Tropic Press: J.C. Bruce: Guest Contributor

About the Author: Craig Pittman is a native Floridian. In 30 years at the Tampa Bay Times, he won numerous state and national awards for his environmental reporting. He has written seven books about Florida and writes a weekly column for the Florida Phoenix. In 2020, the Florida Heritage Book Festival named him a Florida Literary Legend, and in 2022, the national Sierra Club gave him its Rachel Carson Award. Craig is co-host of the weekly “Welcome to Florida” podcast.

The Florida Trident is a Florida investigative news outlet focusing on government accountability and transparency. The Florida Center for Government Accountability created the Trident and first published it in 2022, amid shrinking newsroom budgets and staff across the country. Tropic Press is pleased to share the Trident’s work with you today. You can support the Trident here:

Thanks for your support

Since this newsletter launched a year ago, hundreds of thousands of subscribers have joined the Tropic Press community, making this one of the fastest-growing publications of its kind.

Our goal is to reach as many voters as possible to increase engagement in the political process and, hopefully, raise interest in voting this coming November. We do that through original reporting and commentary as well as by sharing stories of interest such as today’s article by Craig Pittman.

If you are encountering this newsletter for the first time, please consider subscribing. If you are already a subscriber, consider upgrading your subscription to help this work continue.

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J.C. Bruce

How Casey DeSantis’ Hope Florida quietly hollowed out Florida’s safety net

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 10:02:25 GMT

WLRN/NPR

Some legislators and critics say Hope Florida is a black box: The state has yet to share meaningful evidence that Casey DeSantis’ initiative is helping people as intended. But records reviewed by The Florida Trib show Hope Florida has nonetheless come with a steep price—and Florida’s children are paying for it.

By Sharmila Venkatasubban

Florida Trib

Outside Florida’s Department of Children and Families office in Kendall, people stood in line for three to four hours in the South Florida heat, waiting to learn why their Medicaid or food assistance had been cut off and what they could do about it — something the letters the state mailed them often didn’t say.

Many arrived before the doors were open and had already tried the phone with no luck, said Jared Nordlund, the state director for UnidosUS in Florida, an advocacy group that provides assistance to people trying to navigate state agencies.

For years, the organization had been tracking the long waits families across the state had been suffering while trying to figure out why they lost their benefits. Florida runs a single call center for more than a million people on public assistance, and in federal court its own numbers told the story: More than half of all calls were dropped. The 313 agents on the line had six to seven minutes per caller and the screen in front of them couldn’t show the income limit that decides whether a family qualifies.

“Something’s wrong here,” Nordlund told The Florida Trib he remembered thinking at the time. “It shouldn’t take this long.”

These signs of dysfunction became apparent to Nordlund and other policy experts in 2023. That was when the federal government stopped mandating that states provide expanded Medicaid coverage that took effect during the pandemic, and Florida began rechecking the eligibility of Medicaid enrollees and booting roughly 1 million people off the rolls — an arduous task for a chronically understaffed, underpaid agency.

That was also the year DCF began propping up Hope Florida, first lady Casey DeSantis’ signature initiative launched in 2021 with considerable fanfare as a way to shift the burden of public assistance from the state onto churches, charities, and nonprofits — a conservative reimagining of the welfare state.

Its staff, called Hope navigators, would guide Floridians toward self-sufficiency, Casey DeSantis publicly pledged.

Some legislators and critics say Hope Florida is instead a black box: DCF has yet to share meaningful evidence that Casey DeSantis’ initiative is helping people as intended. But budget and position records reviewed by The Florida Trib show that Hope Florida has nonetheless come with a steep price.

To staff up Hope Florida — far beyond what the Florida Legislature has authorized — DCF officials quietly cannibalized the agency’s own workforce, moving jobs out of the offices that determine eligibility for benefits like Medicaid and food assistance and building Hope Florida from the inside out: Roughly 70 percent of the care coordinators in the 2020 pilot program that preceded Hope Florida were already DCF employees, as were 63 percent of Hope navigators in 2022.

And as of April 2025, the Legislature’s analysts wrote, no law authorized the expansion of Hope Florida, or its functions, beyond the relatively small pot of money and staffed positions lawmakers set aside in 2021.

Hope Florida became politically toxic over the past year after a Republican lawmaker and reporters at the Tampa Bay Times and Miami Herald found that Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration diverted $10 million in Medicaid settlement funds into the program’s private foundation, which ultimately ended up in the hands of political committees in 2024 that were working to defeat a proposed constitutional amendment that would have legalized recreational marijuana. A Leon County grand jury has since found the funds were misappropriated “as part of a sophisticated scheme to fund political activities.”

But that controversy has overshadowed the shifting of priorities within DCF that has left the agency unable to handle the basic functions necessary to administer public assistance programs, as detailed in excoriating court rulings, a state audit and federal error data. The staffers who remain have less training and are poorly paid, sometimes qualifying for public assistance themselves, while their counterparts within Hope Florida make on average thousands more.

Today, the DCF division Hope Florida was built on top of is failing by nearly every federal measure.

Florida’s error rate in calculating food assistance hit 15.1% in 2024, the fourth-worst in the nation, and its 2025 rate of 12.97 percent would put the state on the hook for roughly $1 billion a year under the federal One Big Beautiful Bill Act. A scathing state audit also found cases in which the department wrongly cut off Medicaid for eligible children, failed to send legally required termination notices, and stalled the auditors’ own access to its records.

“Not only did they divert $10 million, but they also dramatically eroded the effectiveness of a state agency that’s supposed to be supporting families and kids, and the kids are suffering because of it,” said Holly Bullard, chief strategy and development officer at the Florida Policy Institute.

Neither DCF nor Gov. Ron DeSantis’s office responded to multiple requests for comment and detailed questions The Florida Trib provided. Public records requests the Trib filed with DCF for this story remain pending.

Five positions, 144 jobs

Agency records show that as DCF’s traditional employee ranks shrank, Hope Florida’s grew substantially — and without legislative approval.

In the 2023-24 budget year, the legislature set aside five full-time positions and $324,370 for Hope Florida. State records for that same year show 144 established positions under a Hope Florida organization, budgeted at $9.15 million in salaries and benefits.

A Trib analysis found that as Hope Florida’s ranks swelled, the division responsible for processing Medicaid and food-assistance benefits lost the positions that filled those roles.

The largest group, 101 new Hope navigators classified by the state as senior human services program analysts, came out of local eligibility offices. A year earlier they were frontline jobs in Florida’s safety net: 20 in Miami-Dade, 16 in Hillsborough County, dozens more at service centers from the Panhandle to South Florida. Seventeen state positions classified as government operations consultants and 11 more as management consultants followed, most from the same field offices.

And of the 93 Hope navigators on the payroll today, 54 were already working for DCF before the program launched in September 2021.

Once the program existed, it grew.

The next year, in 2024, Hope Florida added 17 positions and nearly $2 million in salary costs. Today it holds 161 positions, with 150 currently filled, and costs $11.7 million a year, 36 times what lawmakers set aside for it in 2023.

At the same time, the economic self-sufficiency services division, the core DCF department tasked with determining eligibility and fielding questions from public assistance recipients, shrank. Over five budget years, the division outside of Hope Florida shed 211 positions.

In 2025, a legislative staff analysis reached three conclusions: no law authorized Hope Florida; DCF had staffed it with positions established for other work the Legislature had directed; and House staff could not determine how many state employees worked for the program, because DCF did not turn over the documents that were requested.

The number of Hope Florida employees, House staff wrote, was “unknown.” But at DCF alone, the state’s own position records show at least 161.

Lawmakers never got even that count, said state Rep. Alex Andrade, who led the House’s 2025 investigation into the Hope Florida Foundation.

“That type of granular detail has never really been provided to the legislature,” he told The Florida Trib. The closest thing to a roster he ever saw, he said, came from the foundation’s own expense records, which showed bonuses paid to employees labeled Hope navigators that “didn’t go through payroll at all.” The foundation, he said, “just cut checks.”

The jobs nobody wants

The job of deciding whether a Florida family can buy groceries this month or keep its health coverage falls to DCF’s frontline caseworkers, known as economic self-sufficiency specialists.

But retention rates for new caseworkers are prohibitively low in part because of poor training, policy analysts say, and because of low salaries that have had few increases in the past decade, including a raise to $15 per hour, due to an increase in the state’s minimum wage, set to take effect this month.

On that salary alone, a caseworker supporting two children would qualify for the same food assistance the caseworker is deciding on.

DCF records show that a median frontline eligibility caseworker earns about $37,000. Ninety-seven percent earn less than $40,000. Hope Florida staff earn a median of about $42,000, and not one earns less than $40,000. A Hope Florida employee with ten years of state service makes about $6,400 more than a caseworker with the same experience.

Publicly available payroll records also show a workforce that keeps starting over. Half of all eligibility caseworkers have been on the state payroll less than two years and seven months, and 638 of them, more than a third, were hired within the past 12 months. Hope Florida’s staff, by contrast, have been with the state a median of five and a half years.

In public, the department has told a different story. “Even in community hearings, when we’ve had lawmakers quote a report, the DCF staff will say, ‘Oh no, the wait time is like five minutes,’” Nordlund, the UnidosUS advocacy director, said. “And we’re just like, there’s just no way that’s possible. You call right now.”

Nordlund suspects the problems are connected. “It kind of feels like they probably gutted a lot of the DCF infrastructure and pushed it over to Hope Florida,” he said, “and that’s where a lot of the institutional knowledge probably resides.”

Andrade said many Hope Navigators are “really just existing employees that have been told their job is now to act as, you know, some unlicensed social worker.” In his understanding, the work often amounts to taking down a person’s information, entering it into CarePortal, a third-party referral website, and emailing them what information it produces. “And then they call it a day,” he said.

Bullard sees the cost from the other side: Low pay and thin training produce turnover in exactly the jobs that require experience, and the workers who remain absorb the blame. “They’re blamed for everything,” she said.

The cost to Floridians

The consequences of this Hope Florida expansion go beyond shifting numbers on a spreadsheet.

When federal pandemic protections ended on March 31, 2023, Florida began rechecking eligibility and cut off Medicaid coverage for more than 1.8 million people over the next year, according to the numbers the state reported to federal regulators. A federal judge in Jacksonville later said the termination notices DCF mailed them were so confusing, vague and contradictory that they violated the Constitution. This summer, the state’s Auditor General found cases in which the department cut off eligible children through employee error and never told some families their coverage had ended.

Some who uploaded documents to the state’s MyACCESS portal to prove they still qualified got letters weeks later saying DCF had no record of them, Nordlund said.

Food assistance failed on its own measures. In 2019, Florida decided applications within the legal deadline 98.15 percent of the time, fourth-best in the nation. By 2024 it managed 63.31 percent, and its payment error rate had climbed to 15.13 percent, fourth-worst in the country, while most states improved.

That failure now comes with a high cost. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, states with error rates of 6 percent or higher must start paying a share of their residents’ food assistance in October 2027, a bill that for Florida could approach $1 billion a year. “It’s recurring,” Bullard said. “Every year we have to have a low error rate — unless they change the law.”

Asked by legislators to explain the errors, the department pointed partly at itself. It attributed about nine of its fifteen points to taking applicants’ word about rent and expenses under pandemic and hurricane waivers that have since ended, and about five more to staff turnover, training problems, clerical mistakes and an eligibility computer system too old to show caseworkers what they need.

Andrade made the point bluntly on the House floor when he presented his budget. “We didn’t have this problem when Rick Scott was governor,” he said. He noted that DCF has “shown some improvement,” bringing its error rate down in the most recent data, and said he hopes federal officials give the state more time to get its act together under a new administration “and hopefully we aren’t expected to come up with a billion dollars in general revenue next year.”

Documents that don’t exist

Through all of it, the department has declined to show its work.

Between Feb. 26 and March 17, 2025, House staff asked DCF six times for its tax filings, accomplishments, and sworn statements about how it invested its money, records the law requires the department to submit, according to a House staff analysis.

DCF sent a list of five board members and a copy of the foundation’s bylaws. But on March 17, Sam Kerce, who was then DCF’s deputy chief of staff, told lawmakers the department could not provide data supporting its own public claims about what Hope Florida had accomplished. The Hope Florida Foundation’s required audit, due to the Auditor General March 31, 2025, never arrived. And the first finding in the Auditor General’s Medicaid audit is that department management significantly delayed the auditors’ access to records.

At the same time, lawmakers on the House Human Services Subcommittee were weighing whether to enshrine Hope Florida in state law. Its members, Andrade said, “were never getting information.”

DCF has also failed to fulfill public records requests quantifying Hope Florida’s impact on decreasing or eliminating reliance on public assistance programs — requests The Florida Policy Institute had been filing for a year and a half, said senior policy analyst Cindy Huddleston.

“To this day, we’ve had no response from DCF, and we have reason to be concerned,” she told the Trib. “We’re struggling to understand the long-term impact of the program to get people out of poverty.”

The administration has repeatedly cited one stat: Hope Florida has helped 30,000 people off public assistance. Gov. Ron DeSantis repeated it again this month, Andrade said. “That 30,000 number hasn’t changed in two years,” Andrade said. “They’ve never been able to provide the information to say how they get to that number, and the fact that it hasn’t changed in two years … makes me think it’s a made-up number.”

Andrade stopped short of calling Hope Florida an ideological project. To him it looked more like carelessness at the top.

“It was like someone without any understanding of how these programs actually worked thought they knew better,” he said — “this kind of ham-fisted, top-down injection” of an idea that wasn’t ready. “It feels like a PR apparatus that never had any real meat to it.”

Bullard pointed to 211, a statewide information and referral line run by private organizations. Hope Florida, Bullard said, is “profoundly duplicative” of it. “We could have just said, hey, we want to invest also in 211 to ensure that we have this safety net,” she said.

Nordlund’s network of Hispanic nonprofits — most with someone on staff who will walk a stranger through a MyACCESS application — reached the same conclusion when the Hope navigator job description first circulated. “We already exist,” he recalled them saying. “It seems like it’s a duplicate of services.”

Nordlund says Hope Florida at times referred people to nonprofits within UnidosUS Florida’s network — organizations tasked with helping public assistance recipients understand the bureaucracy of state agencies. In other words, a state program housed inside DCF was sending Floridians to volunteer nonprofits whose job is to help them get back into DCF, he said, calling it “a big shell game.”

That’s the part of Hope Florida Bullard wishes more people understood — not the $10 million that made the headlines, but the agency underneath it, and the families who depend on it.

“That’s what I’m most upset about out of all of this, versus any other scandal people are bringing up,” she said. “We’re taking the eye off the ball of the well-being of children in Florida.”

Sharmila Venkatasubban is The Trib’s senior editor and health reporter and a Report for America corps member. You can reach her at sharmila.venkatasubban@floridatrib.org.

The Florida Trib is a nonprofit newsroom producing high-impact government accountability and investigative journalism in the public interest. You can learn more about The Trib and how to support its operations here:

Florida Trib

Thanks for your support

Since launching this newsletter a year ago, hundreds of thousands of subscribers have joined the Tropic Press community, making it one of the fastest-growing publications of its kind.

Our goal is to reach as many voters as possible so we can increase engagement in the political process and, hopefully, raise interest in voting this coming November. We do that through original reporting and by sharing stories such as this one today.

If you are encountering this newsletter for the first time, please consider subscribing. If you are already a subscriber, consider upgrading your subscription to help this work continue.

Regardless, every person you share this with is one more potential vote for change.

Please share and help us make Florida — and America — better for all of us.

Thanks.

J.C. Bruce

Special to Tropic Press from WGCU News

After dropping first artificial reef off Naples, Florida Coastal Corridor creates second off Fort Walton Beach in the Panhandle

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 17:55:25 GMT

A worker unloads one of three million pounds worth of concrete culverts that created the Florida Coastal Corridor's second artifical reef this week off Fort Walton Beach

By Tom Bayles

This article was first published by WGCU News

Two weeks after the Florida Coastal Corridor created an artificial reef off Naples, the nonprofit is sinking a second one offshore of Fort Walton Beach.

About 13 miles off Collier County, the foundation dropped 50 triangular, concrete structures made to become an artificial reef. In the Panhandle, the group is using three million pounds of concrete culverts.

“We basically will sink anything we can that provides safe, permittable habitat: balls to pyramids to transformer towers,” Nick Wiley, director of the Fish & Wildlife Foundation of Florida, said. “As long as it’s clean and safe, we’re ready to go ahead and put it in the water.”

Florida Coastal Corridor

The Fish & Wildlife Foundation of Florida is spearheading the coastal corridor, which mirrors the Florida Wildlife Corridor that has secured more than 10 million acres of an expected 18 million acres for panthers, bears, and birds to travel up the state on land.

Wiley said various marine species have a similar need to have connected safe havens to feed, reproduce, and survive. The corridor of artificial reefs will become a fluid highway of sorts for the migratory fish and other marine species to move up the coastline safely.

The concrete culverts are being placed in concentrated configurations designed to create complex hard-bottom habitat.

Within weeks, an artificial reef acts like ghost town in reverse, going from bare concrete to a thriving community as plants attach and fish and other species move in.

The foundation is building reefs in the gaps between existing ones that many coastal Florida counties have already installed.

