Daily Bread for 8.15.25: Wisconsin State Budget Returns to Typical Margins

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 87. Sunrise is 6:01 and sunset is 7:56, for 13 hours, 55 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 56.5 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1944, Allied forces land in southern France in Operation Dragoon.

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Wisconsin has had large state budget surpluses rarely, and the recent years of those surpluses are now coming to an end:

With this budget, the state has now used most of the surplus that has formed the backdrop for the last few budgets. The surplus, [communications director and policy researcher at the Wisconsin Policy Forum Mark] Sommerhauser said, was mostly the result of federal pandemic aid and was also created in part by an increase in tax revenue, especially through the sales tax, as a result of inflation. At one point the surplus had grown to over $6 billion. 

“[A large surplus is] not business as usual in Wisconsin,” Sommerhauser said. “More often you see the opposite. You see shortfalls that lawmakers are having to scramble to figure out a way to bridge.”

Sommerhauser said that with the smaller reserves, the next budget is likely “going to be kind of coming back to Earth.”

By July 1 2027, Wisconsin’s general fund balance is projected to be $770.5 million — a drop of about $3.6 billion and the lowest balance since 2018. The state will also have $2.1 billion in its rainy day fund.

This leaves Wisconsin with a projected $2.8 billion in its reserves — about 11% of Wisconsin’s net general fund appropriations in fiscal year 2027, Sommerhauser said.

“That’s certainly not disastrous. It’s not cataclysmic at all. It is more than the state has had in reserve for many years prior to the pandemic,” Sommerhauser said. “Of course, it’s a lot less than the last couple of budgets here.”

See Baylor Spears, Wisconsin’s surplus is waning. Next budget will mean ‘coming back to Earth.’, Wisconsin Examiner, August 14, 2025.

One shies from calling Wisconsin’s politics normal, yet perhaps it’s reasonable to say smaller surpluses will be a return to the conventional.

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Why did researchers stick a rubber duck to a rock? To show off their super glue: