 (also known as the Safe and Affordable Transit Act) since it was introduced two weeks ago,” read a statement emailed to The Center Square from Chris Filippi, the communications director for the Bay Area Rapid Transit System. “An initial analysis by BART staff of the funding provided in the bill indicate potential opportunities to support the BART Police Department’s hiring efforts and other investments in safety infrastructure.”
Local elected leaders and staff in Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, the city and county of San Francisco, and the city of San Jose were not available to answer questions on Monday.
While districts in urban areas throughout the state might see the most money, representatives of rural areas also want to see benefits from federal transit legislation, one Republican lawmaker told The Center Square on Monday.
“Making transportation more affordable and safer is important, especially for communities in my district,” said Assemblymember Juan Alanis, R-Modesto. “Our region is large and very rural, which means transportation options can be scarce compared to urban areas, such as the Bay Area and San Francisco. As a former law enforcement officer, I believe we must also ensure that passengers feel safe when they are taking public transportation. We need good bipartisan solutions. This measure furthers that goal.”

The Trump administration has proposed $12 billion in federal aid to American farmers, with many undergoing what Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins described as an economic crisis.
“This country and our farm economy is facing a crisis that we inherited, that most of these farmers have not seen in their lifetime,” Rollins said. “It’s just one crisis after another.”
The Department of Agriculture will deliver the aid through one-time direct payments under its new Farmer Bridge Assistance program, meant to carry farmers from their current struggles to a “golden age for agriculture” the administration has promised. Payments will be released by Feb. 28, 2026, but farmers who qualify and apply will know what they’re getting by the end of December, according to Rollins.
The program will provide $11 billion in “broad relief to United States row crop farmers who produce Barley, Chickpeas, Corn, Cotton, Lentils, Oats, Peanuts, Peas, Rice, Sorghum, Soybeans, Wheat, Canola, Crambe, Flax, Mustard, Rapeseed, Safflower, Sesame, and Sunflower” to help make up for losses they have experienced during the 2025 crop year, according to a press release from the department. The remaining $1 billion will go toward specialty crops not covered in the program, but it may be released on a different timeline than the other funds.
During a White House roundtable rolling out the relief package, President Donald Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also took some time to assure soybean farmers that – apart from the program – good things were in store for their industry, which has been hit particularly hard in the last year.
Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent spoke specifically to soybean farmers several times, saying Trump had struck a deal with Chinese President Xi Jinping committing China to purchasing $40 billion in soybean crops, according to Trump. Bessent quantified the commitment in metric tons.
“China committed to purchase at least 12 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans this growing season, followed by a minimum of 25 million tons annually for the next three years,” Bessent said.
The Agriculture Department said the new program was created to address “temporary trade market disruptions,” “elevated input costs, persistent inflation, and market losses from foreign competitors engaging in unfair trade practices that impede exports.”
Rollins and others present at a Monday roundtable attributed all of those problems to missteps of the previous administration, naming inflation, a lack of trade deals benefiting the agricultural sector and underprioritization of the sector as reasons for the industry’s current challenges.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth compared President Donald Trump to a president known for peace through strength during a talk at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum.
“If you look at the actual policies, Donald Trump is the true and rightful heir of Ronald Reagan,” Hegseth told a large crowd during his keynote address at the all-day Reagan National Defense Forum Saturday at the museum in Simi Valley, near Los Angeles.
Speaking in the museum’s Air Force One Pavilion, Hegseth also defended the recent U.S. military strikes on boats allegedly smuggling drugs from Venezuela. He noted he never issued an order to kill everyone on a boat Sept. 2 in the Caribbean Sea.
“Of course not. Anyone who’s been in the Situation Room, the War Room, knows you don’t go in there and say, ‘Kill them.’ That’s patently ridiculous,” Hegseth said, answering a question from Fox News journalist Lucas Tomlinson during a short on-stage interview after Hegseth’s speech.
A second strike on the boat, ordered by Navy Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley, killed two survivors of the first strike. Bradley told members of Congress last week that he ordered third and fourth strikes to sink the boat.
Hegseth said the second strike was necessary because the drugs were still on the boat and the survivors had access to a radio and a potential link-up with another boat.
Hegseth said he left the Situation Room after the first strike.
“A couple hours later, I was told there had to be a re-attack,” he said.
“From what I understood then and understand now, I fully support the strike,” Hegseth said. “I would have made the same call myself.”
The Trump administration follows specific criteria and protocols for military attacks, the secretary of war said. “What people think is cavalier and cowboy is the exact opposite.”