Environmental reporting for WGCU is funded in part by VoLo Foundation, a nonprofit with a mission to accelerate change and global impact by supporting science-based climate solutions, enhancing education, and improving health. WGCU is your trusted source for news and information in Southwest Florida. We are a nonprofit public service, and your support is more critical than ever. To help support public media consider making a donation here:

Thanks for your support

Since launching this newsletter a year ago, hundreds of thousands of subscribers have joined the Tropic Press community, making it one of the fastest-growing publications of its kind.

If you are encountering this newsletter for the first time, please consider subscribing. If you are already a subscriber, consider upgrading your subscription to help this work continue.

Regardless, every person you share this with is one more potential vote for change.

Please share and help us make Florida — and America — better for all of us.

Thanks.

J.C. Bruce

Florida is developing its controversial herbicide program behind closed doors

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 16:39:44 GMT

Photo by Matthew Beck of the Citrus County Chronicle

Special to Tropic Press from The Florida Trib

By Nicolas Rivero

This story was originally published by The Florida Trib.

After a lifetime fishing on Lake Okeechobee, Justin Jones has gotten familiar with the herbicides state contractors spray on the water to kill invasive aquatic plants like hydrilla and water hyacinth.

“Some taste like metal, like pennies in the air,” Jones said of chemicals with names like Glyphosate, Diquat and Aquathol Super K. “Others smell like a really bad cleaning chemical.”

Jones, a 36-year-old bass fishing guide who has fished this lake since he was 6, says he regularly shares the water with spray boats hired by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC). Wherever the boats spray herbicides, Jones said, mats of dead, brown vegetation sink to the bottom and decay, forming a thick layer of muck that carpets the normally clear, sandy lakebed.

Scientists say the rotting plants release pulses of nitrogen and phosphorus that — combined with nutrient pollution from fertilizer and leaky septic tanks — can fuel toxic algae blooms, lower oxygen levels and kill fish.

Jones blames the herbicides for “decimating” the lake, thinning the bass population and tanking his business.

“They’re spraying this place to death,” Jones said. “I’m working less and less, and I’m honestly wanting to quit guiding because it’s really not fun being out there working and watching them spray all around you.”

The state’s herbicide spraying has sparked fierce public backlash and a recent round of promises from FWC commissioners to reform the way the agency manages invasive aquatic plants. Florida’s largest lake may be the test case for a new strategy.

But state officials are starting to form that strategy in secret.

FWC has created a new body, dubbed the “Lake Okeechobee Coordinating Council,” which holds closed-door meetings — without public notice or published minutes — to consult with state and federal agencies, tribal nations and representatives from special interest groups including the CEO of Bass Pro Shops and a lobbyist for duck hunters. Their goal is to “develop a common vision for aquatic plant management,” according to a draft charter document obtained by the Trib.

The council is “going to be really the lead on helping craft ideas” and “start to develop sustainable solutions for aquatic vegetation management across Lake Okeechobee and beyond,” FWC commissioner Joshua Kellam said during a Feb. 5 public meeting.

Although Kellam has described the council as a source of “long-term solutions” for aquatic plant management that will “last for generations to come” and influence FWC’s strategy not just in Lake Okeechobee but across the state, the council’s meetings aren’t open to the public. The FWC says the council isn’t subject to Florida’s Sunshine Law, which strictly requires government and advisory bodies to meet in public with very few exceptions. Two Sunshine Law experts who spoke with The Florida Trib were skeptical of FWC’s position.

The council held its first private meeting at South Florida Water Management District Headquarters on June 25. It will meet again behind closed doors on Sept. 22 and 23 at the Seminole Brighton Bay Hotel in Okeechobee.

“The Coordinating Council is not subject to Florida’s Sunshine Law, but will operate in accordance with all applicable public meeting and transparency requirements,” FWC spokesperson Ryan Sheets wrote in an email. “The Council is a fact-finding body without policy or decision-making authority, and it does not make recommendations.”

Whether or not a court would agree that the council falls under a narrow exception to Florida’s transparency laws, public bodies are better off meeting in the open, according to David Cuillier, director of the Joseph L. Brechner Freedom of Information Project at the University of Florida.

“It’s just good public policy to operate transparently when you are formulating conclusions or recommendations that could be enacted that affect everyday Floridians,” said Cuillier. “That’s why the law is there.”

FWC did not dispute or confirm the descriptions of internal council documents the Florida Trib obtained that are described in this story. When asked, Sheets suggested the Trib submit a formal public records request, which is still pending.

“Council updates will be forthcoming and made available on MyFWC.com. We can alert you when the information is published in the coming weeks,” he wrote in an email.

Closed-door council

The first meeting of the Lake Okeechobee Coordinating Council on June 25th included representatives from FWC, the Army Corps, the South Florida Water Management District, the Seminole and Miccosukee tribes and Zachary Hartman, chief policy officer for Ducks Unlimited, a nonprofit that represents duck hunters and pushes for wetland conservation.

The council also has a seat for Bass Pro Shops CEO Johnny Morris, although he didn’t attend the first meeting. Bass Pro Shops is planning to build a resort on Lake Okeechobee, pending permits from the state and Army Corps for water and sewer lines in the Okee-Tantie Recreation Area. There is also a seat for an environmentalist representing the interests of “non-game birds,” but it has not been filled.

The only published record of the June 25 meeting is a brief summary that FWC executive director Roger Young gave at the start of a public FWC commission hearing on Aug. 5.

“The first meeting focused on providing a shared understanding of the council’s purpose and responsibilities, reviewing current lake conditions and management activities and identifying priorities for future decisions,” Young said.

“It was nice to see all the stakeholders sitting around the table actually talking about the implementation of action items,” added Kellam, the FWC commissioner who spoke at earlier hearings about the council bringing forward ideas that would shape Florida policy for generations.

According to a draft agenda for the June meeting obtained by the Trib, attendees also planned to discuss whether they needed to tell Floridians what they were up to.

One bullet point for discussion reads: “Council will not be subject to Sunshine requirements (?)”

Judges have weighed in on that question over decades of court cases. Florida’s Sunshine Law is extremely broad and applies even to “advisory boards whose powers are limited to making recommendations to a public agency and that possess no authority to bind that agency in any way,” according to a 2010 advisory letter from the Florida attorney general’s office.

The law has a carve-out for government bodies whose only job is “fact-finding,” which the attorney general’s office described as “strictly information gathering and reporting,” but not “sorting through options and making recommendations to the governmental body.”

The draft charter document for the Lake Okeechobee Coordinating Council directs the group to undertake “fact-finding to reach conclusions on priorities, positions and potential policies or actions for the management of Lake Okeechobee with a focus on aquatic plant management” and build “high-level joint support for management actions.”

It also says the Aquatic Plant Management Interagency Task Force — a group of state and federal officials and university researchers who meet to coordinate Florida’s invasive aquatic plant strategy — “will take into consideration the fact-finding conclusions from the Council when considering management options.”

Catherine Cameron, a law professor at Stetson University who studies public records laws and practiced in Florida, is skeptical that the Lake Okeechobee Coordinating Council falls under the fact-finding exception to the Sunshine Law.

“That means you’re literally just a conduit of raw data to another body that’s going to deliberate and talk about it,” she said. “But it sounds like these folks are discussing it. Even if they can’t make the official act, they’re making recommendations to a body that can put the official act in place, and under the case law and the statute, that would make them subject to the open meetings laws.”

It’s not just an academic debate. If the closed-door council makes recommendations that influence FWC’s herbicide tactics or policies, courts could strike down the changes.

“Should action be taken in violation of the Sunshine Law, it is considered void,” the Florida attorney general’s office wrote. “Only a full open hearing will cure a violation of holding a meeting outside the Sunshine Law.”

An endless fight against weeds

The council’s conclusions may play an important role in the next chapter of Florida’s never-ending battle against invasive aquatic plants.

The state is flat, sprawling and wet — covered with more than 12,000 square miles of lakes, rivers, canals, springs, ponds and water reservoirs that stay warm year-round. It’s a hub for trade and tourism, giving sprouts and seeds from around the world plenty of opportunities to hitch a ride. And pollution from fertilizer and sewage has flooded waterways with nutrients that fuel explosive plant growth.

“Everything comes together for aquatic plants to absolutely thrive and proliferate in Florida,” said Stephen Enloe, a professor of weed science and invasive plants at the University of Florida.

Invaders have been marching across the state for centuries. Florida gardeners brought home water hyacinth, an Amazonian ornamental prized for its pretty purple flowers, from the 1884 World’s Industrial and Cotton Exposition in New Orleans. Aquarium dealers introduced a stringy pest called hydrilla into Florida canals in the 1950s.

Over time, these plants grew out of control and caused headaches for Floridians and local ecosystems.

“If we do nothing, we’ve learned the hard way that many of these invasive plants will literally take over our water systems,” said Enloe. “They will clog our canals and reduce water flow so that you get flooding.”

Water hyacinth in particular grew so thick around the turn of the 20th century that it blocked steamboat traffic on the St. John’s River. So, the Army Corps of Engineers — already deep into its quest to drain the Everglades and conquer nature — went to war with aquatic plants.

Early water managers showed little mercy for invasive plants or any other living thing in the general vicinity of a navigable river. In 1902, spray boats coated the St. Johns River with a mixture of arsenic and saltpeter. The poison got rid of the water hyacinth, but it also killed cows grazing by the river and raised such a ruckus from cattlemen that it was quickly banned.

The Army Corps switched to new chemical controls and also deployed a small armada of crusher boats, “hyacinth destroyers,” conveyor belts and cranes to mechanically pull plants out of the water. In 1910, Congress even debated a bill to introduce hungry hippos into Florida’s waterways to eat hyacinth (and become a source of exotic meat branded “low cow bacon”), but lawmakers ultimately thought better of it.

Around World War II, advances in chemical research yielded new herbicides with fewer obvious side effects. Over time, herbicides won out over mechanical harvesting and biological controls (e.g. releasing plant-eating insects or fish) as the cheapest, most effective way to kill masses of fast-growing plants. Today, water managers — primarily the FWC, but also the Army Corps, water management districts, local governments and homeowners associations — spray chemical herbicides over tens of thousands of acres of lakes, rivers, ponds and reservoirs each year.

They operate under a strategy called “proactive management”: Spray aquatic weeds into submission, then send spray boats on patrols to kill any stubborn survivors before they spread. Enloe said eradicating established weeds is impossible. So, this approach allows water managers to keep invasive plants in check and, in the long run, use less herbicide on small patches of remaining vegetation.

Enloe added that herbicides have improved over time. Scientists have developed new chemicals marketed to target particular species and break down in the water within days or weeks.

“We tried a lot of things. We sprayed a lot of really toxic stuff. We made a lot of mistakes early on,” said Enloe. But since then, “we have come a long, long way.”

Public fury

Not everyone is satisfied with that story of progress.

A very vocal group of Floridians vent their anger over the state’s herbicide use in Facebook groups with names like “Aquatic Plant Management Is Killing Our Waterways.” Dozens of dedicated activists turn up at public meetings to air their grievances.

Jim Watt, a 72-year-old retired reptile dealer and turtle farmer, said he got involved nine years ago after FWC sprayed two of his favorite spots to catch green anoles on Lake Okeechobee and the St. Johns River.

“They killed all the lizards, green snakes, ribbon snakes, all the insects and everything almost overnight,” Watt said. Ever since, he’s been digging through FWC records and accusing the agency of financial impropriety and breaking federal rules about where and how to apply herbicides.

Eric Cassels, who runs a bait shop on Lochloosa Lake, started posting videos on Facebook eight years ago that he said document the environmental consequences of herbicide spraying, including rancid muck, fish kills, and water coated with chemical films or gooey gels designed to slowly release herbicide. He worries about the well water he drinks and the invertebrates he catches and sells to fishermen.

“The shrimp can’t stand the poison,” Cassels said. “The other day I found a whole shoreline of dead shrimp, and I’ve never found that before, ever, in my whole life.”

While some of the herbicides’ federal labels say they can be toxic to invertebrates in high doses, scientists haven’t published studies showing that the chemicals are directly killing animals in Florida’s waterways.

But there is scientific evidence that herbicides can cause big clumps of dead plants to rot all at once, releasing bursts of nutrients into the water that fuel algae blooms. The process can turn naturally clear water into murky, low-oxygen environments.

“A high percentage of freshwater fish kills in Florida are caused by low oxygen conditions, and many times those low oxygen conditions shortly follow an aquatic herbicide treatment,” said James Douglass, a professor of marine science at Florida Gulf Coast University. “It’s not at all uncommon for a fish kill to follow an herbicide treatment.”

Douglass said officials should consider replacing some chemical spraying with mechanical harvesting, which removes nutrients from waterways. He argues the water quality benefits outweigh the higher cost.

Meanwhile, bass fishermen tend to prefer that water managers leave some aquatic plants like hydrilla in lakes to provide habitat for baby bass. Similarly, duck hunters like hydrilla because it attracts ducks. They lobby officials to spray less in popular hunting and fishing areas.

Water managers have occasionally tried to placate their critics. Since 2011, FWC’s official position has been that it will consider “sportfish growth,” “recreational use” and “stakeholder input” among other factors when managing hydrilla, which has sometimes meant letting the plant grow a little more on lakes popular with bass fishermen or during duck hunting season.

In 1986 and 2019, officials paused their use of chemical herbicides and relied solely on mechanical harvesters. A report from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization recorded that the 1986 policy “had considerable negative consequences” in Lake Okeechobee.

Within six months, water hyacinth cover quadrupled, “obstructing most of the boat trails and canals, as well as the 22 flood control and navigation structures,” the authors wrote. “The herbicide program was resumed immediately to restore order but not before thousands of acres of native vegetation, beneficial to fisheries and waterfowl, were smothered or uprooted by floating mats of water hyacinth.”

It took two years, $2 million and much more herbicide to get the lake back under control, according to a University of Florida summary.

Enloe — who stressed that he doesn’t speak for the FWC — said the agency is “between a rock and a hard place.”

“They’re making some people happy, and then making other people angry,” he said. “They can’t please everybody.”

Lately, the controversy around herbicides has become even more heated. Some online commenters have made death threats against spray boat operators.

“I would wait for that boat to come ashore and I would [beat] each person to death with a baseball bat,” one commenter wrote.

Meanwhile, FWC officials were caught using law enforcement records to track agency critics, including Jim Watt. State employees searched Watt’s records 34 times.

“I actually fear for my life,” Watt said.

In this charged environment, public officials and special interest groups on the Lake Okeechobee Coordinating Council began meeting in private to chart a new course for Florida’s herbicide strategy.

“I think a lot of public bodies would like to be able to meet secretly because then they feel they can speak more freely,” said Cuillier of the University of Florida’s Freedom of Information Project. “It is not easy or fun talking about controversial topics in front of everybody.”

“But that’s just the way the law is in Florida,” he said. “If people think there’s shadiness going on behind closed doors, that the old guys are sitting around with cigars and bourbon in some closed meeting room making decisions for everybody else, all that does breed suspicion and mistrust. In the long run, it’s not going to help people feel like they should follow any policy or law that is ultimately adopted.”

Nicolás Rivero is an environmental accountability reporter at The Florida Trib. He can be reached at nicolas.rivero@floridatrib.org.

Florida Trib

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J.C. Bruce

Floridians are drowning in insurance costs. David Jolly has a plan to fix that, but Byron Donalds is attacking it

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 10:01:16 GMT

Photo courtesy of NPR

Special to Tropic Press from Florida Phoenix

By Mitch Perry

The Byron Donalds campaign is aggressively attacking David Jolly’s plan to reduce homeowners’ insurance rates.

The Democratic candidate for governor is proposing a state catastrophic insurance fund that would remove hurricane and wind coverage from the private insurance market. He says doing so could reduce homeowners’ insurance costs by 60% to 70%.

Donalds counters on the campaign trail and in a television ad that Jolly’s plan would institute a $1,000 “hurricane tax” on Florida families.

“It’s all lies,” Jolly responded during a press conference in St. Petersburg this week when asked about the ad. He said his team has never published a detailed plan for anyone to dissect, and emphasized that “it does not include an additional $1,000 tax for homeowners. No governor is going to do that.”

The Donalds campaign cites a recently published study from Florida State University as the source of its contention that Jolly’s plan would blow a hole in Florida voters’ pockets if approved. But that FSU study isn’t based on Jolly’s proposal, but on a plan first introduced by a bipartisan pair of Florida lawmakers in 2024.

That proposal aimed to transform Citizens Property Insurance Corp. — the state-backed property insurer of last resort — by allowing all homeowners to become eligible to buy Citizens coverage specifically for wind damage.

What Jolly has proposed is a state-backed “catastrophic fund” for homeowners’ insurance, fully removing hurricane and wind coverage from the private marketplace and putting it into a state sovereign wealth fund, which he contends would substantially cut homeowners insurance rates.

He says the fund would be paid for by making insurance companies pay taxes that they now avoid, adding that fees on real estate transactions (better known as Florida documentary tax stamps) and existing tourist development taxes (TDTs), are also “on the table” to build up that fund.

Donalds said using TDT funds wouldn’t raise nearly enough money to fund Jolly’s plan, and that those funds are imposed at the county level. “I thought he believed in local control?” he said this week. “Apparently not.”

FSU study on 2025 proposed plan

The FSU study was published last month and lists potential advantages and risks for policymakers if all homeworkers used Citizens for wind coverage. Among the potential advantages: “An improved private market study and insurance solvency; Potential for lower cost of capital through public financing and greater uniformity in coverage and pricing structures.”

The negatives include: “The concentration of catastrophic risk in a single entity; Increased likelihood and magnitude of statewide assessments; Potential impact on state capital perception; Reduced competition and innovation in insurance markets; and exposure to special interest pressures in rate-setting and funding decisions.”

The FSU study also says that when the state assumes the risk of wind accounts, premiums could rise anywhere from 21% to 139%.

Donalds says it would be a government boondoggle, comparable to the federal Affordable Care Act. “Anytime the government takes over, it gets worse. The premiums get higher, and you don’t get the coverage that you were promised,” he said this week during a roundtable discussion in Indian Rocks Beach.

Jolly responds by noting that the state already has a state catastrophic fund (called the Florida Hurricane Catastrophe Fund), created in a special legislative session following the destruction wrought upon Florida by Hurricane Andrew in 1992. “Right now, that fund only reimburses insurance companies for a share of their hurricane losses. It is a bailout for insurers,” he says on his campaign website.

Jolly notes that existing state law already says that if a devastating storm or series of storms leaves Citizens in a deficit, the company can charge its own policyholders a surcharge of up to 15%, and if a deficit still remains it can charge an emergency assessment of up to 10% per year on other property and casualty policies in the state not provided by Citizens, including homeowners, renters, and those with auto insurance policies.

The FSU study was commissioned in 2025 after Broward County Republican Rep. Hillary Cassel withdrew a legislative proposal (HB 13) that would require Citizens to make windstorm coverage available to all homeowners in Florida. The proposal was originally floated during the 2024 legislative session by Cassel (a Democrat at the time) and former North Fort Myers Beach Republican Spencer Roach, and something similar was proposed by a Florida lawmaker in 2006.

“What I really find interesting is that idea that I’ve been talking about for several years, the Democratic potential nominee, David Jolly, runs on my idea,” Cassel said on This Week in South Florida with Glenna Milberg right before last month’s primary election. “So, it is the solution, it is one of the solutions for property insurance, and we as Republicans have taken that on and are studying it with the number one insurance program in the country to figure out how we can apply that across the state.”

Donalds plan

Meanwhile, Donalds unveiled his “Bring Down the Bill” property insurance package this week. Among its provisions:

Reforming the Florida Hurricane Catastrophic Fund “by reducing an unnecessary surcharge on policyholders when the fund is strong.”
Maintaining 2022 and 2023 legislation that has resulted in a reduction of homeowners’ insurance lawsuits that, in turn, has helped lower insurance companies’ legal costs and resulted in lower homeowner insurance premiums.
Restructures the My Safe Florida Home grant and other grants by directing all state agencies receiving funding for projects that benefit homeowners to “coordinate on prioritizing grants for the greatest impact on homeowners.”
Create an “Insurer Scorecard” showing pricing, claims approval rates, denial rates, and time to payment for every carrier in Florida.
Work on reducing the number of Citizens policies. Since 2022, Citizens’ policy count has dropped from 1.4 million in late 2023 to approximately 274,000, according to a Citizens press release in June.

“I would simply ask: Are you good with what Byron Donalds wants to continue in the state of Florida with homeowners’ insurance? ‘Cause he’s offering more of the same and transparency,” Jolly said on Monday. “Transparency doesn’t reduce costs.”

Donalds countered on Tuesday during an event in Hillsborough County that Jolly’s homeowners’ insurance plan was “a big government takeover. That is Democrat policy 101. Blame everybody else, give it to the government. Make a grand promise that you know you can’t pay for, and then by the time you’re gone from office it’s the next person’s fault.”

Mitch Perry has covered politics and government in Florida for more than two decades. Most recently he is the former politics reporter for Bay News 9. He has also worked at Florida Politics, Creative Loafing and WMNF Radio in Tampa. He was also part of the original staff when the Florida Phoenix was created in 2018.

Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization. This story is republished with their permission. To support Florida Phoenix, click here:

News 2 Use

If you haven’t done so already, check out the news2use section on the Tropic Press website. It’s a construction project right now, and we are adding new articles daily, the goal being to create a handy reference library you can use to contact your elected representatives, figure out when and where to vote, how mail-in ballots work, and more.

Thanks for your support

Since this newsletter was launched a year ago, hundreds of thousands of subscribers have joined the Tropic Press community, making this one of the fastest-growing publications of its kind.

Our goal here is to reach as many voters as possible to increase engagement in the political process and, hopefully, raise interest in voting this coming November.

If you are encountering this newsletter for the first time, please consider subscribing. If you are already a subscriber, consider upgrading your subscription to help this work continue.

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J.C. Bruce

Florida’s candidates for governor debate the future of big AI data centers

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 09:46:15 GMT

Special to Tropic Press from Florida Phoenix

By Mitch Perry

Alarm about the potential threat to the labor economy and even human civilization itself from artificial intelligence has sharpened and may lead to even more anxiety for Floridians about AI and, specifically data centers, which power that technology.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei triggered the escalation Saturday by publishing a 3,800-word essay warning that AI models are advancing so rapidly that they potentially threaten humanity. Anthropic makes Claude AI.

Grassroots opposition to AI infrastructure because of its huge demand on local water supplies and the electrical grid had been growing more pointed since early this year, turning into an issue David Jolly and the Florida Democratic Party are using to attack Republican Byron Donalds in the Florida gubernatorial race.

Jolly, a Pinellas County Democrat, has promised that, if elected, he’ll declare a year-long statewide moratorium on construction of data centers in Florida, echoing a position espoused by lawmakers in 15 other states this year but that has become law only in New York.

Donalds dismisses Jolly’s stance as mere “politics,” but has made a notable retreat from his previous enthusiasm for data centers as the public has turned against such projects.

“I think the future of the state, what’s going to be important, are data centers and power. Those are going to be the two critical things for the state of Florida,” Donalds told government affairs consultant and attorney Justin Sayfie in an interview at the Economic Club of Miami in June 2025.

“You’re going to have data centers, tech firms, etc. We need to embrace that, not run away from that. … We are wide open. We have actual land. I mean, not here in Miami, but we have actual land in our state that is still pristine, available to use. We can build out that stuff and still maintain the beauty of our state.”

The Naples Republican voted in May 2025 for the U.S. House’s version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which included a 10-year moratorium on enforcement of state or local regulations for “artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems.”

The U.S. Senate later voted to strip that language from the package, and President Trump signed that version into law.

Donalds now says he no longer agrees with the national moratorium.

“That’s one provision that I wasn’t probably the biggest fan of,” he said last week when asked about that vote during a Turning Point USA chapter meeting on the University of Central Florida campus. He added that he supported other provisions of OBBBA. “When you pass these pieces of legislation, especially when they get that big, there’s always going to be one or two things that you don’t agree with.”

State law

Donalds has expressed strong support for a state law (SB 484) regulating data centers pushed by Gov. Ron DeSantis earlier this year, and notes its sponsor was now-former Hialeah Republican state Sen. Bryan Avila, his recently minted running mate.

The legislation requires data centers to pay their own costs of service; establish large-scale consumptive use permits; and that water management districts or the Department of Environmental Protection force large-scale data centers to use reclaimed water for cooling.

It also calls for the Florida Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability to produce for the governor, House speaker, and Senate president a study related to construction and operation of large-scale data centers by July.

Jolly calls it “a good first start,” but adds, “Why is ratepayer protection considered an accomplishment?”

“I mean, what was the baseline before they suggested that these data centers had to pay for water and pay for electrical usage?” he asks. “Before that, it was tax breaks and hiding it from the public. Now they’re saying, ‘Well, let’s use transparency and make them pay for it.’ But the reality is, people don’t want them.’”

Although Donalds praises Avila’s sponsorship of the data center bill, his campaign isn’t saying anything about a corresponding Avila bill (SB 1118) that would have created a public-records exemption to keep information about potential data centers confidential for up to a year. The bill passed through all three of its assigned committees in the Senate but died on the floor.

“There’s no reason, at least in the spirit of Florida, there’s no reason why our elected officials should be signing NDAs, right?” Avila acknowledged to the Senate Committee on Community Affairs on Feb. 3, referring to non-disclosure agreements. He tried to soften the impact by telling lawmakers, “You look at other states and they’re signing NDAs for multiple years.”

Sen. Jason Pizzo, an independent from South Florida, was having none of that.

“The greatest implication and consequence of this bill is that local mayors and commissioners will look like they took a kickback — will make it impossible for them to convince their constituents that they didn’t take something from a billionaire developer, data center, whatever, and keep it quiet and not share it with their own neighbors, that one of these things were coming,” he told Avila during the committee meeting about why he could not support his bill.

“That is an impossible position to put local officials in. And it’s one that if any of my local officials in my 20 cities happen to violate, I will represent them for free. So, I have to vote no.”

Industry support for Donalds

Donalds has been a fundraising machine since he entered the race in February 2025, scoring dozens of contributions from artificial intelligence interests including multiple companies seeking to build hyperscale data centers in Florida, as Politico reported in July.

Speaking at the University of Central Florida in Orlando last week, he denied he could be influenced by any single industry despite financial contributions it has sent to his campaign.

“No. Because when I talk about policy and industries and economics, I do it from a laissez-faire approach,” he said. “I do it from essentially the Austrian School of Economics. That’s been my political foundation ever since I got into politics. When I talk about these issues, what you’re hearing right now are my thoughts. Not a white paper. Not some position paper. These are my thoughts. When I go into rooms with companies or interests or donors, I tell them what my plans are for Florida.”

Nineteen Florida local governments have paused or banned data centers, according to FloridaDataCenters.org. There would be a 20th, but although Hillsborough County voted in August to draft such a moratorium, county attorneys informed commissioners that such an ordinance can’t go into effect for another year because of a controversial 2025 state law (SB 180) banning moratoriums on development, which they thought would cover data centers.

Florida Democratic agriculture commissioner candidate Joey Mendoza Atkins speaking in Pinellas County as part of the Democrats’‘Data Center’ Donalds Tour on Sept. 15, 2026. (Photo by Mitch Perry/Florida Phoenix)

The Florida Democratic Party wants to supercharge the issue. It held a press conference Tuesday at a site where a developer had proposed a 17,000-square-foot data processing facility in Pinellas County. That proposal was quashed for the time being after the county commission imposed a one-year moratorium on data centers last month.

“This November, data centers will be a defining issue for Floridians and voters as they go to the ballot box,” said Joey Mendoza Atkins, the Democratic candidate for agriculture commissioner. “And when I’m Florida’s next commissioner of agriculture, keeping them out of communities is going to be a top priority.”

The Jolly campaign announced this week that the Democratic candidate will visit “Data Center Alley” in Northern Virginia “to see firsthand how out-of-control data center development has upended local communities.” The region has been described as the densest concentration of data centers in the world.

Bipartisan anger

Elizabeth Plantan is an associate professor of political science at Stetson University. She points to widespread uncertainty, anger, and fear about what AI means for the future of work and employment in the country — as well as the environmental concerns — driving bipartisan anger against these facilities.

“I think that this is unique, especially as we have more and more data and research on how polarized the American public is, that it’s quite surprising to have something with this much bipartisan pushback,” she said.

A public opinion poll published in July by the Public Opinion Research Lab at the University of North Florida showed that 68% of respondents said they would oppose building an AI data center in their area. A James Madison Institute poll of 1,400 Floridians also taken in July found that 49% of respondents said they either somewhat or strongly opposed data center investment in the state, while 40% said that they somewhat or strongly support it.

Jonathan Schaeffer is a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Alberta. He says it’s healthy for local communities to hold public discussions around housing data centers, but people need to know the benefits and potential downfalls of building one in their neighborhoods.

“We are an information technology-rich society,” he said. “Data centers are the reality. We want the internet. We want cloud computing. We want e-commerce. We want lots of things that these data centers provide. Not just AI. The real issue only comes into focus when you talk about one of these hyperscale centers because of their enormous size and impact.”

Donalds is hardly the only public official who has curbed his enthusiasm for data centers. Both Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and Pennsylvania Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro also have made notable pullbacks from their previous support.

Donalds was attacked for his stance on data centers during the GOP primary campaign by his opponents. In July, he responded by introducing federal legislation called the “Protecting the Ratepayers Act,” to ensure entities that build, own, or operate data centers obtain all their energy and water from alternative sources that don’t use or interfere with the electric grid or public water systems.

Plantan warns of unintended consequences from such legislation, however, because it doesn’t regulate how those companies obtain their energy or water resources.

A case in point is Elon Musk’s supercomputer facility called xAI in Memphis. Since breaking ground last year, the company has operated dozens of unpermitted methane gas turbines without public notice, permits, or air pollution controls. In response to growing community outrage, SpaceX agreed to remove all 69 gas turbines by July 2027.

Donalds “is shifting his positions because they’re politically unpopular,” Jolly argues.

“He went through the framing of ratepayer protection that you can plunder our state as long as you pay us for it,” he told the Phoenix during a Labor Day event last week in Tampa.

“Now he’s saying local control, but when he had a chance to stand up for local control, he voted against it. The Big Beautiful Bill, the House version, said that they were going to preempt local control of data center decisions. He named a running mate that actually tried to hide [via his proposed NDA legislation] from residents when AI data centers were being contemplated or being planned. We know what he’s doing. He’s doing everything but saying, ‘We should keep data centers out of the state,’ because he’s furthering the special interests of people who are benefitting from them.”

Donalds told the Phoenix earlier this month the state’s law is “a really strong step in the right direction. … It starts with local control. If local governments don’t want them, they won’t build them, and that’s just the way it is.”

Perhaps complicating Donalds’ stance is the attitude of the president of the United States, who has been dismissive of concerns about data centers.

“AI and Data Centers, will be the Greatest Economic Development Engine in History — Bigger than Oil, Gold, Diamonds or even the Internet,” Trump said Monday on his Truth Social page. “It will not be stopped by brilliantly run Destructive Forces during the Term of President DONALD J TRUMP!”

Editor’s Note:

As Mitch Perry notes in the above article, Trump is a booster of hyperscale data centers and dismisses their threat.

“AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX,” Trump posted on social media.

He added:

“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!”

Not to be too snarky about this, but what “High IQ” person Trump was referring to remains a mystery.

JCB

Tropic Press now has an official new mascot

I get a fair amount of mail here at Tropic Press, but I have to say this was one of the most welcome I’ve received in a long time.

It came in a box with an actual return address from a reader identified as Silens DoGood, so I was fairly confident it must be legit and not, oh, I don’t know, something dreadful—I’ll let you use your own imagination. I certainly don’t want to put any ideas in people’s heads.

Nope. It was this amazing flamingo statuette, which I have now adopted as the official Tropic Press mascot. (I wonder if this will make Miss Mingo jealous?)

Thank you so much, Silens DoGood. This was very thoughtful and generous of you.

I’ve placed this mini mingo right in front of my main computer monitor, where I’m sure it will provide inspiration to do my very best to do good every day in your good name.

The original Silence Dogood, btw, was the pen name that Benjamin Franklin adopted when he was a teenager so he could get his letters into his brother’s newspaper, The New England Courant. The 14 Mrs. Silence Dogood letters were first printed in 1722.

Franklin concocted an elaborate fictional backstory for Mrs. Dogood, describing her as “an Enemy to Vice, and a Friend to Vertue.” Which, come to think of it, does sound a bit like Miss Mingo

Could Miss Mingo be a copycat?

LOL.

You can catch her columns every Saturday here on Tropic Press.

Donald Trump Jr.’s Bahamas wedding was secretly bankrolled by Russian oligarch close to Putin

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 13:50:39 GMT

In this special report from Pro Publica, an exclusive look at how the Trump family is benefitting from its connections to Russia. For a decade, Vladimir Putin’s government, regarded as a chief adversary of the U.S., has been accused of efforts to influence American elections. Attempts by Russia to make inroads with the Trumps before the 2016 election exploded into controversy that dogged much of the president’s first term. Now this…

By Justin Elliott, Brett Murphy, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski

This story was originally published by Pro Publica

On May 24, Donald Trump Jr. was celebrating in the Bahamas, as scantily clad dancers in stilettos and sailor caps performed for him and his guests. It was the last night of his wedding, a lavish, three-day party held across a pair of ultra-exclusive private islands. A five-tier funfetti cake had been airlifted in from Florida, and helicopters and seaplanes descended on the islands before guests settled into their oceanfront villas. That night on the beach, Trump Jr. lifted his bride into the air while fireworks launched from a barge over the sea.

“It was everything we dreamed of and more,” his wife later wrote on Instagram.

That dream was heavily funded by a secret benefactor: Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin.

Kremlev footed the bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars of wedding expenses, according to records reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with three people familiar with the event. The oligarch paid to rent out one of the private islands, where a reception was held and where guests slept. He also covered other big-ticket items, like the fireworks show, and his team helped plan the event. Kremlev is the head of the International Boxing Association, a scandal-plagued sports group that has been financed by the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. The wedding payments came from an IBA-affiliated entity in Dubai that the boxing association uses for financial transactions.

The guest list numbered around 50. It included Trump Jr.’s brother-in-law Jared Kushner, Eric Trump — and Kremlev, an imposing man with a shaved head who speaks limited English. The oligarch was part of a large group whose presence puzzled other attendees. They sometimes stood off by themselves, speaking Russian.

“It was really small, like, just really close friends,” Trump Jr. later said on his podcast. “Tried to keep it really tight. And it was just awesome.”

Kremlev’s previously unreported relationship with Trump Jr. represents an extraordinary development: a member of Putin’s circle financially supporting the president’s son and gaining intimate access to the Trump family. For a decade, Putin’s government, regarded as a chief adversary of the U.S., has been accused of efforts to influence American elections. Attempts by Russia to make inroads with the Trumps before the 2016 election exploded into controversy that dogged much of the president’s first term.

National security experts expressed alarm at Trump Jr. accepting the oligarch’s largesse, saying it raised an urgent question: What motivated Kremlev to spend a fortune cultivating the connection?

“If I’m paying for your wedding, at some point, you’re going to owe me something,” said Frank Montoya Jr., a retired career FBI official who held senior counterintelligence roles. Oligarchs like Kremlev often act in coordination with the Russian government. While it’s unclear if that happened here, Trump Jr. put himself in a precarious position, Montoya said. “This should be unthinkable for the son of the president. End of story.”

Holden Triplett, who served as Trump’s counterintelligence director on the National Security Council during his first term, said Russian intelligence frequently seeks to build ties with U.S. government officials and their family members. “Money is a tried-and-true method to gain access,” said Triplett, who also worked for the FBI in Moscow.

In the days leading up to Trump Jr.’s wedding, Kremlev was in China as part of the delegation accompanying Putin, according to Chinese state media. The month before, Putin had bestowed him with a state honor, the Order of Friendship. The Ukrainian government has imposed sanctions on Kremlev personally, citing his closeness to Putin and Russian security services.

It’s not clear why Kremlev helped pay for Trump Jr.’s wedding. The men appear to have met only recently. Public reporting suggests Trump Jr. could have afforded it himself, with Forbes recently estimating his net worth at roughly $300 million.

In response to detailed questions, a spokesperson for Trump Jr. did not dispute the wedding payments from Kremlev. “Umar is a personal friend of Don,” he said. The spokesman said that Kremlev is “not someone he has a business relationship with” and that the men met through a mutual friend in the hunting world and bonded over their love of boxing and the outdoors.

A spokesperson for Trump Jr.’s brother Eric said of Kremlev: “Eric has absolutely no clue who this person is, nor has never heard his name.”

In a statement, Kremlev’s press office said, “Mr. Kremlev and Mr. Trump Jr have a friendly relationship” and they first met “a couple of years ago.”

The press office described Kremlev as a businessman and philanthropist, adding, “Mr. Kremlev has never discussed political matters with any of his American friends and acquaintances,” including Trump Jr. They said the boxing organization itself did not incur expenses for the wedding but did not comment on the payments from the Dubai entity. The press office also said that when Putin and Kremlev were in China recently, Kremlev was not part of Putin’s “official delegation.”

Kushner, who has been helping lead the U.S. government’s negotiations with Russia over Ukraine, did not respond to requests for comment. The White House and the Russian government did not respond either.

The revelations come as Trump Jr. has emerged as a political power center in his own right. Beloved by the MAGA base, he reportedly played an active role in vetting White House cabinet picks for Trump’s second term and was dubbed his father’s “most essential political adviser” by The Wall Street Journal. “I certainly don’t think I’d be sitting here as the VP nominee without Don’s help,” Vice President JD Vance told the outlet in late 2024.

This account is based on records and interviews with dozens of current and former IBA officials and contractors, wedding attendees and other people in Trump Jr.’s and Kremlev’s circles.

Trump Jr. exchanged vows with socialite Bettina Anderson on a private island that was featured in “Pirates of the Caribbean” and the 2006 James Bond movie “Casino Royale.” They had their first dance on a second private island nearby that can rent for around $100,000 a night, paid for by Kremlev. The company that put on the fireworks display charges around $70,000 for such shows. (Kremlev did not attend the ceremony itself, which was held on the first day and had just 18 guests, Trump Jr.’s spokesperson said.)

The atmosphere was Monte Carlo meets frat party — helicopters in and out, a beachside DJ set, beer pong tournaments. One day, the men went spearfishing. Artisans at the London fashion house Safiyaa spent 150 hours embroidering Anderson’s bespoke silk reception outfit. The president’s son had undergone treatment to better define his jawline for the occasion.

Some longtime friends of Trump Jr. told associates they were disappointed not to be invited, though a few of his closest business partners — executives at the Trump family crypto company, World Liberty Financial, and the venture capital firm 1789 Capital — did make the cut. President Trump himself skipped it. (“He’d like me to go, but it’s going to be just a small, little private affair,” the president told reporters beforehand. “I said, you know, this is not good timing for me.”) But many of the guests were immediate family of the bride and groom.

That made the large contingent of Russians all the more conspicuous. “What are they doing here?” one person recalled thinking. At least one of the Russian guests had been with Kremlev on his China trip: Alexander Lagutin, a businessperson who has served in senior roles at a Russian defense contractor and a state-backed energy company. Kremlev’s right hand at the IBA, Elena Sobol, attended the wedding too.

Since the wedding, the Trumps have released scores of photos and videos of the festivities. While they show many of the guests, the Russians have been absent from all of them. (The top of Kremlev’s head is visible in the back of one group photo posted on Instagram by a friend of the bride.) After the party was over, on his “Triggered” podcast, Trump Jr. emphasized the event’s privacy: “The people that were there — if you’re on that list, you weren’t talking.”

In 2009, Umar Kremlev did not yet exist.

He was in his late 20s, with a criminal record for extortion and battery, still going by his birth name, Umar Lutfulloyev, according to the Russian independent news outlet Proekt. But he was about to rapidly ascend in Russia to a position of wealth and influence, with the help of a powerful friend. (“Mr. Kremlev has a completely clean legal record,” his press office said.)

In 2010, he changed his name to Kremlev. He soon joined a Russian government-backed biker gang called the Night Wolves, eventually taking a leadership role, according to news reports. That is what first brought him close to Alexei Rubezhnoi, who now leads Putin’s presidential security service, Proekt reported. In 2017, Kremlev took over the Russian Boxing Federation, after Rubezhnoi personally intervened to put him at the helm.

In 2020, Kremlev became president of the IBA. The association was something akin to FIFA but for boxing and had long overseen the sport in the Olympics. But it had been beset by corruption allegations and was on the brink of insolvency. Kremlev brought money to the table from Gazprom, the state-owned company that operates as an arm of Putin’s government. Gazprom publicly became the IBA’s financial backer, filling its coffers with tens of millions of dollars.

Former high-level IBA officials said that Kremlev had a clear political agenda. “Umar is guided by Putin. It was using the sport for soft political power,” a former IBA board member told ProPublica. “It’s geopolitics. That it’s boxing is just happenstance.” Kremlev, 43, is also heavily involved in an organization called Healthy Fatherland, run by his 23-year-old wife’s twin sister. The group — which promotes healthy eating and youth sports — is under Ukrainian sanctions for its alleged role in a program of abducting Ukrainian children from occupied territories and relocating them under the guise of “rehabilitation.” (Healthy Fatherland did not respond to a request for comment.)

Kremlev’s cozy relationship with the government has made him rich. Putin used the levers of the state to make Kremlev a dominant player in the Russian sports betting industry, according to Proekt, and one of his companies was chosen to operate the national lottery. After Putin nationalized Russia’s largest car dealership company in 2023, Kremlev became the owner of that too.

He now flaunts that wealth through his boisterous public persona. In one video Kremlev posted on social media, he surprises a young mother by giving her a free car. In another, he criticizes his young female aide’s outfit as not feminine enough and makes her change. He shadowboxes with ostriches and brings in celebrities like Rick Ross and Naomi Campbell for IBA events; he praises Stalin and rides private jets.

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the U.S. began to indict Russian oligarchs and seize yachts and other assets. Kremlev repeatedly told associates he was worried about being targeted by a U.S. government probe, according to a person close to IBA leadership. “He was very afraid of American sanctions,” the person added. (Kremlev does not appear on public U.S. sanction lists.)

With the business environment in Europe growing more hostile to Russia, Kremlev moved much of the IBA’s operations from Switzerland to the United Arab Emirates. A new Dubai entity, IB Challenger, would later pay wedding expenses for Trump Jr. The current sources of the IBA’s funds are murky, and, in recent years, top executives have given conflicting accounts of the status of its relationship with Gazprom. (Kremlev’s press office told ProPublica the IBA’s sponsorship contract with Gazprom “expired long ago.”) People close to the organization said they understood that its money still comes from Russia.

In 2023, the International Olympic Committee stripped Kremlev’s IBA of its role organizing Olympic boxing. It has cited a host of governance issues and the group’s refusal to “transparently explain the sources of its financing or to explain its full financial dependency, at the time, on a single state-owned company.”

It was a major setback that deprived the IBA of a key source of its international influence. Kremlev has raged against the Olympic committee ever since and has said that his IBA predecessor, who he blames for the problems, “must be shot.”

Kremlev saw a potential ally in President Trump. After Trump’s second inauguration, in January 2025, Kremlev sent an open letter to the president asking him to look into the Olympic committee’s actions in advance of the 2028 Los Angeles Games. “We look forward with great optimism to the possibility of working together to make the Olympic movement great again,” he wrote.

In September 2025, the IBA brought in Trump Jr. for a panel discussion in Istanbul about boxing. With his then-girlfriend, Anderson, sitting offstage, he criticized transgender women competing in women’s sports and reminisced about watching Saturday night fights as a child. Trump Jr. shared the stage with Kremlev, the boxer Manny Pacquiao and Muhammad Ali’s daughter Rasheda. (Trump Jr.’s spokesperson said he was not paid for the appearance and was already in Turkey for an unrelated event.)

The president’s son had reason to be attuned to the sensitivity of cozying up with a Putin associate, especially while his father navigates the Russia-Ukraine war. Trump Jr.’s June 2016 meeting with a Russian attorney in Trump Tower became a major focus of the Robert Mueller investigation.

The Trump Tower meeting was arranged after an email offering Trump Jr. damaging information about Hillary Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Trump Jr. famously responded, “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.” Trump Jr. later dismissed the matter as a “witch hunt,” and the Mueller report concluded that there was not enough evidence to convict him of a crime.

Recently, Kremlev has been working to expand into the U.S. market. In July, his group hosted a bare-knuckle boxing event in Miami, a chance to showcase a particularly bloody form of the sport in which contenders fight without gloves. But the debut was overshadowed when manosphere influencer Andrew Tate, who the IBA had brought in to host, was arrested by U.S. Marshals outside the arena. (Tate is facing rape and sex trafficking charges in the United Kingdom, which he has denied.)

Much about Kremlev’s relationship with Trump Jr., and where it is headed, remains unknown. In a press release after the Istanbul panel, the IBA hinted there was more to come.

“President Kremlev and Donald Trump Jr made it clear – this alliance will not remain symbolic,” the press release read. “More joint initiatives will follow.”

ProPublica exists to hold power accountable, expose injustices and drive real-world change. Over the years, ProPublica’s reporting has led to new laws being passed, vulnerable communities getting expanded protections and people in power resigning. Tropic Press is pleased to share their work in today’s newsletter. To support this independent journalism you can donate here:

ProPublica

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Florida government wants to fool kids about climate change--hopefully it won’t work

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 10:03:27 GMT

Hurricane floodwaters worse than ever because of climate change (Photo courtesy of Venice Police Department)

By Craig Pittman

NEWS HEADLINE: How Florida quietly removed climate change content from textbooks

“Good morning, class! Please take your seats. I’m your new science teacher, Mr. Ilg.

“You’re probably wondering what happened to your old teacher, Ms. Glowasky. She made one factual comment on Facebook about Charlie Kirk, got fired, sued the school board, and collected a $650,000 settlement. She told the vice principal it was like winning the First Amendment lottery.

“Anyway, please open your textbooks to page 77. Yes, you in the third row, you have your hand up. What’s your question?”

KID IN THIRD ROW: “Mr. Ilg, why aren’t we starting at the beginning of the textbook?

TEACHER (speaking slowly): “Good question. This is science class, and science is all about asking questions and looking for answers. In this case, the answer is, ‘Because the state Education Department wants me to skip over all that stuff about evolution.’ Now let’s get back to today’s lesson, which is about climate change. How much do you already know about that subject? Yes, you in the fifth row?”

KID IN THE FIFTH ROW: “It’s making, like, our world a hella lot hotter. Even at night.”

TEACHER: “Yes, anyone else? You in the second row?”

KID IN THE SECOND ROW: “The higher temperature is heating up the water and making hurricanes much more intense.”

TEACHER: “Excellent. You in the fourth row, your hand is up.”

KID IN THE FOURTH ROW: “Because of sea level rise, the storm surge goes much further inland. My mom’s in real estate and she says it’s changing where people are moving to in Florida.”

TEACHER: “Very good. Anyone else? You in the front row?”

KID IN THE FRONT ROW (holding up the textbook): “Mr. Ilg, while everyone’s been talking, I’ve been skimming this part of our textbook, and it doesn’t say climate change is bad. It even claims the excess carbon dioxide that’s killing our planet can actually HELP plants! What’s up with that?”

TEACHER (taken aback): “Oh, uh… You noticed that, huh?”

KID IN THE FRONT ROW (sounding disgusted): “Well c’mon, Mr. Ilg, we LIVE in this world. We can see what’s happening. We’re not stupid. Although this textbook seems to think we are.”

A world of information

TEACHER: “Okay, let me try to explain.” (Inhales deeply, then exhales.) “The Florida Department of Education is the branch of state government that oversees the selection of textbooks you get. A couple of years ago, the department told publishers they should play down the climate change stuff in Florida’s textbooks because the science isn’t settled.”

(Someone makes a derisive raspberry sound.)

TEACHER (narrowing his eyes at the sound): “You in the back, did you have something to say?”

KID IN THE BACK ROW: “Yeah, I said (makes raspberry sound again). That’s a bigger bunch of bull than the University of South Florida mascot.”

TEACHER: “What makes you say that?”

KID IN THE BACK ROW: “Because the scientists DO agree that climate change is real and it’s real bad. It’s the politicians who refuse to accept reality.”

KID IN THE FRONT ROW: “Yeah, like that 80-year-old loser in the White House who keeps saying it’s a hoax. Everybody knows he’s just trying to suck up to the oil industry dudes who helped him get re-elected.” (Multiple kids nod their heads.)

KID IN BACK ROW: “Yeah, him saying it’s a hoax is about as believable as him blaming vandals for what he did to the Washington Reflecting Pool.”

TEACHER: “Now wait a minute. Back up a second. How do you know the scientists are all in agreement?”

KID IN THE BACK ROW : “Do you think we get all our information from our textbooks like kids back in the ’50s used to do?”

TEACHER: “I … uh, you know I never thought about it.”

KID IN THE BACK ROW: “Well, we don’t. We have access to the internet and we use it. And I mean use it a LOT.”

KID IN THE SECOND ROW: “Right. Like, we know how to search for answers online. We’ve been doing that for years. Plus, there’s a lot of social media we can use now. We can get information from TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. We’ve got a world full of sources to tell us what’s going on beyond the classroom and these textbooks.”

KID IN THE BACK ROW: “Right. For instance, I follow Greta Thunberg on Instagram and Hank Green on TikTok.”

KID IN THE THIRD ROW: “Oh, you should try Ecotok Collective! They’re awesome.”

KID IN THE FRONT ROW (waving a hand around, making her bracelets clink together): “See? All these accounts act like an instant fact-check about what’s in these weaselly textbooks.”

TEACHER (in a voice full of wonder): “I had no idea.”

KID IN THE BACK ROW: “Heck, there are even video games about climate change, and, like, not one of them tries to claim that it might be a GOOD thing.”

KID IN THE FOURTH ROW: “Is there one with Mario and Luigi?”

KID IN THE BACK ROW: “No — and don’t even ask about Minecraft.”

The tell-tale turtles

KID IN THE THIRD ROW: “You know, Mr. Ilg, we have, like, an environment club here in school. We talk about issues and bring in special speakers. We were just talking about climate change, like, I dunno, two weeks ago.”

KID IN THE SECOND ROW: “Yeah, like, my aunt came in and talked to the club about what it’s like volunteering with her sea turtle rescue group. She said the temperature of the sand, like, determines whether sea turtle eggs hatch out as male or female turtles. And she said that the sand has been, like, sooooo hot over the past 15 years that they’ve seen all or mostly all female sea turtles — hardly any males.”

KID IN THE THIRD ROW (nodding vigorously): “Oh man, that was so weird!”

TEACHER (speaking slowly): “I didn’t know that was happening. That’s a biological marker of climate change that’s pretty hard to ignore, isn’t it?”

KID IN THE BACK ROW: “You’re right it’s hard to ignore, Mr. Ilg. But even though it’s been happening for so long, she told us the politicians continue to ignore it because it doesn’t fit what they believe.”

KID IN THE FRONT ROW: “You shouldn’t be surprised at us being aware of this stuff, Mr. Ilg. Kids like us have been, like, on the front lines of the fight against climate change. A few years ago, a bunch of kids filed a lawsuit over it. One of them was a 10-year-old from Florida.”

