At a Tavern Talk in Medford on July 9, Tom Tiffany told the room what he plans to do to Wisconsin's Department of Natural Resources if he becomes governor.

"We are going to revamp the Department of Natural Resources. I am open to splitting the agency. I am open to splitting the agency so you separate fish, wildlife, hunting, fishing, trapping from the environmental permitting part of it."

His pitch was that hunters and anglers aren't getting their money's worth. "We're going to make sure that all of you with your sporting license fees, that it actually goes to having better habitat and more opportunity for sportsmen here in Wisconsin."

There is a straightforward problem with that argument. The state already checked.

The audit

The Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau went through the Fish and Wildlife Account for fiscal year 2023-24 and classified every state-supported dollar by who it benefited. From the report:

"We determined that $46.3 million, or 49.8 percent of Fish and Wildlife Account expenditures supported by state revenue, was spent for activities that primarily benefited hunters and anglers. … We also determined that $36.7 million (39.5 percent) was spent for activities that benefited hunters, anglers, and other users. In addition, we determined that $0.3 million (0.3 percent) was spent for activities that did not directly benefit hunters and anglers."

Add the first two together and roughly 90% of that spending benefits sportsmen, either exclusively or alongside other outdoor users. The share that doesn't directly benefit hunters and anglers is three-tenths of one percent.

Tiffany is proposing to dismantle a 59-year-old agency to fix a diversion of license-fee money that the state's own auditors could not find.

This is not a new argument, either. Republican lawmakers made the same claim in 1999 and again in 2001 — that hunting and fishing license fees were being misspent. Audits concluded the money had properly gone to conservation wardens, land acquisition and wildlife-related purposes.

What sportsmen themselves say the problem is

The Wisconsin Wildlife Federation is the state's largest conservation organization representing sportsmen. These are Tiffany's stated constituency. Their diagnosis is the opposite of his:

"The funding problem is structural, not managerial. … Most resident hunting, fish and trapping license fees have remained unchanged since 2005, even as costs have risen ~65%."

Fees frozen for 21 years while costs rose by roughly two-thirds. That is arithmetic, not bureaucracy. No reorganization chart fixes it.

The Federation also said this, and it reads like it was written with Tiffany's tavern speech in mind:

"There is no single solution to Wisconsin's conservation funding challenges. Rising costs, shifting outdoor use, and stagnant license sales demand collaboration across political lines and user groups. Polarization only weakens conservation; our natural resources and outdoor traditions require unity."

The quiet part, said out loud in 2016

Wisconsin merged its wildlife conservation and pollution control agencies into a single DNR in 1967, on the theory that state government would run better that way.

Republicans have tried to undo it repeatedly and have never succeeded. Tim Michels, the 2022 GOP nominee for governor, proposed it. Former Republican lawmaker Adam Jarchow proposed it in 2016. Former Republican Congressman Mark Green and former Assembly Speaker John Gard both floated it.

George Meyer, who ran the DNR from 1993 to 2001, counted at least four such attempts and told Wisconsin Public Radio in 2022 that "each of those efforts have not been finally enacted by the Legislature, and there's been pretty strong public opposition to them for several reasons."

Meyer also explained what he thinks is actually going on: "Those who are not friends of conserving the environment want to split the department."

Another former DNR secretary, Scott Hassett, said it more bluntly to the Wisconsin State Journal in 2016. If the agency is split, Republicans will —

"have one agency they can feed and one they can starve. They like to feed fish and wildlife, and starve environmental protection."

That's the mechanism. You don't have to cut environmental enforcement in a way voters would notice. You just move it into its own agency and stop funding it.

Michigan already ran this experiment

Wisconsin doesn't have to guess what a split does, because Michigan split its DNR in 1995.

According to the Ann Arbor News, the results were: the cost of administration up 15%, the cost of executive division programs up 66%, and environmental program funding down 4%.

More bureaucracy, more executives, less environmental protection. That is the outcome Hassett predicted, produced in a neighboring state, with numbers.

In 2017, the 300-member Wisconsin Association of Retired Conservationists wrote to Gov. Scott Walker and the Legislature urging them to reject a breakup. They argued that dividing the agency "would be costly to taxpayers while reducing the value of natural resources and environmental protections," and pointed to what the integrated DNR had produced: the state's top ranking for hunting and fishing, popular parks and trails, the revival of the osprey, and the cleanup of contaminated rivers and harbors in Milwaukee, Sheboygan, Racine and Marinette.

"These high-quality natural resources that make Wisconsin a vacation, hunting and fishing destination, a healthy place to raise our children, and a quality of life attraction to businesses were the direct result of an integrated DNR. Stepping backward from that successful and proven structure is a mistake."

The reason these attempts keep failing is that outdoors clubs and environmental groups — two constituencies Republicans expect to be able to split — keep ending up on the same side. As Meyer put it in 2016: "We all at some point have common interests in terms of the protection of the environment."

Tiffany has done this before

None of this should surprise anyone who watched Tiffany in the state Legislature. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel once described him as "the state legislator environmentalists love to hate."

In 2013 he helped lead the fight to ease environmental protections for a proposed $1.5 billion open-pit mine in Ashland and Iron counties. In the same period, he lobbied Gov. Scott Walker to cut funding for scientific research at the Department of Natural Resources. He pushed to expand logging on state forests and stripped counties of the power to set stricter shoreline-protection zoning. He called the EPA "radical," said the human role in global warming is "not settled," and when the Wisconsin League of Conservation Voters put him on its "dishonor roll," he called it "a badge of honor."

The League of Conservation Voters scores him at 0% for 2025 and 1% lifetime.

A politician who spent a decade trying to defund the DNR's science now says he wants to restructure the DNR on behalf of the people who use it.

The DNR and Tiffany's campaign did not respond to the Milwaukee Courier's request for comment.

Sources

• "Tom Tiffany pushes extreme Wisconsin DNR break up plan opposed by Republican officials" — Drake Bentley, The Milwaukee Courier, August 4, 2026
• Tom Tiffany's environmental voting record — League of Conservation Voters

Photo: Tom Shaw / Getty Images.