The Institute for Reforming Government (IRG) released the Agency Sunshine Report on Thursday, finding that most Wisconsin offices and agencies failed the State’s own public records performance test. The report examines how quickly state agencies and constitutional offices answer the public and is accompanied by an interactive dashboard displaying response times.

The report from IRG’s Center for Investigative Oversight (CIO) scores 13 state agencies and constitutional offices against a single standard drawn from the State’s own guidance, using request logs and publicly reported data. Seven of the 13 scored offices failed. Several additional offices could not be scored because they did not provide usable request-level data, while two agencies produced no records at all. The result is not a few isolated delays, but a broad failure to measure, disclose, and deliver timely access to public records.

Wisconsin once published these numbers itself. Two executive orders, issued in 2016 and 2017 by Gov. Scott Walker, required every agency to track its records requests and post its response times on a statewide dashboard. The Evers Administration stopped updating the dashboard in 2019. A report from the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty explained how the Evers Administration offered no cogent explanation for the reversal.

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