TEACHER (nodding): “I kinda remember that. Whatever happened to that case?”

KID IN THE BACK ROW (consulting his phone): “Says here the Supreme Court shot ‘em down last year.”

KID IN THE SECOND ROW (sounding angry): “That bunch of creeps! They’re gonna kill us all. How many of them own stock in fossil fuels?”

Fossil fuel fooling

KID IN THE FRONT ROW: “Hey, do you remember the Great American Teach-In last year? One of our speakers was Dawn Shirreffs from the Environmental Defense Fund.”

Dawn Shirreffs

KID IN THE BACK ROW: “The Environmental Defense Fund has a cool TikTok too.”

KID IN THE FRONT ROW: “Right. So anyway, she was talking about how we’ve got to be ready for this kind of stuff, because the fossil fuel industry has spent years spreading misinformation about the climate. They’re desperate to fool people so they can keep selling this product that’s polluting the atmosphere, ruining the world, and killing people.”

KID IN THE BACK ROW: “Yeah, plus they’ve been spending beaucoup bucks on campaign contributions, too. Buying loyalty.”

KID IN THE THIRD ROW: “She also talked about how politicians who sell out to these people wind up undermining, like, the confidence we have in government and in education.”

TEACHER (appalled): “Oh, I hope that’s not true.”

KID IN THE FRONT ROW: “She warned us to be careful about anyone trying to mislead us about what fossil fuels are doing to our future. Especially the way they influence politicians. And, apparently, textbooks.”

KID IN THE BACK ROW: (Clears throat.) “So, let’s talk about which politicians have been pushing for weakening Florida textbooks and trying to fool us students.”

A current events discussion

TEACHER (looking uncomfortable): “I’d rather not get into any political stuff. I’m not Ms. Glowasky.”

KID IN THE FRONT ROW: “Think of it as, like, a current events discussion. We’re supposed to have those from time to time, right? So, what we’re wondering is, who twisted the arm of the textbook publishers to play down the role climate change has in everything that’s going wrong?”

KID IN THE THIRD ROW: “I wonder if it was the Florida Legislature. My uncle is a pilot at MacDill Air Force Base, and he was cracking up last year when the Legislature banned ‘chemtrails.’ He was laughing so hard he was falling over. They cut climate change out of the law like it’s no big deal, but they’re freaking out about chemtrails? He said anyone with any sense knows those don’t exist. Banning them was like banning the Skunk Ape.”

KID IN THE BACK ROW: “No, I bet it was the governor. That smells like his work.”

TEACHER (speaking cautiously): “The Education Department is under Gov. Ron DeSantis.”

KID IN THE FRONT ROW: “Figures. I remember he’s the guy claiming that slavery wasn’t all that bad.”

KID IN THE FOURTH ROW: “Didn’t DeSantis work as a teacher somewhere?”

KID IN THE BACK ROW: “Yeah, I think it was in Georgia.”

KID IN THE FRONT ROW (looking at her phone): “Yeah, here’s a New York Times story about that. Says he spent a year working as a teacher at a private school. Some students thought he was cool because he was a jock, but some said he came across as smug and superior. One Black student said he treated her badly because of her skin color. And he liked partying with the seniors, even though that was against the rules.”

KID IN THE THIRD ROW: “Can you imagine what would happen if he tried that now?”

KID IN THE FRONT ROW: “Oh man, this is wild! Listen to this: The story says he made some weird comments about the Civil War and so, for the school’s video yearbook, some of the kids made a video that made fun of him.”

KID IN THE BACK ROW (in a speculative voice): “I wonder if he’s devoted the rest of his life to getting revenge.”

TEACHER (sounding skeptical): “That seems a trifle far-fetched.”

KID IN THE BACK ROW: “No, no, hear me out! He decides to get vengeance on the whole education system. He works his way up to being governor, then takes a wrecking ball to the schools. He pays teachers so poorly they leave. He shuts down their unions so they can’t fight back. He turns the censors loose on the school libraries. He gives so much money to private schools that a lot of public ones have to close. Then, as the finishing touch, he undermines confidence in the textbooks.”

TEACHER (shaking his head): “That’s crazy. What’s your name, young man?”

KID IN THE BACK ROW: “My name is Danny — Danny Glowasky.”

TEACHER: “You mean …”

KID IN THE BACK ROW: “Yeah, that was my mom who used to teach this class.”

TEACHER: (Stands with his mouth open, then closes it and clears his throat.) “OK, this concludes our discussion of climate change. Let’s move on to the next section of our textbook, which is about — oh shoot. It’s about sexual reproduction.”

Craig Pittman is a native Floridian. In 30 years at the Tampa Bay Times, he won numerous state and national awards for his environmental reporting. He is the author of six books. In 2020 the Florida Heritage Book Festival named him a Florida Literary Legend. Craig is co-host of the "Welcome to Florida" podcast. He lives in St. Petersburg with his wife and children.

Thanks for your support

Since this newsletter was launched a year ago, hundreds of thousands of subscribers have joined the Tropic Press community, making this one of the fastest-growing publications of its kind.

Our goal is to reach as many voters as possible so we can increase engagement in the political process and, hopefully, raise interest in voting this coming November.

If you are encountering this newsletter for the first time, please consider subscribing. If you are already a subscriber, consider upgrading your subscription to help this work continue.

Regardless, every person you share this with is one more potential vote for change.

Please share and help us make Florida — and America — better for all of us.

Thanks.

J.C. Bruce

How badly do we want to change the Supreme Court? Congress may weigh in today. What do you think?

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 17:27:49 GMT

Is expanding the Supreme Court to 13 members a good idea? Or would term limits be better? The House may vote today on this issue. Republicans want to cap the court at nine. What do you think? Cast your votes in the reader polls below.

By Ashley Murray

States Newsroom

WASHINGTON — As public opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court flags amid decisions that have roiled the nation, Democrats renewed calls ahead of the midterms to expand the high court, while House Republicans are considering a constitutional amendment this week that proposes to cap the number at nine.

Just Monday, the court gave the green light to President Donald Trump’s ballroom expansion and is expected to issue a major ruling soon on Trump’s vote-by-mail order that could throw the midterm elections into chaos.

Over the weekend, Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., said, “I think that we are in a position now that calls for some significant actions taken by the Congress.

“And we ought to expand — and 13 is a pretty good number. A baker’s dozen would be a good number to have on the court,” the 17-term House Democrat said on NBC News’ “Meet the Press with Kristen Welker.”

Clyburn said conservatives on the court, specifically naming Justice Clarence Thomas, have decided to “take the country back” in time.

In late April, the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority struck down a protection in the Voting Rights Act that assured the vote of majority Black congressional districts could not be diluted.

In June, the court upheld the Constitution’s 14th Amendment guaranteeing birthright citizenship, but the decision was not unanimous. Four justices dissented, arguing that there are some exceptions for certain babies born to immigrants on U.S. soil, depending on their parents’ immigration status.

Clyburn is not the only Democrat to call for court expansion. Former Vice President Kamala Harris, a likely 2028 presidential hopeful, also advocated for a 13-justice high court during July 31 comments at the National Urban League meeting in Nashville, Tennessee.

Other high-profile Democrats have said in recent weeks and months they want to see change at the Supreme Court, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.

As for public opinion, Pew Research found that just over half of Americans have an unfavorable view of the Supreme Court, according to survey results published July 30, a near-historic low.

A Gallup poll published July 28 found confidence in the Supreme Court at a record low of 33%.

Constitutional amendment

While many Democrats’ answer to the dissatisfaction is to add more justices, the House is poised to vote as soon as today on a Republican resolution to propose a constitutional amendment that would codify the number of justices at nine.

House Republican leadership is expected to bring the resolution to the floor under a suspension of rules, meaning that a two-thirds majority would be required to pass it.

The resolution would also have to pass the Senate to begin the seven-year clock for three-fifths of states, or 38, to ratify it.

Johnson fears ‘political palooza’

House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters on Capitol Hill Tuesday that he expects the resolution to hit the floor today.

Johnson accused the Democratic Socialists of America, whom he referred to as the “communist socialists in the Democrat party who are taking the party over,” of wanting “to pack the U.S. Supreme Court.”

“We’re gonna make sure that doesn’t happen,” the Louisiana Republican said.

“There’s a couple of Democrats here in the House who have suggested that they’re not on board with the Democratic Socialists of America, just a few. They’re gonna get a chance to show us tomorrow. … Nine justices has worked well.”

Johnson added expanding the court risks turning into “a political palooza.”

His office did not respond to a States Newsroom request for comment on whether he believes the resolution would succeed or if leadership has put the bill on the floor calendar to send a message ahead of the November midterm elections in which control of the House is at stake.

Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., introduced the resolution in January 2025. The resolution was referred to the House calendar on July 6 of this year. Biggs won the GOP primary for Arizona governor in July.

Biggs argued in early June that his resolution would protect the court from people “threatening to pack this iconic American institution to ensure favorable outcomes for their causes.”

“This action will protect the Court’s legitimacy, preserve the checks and balances that safeguard our cherished freedoms, and ensure every American’s rights remain secure – no matter who holds political power,” he said in a statement after the House Committee on the Judiciary advanced the legislation.

Rep. Derrick Schmidt, R-Kansas, signed on as a cosponsor in early June, and Rep. Rick Allen, R-Ga., on July 16. Both men are in solidly Republican districts, according to the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter.

‘Magical thinking’

Not all think that expanding the Supreme Court or restricting its size to nine justices will fix what many see as serious flaws.

Gabe Roth, executive director of the nonprofit Fix the Court, said both ideas are “pretty cynical positions.”

“I think it just is part of this magical thinking that all of a sudden we’re going to have 13 justices and everything is going to be okay in the federal judiciary. That voting rights will come back, abortion rights will come back, and that’s not how cases reach the court,” said Roth, whose organization advocates for “non-ideological fixes.”

On the “keep nine” side, Roth said there’s a belief that the court now has a “perfect construct.”

“It’s not,” he said, adding “I don’t see why keep nine is a good idea other than to try to rile up the base.”

Instead Roth wants to see term limits gradually phased in over time.

“Every democracy that’s younger than ours has term limits or age limits for their apex court justices. Forty-nine out of 50 states have term limits, age limits, or retention elections for their apex courts,” he told States Newsroom in an interview Tuesday.

The Supreme Court lacks term limits “because King George was firing colonial judges, and so some monarch’s mental decrepitude shouldn’t be a reason for maintaining something 250 years later,” Roth said, referring to Great Britain’s King George III at-will firing of judges in the colonies.

Founders of the United States wrote into the Constitution several guardrails against influencing the court, including giving judges lifetime appointments, according to the American Bar Association.

Roth supports legislation introduced last year by Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., that would limit a justice’s Supreme Court service to 18 years, and would give each president a chance to nominate one justice during their first and third years in office.

That means the number of justices could fluctuate at times, depending on retirements or deaths.

“It’s basically like you add a new justice every two years, and you know, if there are 10 or 11 justices for 10 or 15 years, so be it,” he said.

Democrats “came to the number four because that would give Democrats a 7-6 majority. It’s not like they’re pulling four out of thin air,” he said, referring to advocates who want 13 justices.

The system would be “fair” and “regularized,” Roth added.

“So we don’t have a system where Trump gets three (nominations) in one term, and then Jimmy Carter got zero in his one term.”

Eight cosponsors, all Democrats, joined Khanna’s legislation. They include Reps. Don Beyer, D-Va., Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich, Sean Casten, D-Ill., Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., Daniel Goldman, D-N.Y., Juan Vargas, D-Calif., Summer Lee, D-Pa., and Yassamin Ansari, D-Ariz.

Both Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., have sponsored other legislation to create term limits for Supreme Court justices.

Johnson’s bill, first introduced in 2023, has 86 Democratic cosponsors.

Sens. Cory Booker, D-N.J., Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Alex Padilla, D-Calif., joined Whitehouse to reintroduce their term limits bill in July.

Ashley Murray covers the nation’s capital as a senior reporter for States Newsroom. Her coverage areas include domestic policy and appropriations. Jennifer Shutt contributed to this report. Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization. This story is republished with their permission. To support Florida Phoenix, click here:

What do you think?

Thanks for your support

Since this newsletter was launched a year ago, hundreds of thousands of subscribers have joined the Tropic Press community, making this one of the fastest-growing publications of its kind.

Our goal is to reach as many voters as possible so we can increase engagement in the political process and, hopefully, raise interest in voting this coming November.

If you are encountering this newsletter for the first time, please consider subscribing. If you are already a subscriber, consider upgrading your subscription to help this work continue.

Regardless, every person you share this with is one more potential vote for change.

Please share and help us make Florida — and America — better for all of us.

Thanks.

J.C. Bruce

BREAKING NEWS: After months of cover-up, grand jury report on Hope Florida scandal shows millions ‘misappropriated’

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 01:23:33 GMT

Casey and Ron DeSantis

Ten million dollars of Medicaid funds that should have been used to help poor Florida children were, instead, rerouted by the DeSantis administration for political purposes. A grand jury report detailing this abuse has been kept secret for months. Finally, the public gets to see the depth of the scandal.

By Michael Barfield

Florida Trident

For seven months, the finding sat in a sealed envelope at the Leon County Clerk of Court’s office in Tallahassee: A state grand jury had concluded that Florida officials misappropriated $10 million in taxpayer money and funneled it, through a charity tied to First Lady Case DeSantis, into political committees run by the appointed Attorney General that spent it on an election.

No public docket showed the case. The Second Judicial Circuit told a lawyer for a coalition of news organizations it had “no records responsive” to a request for the case number and docket sheet. The Leon County Clerk first said it could neither confirm nor deny that any such records existed, then said it had none. The presentment was filed under seal on Jan. 28, and, according to reporting published first by CBS News Miami investigative reporter Jim DeFede, who obtained a copy, the people named in it, including Attorney General James Uthmeier, spent the months since blocking its release through closed court proceedings.

What the report says, DeFede reported, is this: The DeSantis administration diverted $10 million from a Medicaid overbilling settlement into the Hope Florida Foundation as part of what the grand jury called “a sophisticated scheme to fund political activities.” Money owed to Florida taxpayers as compensation for a health care contractor’s overcharges on the program that insures poor children instead ended up in political action committees and the Republican Party of Florida, where it was spent in the fall of 2024 to defeat Amendment 3, the marijuana legalization initiative.

And then, having found the money was taken, the grand jury declined to charge anyone.

“Despite our finding that the money was misappropriated,” the panel wrote, according to the copy DeFede obtained, “we find insufficient evidence to charge anyone criminally.”

A settlement that sat for three years, then moved in days

The underlying facts have been reported in pieces since April 2025, when state Rep. Alex Andrade’s House Health Care Budget Subcommittee began pulling at the thread. The grand jury’s account, as described by DeFede, assembles them into a sequence.

In 2021, Florida determined that Centene, one of the country’s largest Medicaid contractors, had overbilled the state roughly $67 million for prescription drugs under Florida’s Medicaid program — money that, as the grand jury framed it, was owed back to taxpayers who fund health coverage for poor children. Other states that caught Centene doing the same thing settled quickly and announced it. Florida did not. Settlement offers went unanswered for three years.

Then, in September 2024, the state moved abruptly — and with new conditions. On Sept. 12, the draft settlement was modified so that $62 million would go to the state and $5 million to the Hope Florida Foundation. A day later, on Sept. 13, the split changed again: $57 million to the state, $10 million to Hope Florida. The grand jury found no explanation in the record for why the charity’s cut doubled overnight.

Nobody, the grand jury wrote, would own the decision. “Nobody will take responsibility for deciding the $10 million of taxpayer money would go to Hope Florida,” the report states, “or had any memory of who made it.”

The panel rejected the framing offered by Agency for Health Care Administration Secretary Jason Weida, now the governor’s chief of staff, who signed the agreement and characterized the $10 million as a “bonus” rather than money owed back to taxpayers. “We find that the full Centene settlement was taxpayer reimbursement,” the grand jury wrote. “This money was part of the damages Centene owed to Florida taxpayers.”

Signed during a hurricane

The grand jury’s timeline runs directly through two of the worst weeks Florida had in 2024.

Hurricane Helene came ashore in the Big Bend on Sept. 26, killing at least 18 people in Florida and causing an estimated $14 billion in damage. The next day, Sept. 27, with the state Emergency Operations Center in full response, Cassandra Pasley, chief of staff at the Florida Department of Health, was asked to sign a settlement agreement she had never seen. She testified she would not have signed it had she known the money would end up with political committees.

Centene wired the $10 million to the Hope Florida Foundation on Oct. 4. Hurricane Milton made landfall on Oct. 9. On Oct. 11, amid that response, Uthmeier — then the governor’s chief of staff — personally contacted Amy Ronshausen, executive director of Save Our Society from Drugs, and directed her to apply for a Hope Florida grant.

“The Centene settlement itself seems rushed,” the grand jury wrote. “Once reached, it took a mere 7 days to fund. We believe the rush was due to the impending election, which was just 45 days away.”

Twenty-five days, two grants, one destination

Within 25 days of receiving the money, the Hope Florida Foundation had given all of it away in two $5 million grants.

