Over the weekend, Gov. Ron DeSantis made news and got praise when he said that Florida would “return” nearly $900 million to the federal government to help Elon Musk’s DOGE efforts.
Musk said, “Almost a billion dollars of your tax money saved.”
The claim was not true. DeSantis said he was “returning” money for two government programs that Florida never asked for. One of them was over a year old.
There were no details about those things in the governor’s 33 million-view Friday night X speech. DeSantis wrote in the post that Florida had been trying “for years” to pay back federal money but that President Joe Biden’s office “couldn’t even figure out how to accept it.”
In his letter, DeSantis wrote, “Today, I met with @elonmusk and the DOGE team, and we got this done in the same day.” He was referring to President Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency.”
DeSantis sent a screenshot of the first half of a memo from the governor’s office to the U.S. Treasury Department saying that Florida was “formally returning $878,112,000.00 in taxpayer dollars.”
But the rest of the memo, which described what was being sent back, was kept secret. Text calls and emails asking for the whole memo did not get a response from his spokespeople.
Legislative leaders were immediately interested in what DeSantis said, and they are now working on their budget proposal for the next fiscal year. There would likely be a big hole of almost $1 billion that they would have to fix.
On Monday, a spokesman for Senate President Ben Albritton, R-Wauchula, said that leaders had asked DeSantis’ office for more information on Friday.
“This morning, we asked again and learnt that the $878 million was related to federal drawdown authority that had not yet been spent on two programs: resettling refugees and cutting carbon emissions,” the spokesperson wrote. She said that the information had been given to Senate officials over the phone instead of in writing.
The Herald-Times got a copy of the letter that says Florida’s Department of Transportation “formally rejected” Biden’s $320 million plan to cut carbon emissions in December 2023. The memo says that the state “has yet to receive confirmation” that the money has been put back. That amount was only given to the state for $49 million, according to the report, and was being wired back to the federal government.
The money came from a scheme set up by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to help states cut down on pollution from cars and trucks. Also, Florida’s Department of Children and Families was “turning back” the power to spend $557,725,139 in government funds on “refugee social service grant funding.” People who are not safe enough to go back to their home countries are resettled in the United States by the government Refugee Admissions Program.
On Monday, while DeSantis was campaigning in Idaho to pass an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would require Congress to make balanced budgets, he was asked for more information.
He said that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services got back “refugee money.” Some $350 million was supposed to go to the U.S. Department of Transportation for road projects that were linked to “DEI and woke policies,” which were not at all in line with the policy of our state.
DeSantis said, “We had kind of led the fight against that stuff.” “These days, it’s more in style to be against it.”
While Trump was in office, Musk’s team started cutting back on federal spending programs, making it hard for DeSantis to connect himself to Musk’s DOGE work. In February, DeSantis said he was putting together his own DOGE team to look into waste in the state government, but no more information has been made public.
Since then, lawmakers in the state have been looking into how much his departments spent and questioning DeSantis’ staff about what they found.
Last week, Rep. Vicki Lopez, R-Miami, told reporters, “If the governor had really wanted to be DOGE, then the budget he sent us a few months ago would have been DOGE.” “What we’re finding is that the DOGE work is being done by the Legislature.”
DeSantis also wouldn’t return billions of dollars in government COVID relief funds during the pandemic, even though Republicans like Sen. Rick Scott asked states to do so.