The University of Florida (UF) will be a significant resource for historians of Marco Rubio’s Senate career.

Now that Rubio is handling international affairs for the U.S. as Secretary of State, he is leaving his political papers drafted as he was U.S. Senator to libraries at UF.

Rubio served in the Senate between 2011 to 2025, when he departed to become Secretary of State. In those 14 years in the Senate, Rubio generated quite an archive of official papers and memos.

UF officials announced Monday that Rubio, a Republican, agreed to deposit his papers from his senatorial service, along with other materials of historical nature, to the school’s George A. Smathers Libraries political papers collection.

Many of those documents will come from Rubio’s time as a member of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Vice Chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He also served on the Senate Appropriations Committee, as well as the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship.

“We are honored that Secretary of State Rubio is entrusting us with his Senatorial papers,” said Judy Russell, Dean of University Libraries. “Preserving these historical documents is so important, and we are pleased future scholars will have the opportunity to engage with his materials and others in our collection.”

Rubio is an alumnus of UF, where he received a bachelor of arts degree in 1993.

The Florida Political Papers collection at UF houses many manuscripts from several of Florida’s highest-profile political leaders. The late Democrat Bob Graham, a former Governor and U.S. Senator, bestowed many of his political papers to the UF library system. Graham passed away in April.

Former U.S. Sen. and U.S. Rep. Bill Nelson also contributed many of his documents to the UF collection, along with many of his documents from NASA from when he served as the space agency’s Administrator from 2021 to 2025.

There are also documents in the UF archives from David Levy Yulee, who was a U.S. Senator for Florida before the American Civil War.

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Gov. Ron DeSantis is promoting a state version of the Elon Musk-led spending slash in Washington that will reach into all areas of state administration and local governments.

“We were DOGE before DOGE was cool,” DeSantis said in Tampa. He praised the Department of Governmental Efficiency in Washington while noting that Florida has already been on a similar track in terms of reining in government to make sure state administration is as “lean and efficient as possible.”

But there’s still a long way to go, DeSantis noted.

To that end, he’s creating a state “DOGE Task Force” that will sunset in a year to look at more efficiencies. Though Florida has the “lowest number of state government workers per capita of any state in these United States,” DeSantis wants that number to get lower.

He wants to cut 740 net positions in the next budget, despite adding law enforcement and corrections staff. DeSantis is also proposing the sunset of 70 Boards and Commissions with 900 associated positions “to get them off the books,” pending legislative ratification.

“There’s hundreds of these things. A lot of people have never heard of them, but they’re there,” DeSantis said.

He noted that many of them haven’t met in years. And he wants to “utilize” artificial intelligence for contract review.

Additionally, DeSantis wants to ensure colleges and universities are “good stewards” of tax dollars, asking for an independent audit of their finances in what he calls the “DOGE-ing” of the State University System.

Course offerings will also be “pruned,” with an eye to getting “some of the ideological stuff out.” And administrative “excess or bloat of personnel” will also be targeted.

Florida Department of Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. is on board with this, promising an audit to ensure administrators are “laser-focused” on doing things the right way.

State agencies will also be audited with artificial intelligence, with “people with strong IT” skills going in to take a second look and “put the kibosh on” contracts that backdoor diversity, equity and inclusion and the like.

Local budgets will also be eyed, given they’ve “ballooned” in recent years, and DeSantis isn’t sure “taxpayers have been at the table” amid bigger spending and tax increases.

The task force will “DOGE at the local level,” taking a look at “publicly available” budget records to make sense of local spending. DeSantis hopes to get legislative authorization to compel local governments to comply with his DOGE task force over the next few years.

“DOGE teams can show up at the county and they can audit, and they can use AI,” DeSantis said. “I think that would be really healthy.”

DeSantis also said he wants to return “close to a billion dollars” in federal funds given to the Department of Children and Families and the Department of Transportation that were unused from Joe Biden administration initiatives tied to “noxious concepts and policies” with an eye towards helping the federal DOGE initiatives and defraying debt.

The Governor’s comments here represent an evolution of thought over the years. When U.S. Sen. Rick Scott pressed states to return unused federal monies years ago, DeSantis said the feds would just send the money to “blue states.”

State Board of Administration Director Chris Spencer supplemented DeSantis’ comments, hailing the drive toward “efficiencies,” and spotlighting Florida’s strong credit rating and “accelerated debt repayment program” as “Washington’s largesse has been driving debt to historic highs.”

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Capital City Consulting notched nearly $7 million in the fourth quarter and the No. 3 spot on Florida Politics’ lobby firm rankings along with it.

New lobbying compensation reports show CCC collected $6.87 million during the closing quarter of 2024. Legislative lobbying revenues surpassed $3.55 million last quarter, and executive branch income also topped the $3 million mark by $220,000.

Florida Politics estimates lobbying pay based on the middle number of the per-client ranges firms listed on their compensation reports. Contracts are reported in $10,000 increments up to $50,000. Using median estimates, Capital City Consulting still has an iron grip on the No. 3 spot in Florida Politics’ Lobby Firm Rankings — there’s nearly $4 million in daylight between CCC and the No. 4 firm in Q4.

CCC’s legislative compensation report listed more than 250 clients, several of which paid sums exceeding the cap on range reporting, meaning the listed amounts are concrete and not estimates. That set included USAA at $68,000, Advocating for Seniors at $63,000, CVS Health at $56,000, Neal Land Development Group at $56,000 and Lennar Homes at $54,000.

Beyond the top moneymakers, CCC’s report included several well-known corporations and associations, such as AT&T, BlackRock, Paypal, Adobe, Chick-fil-A, Yamaha and 3M. The world’s largest airline, Delta, and one of just a dozen or so companies to achieve a trillion-dollar-plus market cap, Amazon, also rely on Capital City Consulting to handle their affairs in Tallahassee.

On the executive side, CCC’s most lucrative contract was a $77,000 deal to represent Horne LLP, a major professional services firm. Other contracts crossing the $50,000 threshold included PCI Gaming at $60,000 and Fox Corporation at an even $50,000.

Gaming is one of the firm’s specialties — Iarossi is a past winner of INFLUENCE Magazine’s “Gaming Lobbyist of the Year” award as well as the 2021 “Lobbyist of the Year” award — and its client roster includes a handful of other gambling enterprises such as bestbet Jacksonville and Melbourne Greyhound Park.

In addition to Iarossi and LaFace, Capital City Consulting’s fourth-quarter team included Anthony Carvalho, Justin Day, Cory Dowd, Megan Fay, Kaley Flynn, Kenneth Granger, Maicel Green, Ashley Kalifeh, Andrew Ketchel, Drew Meiner, Joseph Mongiovi, Jared Rosenstein, Scott Ross and Chris Schoonover.

Of note, Capital City Consulting also has a robust local lobbying presence following its acquisition two years ago of Miami-based Prodigy Public Affairs, now known as CCC Miami. The new compensation reports only cover state-level lobbying revenues — pay received for lobbying county and municipal governments is not included.

Capital City Consulting’s Q4 haul makes for a full year of reports in the $7 million neighborhood. The firm’s growth has accelerated rapidly over the past two years, surpassing $25 million in earnings for 2023, just one year after it broke the $20 million mark. This year saw CCC raise the bar yet again with total revenues $26.83 million, a total that includes $14 million in legislative lobbying revenues and $12.83 million in executive branch pay.

Florida lobbyists and lobbying firms faced a mid-February deadline to file compensation reports for the period covering Oct. 1 through Dec. 31. Compensation reports for the first quarter are due to the state on May 15.

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