Secure Florida’s Future, an arm of the Florida Chamber of Commerce headed by Mark Wilson, received $5 million on an application stating the money would fund “webinars, podcasts, summits” promoting Hope Florida. Within days, $3.75 million went to Keep Florida Clean, the political committee chaired by Uthmeier.

Save Our Society from Drugs received its $5 million on an application approved within hours of submission. Within a week, $4.75 million of it went to Keep Florida Clean.

Both applications, the grand jury found, “mischaracterized” the purpose of the money and represented that it would not be used politically. In total, Keep Florida Clean took in $8.5 million. From there, $7 million went to the Republican Party of Florida and $1.23 million to the Florida Freedom Fund, another committee associated with Uthmeier.

Joshua Hay, chair of the Hope Florida Foundation, testified that he approved the transfers without asking questions, under the impression the money was needed to help hurricane victims.

As for the charity at the center of it all — Hope Florida, the welfare-navigation initiative championed by First Lady Casey DeSantis — the grand jury could not verify that it was much of anything. “Hope Florida was touted by some witnesses as a high-profile project with a high success rate, but we were unable to get any evidence to substantiate these representations,” the report states. “On the contrary, other witnesses referred to Hope Florida as just a concept and did not have a clear understanding of what it did, where it existed, or how it operated.”

There was no press release, no notice to the Legislature, no restriction on how the money could be spent, and no oversight of what happened to it.

Who the report names — and who never testified

The grand jury placed Uthmeier “in a position of authority” directing the funds once they reached Hope Florida. It concluded that then-Attorney General Ashley Moody, now a U.S. senator, knew of the diversion plan and “authorized” her chief deputy to sign the settlement. That deputy, John Guard, appointed by DeSantis to the Second District Court of Appeal in January, signed despite “reservations,” having raised concerns that the arrangement violated Florida statutes requiring legislative approval to spend state money.

Gov. Ron DeSantis was not called to testify. Neither was Moody. Neither was Uthmeier.

The grand jury closed by recommending the Legislature pass two laws: one requiring all money received by the state be deposited into the General Fund, with penalties for violations; and one setting clear rules, with tracking, monitoring, and consequences for how entities like Hope Florida may use taxpayer dollars.

The fight to make it public

Florida law does not make a grand jury presentment secret forever. Section 905.28, F.S., delays release so that a person named in a report may ask a judge to repress or expunge material about them. But the statute has been amended to incorporate Chapter 119 and Article I, Section 24 of the Florida Constitution, and the Florida Supreme Court held in Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Marko that “implicit in the power of the grand jury to investigate and expose official misconduct is the right of the people to be informed of its findings.” Criticism or damage to reputation, the courts have said, is not by itself a reason to bury a presentment.

In March, the Florida Center for Government Accountability, publisher of the Florida Trident, and this reporter, appearing pro se, moved to intervene in the Leon County proceeding. (Disclosure: the author is executive director of FLCGA and a movant in that case.) The motion, filed by attorneys Barbara Petersen and Robert Craig Waters, does not ask the court for the grand jury’s secrets. It asks for something narrower and, arguably, more basic: that the case exist in public. Rule 2.420 of the Florida Rules of Judicial Administration forbids a court from making a case number confidential, requires any sealing order to contain specific findings that it is no broader than necessary, and requires the clerk to post that order on its website and in the courthouse. No such order has been found.

“If the public has no right to intervene and be heard in these proceedings,” the motion argues, “the result could be a process in which public officials and recipients of public funds are publicly reprimanded by a grand jury while the entire presentment is later suppressed or expunged without meaningful scrutiny.”

Uthmeier’s office has declined to say whether he sought to keep the report sealed, noting only that “grand jury proceedings are confidential” and that “unauthorized disclosure of those proceedings is a crime.” In April he called the matter a “big nothingburger,” adding: “I have not been indicted. I’ve not been a suspect or a target. I have not been involved in any criminal activity.” Asked about Hope Florida on Wednesday, DeSantis said he “wasn’t involved in the settlement agreement, but I’m very happy with how everything was done,” and called the controversy a hoax.

Three weeks after the grand jury’s report, Uthmeier announced a public corruption Public Integrity Unit to prosecute “anyone using a position of public trust for personal benefit.” Its mandate: public money routed to nonprofits.

Voters go to the polls in November. Uthmeier is on the ballot, facing Democrat Jose Javier Rodriguez. The grand jury’s report is not.

This article is shared with Tropic Press readers courtesy of Florida Trident. The reporter, Michael Barfield, is an award-winning investigative reporter who helps strengthen transparency and accountability across Florida. He assists reporters and the public with public records questions and requests, and he oversees and supports the organization’s litigation to enforce open government. He’s a frequent lecturer on Florida’s Public Records Act and Sunshine Law, serves on the governance committee of Investigative Reporters & Editors, and is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists. Barfield is a former President of the ACLU of Florida, a life member of the Florida Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and has twice been named by Sarasota Magazine as one of the most influential people in Sarasota. He lives in Sarasota with his wife, Iru.

The Florida Trident is a news outlet focusing on government accountability and transparency across Florida. The Trident was created and first published in 2022 by the Florida Center for Government Accountability in the wake of shrinking newsroom budgets and staff across the country. To help the center’s work, you can donate here:

Thanks for your support

Since this newsletter was launched a year ago, hundreds of thousands of subscribers have joined the Tropic Press community, making this one of the fastest-growing publications of its kind.

Our goal is to reach as many voters as possible so we can increase engagement in the political process and, hopefully, raise interest in voting this coming November.

If you are encountering this newsletter for the first time, please consider subscribing. If you are already a subscriber, consider upgrading your subscription to help this work continue.

Regardless, every person you share this with is one more potential vote for change.

Please share and help us make Florida — and America — better for all of us.

Thanks.

J.C. Bruce

Abortion ruling--if it gets to Supreme Court--could impact Florida’s restrictive laws

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 10:00:59 GMT

A federal court ruling in Idaho is making its way through the appeals process that could have implications for states like Florida with highly restrictive abortion laws by broadening exceptions to include mental health issues. More on Florida’s laws following this guest article.

By Kelcie Moseley-Morris

Stateline

A federal court ruling out of Idaho has potential implications for exceptions in abortion bans nationwide and could eventually end up before the U.S. Supreme Court to decide.

U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill ruled earlier this month that the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution provides a narrow right for a pregnant patient to obtain an abortion if the pregnancy could be a risk to their health, including their mental health. It’s the first ruling since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health in 2022 to find that the U.S. Constitution includes a right to abortion access in certain situations.

Mary Ziegler, a legal historian and law professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law, said Winmill’s ruling could be the beginning of a “slow erosion” of the Dobbs decision, similar to the way that anti-abortion advocates used lawsuits and legislation to chip away at the law established by Roe v. Wade after it was decided in 1973.

“They kind of worked over the course of decades to do a death by a thousand cuts, chipping away at its breadth,” Ziegler said. “This may be kind of a funhouse mirror version of that.”

For years, anti-abortion state officials and advocacy groups used various legal tactics to diminish access to abortion nationwide after Roe v. Wade determined that the procedure was a constitutional right. Over time, state legislatures passed procedural laws that made it more difficult for providers to offer abortion services, as well as so-called “fetal pain” laws, and worked up to passing the six-week and 15-week abortion bans that eventually led to Dobbs.

Two years ago, U.S. Supreme Court justices were asked to consider whether Idaho could set aside federal law mandating stabilizing care in an emergency if that stabilizing care, in a doctor’s opinion, was to terminate a pregnancy. Now the question could be whether any pregnancy scenario where a patient’s physical or mental health is threatened is something that all states can regulate under Dobbs.

Health exceptions

Out of the 13 states that have near-total abortion bans, five have no exception for preserving a pregnant patient’s health, including Idaho, Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma and South Dakota.

All 13 have an exception to save a pregnant woman’s life, but doctors say there most often is no clear moment when they can easily say a person will die without an immediate abortion. Instead, doctors are left to guess whether terminating a pregnancy to save a patient would cost them their license to practice or land them in prison.

Even in states with health exceptions, some doctors hesitate to act because of the ban, opting for delays that can cause medical complications such as organ damage or fertility loss. An Arkansas woman said she was denied an abortion during a miscarriage in 2024, resulting in a days-long ordeal that eventually led to her being transferred out of state to Kansas, where abortion is legal.

Winmill’s legal decision blocks enforcement of Idaho’s near-total abortion ban when a pregnancy is terminated under those circumstances. Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador, a Republican, appealed the decision to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday, and also asked Winmill to pause that injunction while the decision is appealed.

“The state’s interest in protecting unborn children from unjustified abortion is irreparably harmed by the order, and public interest and equity support a stay for that same reason,” Idaho Assistant Solicitor General Aaron Green wrote in the request for a stay.

The attorney general and leadership at the Idaho Family Policy Center, a religious organization that helped craft the legislation that established the state’s ban, have expressed confidence that Winmill’s decision will be reversed quickly.

“The Fourteenth Amendment protects the basic rights that are part of the historical fabric of our nation, not a right to take the life of an innocent child in the womb, an act that was a crime at the time that the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified,” said Caleb Pirc, general counsel for the Idaho Family Policy Center, in a statement. “We fully expect Judge Winmill’s attempt to shoehorn a right to abortion into the Constitution to be swiftly rejected on appeal.”

Supreme Court watch

Dr. Stacy Seyb, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist for Idaho’s largest health system, St. Luke’s, sued state officials and the Idaho Board of Medicine in 2024, arguing that the state’s near-total ban prevented him from providing appropriate care to all of his patients. Maternal-fetal medicine specialists handle the most high-risk pregnancies, including patients carrying multiples and those with conditions such as high blood pressure and gestational diabetes.

In his ruling, Winmill wrote that although Dobbs allowed states to regulate abortion access, that case was about elective abortions, and that his ruling was about a pregnant woman’s ability to seek care under “the most difficult and tragic circumstances,” almost always when the woman wanted the pregnancy.

“By banning health-preserving abortion, Idaho attempts to deny this fundamental right on the basis that the threat of harm comes from a fetus, which depends on the woman for survival,” Winmill wrote. “But a pregnant woman’s health is not a state resource to be allocated at the legislature’s whim. The Fourteenth Amendment exists precisely to prevent subjugation like this.”

Winmill discussed the history of abortion bans in his opinion, writing that when the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, the states and territories that restricted abortion also included exceptions for therapeutic purposes when a doctor was acting in good faith.

But Winmill went further than many judges have gone by including a pregnancy’s threats to mental health, something that only Alabama has recognized as an explicit healthcare exception for abortions among states with bans, according to KFF. There, a psychiatrist is required to diagnose a pregnant patient with a serious mental illness that could result in their death or the death of the fetus in order to qualify for that exception.

“The brain is an organ of the body, and healthcare providers use empirical tools to reliably assess the risk of suicidality and the most effective treatments,” Winmill wrote. “It is an affront to human dignity to bar pregnant women from receiving life-saving care on the basis that the threat comes from a mental health condition rather than a physical health condition.”

Idaho’s role

Idaho has been at the center of the national debate about when health conditions take priority over an abortion ban since the first year after the Dobbs decision.

The U.S. Department of Justice under former President Joe Biden sued Idaho to require that it acknowledge a federal law known as the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act — better known as EMTALA — in the context of patients who come to the emergency room with pregnancies that may need to be terminated to prevent infection or other adverse health outcomes.

The U.S. Supreme Court heard that case in late April 2024, but sent it back to the lower appellate court in June, saying it was too early in the process for justices to have considered ruling on it. The case was later dropped by the DOJ under President Donald Trump, but St. Luke’s filed its own lawsuit against the state that is still ongoing. That case is also before Winmill in federal court.

At the time of the EMTALA arguments, Idaho officials had argued that if it allowed women to get a legal abortion in an emergency room, anyone could come to a hospital’s emergency department and threaten to harm themselves.

Tanya Pellegrini, co-director of litigation at The Lawyering Project and one of the attorneys who represented Seyb in this month’s case, said that wasn’t true under EMTALA, and it won’t be true following Winmill’s ruling.

“I think the order really speaks for itself in terms of why mental health should not be treated differently from physical health,” Pellegrini said.

Ziegler said she won’t be surprised if Seyb’s case ends up before the Supreme Court in the near future, because it strikes at the heart of questions about the Dobbs decision that have yet to be fully resolved.

“It’s a really important question that they’ll have to address sooner or later,” Ziegler said.

Stateline reporter Kelcie Moseley-Morris can be reached at kmoseley@stateline.org.

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network that includes Florida Phoenix, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

To support the work of Florida Phoenix, please click here:

Editor’s Note

As mentioned at the top of this article, this ruling could impact Florida and other states with highly restrictive laws limiting reproductive care for women. Florida does not allow for mental health issues when considering the welfare of women seeking pregnancy termination. Here are the current rules, drawn from a Google AI search:

Abortion is banned in Florida after six weeks of gestational age. Under Chapter 390 of the Florida Statutes, the state enforces a strict six-week limit alongside mandatory administrative hurdles.

Permitted Exceptions

Abortion is legally permitted after six weeks only under narrow, certified circumstances:

Life and Physical Health: To save the life of the pregnant individual or to avert a serious risk of substantial, irreversible impairment of a major bodily function (certified by two physicians). Psychological conditions do not qualify.
Fatal Fetal Abnormalities: Allowed up to the third trimester if two physicians certify a terminal condition incompatible with life outside the womb.
Rape, Incest, and Human Trafficking: Allowed up to 15 weeks if the patient provides official documentation, such as a medical record or police report.

Procedural Restrictions

Patients seeking legal care before the six-week mark must navigate several statutory restrictions:

Two-Trip Mandatory Delay: Patients must attend two separate in-person appointments at least 24 hours apart to complete counseling and obtain care.
Mandatory Ultrasounds: A physician must perform an ultrasound to determine gestational age prior to any procedure.
Medication Restrictions: Telehealth prescriptions and mailing abortion pills are banned. The first dose of a medication abortion must be ingested in person at the clinic.
Minors: Patients age 17 and younger require notarized parental consent and notification, unless a judicial waiver is granted by a judge.
Funding Limits: Public funds and state Medicaid are prohibited from covering abortion care except in rare cases of life endangerment, rape, or incest.

Legal and Constitutional Status

The state’s current legal status remains highly restrictive following major constitutional developments:

Privacy Clause Ruling: The Florida Supreme Court ruled that the state constitution’s right to privacy does not protect abortion rights, clearing the path for the current ban.
Constitutional Amendments: Florida voters previously considered Amendment 4, which sought to establish a constitutional right to abortion; however, it failed to reach the required 60% supermajority threshold.

Thanks for your support

Since this newsletter was launched a year ago, hundreds of thousands of subscribers have joined the Tropic Press community, making this one of the fastest-growing publications of its kind.

Our goal here is to reach as many voters as possible, so that we can increase engagement in the political process and, hopefully, raise interest in voting this coming November.

If you are encountering this newsletter for the first time, please consider subscribing. If you are already a subscriber, consider upgrading your subscription to help this work continue.

Regardless, every person you share this with is one more potential vote for change.

Please share and help us make Florida — and America — better for all of us.

Thanks.

J.C. Bruce

Donalds kept House re-election campaign alive during run for Governor

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 13:38:22 GMT

By William March

Florida Trident

Byron Donalds, who cruised to an easy victory in the Republican primary for governor with the endorsement of Donald Trump, has maintained two separate campaigns – one for the governorship and one for re-election to his U.S. House seat – during almost his entire campaign for governor.

Despite a warning from federal election authorities that he was skirting campaign finance laws, Donalds continued to raise and spend money for more than 18 months in a campaign for re-election to his U.S. House seat.

Since the start of 2025, Donalds’ campaign for his House seat has taken in $738,092, and spent more than $2.1 million – most of it since he declared on Feb. 26, 2025 that he was running for governor and not running for House re-election.

The biggest chunk of that spending was taking $1.2 million he had raised to run for re-election to Congress and passing it to a political action committee, Friends of Byron Donalds, backing his run for governor.

But his campaign for re-election to the House has also taken in $30,000 from PACs, spent $136,561.47 for “security services” and paid $36,000 to a polling and research firm, all since he announced he was not actually running for the House.

Donalds is the U.S. House representative from Florida’s District 19 in southwest Florida, encompassing coastal areas from Fort Myers to Naples.

Six months after he initially announced in February 2025 that he was running for governor and not for re-election to Congress, the Federal Elections Commission warned Donalds that he should stop accepting contributions to his House campaign and refund those donations he had accepted since his announcement.

In response, the Donalds campaign told the FEC that he was still in fact “an active candidate” for House re-election.

It wasn’t until earlier this month, on Aug. 5, that Donalds’ House re-election campaign told the FEC it would stop raising and spending money and declared – for the second time – that he was not a House candidate.

