Empower Wisconsin | July 15, 2022
MADISON — The delays and dysfunction roll on at Gov. Tony Evers’ troubled Department of Safety and Professional Services (DSPS).
As Empower Wisconsin has detailed, the agency has left many of the professionals it regulates in limbo waiting for their license applications and renewals to be processed. Some have reported waiting as much as a year amid a backlog that is the subject of legislative review.
State Rep. Shae Sortwell (R-Two Rivers) served as chairman of an Assembly committee that earlier this year held a hearing into the delays. He also co-chairs a joint task force that will be conducting a follow-up public hearing early next month.
Sortwell said the DSPS disaster is the latest example of an Evers administration-led department mired in incompetence. He noted the Department of Workforce Development, which failed to timely process tens of thousands of unemployment claims following Evers’ stay-at-home orders at the beginning of the pandemic.
“It’s ironic that the two departments we’ve seen the most incompetence at are the Department of Workforce Development where all of these big government people told the citizens they weren’t allowed to work but then they wouldn’t give them their unemployment. And now the other department (DSPS) is once again is getting in the way of workforce,” Sortwell told Empower Wisconsin’s M.D. Kittle on Thursday’s Dan O’Donnell Show.
“As we go forward in this upcoming election, it’s not even about conservatives versus liberals as much as it is incompetence versus common sense, being able to run anything,” the lawmaker said. “All we’ve seen out of this administration is he has no clue what he’s doing.”
Rep. Sortwell is our guest today on this edition of PowerUp, Empower Wisconsin’s podcast.