Before his interview with Tomlinson, Hegseth noted critics of Trump like to invoke Reagan’s name.
“They say the current president’s approach is nothing like the vision championed by Ronald Reagan at the height of the Cold War as we grappled with the Soviets and ultimately prevailed,” Hegseth said.
“These folks are wrong, dead wrong,” the secretary of war said.
“It’s President Trump who inherited and restored President Reagan’s powerful but focused and realistic approach to national defense,” Hegseth said.
He compared Trump’s buildup of the U.S. military to Reagan’s efforts to rebuild armed forces after the Vietnam War.
“But President Reagan also believed sincerely in the peace part of peace through strength as his actions showed,” Hegseth said. “It was not a popular thing to do at the height of the Cold War to talk to Communists, yet President Reagan did. Ronald Reagan saw the prudence and potential in engaging with the nation’s adversaries from a position of strength, even in the face of criticism from home including his own party.”
Like Reagan talking with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, Trump has talked with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, Hegseth said. “People in Washington like to criticize President Trump for doing so, but they forget this is exactly what Ronald Reagan did.”
Hegseth criticized elected officials, who compared themselves to Reagan but didn’t govern like him, for trying to make America the world’s police officer while subsidizing allies’ defense with U.S. taxpayers’ money. He also accused those officials of dismantling the U.S. industrial base and said their actions resulted in “rudderless wars in the Middle East, a land war in Europe and the economic rise of China.”
“President Trump knows better. He knows what it means to restore peace through strength on an enduring basis, to put our nation’s interest first,” Hegseth said.
“Like President Reagan, President Trump is dedicated to both sides of the peace through strength point, not using the phrase as a thin veil for warmongering,” Hegseth said. “In less than a year, President Trump has secured eight major deals, including a historic end to the war in Gaza. And he’s not finished yet.
“Even as we speak, under the president’s leadership, we are working tirelessly to end the war in Ukraine, a war that never would have started had Trump been president,” Hegseth said, criticizing the Biden administration.
He noted the newly renamed Department of War received a historic boost in funding.
“Make no mistake about it. President Trump is hell-bent on maintaining and accelerating the most powerful military the world has even seen, the most powerful, the most lethal and American made,” Hegseth said.
He later added, “The opposite of peace through strength is war through weakness.”

The Washington, D.C. Police Union is questioning the timing of Washington Metropolitan Police Department Chief Pamela Smith’s resignation amid allegations of manipulated crime statistics.
Smith announced her resignation Monday, which will be effective Dec. 31. The resignation comes on the heels of Mayor Muriel Bowser’s announcement that she will not be seeking reelection.
The chief’s resignation comes as the U.S. House Oversight Committee and the U.S. Department of Justice are actively investigating allegations stemming from a whistleblower that came forward “suggesting” leadership within MPD “deliberately manipulated crime data.”
Chairman Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., says the committee is launching the investigation following “disturbing allegations” after a whistleblower came forward “suggesting” leadership within MPD “deliberately manipulated crime data.”
In a letter to Smith, Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., noted that the department “recently entered into a settlement over allegations that senior officials falsified D.C. crime statistics to reported crime rates.” In response, the committee requests documents and transcribed interviews with district commanders within the department.
“The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is investigating disturbing allegations that DC crime data is inaccurate and intentionally manipulated, potentially at the direction of Metropolitan Police Department leadership. MPD has a duty under federal and local law to accurately report crime to the public. However, in May, MPD placed Third District Commander Michael Pulliam on administrative leave following allegations that he altered crime reports,” Comer wrote in an August letter to Smith.
“According to the whistleblower, while MPD took action against a single District Commander, the issue potentially affects all seven patrol districts, as MPD leadership allegedly instructed Commanders to routinely downgrade charges to artificially lower District crime statistics,” according to the committee. “The whistleblower stated this manipulation is accomplished by supervisors – with only a cursory understanding of the facts and circumstances of the crime – ignoring the judgement of patrol officers who actually interviewed witnesses and collected evidence by recommending reduced charges.”
In response to Smith’s resignation, the union underscored the need for “transparency and accountability,” urging “full cooperation to ensure the integrity” of MPD is upheld.
President Donald Trump and his administration have received backlash from district leadership, Democrats, and the media for declaring a crime emergency in Washington, D.C. on Aug. 11, resulting in the president deploying the National Guard and stepping up patrols by several federal law enforcement agencies.
While the union questioned the timing of Smith’s resignation, it did praise her dedication and the “distinguished” 24 years of service she provided to the department.
