Josh Kaul’s Department of Justice is supposed to use Victims of Crimes Act money on groups that help rape and beating victims. Opening Freedom Inc.’s website makes you wonder what that money was actually going toward. Gender Justice. Queer Justice. Black and Southeast Asian Liberation. “We bring queer analysis to all of the work that we do.” The mission is “social, political, cultural, and economic change” until violence against “women, gender-non-conforming and transgender folks, and children” ends, which in their lexicon means taking on “the root causes”: poverty, racism, discrimination, and the cops.
Federal inspectors just caught Kaul’s office funneling money. We here at The Heartland Post reported the U.S. Justice Department inspector general’s audit of Victims of Crime Act money Wisconsin DOJ passed to Freedom Inc. The state awarded more than $630,000 for sexual-assault services in fiscal years 2024 and 2025 and had reimbursed $515,959 by September 2025. Inspectors questioned $46,439. More than $7,000 went to contractors without prior approval and above the state’s hourly cap. Two group-therapy invoices, about $9,000 and $24,500, did not match the volume, nature, or duration of work billed. Victim counts dropped in the quarter before the bigger invoice.
In 2024, the group mixed VOCA cash with American Rescue Plan Act dollars and did not keep straight which pot paid which bill, which the auditors said could have made the reimbursement requests themselves inaccurate. Freedom Inc. may have had policies on paper, but it did not reliably code expenses, track staff time, recover security deposits, or keep the files. The official OIG line was polite and damning: the money went to counseling and emergency housing, “but we identified needed improvements in grant management and administration.” Seven recommendations. No criminal theft charge. Federal victim funds still left Madison on invoices Kaul’s department later admitted it never opened.
Wisconsin DOJ’s own rule said review the invoice first. The Kaul administration skipped that step and still hit approve. Freedom Inc. told inspectors a July 2026 state notice blessed one contractor’s higher rate. It refused a recommendation to repay more than $33,000 in unsupported contractor costs and said it would hunt for paperwork. Channel 3000 booked an interview. The group canceled. Communications director Riley Vetterkind said the department “expects that organizations receiving federal grant funds comply with strict reporting requirements” and is “actively working with the Office of the Inspector General and Freedom Inc. to address and remedy the audit findings.” The deadline they gave the nonprofit to update policies and document the questioned costs is November 27. That is after years of checks, not before.
This is not a one-off. In 2020, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel documented $3.6 million in state grants and contracts over five years, including $876,674 in federal victim money that Kaul’s DOJ awarded after he took office in 2019. Children and Families under Tony Evers sent hundreds of thousands more. The Washington Examiner later tallied more than $5 million in government money since 2020, plus city of Madison youth grants. Biden’s Justice Department separately cut $475,000 in 2024 for “culturally specific” domestic-violence work. In 2021, the feds branded Wisconsin DOJ a high-risk grantee after Kaul’s Office of Crime Victim Services left prior audit findings to rot. The taxpayer dollars to the left-wing political NGO pipeline kept flowing.
Read what Kaul’s DOJ was funding through Freedom Inc. Youth programs are “anti-violence groups” built on “political education.” Nkauj Hmoob teaches Hmong girls organizing skills and “LGBTQ issues.” Viv Ncaus Dance Troupe says it will “challenge patriarchy, homophobia, racism, and classism.” Black Girls Matter is political education for Black teen girls. Freedom Youth Squad gets “deep political education.” The 2018 annual report brags about a #NoCopsInSchools campaign. The 2021 report lists Police-Free Schools as a voting issue, plus letters to “Black political prisoners” and a study of cop-killing Black Panther terrorist Assata Shakur. A city grant application boasts they are “leading the liberation movement in the Midwest” and building a pipeline inside the Movement for Black Lives. Governance is a “flower,” not a hierarchy, because a 501(c)(3) that takes VOCA money still wants to sound like a commune. Freedom Inc. is not simply an NGO helping victims of sexual assaults; it is a full-on left-wing political campaign operation funded by taxpayers via Wisconsin’s top cop.
Their Madison People’s Budget talks “racial capitalism” and “settler colonial violence.” Community Control over police means the “most affected” hire and fire officers, write policy, and decide “how much funding the department should receive, if any at all.” That last clause is the tell. Not reform. Optional police. On Instagram, they have called to abolish police, defund ICE, end deportations, and close jails. A spokeswoman in a bail-fund video said any Black person behind jail walls is a “political prisoner” and called police “an occupying army.” They partnered with Free the 350 Bail Fund and boasted of bailing dozens out of Dane County.
After the July shooting of Corey Ruiz, who police said pulled a knife and wounded an officer, Freedom Inc. ran education tents at the Williamson Street occupation, passed abolish-police signs, marched on the mayor’s lawn, and demanded the officer’s arrest, a police defund, and community control. Staffers Hope Vang and Zon Moua were arrested at a Capitol protest. The group’s line: “OUR ONLY ENEMY IS THE STATE.” The same state that pays the grant.
When Madison and Dane County declared sanctuary status for trans and non-binary residents, Freedom Inc. called municipal paper “not even a low bar” against “fascist politics.” The Queer and Trans Power Team promised “radical direct services.” That is the political education page in practice: gender theory first, then the street. Leaders say they do not want to defund police only to install another punishment system. They want the lineage of “harm and domination” gone. In 2020, after the group helped lead Madison protests, Sen. Steve Nass asked Kaul and Evers to make sure grant cash was not subsidizing street violence. Kaul’s office answered that the group had received VOCA-style money under Republicans too and did “great” victim work. The invoices still were not being opened by Kaul and team.
Eric Toney, running to replace Kaul, put it in one sentence. A group that wants the police abolished just fleeced taxpayers on Kaul’s watch. Crime labs lag. Narcotics coverage in the north thinned out. Fentanyl did not.
Meanwhile, the attorney general’s victim office paid a nonprofit that studies Assata, trains kids that schools should be cop-free, and treats the badge as an occupation. Direct services for battered women can be real. Kaul cannot hide behind the counseling line. His agency had a policy: read the bill before you pay it. They skipped that step for an organization whose homepage is a seminar in the new left, creating political activists and Kaul voters.
