A Wisconsin Assembly candidate is facing renewed scrutiny of his complicated Kansas ties

A messy five-way primary collides with the legacy of welfare reform.

Five days before Wisconsin’s August 13 primary election, four of the five candidates in the Democratic primary for a northeast Madison-area Assembly race laid out detailed allegations that the fifth candidate, Andrew Hysell, misused millions of dollars in federal funds during his tenure as a partner at a company that operated reading programs for the State of Kansas.

Wisconsin’s 48th Assembly District includes the areas of north and far-east Madison, around East Towne Mall, and moves northeast into Sun Prairie and southwestern Dodge County. The incumbent, Samba Baldeh (D-Madison), is running for State Senate, so five Democrats are running in the primary: Bill Connors, Andrew Hysell, Goodwill Obieze, Avery Renk and Rick Rose.

On August 8, Connors, Obieze, Renk, and Rose released a joint statement, saying “each campaign has been flooded with messages from voters concerned about [Hysell].” Ok, sure. As a journalist, I’d feel a lot better about running the story if they’d informed the press well before early voting started so we’d have time to properly look into the allegations instead of slapping it into the discourse at the last minute. 

Hysell donated to Kansas and Wisconsin Republicans over the last 10 years, including former Kansas Attorney General, now-Congressional candidate Derek Schmidt. People who follow Kansas politics know Schmidt as the elite legal mind who thinks that the recent US Supreme Court ruling giving presidents overarching immunity is a victory for the “rule of law.” And of course, Schmidt joined a lawsuit to overturn the 2020 election results. Hysell’s $100 donation to Schmidt was made in 2021. 

Hysell also released a statement on Aug. 8, stating that his “political contributions have overwhelmingly gone to Democrats.” Campaign finance records compiled by the campaign transparency website Open Secrets corroborate this.

“When I worked in advocacy for Save the Children, the Campaign for Tobacco-free kids, and the Reading Roadmap, I made contributions to Republicans who were supportive of tobacco control, early literacy and early childhood programs,” Hysell wrote. 

Tone Madison reached out to Hysell’s campaign but did not receive a response.

The more concerning allegations are about Reading Roadmap, an afterschool literacy program managed by Hysell and Wagner LLC, where Hysell was a managing partner from 2013 to 2020. In 2013, then-Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, a Republican, awarded Hysell and Wagner a no-bid contract for an average of $9 million a year in funds from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program—what most people simply think of as the federal welfare program. But an audit that the state initiated under Brownback—but didn’t publish—found that the company collected $2.3 million in incorrect payments in 2014 and 2015.

After Democratic Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly took office in 2019, the state’s Department of Children and Families (DCF) alleged that Reading Roadmap had:

• Exceeded federal salary limits for executives for organizations receiving TANF funds.
• Used TANF dollars to pay for 38 flights for executives. 
• Violated the limit of 15% on administrative costs set in the grant agreement.

Hysell pushed back, and in response DCF published the 2014 and 2015 audit after all. It indicated: 

• More than $820,000 in salary and benefit payments lacked documentation.
• $870,000 nonpayroll and indirect costs were insufficiently documented.
• $988,000 in subcontractor payments were higher than actual costs.
• $2,260 of Reading Roadmap funds were spent to lobby state senators.

In 2019, the State of Kansas canceled its contract with Hysell and Wagner. However, Hysell and Wagner filed a fair hearing request, alleging DCF’s audit was “unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious,” and that its results were “inconsistent with applicable legal standards and requirements, [and] not supported by substantial evidence.” In 2020, the state signed a settlement with Hysell and Wager, under which the company agreed to drop its appeal in exchange for $100,000.

Hysell told WORT last week that his opponents released the joint statement because “they’re afraid I’m winning.” Hysell graduated from high school in Milwaukee, attended Carroll University in Waukesha, and started his career as an aide in the legislature. Since returning to Wisconsin, Hysell has been involved in Democratic politics. That probably accounts for his endorsements from trade unions and Madison-area politicians, including District 16 State Senator Melissa Agard, who is running in a competitive four-way primary for Dane County Executive.

“I think this is a last-ditch effort to try to stop me, basically,” Hysell said.

I wish I could give you a final read on Hysell, but I can’t because I’ve never talked to him. But beyond this one person in an Assembly race, there’s a bigger story to tell. That’s the misuse of TANF funds, not necessarily by people like Hysell, but by the states that are supposed to administer them. Despite the popular perception of welfare, most TANF funds don’t go directly to poor families in the form of direct cash aid. Instead, the welfare-reform bill that President Bill Clinton signed in 1996 gives state-level politicians broad discretion to channel those funds into all manner of initiatives and pet projects.

Sociologist Matthew Desmond pointed out in a 2023 interview with NPR, while promoting his book Poverty By America, that U.S. welfare funding “is allocated to the poor on paper but doesn’t reach them in practice.”

“If you look at [TANF], for every dollar that’s budgeted to that program, only about 22 cents reaches a family in, like, dollars in hand,” Desmond told NPR at the time. “[B]ecause that program is doled out by something called a block grant, which gives states a lot of discretion about how to spend their money, and they use that discretion. They use welfare funds to fund Christian summer camps, anti-abortion centers, [and] marriage initiatives.”

And afterschool reading programs. Not that there’s anything wrong with an afterschool reading program, per se. Kansas’s DCF has resumed management of Reading Roadmap since 2020, though rural schools complained they were left out. However, aside from a few case studies, there’s no evidence that all that money improved reading scores statewide.

Because we keep trying to make education solve a poverty problem. Kids learn how to read much more effectively if they are well-fed and safely housed (as long as they’re not being taught via that “whole language learning” junk). Nine million dollars a year in a small state like Kansas could have made a significant difference in a lot of children’s lives.

This is not an attack on Hysell. If not him, Brownback would have found some other program to spend TANF dollars on. Of all the options Brownback could have chosen, an afterschool reading program is not the worst, by a long shot. Because, as a Kansan, I can definitively say that if there was one thing Brownback hated, it was actually helping poor people.