Politics

Ron DeSantis returns unallocated federal funds to D.C.

Published

3 days ago

March 22, 2025

Florida has finally figured out how to give back money it didn’t want to appropriate during the Joe Biden administration.

“For years, Florida has been trying to return federal funds to the federal government due to the ideological strings attached by the Biden Administration—but they couldn’t even figure out how to accept it. Today, I met with Elon Musk and the DOGE team, and we got this done in the same day. Other states should follow Florida in supporting DOGE’s efforts,” posted Gov. Ron DeSantis to Musk’s X on Friday.

More than $848 million is headed back to Washington, according to a letter from the Governor.

The Governor’s recent claims that the previous administration couldn’t figure out how to take money differ from what he was saying when Biden was in office, when his predecessor pressed him and others to send the money back. If DeSantis asked Scott how that should be done, it was never publicized.

In 2022, U.S. Sen. Rick Scott was asked about DeSantis continuing to “deploy” COVID-19 relief funds for priorities not related to the pandemic. Scott said leaders with extra funds should return them to defray the federal debt.

“What every responsible state and local official should do is they should say ‘Hey, I’m going to send that money back. We need to pay down this $30 trillion worth of debt.’ We can’t waste money,” Scott said.

“If there’s something that we needed to do to deal with the COVID crisis, I get it,” Scott added. “But you’re sending money to states that they can spend basically any way they want, or to local governments. It makes no sense. Somebody’s going to pay that money back.”

Scott offered a similar appeal in 2021: “Send it back! We’re all American citizens. Don’t waste the money,” the Naples Republican urged on America’s Newsroom.

When rolling out the $116 million Civic Literacy Excellence Initiative in 2021 in Scott’s hometown of Naples, DeSantis suggested he had complete discretion on how to allocate the federal pot.

“We got this money dumped,” DeSantis said in March 2021. “I could have just spent it and said it was emergency spending.”

The Governor took issue with the funding formula, suggesting it has served as “a bailout for blue states, poorly managed states.” He also has described the allocation process as “Washington at its worst.” And he said before running for President that there was no point in giving the overage back to the federal government.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” said DeSantis, as reported by POLITICO Florida. “If Florida were to send the money back, (Treasury Secretary Janet) Yellen is going to send it to Illinois, California, New York or New Jersey. I don’t think that would make sense for Floridians — for us to be giving even more money to the blue states.”

The money returned is just a fraction of what the Biden administration sent to Florida.

Billions of dollars worth of that cash went to the Sunshine State, and the Governor made no moves to return it to the federal government.

The office of Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis noted that “the Coronavirus Relief Fund … provided $150 billion in direct assistance across the nation to State, territorial, local and Tribal governments.”

“Of this amount, the State of Florida was allocated $8.4 billion: $5.86 billion was deposited into the State Treasury as General Revenue and approximately $2.47 billion was allocated to 12 of the largest counties directly by the U.S. Treasury,” the CFO office noted. Those large counties include Brevard, Broward, Hillsborough, Duval, Lee, Miami-Dade, Orange, Palm Beach, Pasco, Pinellas, Polk and Volusia counties.

The Florida Housing Finance Corporation received $250 million. Smaller Florida counties got $1.137 billion from the CARES Act as well.

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Politics

Daylight still exists between Ron DeSantis, Andrew Tate

Published

14 minutes ago

March 25, 2025

May Greene

Controversial influencer Andrew Tate says he made peace with Gov. Ron DeSantis, whom Tate says was misled and took the media’s bait surrounding Tate’s actions.

But whether he’s telling the truth or not is a different matter.

“The media jumped on him and he didn’t realize it was an American citizen, and now he understands he made a mistake and there’s been some conversations and everything’s been settled and fixed,” Tate said of DeSantis.

But that’s not the whole story.

When asked if there had been such conversations Monday, DeSantis Press Secretary Bryan Griffin said “nothing of the sort happened.”

Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan Tate arrived in Fort Lauderdale a few weeks back, leading to DeSantis saying the two were not “welcome” in the state. Attorney General James Uthmeier said as recently as last week that a criminal probe against the two was in the works.

