Before joining the Watchdog Team as the local government investigative reporter, David Umhoefer covered Milwaukee County government for the past five years. He has covered governmental affairs and elections in Milwaukee for 21 years, also filing from Milwaukee city hall, the federal courthouse and the suburbs for The Milwaukee Journal and Journal Sentinel. During a five-year editing stint in the '90s, he supervised the merged paper's enterprise team and served as a computer-assisted reporting trainer.

His reporting has won a variety of national, state and local reporting awards. Major reporting projects have examined election fraud, quality-of-life policing, deadly conditions on traveling sales crews, county ethics violations, Milwaukee County's budget troubles, rip-off charities, warehousing of the mentally ill and the near collapse of the Milwaukee Public Museum.