The union urges the search for the district’s next police chief to consider a candidate who will “prioritize respect for the rank-and-file officers, foster trust within our communities, and commit to reforming broken policies lingering from the misguided ‘defund the police’ era, which resulted in laws and regulations that have undermined effective policing and officer morale.”
Smith was appointed police chief of the MPD in 2023, making her the first Black woman to serve in that role.

Amid a steady decline in K-12 enrollment, nearly 2,000 apartments were created from former school buildings across the U.S. in 2024, according to a new report by RentCafe.
The report showed a 296% increase from 2023 to 2024 in school buildings converted into apartment complexes. Around 70% of these upcoming apartments are projected to come from cities in Ohio, Washington state and Pennsylvania, among others. The apartments are also in Washington, D.C.
Cities like Columbus, Cleveland, Seattle and Pittsburgh are projected to see the highest number of future school-to-apartment conversions, Alexandra Both, the author of the report, told The Center Square.
Columbia and Cleveland are projected to create 1,405 apartments combined.
“These typically involve older or unused school buildings that districts have closed and that cities are considering for reuse as housing,” Both told The Center Square. “Conversions of educational facilities made up 7.9% of all adaptive reuse apartments in 2024, up from just 3% the year before, making it the fastest-growing reuse category.”
The report noted that the increase in apartment conversions is tied to factors such as declining enrollment.
For Ohio, the decrease in 2025 was 1.0% or 14,786 students, which is faster than the declines in the three previous years.
Enrollment in Washington public schools is down 4% since 2019, with many students now enrolled in private schools, charter schools or home school programs.
Enrollment is projected in the state to decline by another 3% by 2031.
Since 2020, COVID-19 and the rise of alternative schooling have affected K-12 public school enrollment. Nationally, public school enrollment fell 3% in 2020.
According to an August 2025 Brookings Institution study on public school enrollment declines, the current 45 million public school students are projected to drop to 38 million by 2050, a trend that “could drive future school closures and alter the number of seats traditional districts will need.”
The Center Square reached out to the Ohio Department of Education and Seattle Public Schools, but did not receive a response.

An employee is accusing union officials of illegally declaring a Michigan manufacturing plant a “closed shop” and compelling dues deductions.
Kristen Dickinson, an employee of fire sprinkler manufacturer The Viking Corp., filed the federal unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board last week against the Steelworkers union.
“Steelworkers union bosses are just interested in gaining more power over us and our pocketbooks,” Dickinson said. “If they really believe they are doing right by us, they shouldn’t feel the need to force everybody to join or trick people into supporting the union’s politics, yet that’s exactly what they’re doing.”
Viking is located in Hastings. Dickinson is receiving free legal assistance from the National Right to Work Foundation, an anti-union nonprofit organization.
From 2012 until early 2024, Michigan had right to work laws, meaning unionized workplaces could not require employees to join the union. Under a Democratic legislature, those protections were removed.
National Right to Work Foundation President Mark Mix told The Center Square in an exclusive interview that, even though Michigan ended its right to work laws in 2024, there are still legal protections for Michigan workers.
“Michigan workers need to be on guard for their individual rights in this new legal environment without right to work,” Mix said. “No matter what union bosses or company managers in their workplaces might tell them, union officials can’t require any Michigander to become a formal union member as a condition of employment.”
Now, Mix explained that, even though union contracts can force employees to pay some union fees to stay employed, those fees are not supposed to go to fund union politics. Employees are also supposed to be given different options to pay those fees, instead of them just being deducted from their paychecks.
Dickinson says in her charges that, not only is Viking not a “closed shop” where formal union membership is required, the union is also mandating that dues are deducted directly from employees’ paychecks.
Mix said this is illegal.
“Established Supreme Court case law explicitly forbids what Steelworkers union bosses are attempting to do here,” he said. “The National Labor Relations Board needs to prosecute the union for its illegal demands, and foundation attorneys are prepared to do everything possible to ensure that happens.”
If the board rules in Dickinson’s favor, Viking and the Steelworkers union could be mandated to notify other employees that they cannot legally be required to be a union member, to pay full union dues, or have dues money automatically deducted from their paycheck.
Mix said that this case is an example of why right to work laws are important for all states to have.
“Federal law already gives union officials tremendous power over workers, and as Ms. Dickinson’s case shows, they will often simply disregard what limited protections wage earners have if it means more dues in their coffers,” he said. “Employees need more protection for their free association, not less, and right to work provides just that.”