During an appearance on “The Dana Show,” Uthmeier condemned the brothers’ “weakness and sickness,” and suggested that a case against them continues to build.

“Every time these guys open their mouths, it gets them deeper in a hole,” Uthmeier said. “If we can show that they committed crimes on Florida soil, then we will continue to pursue them, you know, at all costs.”

While the Tates have been accused of human trafficking in Romania and face civil action for sexual abuse from four women in Britain, they have not been convicted there or anywhere else, despite a wide array of sordid soundbites and lurid anecdotes about them.

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Politics

Bill cutting AI from insurance claims clears first Senate hurdle

Published

44 minutes ago

March 25, 2025

May Greene

Humans will have to make the call.

Floridians who want humans to assess their need for home repairs after a hurricane are cheering a move by the Senate Banking and Insurance Committee.

The panel approved a Sen. Jennifer Bradley bill (SB 794) that would restrict the use of artificial intelligence, mandating manual review of claim denials by a “qualified human professional” who is compelled to sign off on the refusal to pay out.

“The bill emphasizes the need for human oversight in the decision-making process by providing the insurer’s decision to deny claim or any portion of a claim must be made by a human being,” Bradley said.

“The bill provides that an artificial intelligence system may not serve as the sole basis for determining whether to deny a claim, that denial under the insurance code must be reviewed and decided by a qualified human professional. While AI can improve efficiency and accuracy in certain cases, the bill seeks to mitigate risks related to potential inaccuracies and biases.”

The Florida Medical Association and Insurance Consumer Advocate Tasha Carter are among those supporting the bill.

The bill from Bradley, a Clay County Republican, has two committee stops ahead. She said it will “strike the right balance between allowing innovation” and “protecting consumers from unaccountable algorithms.”

Bradley has two other insurance bills this Session that haven’t moved yet.

SB 790 would protect people from having wind policies canceled in the event of flood damage from a hurricane.

SB 792 addresses the financial health of insurance companies. The bill would require the Office of Insurance Regulation to keep records of the “financial strength rating issued to each property insurer by an independent rating agency each calendar quarter during the reporting period.”

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Politics

Poll shows majority of Florida voters approve of Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis

Published

4 hours ago

March 25, 2025

May Greene

A majority of Floridians are still on board with the agendas of both President Donald Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis.

That’s according to a new Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy survey that shows 52% of voters in the state approve of Trump’s job performance. A similar 53% are liking the Governor’s work.

Notably, DeSantis’ number is down from 59%, the job approval rating he enjoyed just after his 2022 landslide re-election. But a polling memo says the job ratings for DeSantis are on par with how he polled in 2021 or 2022.

Currently, about 42% of Florida voters disapprove of DeSantis’ job performance, putting the Governor a solid 11 points above water.

DeSantis’ peak popularity in the history of Mason-Dixon polling was in March 2019, when about 62% of voters approved of his work and only 24% disapproved. That was a few months after DeSantis’ first inauguration as Governor, and a significant 14% of voters at that point still said they were not sure how they felt about him.

The closest he came to those levels again was in March 2023, after his re-election, when 59% of voters approved of him and 39% disapproved.

But for Trump, the most recent polling numbers show a marked uptick in his approval ratings.

With 52% approving of his job performance and 44% disapproving, he’s 8 percentage points above water. That puts him in a better position than at the end of his first term in the White House.

The pollster notes that Trump in December 2019 was underwater with Florida voters, with 47% approving of his job performance and 50% disapproving.

Notably, more than half of Hispanic voters support both DeSantis, who boasts 57% approval with that demographic, and Trump, who has a 53% approval.

Women appear sharply split regarding Trump, with 48% approving of the President and 47% disapproving. But 57% of male voters support the President, and just 40% disapprove of the job he has done.

Among independent voters, Trump enjoys a 55% approval rating, while just 37% disapprove. Meanwhile, about 51% approve of DeSantis’ job performance and 42% disapprove.

Mason-Dixon conducted the poll between March 11 and March 25, surveying 625 registered voters by telephone. The pollster reported a 4-percentage-point margin of error.

FL325Poll by Jacob Ogles on Scribd

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