The timeline:

Feb. 25, 2025 – Donalds notifies the FEC that he is not running for re-election to the House, saying he “is not seeking re-election and will not be conducting any further activities with respect to the 2026 primary election.”
Feb. 26, 2025 – Donalds files as a candidate for governor of Florida and immediately transfers $1.2 million from his House campaign to Friends of Byron Donalds.
July 15, 2025 – Despite having declared he was no longer a House candidate, Donalds files a campaign finance report with the FEC showing his House campaign raised $74,693.49 and spent $146,084 in the previous three months.
Aug. 5, 2025 – An FEC official tells the Donalds campaign that because he is no longer a House candidate, its contributions received since his February announcement “must be refunded” except the amount used to pay off debts.
Aug. 6, 2025 – Donalds campaign treasurer Bradley Crate responds to the FEC with a letter saying Donalds “has not officially ended his Congressional re-election campaign and he has made no announcement to that effect,” and “is still an active candidate for the 2025-2026 Election Cycle.”
June 6, 2026 – Donalds files qualifying papers for governor of Florida.
Aug. 8 – Crate sends a letter to the FEC saying Donalds is not running for re-election to the House after all.

The Donalds campaign didn’t respond to an inquiry from the Florida Trident with questions about his contradictory statements on whether he was running for re-election to Congress and why his House campaign continued spending on items such as polling and security services.

FEC reports show Donalds has refunded some donations to his House campaign, but far from all that he raised since initially declaring he was no longer a House candidate.

The Trident initially reported in September 2025 about Donalds’ dual campaigns.

At that time, Ian Vandewalker, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, told the Trident that any enforcement action by the FEC was unlikely, regardless of whether the campaign violated campaign finance regulations.

Only two of the six seats on the commission that governs the FEC are filled, and the six-member commission hasn’t had a quorum since May 2025. That means the commission cannot “resolve enforcement and audit matters, implement rules, issue advisory opinions, and litigate most cases,” according to a statement in May by Commission Chair Shana Broussard.

The bipartisan FEC members are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

Jeff Swartz, professor emeritus at Cooley Law School in Tampa, speculated that Donalds may have kept his House campaign open as a way of “keeping his powder dry” – preserving the option to run for House re-election in case another strong candidate emerged for governor.

William March has written about politics in the Tampa Bay area for the past 40 years. He has worked for newspapers in his native North Carolina and for the Tampa Tribune, the Tampa Bay Times and the Associated Press in Florida. Trident Staff Writer Melanie Payne contributed to this report.

The Florida Trident is an investigative news outlet focusing on government accountability and transparency across Florida. The Trident was created and first published in 2022 by the Florida Center for Government Accountability in the wake of shrinking newsroom budgets and staff across the country. This article is published with the Trident’s permission. To support the Trident’s work, click here:

Donate

Thanks for your support

Since this newsletter was launched a year ago, hundreds of thousands of subscribers have joined the Tropic Press community, making this one of the fastest-growing publications of its kind.

Our goal here is to reach as many voters — especially Democrats and independents — as possible, so that we can increase engagement in the political process and, hopefully, raise interest in voting this coming November.

We do that with original reporting and commentary and by sharing worthwhile articles from other publications, such as today’s story from Florida Trident.

If you are encountering this newsletter for the first time, please consider subscribing. If you are already a subscriber, consider upgrading your subscription to help this work continue.

Regardless, every person you share this with is one more potential vote for change.

Please share and help us make Florida — and America — better for all of us.

Thanks.

J.C. Bruce

More than a million Floridians have voted early in advance of next week's primary election

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 10:03:03 GMT

By Jay Waagmeester

As of 2 p.m. Thursday, 1.33 million voters had returned vote-by-mail ballots or voted early in Florida’s primary elections. Just over 1 million vote-by-mail ballots were yet to be returned.

Among the votes cast, 555,056 were from Democrats and 593,800 from Republicans. About 160,000 ballots cast were by No Party Affiliation voters.

Of the 1 million vote-by-mail ballots outstanding, about 325,000 were for Republicans and 429,000 for Democrats. Another 228,000 belonged to NPA voters.

Republicans enjoy a lead of nearly 1.6 million registered voters. As of Thursday, about 55,000 more Democrats than Republicans had returned ballots by mail. Nearly 100,000 more Republicans have voted early than Democrats.

Early voting ends Saturday, and vote-by-mail ballots must be returned to county election supervisors by 7 p.m. election day Tuesday, Aug. 18 — no matter the postmark. For more information on voting deadlines for the primary and general elections, check out the Phoenix Election 2026 landing page.

Historical

According to the archived 2020 primary vote-by-mail and early voting statistics, 2.9 million ballots were cast early or by mail that year, and 1.9 million mail ballots were not returned.

In 2022, 2.3 million mail ballots were not returned, while 2.36 million ballots were cast early or by mail.

In 2024, there were half as many ballots not returned, 1.02 million, compared to the 2.07 million cast early or by mail.

Outstanding vote-by-mail ballots in large counties | Ballots cast

Broward: 61,416 | 80,192

Collier: 18,464 | 32,227

Duval: 18,400 | 39,844

Hernando: 9,666 | 14,724

Hillsborough: 78,368 | 91,299

Lee: 49,928 | 74,118

Manatee: 21,202 | 28,332

Miami-Dade: 113,505 | 116,851

Orange: 53,277 | 73,984

Pinellas: 114,432 | 83,226

Volusia: 31,541 | 45,764

During a campaign rally Thursday in Wakulla County, gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds asked who there had already voted. Almost everyone raised hands.

Donalds commented on the overall shift in the share of voters who are Republican. He recalled a conversation he had with Florida GOP chair Evan Power in 2024. “I said, Evan, if you don’t get over 1.4 million by the time we hit election day, you’re in trouble.”

“But he accomplished it, and by the time we got to the November elections in 2024, the voter advantage in Florida, Republicans over Democrats, was more than 1.4 million voters. And, since then, he hasn’t stopped; it’s now gone to 1.5 million and counting.”

In 2018, the Florida Democratic Party had about 260,000 more registered voters than the Republican Party.

Jay Waagmeester covers education for the Florida Phoenix. He previously worked for the Iowa Capital Dispatch and the Iowa State Daily. He grew up in Iowa and is a graduate of Iowa State University.

EDITOR’S NOTE:

While, as this article from Florida Phoenix points out, Republicans do outnumber Democrats in Florida—by quite a lot—if you look at the broader picture of Democrats, minor party members, and voters with no party affiliation (NPAs), combined they vastly outnumber the number of Floridians registered to the G.O.P. as you can see in this chart from the Florida Secretary of State’s office:

I would also note that voter registration does not determine election results. Turnout does.

So, while Floridians registered as NPAs, for example, cannot vote in either the Republican or Democratic primary elections, they can vote in November. It’s reasonable to expect that voter turnout among NPAs will be smaller in the primary election next week than in the general election.

Polls indicate a high degree of dissatisfaction with Donald Trump among unaffiliated voters, and it is also reasonable to expect that at least some percentage of Republicans may sit this election out in disgust.

While the raw voter registration numbers may be against those opposed to the fascist impulses of the MAGA movement, there is every reason to believe that the general election in November is a realistic opportunity to change the political complexion of our state.

It will take a lot of work. But it is work worth doing.

Which is why I am so thankful for those of you who are subscribers to this newsletter. Please share this with your friends. It’s vital that we engage every possible voter.

Thank you.

J.C. Bruce

Instead of installing more EV chargers, Florida DOT dreams of flying cars

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 10:02:53 GMT

Florida wants to use federal funds designated for electric car chargers for something else entirely— flying cars. No joke. Well, certainly not funny. Craig Pittman has the story, reprinted here with permission of Florida Phoenix, the Tallahassee-based news service.

By Craig Pittman

I watched a lot of cartoons as a kid. None was more visually stunning than “The Jetsons.” It focused on a family coping with life in a streamlined future filled with snazzy gadgets.

George Jetson, for instance, commutes to work in a flying car that’s quieter than your average vacuum cleaner. When he lands, George folds his vehicle up into a briefcase he then carries into his office. No need for roads OR parking!

Apparently, Gov. Ron DeSantis and his Department of Transportation secretary, Jared Perdue, fell under the spell of this cartoon, too. Now they want to make it real using millions in federal funding intended for a different purpose.

The Miami Herald broke the story over the weekend. The headline said, “Florida wants to use cash meant for electric car chargers on flying cars instead.”

There’s just one problem with this plan: Flying cars do not exist.

For years the Florida DOT has been sitting on $197 million in federal grant money that it was supposed to spend on new chargers for electric cars and trucks. Now, the Herald says, the DOT has plans to steer (sorry!) that money to something bizarre. It wants to “build what it calls an ‘Aerial Highway Network’ that includes places the futuristic aircraft can charge, take off, and land.”

In the secret nine-page plan that the Herald got hold of, the DOT says the state is taking “a bold step in building an entirely new mode of transportation.” My hard-headed Cracker forebears would call this “buying a pig in a poke” — throwing money at something that’s not real.

“The Florida Department of Transportation will not waste taxpayer dollars and spend it on everyday passenger vehicles,” the DOT wrote in its flying-cars-are-cool report.

Of course, that’s exactly what the DOT promised the federal government the agency WOULD do with that money. It promised to spend it on chargers needed for the growing number of everyday electric vehicles.

The agency never mentioned that it would instead blow that cash on some cockamamie contraption conjured up by a 1960s Hanna-Barbera cartoon. They never brought up their plans to build 32 landing pads across the state and use state funds to supplement the federal grant.

I suspect DeSantis and Perdue know this looks bad. They’ve been trying for months to hide the DOT document from the public.

As the Herald explained, “The state’s flying-car pivot only came to light after the Miami Herald filed a records request in January, which went unfulfilled until the newspaper’s lawyer got involved.”

“It’s a complete misappropriation of these funds,” said Stephen A. Smith, executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. “This just shows how of touch their decision-making is.”

Smith suspects he knows who the beneficiaries will be. It’s not the average Florida driver. Instead, he said, “This is a giveaway to the people who need it the least.”

Roads vs. politics

The millions of taxpayer dollars at stake here came from one of the worst-named bills ever considered by Congress.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which passed in 2021, included language to expand the nation’s fast-charging network for electric cars and trucks. The provision called for adding more chargers within a mile of all interstate highways. That would help EV drivers travel greater distances without getting stranded.

It wasn’t intended as a total government giveaway. Businesses that received the funding, such as Buc-ees and Wawa, would get enough to cover about 80% of the costs. They would be required to put up the other 20%.

Florida’s DOT submitted a plan for spending the money properly, and the federal government approved it. After all, drivers in Florida have really fallen in love with EVs.

A report last year noted that Florida leads all other Southeastern states in the number of EVs sold — roughly half a million in 2024. This is a good thing.

It’s not just that EVs are cleaner for the air and offer a way to combat that thing about the climate that DeSantis doesn’t want us to mention. Given the soaring cost of gas since the start of the Iran War, you can understand why drivers might prefer vehicles that don’t require a second mortgage to fill the tank.

“Every time the gas prices go up, I say thank you that my price is always the same,” said Leighanne Boone of the Sustainable Tallahassee Ride Electric Club. “I plug in every night.”

What Florida lacks is sufficient public places for rapid charging on the road. As the Herald pointed out, “Florida boasts the second-highest number of EVs in the country but still falls behind the national average on chargers per vehicle.”

“We definitely need more charging infrastructure,” Boone told me. Range anxiety is a deterrent for potential buyers, she explained. Greater availability “will encourage the average driver to go electric.”

Instead of spending the money for more chargers the way it promised, the DOT put it aside. Meanwhile, the agency set up a website called “Roads Are Not For Politics.” Contrary to its name, the site features a list of culture-war complaints, such as “COVID tyranny.” It also offers off-base criticism of EVs.

In the DOT press release about this (which has since been removed), DeSantis said, “We listen to Floridians and meet their needs. Roads are not for politics.”

Except they weren’t listening to Floridians OR meeting their needs. They were playing politics. And now they want to go back on their word to the feds and spend the money on something that hasn’t been built yet.

And I mean spending a LOT. The DOT’s secret plan estimates that each of the 32 landing pads would cost about $5.6 million to build. That’s after going through testing at the DOT’s 775-acre Auburndale test track, the Suntrax Center.

The plan calls for building these landing pads near airports, luxury apartment buildings, and golf courses. All that’s missing is a listing of such hoity-toity locations as Miami’s Indian Creek Island, aka the “Billionaires’ Bunker,” and the Ocean Reef Club in North Key Largo.

Meanwhile, the growing number of EV drivers have to keep scanning the exit ramps and hope they spot a place to pull over and charge.

“It’s disappointing,” Boone said.

Former trailblazer

I watched a Florida DOT video touting this flying car foofaraw, complete with AI mockups of what they might look like. The video didn’t mention where the money would come from, just how groovy it would be.

“It’s an opportunity to introduce a new mode of transportation to the world,” Perdue said, as giddy as Olivia Newton-John soaring into the clouds in John Travolta’s flying car at the end of “Grease.”

Florida once fancied itself as a trailblazer in aviation.

In 1914, Tony Jannus flew a local politician from St. Petersburg to Tampa via seaplane, inaugurating the first regular commercial airline service in the nation. The ticket cost $400 and the ride lasted 22 minutes. No word on whether the airline lost the passenger’s luggage.

That same year, the Navy established its first flight training base in Pensacola. It’s still there. The Blue Angels stunt flying team is based at NAS Pensacola and recently sent hats, tents, and chairs flying during a too-low practice run over the beach.

So perhaps it makes sense that the DOT’s looking to the skies, now that our roads are so consistently clogged. It’s as if the agency is giving up on ever freeing our asphalt from those frustrating traffic jams.

“As Florida’s surface transportation networks reach capacity, and right of way is constrained,” it says, “additional modes of transportation are required to maintain economic development goals as well as quality of life for residents and visitors.”

People — especially people stuck in traffic — have been dreaming of taking off in flying cars for years. But we’re still waiting for the Jetsons’ car-briefcase combo.

“NASA had an air taxi program they were working on back in the 1980s,” recalled David King of Arizona State University, a transportation planning expert. So far, the only place you can see any “air taxis” is in the Bruce Willis science-fiction movie “The Fifth Element.”

Glorified helicopters

I had a lengthy conversation with King, who displayed an encyclopedic knowledge of the “flying car” phenomenon. It’s been a hot topic in Arizona in recent years, he said, and now has begun showing up in other states.

“There’s a lot of enthusiasm about this,” he told me. “Strangely, it’s become a partisan Issue. It’s been seized on by people who think government shouldn’t be involved in mass transit, but it’s all about an unproven technology that, as of August 2026, is not currently available.”

While flying cars sound good on paper, King said, there are lots of details still to be worked out. For one thing, he said, forget about them relieving highway congestion.

The perpetually-under-construction Interstate 4, for instance, draws 180,000 to 200,000 vehicles a day. If and when the flying taxis DO appear, they can’t carry much, he said. Because of the weight of the battery, they can carry no more than three passengers and one pilot.

All the trucks have to keep their tires on the ground. These flying cars can’t carry freight the way 18-wheelers do.

You won’t travel far in your glorified helicopter, King said. Because the batteries are depleted after 40 minutes, “they just won’t stay in the air too long.”

Traveling to and from the 32 launch pads will still require use of land vehicles, he pointed out. And you may have to travel quite a ways because of the Federal Aviation Administration.

“As of now, the FAA will not approve any operations over populated areas,” King told me. “You can’t just put one of these things in the air and start flying.”

King used a transportation-related metaphor to describe the Florida DOT’s secretly swiping EV money to use for flying cars: “They’re putting the cart before the horse.”

Try a trebuchet

This kind of creative accounting has been a hallmark of the DeSantis administration.

I’m not just talking about the Hope Florida scandal. You remember that one — $10 million from a Medicaid settlement wound up in the hands of political consultants hired to counter the drive to legalize weed.

Remember, too, how DeSantis took $20 million from a disaster relief fund designed to cope with hurricane damage and instead used it to build a destructive immigrant detention camp in the Everglades. A lot of the no-bid contracts went to his donors, too.

Speaking of donors, don’t forget how he cajoled the Cabinet into spending $83 million from the Florida Wildlife Corridor fund on four acres of land in Destin that was nowhere near the wildlife corridor. The seller just happened to be one of his campaign contributors, making this transaction look more like a payback than a payment.

Usually when I call the governor’s office seeking a comment on one of these scandals, his spokespeople don’t even acknowledge receiving the inquiry. But this time, to my surprise, I got an immediate reply.

One of the governor’s spokespeople said he would refer my question to Perdue of DOT. And he did, too. I never got a response from Perdue’s people. Maybe they’re standing on a launch pad in Auburndale, waiting for George Jetson to pick them up for work.

Because I am at heart a problem-solver, I have a proposal for DeSantis and Perdue. It’s based on something that happened when my kids were in Boy Scouts.

A couple of teenage Scouts built a medieval siege engine called a “trebuchet.” It’s basically a fancy catapult. The boys would roll it out at various events and use it to hurl things like a Barney the Dinosaur toy a long distance.

I think the DOT should spend $1 million of its EV funds to build at Skytrax the most impressive trebuchet ever constructed. DeSantis and Perdue can put a Hot Wheels toy in the pouch. DOT employees can hurl the payload as far as possible and claim they finally created a flying car.

Then they can spend the remaining $196 million on what they SHOULD have spent it on in the first place.

Craig Pittman is a native Floridian. In 30 years at the Tampa Bay Times, he won numerous state and national awards for his environmental reporting. He is the author of six books. In 2020 the Florida Heritage Book Festival named him a Florida Literary Legend. Craig is co-host of the “Welcome to Florida” podcast. He lives in St. Petersburg with his wife and children.

