What we found
Where an agency keeps an honest log, it answers on time
The pattern is clear: agencies that keep organized logs largely meet the ten-business-day benchmark for the typical request, and the failures cluster where the tracking itself breaks down.
Median response time by agency
Business days to close the typical request. Bars past the marker miss the State’s benchmark.
Click a bar to jump to the agency · green = pass, red = fail
The scorecard
Agencies that produced a usable log
Seven agencies returned per-request logs we could measure the same way. An agency passes only if the typical request closes within the State’s ten-business-day benchmark and fewer than one in ten requests remains outstanding. Click any card for its full metrics and the story behind the number.
Best-practice responders — not scored
Two offices already meet the standard
Neither produced a ranked-style log, so neither gets a median — but each did the one thing this project rewards: it made its own record checkable. Proof the standard isn’t theoretical.
Still in the shadow
Eight offices produced nothing
These offices received the same request in late April 2026 and, as of the date below, have not responded — no records, no denial, no fee estimate. We sent each a written follow-up on July 7, 2026.
A 2019 review singled out the Departments of Administration, Agriculture, Natural Resources, and Revenue as models — each then answering the typical request in roughly eight or nine business days. Six years later, those same four produced nothing at all. The trajectory is the finding.
Silence is a choice the law does not allow: an authority must fill a request or deny it “as soon as practicable and without delay.” An office that neither produces nor denies has not deferred a decision — it has made one. This list is not a verdict on any agency’s system, only on its silence.
★Praised as a model in a 2019 review of the same practicesThe standard we measured against
Wisconsin’s own rules — and its own baseline
One ruler, source-anchored, applied the same way to every office regardless of its size, mission, or the party of the official who runs it. Wisconsin enacted its first open-records laws in 1917; records are presumed open, and the burden of justifying any withholding rests on the custodian, not the requester.
The executive-order baseline
Two Walker-era executive orders — issued under an administration of the party not now in power, part of why the standard is a fair one to hold everyone to — set the best practice this report measures against.
Methodology
How we measured
Because there is no longer a single public dashboard, we went to the source — requesting each agency’s own tracking log, then measuring every log the same way.
Recommendations
A fix that needs no new money
The findings point to a remedy that requires no new appropriation and, in the first instance, no new law — only the will to follow standards Wisconsin has already written down and, within the last decade, already met.
Why this matters
A year-long wait is a denial with a friendlier name
Take action
What a Wisconsinite can do
Transparency is not self-executing. The public’s right to know depends on citizens who exercise it.
Exhibits & addendum
The underlying record
The raw tracking logs returned by each agency are attached as exhibits. A companion workbook with all calculations, OCR transcriptions, and cross-checks is available from IRG upon request.
The bottom line
Does the government answer — promptly, honestly, and on the same terms for everyone?
Some agencies do, with the staff and budget they already have. Others make the public wait the better part of a year and then certify, in writing, that nothing was delayed. Transparency does not require a new appropriation: the Department of Financial Institutions achieved a zero-day median response time using only the staff and tools it already has.
Wisconsin has met this standard before, within the last decade, under an administration of the other party. It can meet it again. What it needs is not new law but the will to follow the standards already on the books — and, failing that, a Legislature willing to make them mandatory.
The sunlight belongs to the people. It is time to turn it back on.