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Guy drowning in debt
No matter what you think of Gov. Tony Evers, one word nobody would apply to his administration is “dynamic.”
A gut-wrenching case in point is his handling of the unemployment compensation backlog. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports that thousands of Wisconsinites have been waiting, in some cases for several weeks, to get their checks and thousands more can’t even access the system. The paper reports that 500,000 people are waiting to be approved and that that grossly underestimates the frustration because thousands more can’t even get basic questions answered or simple problems solved.
Here’s a personal example. I have a friend who told me this story. He was furloughed from his job in March. He hasn’t been paid in two months and he’s struggling to pay his mortgage and other bills. He’s been trying with increased desperation to get through to someone at the Department of Workforce Development to clear up a bureaucratic nightmare having to do with his username and password in the online system. After weeks of trying he finally got a recording that said he was 79th in line.
He told me that having only 78 people waiting in front of him felt like winning the lottery. He had some hope now of actually speaking to a real human being who could help him. So he put the phone on speaker while he took a shower, cleaned the condo, did some gardening. Finally, after hours he was number two in line. Excited, he got out his pen and paper and cleared his voice. Then he was in! He started to say, “I’m so happy to talk to someone! I’ve got this problem with…”
Click.
Yep, he was cut off. And he had to start all over again. More days passed and finally he got through again. He asked the worker to take down his number just in case they got cut off. Guess what? They got cut off, but the worker called right back. They worked through the problem and the worker set up a new username and password for my friend. He was so excited. But the new login information didn’t work. He’s back to square one again.
This isn’t an isolated incident and it’s not all due to the coronavirus crisis. I have another friend who has been trying to get into the system since January, long before the shutdown began. And, as a matter of fact, the system was designed to make it hard for laid off workers to get the benefits they are entitled to. Wisconsin isn’t alone in that; almost every state does it.
That was bad enough in good times, but in the middle of a crisis it would be good to have a governor who just knocked down the barriers and asked questions later.
There’s no question that it’s a daunting problem. Claims are up an astounding 6,000% over the highest months previously on record and the 600 Department of Workforce Development personnel trained to handle them are understandably overwhelmed. The administration is moving workers over from other divisions and they recently hired another 250, but it takes time for background checks (needed since they’ll be handling a lot of personal information) and training.
I get all that. No one should blame the frontline workers and this would be a challenge for any administration. But why isn’t Evers taking a higher profile on this, talking about it and making it a priority? One thing a governor needs to do is make it clear that he hears people and that he’s trying to move heaven and earth to help them. But you don’t get the feeling that Evers is channeling the frustration of all those unemployed workers. Why isn’t the administration hiring 2,500 new claims workers instead of 250? And, most importantly, why aren’t they streamlining the system so that workers forced out of their jobs by the pandemic can get paid now while the state catches up with certifying their eligibility later?
Evers has made it a practice of letting Republican legislators outmaneuver him and he’s following the same pattern here. Last week several Republicans sent his DWD secretary a letter, claiming the political high ground by asking him to order DWD to preapprove claims. Secretary Caleb Frostman responded by saying that the department didn’t have the legal authority to do that.
This is another pattern. Evers’ people gave the same legalistic answer to calls to delay the April 7 in-person election. His spokesperson said that he didn’t have the power to act only days before he would claim that he did have the power after all. He had essentially conceded the argument and undercut his own case and the Wisconsin Supreme Court overturned him within hours.
If anybody ever needed a wartime consigliere it’s Tony Evers. He seems to be getting legal advice from the most timid bureaucratic attorneys on the face of the earth. Why not just preapprove the claims and do the necessary checking after the fact? If fraud is discovered (and my guess is that it will be found in an exceedingly small number of cases), the state can go after the scofflaws later.
It comes down to a question of being able to see the big picture. Do you value getting dollars into the hands of people who desperately need them? Or do you value the fine print? If Evers would really be violating the law by preapproving applicants then let the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty sue him and let the conservative majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court or the Trump administration in Washington stop him. If Legislative Republicans were trying to trap him with a request they knew might be struck down, well, call their bluff.
Evers is getting good marks for his overall handling of the pandemic, although support for his efforts slipped significantly in the last month. The latest Marquette Law School poll found that support went from 76% down to 64% while those who said they disapproved of his handling of the situation nearly doubled from 17% to 32%. And the unemployment mess isn’t going to help those numbers. Republicans are already hammering him on it. A half million desperate and angry people make for a bad start in 2022.
There’s this feeling that the administration has no sense of urgency, that it’s not willing to bend the rules to meet a higher imperative. In his soul Tony Evers, who had been a school principal and state superintendent, is a bureaucrat. That’s fine, we need people who can professionally administer policy. But a governor isn’t essentially an administrator, but a leader. And that’s something else entirely.