Thanks for your support

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed if you are a rational person living in the Free State of Florida, but there are plenty of smart, reasonable people just like you here. The purpose of this newsletter and the Tropic Press website is to provide a source of news and commentary that shines a light through this irrational fog, both original reporting and contributions such as today’s article from the Florida Phoenix.

Thank you for your support as a subscriber. It is invaluable. This is especially so for those of you who have chosen to upgrade to paid subscriptions. Your contributions are making this possible.

J.C. Bruce

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How big tech is trying to influence Florida's elections

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 13:23:56 GMT

White House photo

Enormous data centers that suck up the water supply and cause electric rates to skyrocket are wildly unpopular.

But that isn’t stopping tech giants from using their money and influence to get their way— especially here in Florida.

While I am on the road this week, I’m still keeping up with news worth sharing, and I commend independent journalist Jason Garcia’s report on how Facebook is meddling in Florida elections.

Here’s a sample:

Meta Platforms — the Big Tech giant behind Facebook and Instagram and a leading developer of hyperscale data centers — just launched a campaign to fill the Florida Legislature with politicians friendly to the artificial intelligence industry.
The Mark Zuckerberg-led corporation is already funding advertisements on behalf of one key lawmaker: Rep. Mike Redondo, a Republican from Miami who is in line to become speaker of the Florida House of Representatives in a few years.
Redondo is part of a House GOP leadership team that killed a proposed “AI bill of rights” earlier this year that would have, among other things, exposed AI companies to heavy financial penalties if they permitted children to use chatbots without oversight from parents.
House leaders also weakened a law regulating large data centers just before passing it in March — via a last-minute amendment removing a provision from the bill that would have forbid local governments from signing non-disclosure agreements that hide the identities of data center operators like Meta.

You can read the full report and subscribe to Jason Garcia’s Substack newsletter here:

Jason Garcia

See you soon

I’m on a two-week sabbatical, but will be back before the Florida primary election. In the meantime, I hope to use this space to share articles of interest from guest contributors from time to time, such as today’s article.

I hope you found it thought-provoking. If so, please feel free to share it with friends.

Our democracy as we’ve known it for 250 years is at risk. To save it, we will need a groundswell of support from voters in the coming midterm election.

The purpose of this newsletter—and the accompanying Tropic Press website—is to encourage that engagement through original reporting and commentary as well as shared stories such as today’s.

Currently, Tropic Press reaches more than 700,000 subscribers in Florida and elsewhere, which is great, but there are literally millions of Florida Democrats and independents we are not reaching yet.

You can help spread the word.

Please like this post. Comment if you are so inclined. But, please, also take a moment to share it with people you know.

With mid-term elections on the horizon, the more people we reach, the more effective we can be in helping turn our state and this country around. You can play a vital role in that effort.

Thanks.

J.C. Bruce

How progressive are Florida Democrats? Alex Vindman, Angie Nixon Senate race offers a test

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 13:29:23 GMT

Courtesy WUSF

By Mitch Perry

As progressives rack up victories in other parts of the country against moderate Democrats, Florida’s Aug. 18 primary could prove a big test for that movement.

Retired U.S. Army Lt. Col Alex Vindman has tried to reserve his rhetorical fire for Sen. Ashley Moody, the Republican incumbent, instead of his Democratic primary opponent, the fiery Jacksonville state Rep. Angie Nixon, reprimanded by the House of Representatives earlier this year for her megaphone-fuelled protest on the House floor that disrupted a vote on new congressional district maps.

Nixon has plenty to criticize about Moody, as well. But she’s concentrated on contrasting her progressive stances against the more centrist Vindman, who is running for political office for the first time after moving to Broward County in 2023.

As the primary inches closer, tensions between the two continue to grow, from initial acrimony over Vindman’s refusal to debate Nixon before the primary, to outrage over a recent social media remark attacking Nixon as a “shitty human” who should “buy some professional clothes for the love of everything (including shoes).”

For his part, Vindman says he doesn’t believe hype about the growing clout of progressives — at least not in Florida.

“I think actually I’m not sure if I see those trend lines in Florida. I see them in urban cores in different parts of the country, New York. But what’s applicable in New York doesn’t necessarily resonate and carry over to the ‘Free State of Florida,’ Vindman told the Florida Phoenix last week.

Moody

As for Moody, on the campaign trail and social media she has denounced left-leaning Democrats — an argument that might lose its resonance if she faces Vindman rather than Nixon in the fall.

“They are anarchist psychos who want to destroy this country,” Moody said while speaking at the Republican Party of Florida’s Sunshine State Showdown in Hollywood last month. She cited a public opinion survey that she said showed how few Democrats say they love America.

“What’s on the ballot in November is more than just Republican vs. Democrat,” she declared. “It is: Are you a patriot or are you not?”

Moody is being challenged for the Republican nomination by three opponents — election integrity advocate Chris Gleason, physician and author Neelam Taneja Perry, and Presbyterian minister Ernie Rivera.

Polling

There’s been little public polling between the two Democrats as the primary nears. That dearth of information was in part a major reason why several news organizations (including the Phoenix) seized on a poll released last month that showed Nixon doing slightly better than Vindman against Moody in a presumptive one-on-one matchup in November.

There are clear distinctions between the two on domestic and foreign policy.

Both support a raise in the federal minimum wage. But while Vindman wants a boost to $17 per hour, Nixon says it should be much higher.

“I was one of the statewide organizers helping to lead that minimum wage campaign back in 2020, and so I want to be perfectly clear about that. So, raising it to $15 an hour, I believe at a minimum we need a $25-$26-dollar minimum wage, and we can get there by taking incremental steps as it relates to small businesses if they are worried about taking on that cost,” she said.

“We haven’t had a minimum wage increase in a generation,” Vindman said, noting the federal government last raised it to $7.25 in 2009. “It should be indexed to make sure people aren’t falling further and further behind.”

Israel

A key point of difference is support for Israel.

As the Phoenix has previously reported, Nixon has been outspoken in her support for Palestinian rights. When she sponsored a resolution calling for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas a month after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, members of both political parties shunned her and said anyone who supported her proposal was antisemitic.

“Palestinians were losing their lives at record high rates,” Nixon said recently when asked about that moment. “And to have people turn their back on me. To be called a terrorist on the House floor. Ignorant. Antisemitic. That was very hurtful. But I will always fight to stand on the right side of history, and I believe that I was on the right side of history then just like I’m on the right side of history now.”

Vindman is a stalwart supporter of Israel, but critical of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and supportive of a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians.

Debate?

A big point of contention is that Vindman has avoided a debate with Nixon, much to her disappointment. His “audacity” to refuse a debate, she said, is “wild to me.”

“It just shows you that he does not know Florida,” she said. “He has no clue in regard to the issues that we face here in this state. He’s a millionaire. He doesn’t understand working class issues.” (A review of Vindman’s Senate financial disclosure form shows that he has made more than $1.4 million from the Here Right Matters Foundation, which he founded).

Vindman has aimed most of his criticism towards Moody, not Nixon.

“Angie has been a terrific fighter in the state House, there’s no question,” he told reporters last month. “She’s been a champion. … She should be celebrated for her contributions.”

Trash talk

That point illustrates how, in a divisive political environment, the Democratic candidates initially tried to remain civil to one another. But as Aug. 18 neared, that changed.

Rachel Vindman, who is married to Alex Vindman, wrote an aggressive social media post on @threads late last week that she removed within hours and by day’s end had her issuing a public apology to Nixon.

Ms. Vindman never mentioned Nixon by name in her original post, something she made a point of. “I know you’re checking my page and yes I am talking about you, but I won’t say your name because you’re not worth it,” she wrote.

Rachel Vindman said a “s— human ” was making personal attacks against their opponent at campaign events “attended by less than 20 people.”

As an aside, she added, “Also, buy some professional clothes for the love of everything (that includes shoes.)”

Nixon supporters quickly responded.

“This is disgusting, tone deaf and beyond out of touch,” Central Florida Democratic state Sen. Lavon Bracy Davis wrote on Facebook.

During her six years in Tallahassee, Nixon hasn’t been able to get much passed in the GOP-controlled House — and she’s not the only one, given the GOP’s supermajorities in both legislative chambers.

She’s become better known for her activism, sometimes on the House floor, including protests against the Legislature’s approvals of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ congressional redistricting maps in 2022 and earlier this year.

Money, money, money

One of Vindman’s most remarkable feats as a candidate to date has been his ability to raise money — more than $19 million since getting into the race in January, more than anyone else in the contest (Moody had raised more than $14 million by the end of June). Many of those donations have come from across the country, demonstrating his appeal to liberals who remember his involvement in the 2019 impeachment hearings against President Donald Trump.

It’s a skill he shares with his identical twin brother — Eugene Vindman raised $14 million in his successful run for Congress in Virginia in 2024 and he’s already raised $12 million in his bid for re-election this year.

Vindman’s fundraising prowess may not mean that much in a one-on-one matchup with Moody. Democrat Val Demings crushed Marco Rubio in fundraising in the 2022 Senate race, yet Rubio won by 16 points that year.

“These previous races that you talked about were with true incumbents that had been tested, that had been proven in the field,” Vindman responds.

Moody has won two statewide elections, both by comfortable margins. She won her first race for attorney general by six points in 2018 and by 22 points in 2022. Vindman, however, has never run a statewide campaign before now.

All together now

While the candidates aren’t in lockstep on all issues, they hope to parlay Moody’s role in the Hope Florida Foundation controversy and the siphoning of $10 million in Medicaid funds to political committees. A Leon County grand jury investigated the transaction but its report, officially called a presentment, has not been released.

Vindman has launched a website with a petition calling on Moody to push for the release of the presentment.

A spokesperson for the Moody campaign said the senator doesn’t oppose public release of the report, but did not comment about whether the senator would advocate for its release.

“This was an Agency for Health Care Administration agreement that AHCA chose to negotiate and settle through AHCA-lawyers and outside counsel almost two years ago. This information is publicly available in previously released documents,” said Cameron Gambini, communications director for the Moody campaign. ‘The Senator has had no role in any grand jury proceedings and would certainly have no issue with the public release of any report.”

Nixon, meanwhile, has said Moody should resign from office.

See you soon

I hope you found it thought provoking. If so, please feel free to share it with friends.

Our democracy as we’ve known it for 250 years is at risk. To save it, we will need a groundswell of support from voters in the coming midterm election.

The purpose of this newsletter—and the accompanying Tropic Press website—is to encourage that engagement through original reporting and commentary as well as shared stories such as today’s.

Currently, Tropic Press reaches more than 700,000 subscribers in Florida and elsewhere, which is great, but there are literally millions of Florida Democrats and independents we are not reaching yet.

You can help spread the word.

Please like this post. Comment if you are so inclined. But, please, also take a moment to share it with people you know.

With mid-term elections on the horizon, the more people we reach, the more effective we can be in helping turn our state and this country around. You can play a vital role in that effort.

Thanks.

J.C. Bruce

Reminder:

Miss Mingo is also on vacation. Her Saturday column will return soon.

Democratic state officials urge Supreme Court to affirm pause on Trump's vote-by-mail order

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 09:00:51 GMT

By Jacob Fischler

States Newsroom

States do not have time before November’s midterm elections to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order mandating overhauls of their mail-in-voting systems, two dozen Democratic state officials told the U.S. Supreme Court this week.

Justices should keep a stay pausing the order in place through Election Day, the Democrats, led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, wrote. The court is compelled to keep voting rules in place this close to an election, but the executive order would force massive changes on state administrators, they wrote.

Neither the president nor the U.S. Postal Service has authority to administer elections under the U.S. Constitution, which assigns that responsibility to state governments, the Democrats wrote.

Trump’s March 31 order directs USPS to collect lists of registered voters from each state and only mail ballots to registered voters, and the Department of Homeland Security to compile lists of voting-age citizens in each state.

That would insert the executive branch directly into elections administration and the administration has not defended the legality of that move, the Democrats wrote.

Worse, the officials said, the order would create mass confusion at this point in the election cycle, meaning that the court should delay considering whether it is legal until after the midterms.

“Because of the high risk of errors and the limited window for correcting mistakes, many of the millions of voters who rely on mail voting—especially voters with disabilities and those in rural areas—would likely be denied mail ballots and, as a result, disenfranchised,” the state officials said. “Many more voters would be confused—either because they wouldn’t receive their mail ballots or would fear that USPS would fail to deliver their voted ballots to state officials for tabulation.”

Bonta signed the brief along with the attorneys general of Massachusetts, Washington, Nevada, Arizona, Connecticut, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia and Wisconsin. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro also signed on.

Their filing was the Democrats’ response to the Justice Department request that the Supreme Court overturn an appeals court decision against lifting a district court stay of the executive order. The court is considering the issue on its emergency docket that allows for speedy decisions.

Spokespeople for the Justice Department did not return a message seeking comment.

No final rule

The administration argued that the states’ challenge was premature because the Postal Service and DHS had not yet written the rules the executive order directed.

While a three-judge panel of the U.S. 1st Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the Democratic states, a separate case at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the administration that the states could not yet challenge the policy because there was no final rule. The case under consideration at the Supreme Court is from the 1st Circuit.

In an amicus brief supporting the federal government, a coalition of conservative groups led by attorney William Olson said Monday that the district court stay was possibly the first time a judge has blocked a notice of proposed rulemaking, which “is the very definition of an agency action which is not a final agency action.”

Sowing voter confusion

The states said the order itself, even without final rules from the affected agencies, would impose significant burdens on their election administrators. And the administration has detailed in court the steps the agencies must take to finalize the order’s mandates.

Forcing the states to wait until there is an actual rule in place, especially when the steps agencies have taken “do not materially differ” from the order, would mean state election officials could face an untenable situation of needing to prepare for the new requirements.

“If litigation challenging final implementation of the EO does not even begin for several more weeks, it would be extremely difficult—if not impossible—to obtain a definitive judicial resolution with enough time remaining for States to redesign and reorder their ballot mail, train elections officials, and adequately educate the public before the November midterms,” the state officials wrote.

That would drain significant resources from overworked election offices at a busy campaign time, and leave voters “confused about which rules govern,” they added.

Support for states

Several friend-of-the-court briefs weighed in on the states’ side.

Scores of state and local election officials and the nonprofit voting rights group Center for Election Innovation wrote in one amicus brief that if the executive order is allowed to proceed, it would put them in the “untenable position” of updating their mail-voting procedures in the midst of primaries and just weeks before a general election.

And Democratic campaign groups said the order was plainly unconstitutional and rejected the administration’s argument, saying it “makes little sense.”

In part, the administration argued the district court injunction caused irreparable harm because the administration was running out of time to implement the policy before the midterms, attorney Marc Elias wrote for the Democratic National Committee, three campaign groups and the Democratic leaders of each chamber of Congress.

“When the President launches an unconstitutional seizure of sensitive election powers during an election year, he may not avoid an injunction by insisting he is in a rush,” Elias wrote.

Jacob Fischler covers federal policy and helps direct national coverage as deputy Washington bureau chief for States Newsroom. Based in Oregon, he focuses on Western issues. His coverage areas include climate, energy development, public lands and infrastructure.

See you soon

I hope you found it thought provoking. If so, please feel free to share it with friends.

Our democracy as we’ve known it for 250 years is at risk. To save it, we will need a groundswell of support from voters in the coming midterm election.

The purpose of this newsletter—and the accompanying Tropic Press website—is to encourage that engagement through original reporting and commentary as well as shared stories such as today’s.

Currently, Tropic Press reaches more than 700,000 subscribers in Florida and elsewhere, which is great, but there are literally millions of Florida Democrats and independents we are not reaching yet.

You can help spread the word.

Please like this post. Comment if you are so inclined. But, please, also take a moment to share it with people you know.

With mid-term elections on the horizon, the more people we reach, the more effective we can be in helping turn our state and this country around. You can play a vital role in that effort.

Thanks.

J.C. Bruce

Corruption by Any Other Name (Part II)

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 10:02:45 GMT

Courtesy of WUSF

By Barrington Salmon

In announcing the closure of the Everglades immigration detention center known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said the notorious facility — denounced as inhumane by civil rights groups — was always meant to be only temporary until more permanent detention centers could be secured, and federal officials now have that capacity.

“Alligator Alcatraz fulfilled the role that it was designed to serve,” DeSantis said. “Today it now has zero detainees. It has helped remove many, many dangerous people from the street and get them out of not only the state of Florida, but the United States of America.”

DeSantis said he was proud of what his administration had accomplished.

“We stood this up,” he said. “We surged critical resources. We built critical infrastructure. We were able to manage very complex operations, and we were able to execute the mission when called upon efficiently.”

These comments are vintage DeSantis, a staged response to his deliberately inhumane decisions as he tries to save face. He may tout efficiency, but despite being open for less than a year, Alligator Alcatraz will likely turn out to be the single most expensive immigration detention center in the history of the United States, critics assert.

CBS News Miami reports that financial analyses by its journalists indicate that operating the detention camp in the Everglades and Baker County cost as much as $3,571 per detainee each day, more than 20 times the national average. Critics have decried these massive, no-bid contracts, which drew more than $1 billion in taxpayer dollars away from essential state health, food security, and housing programs.

A recent Miami Herald investigation estimates that while misusing more than $1 billion on the detention camps, he guided taxpayers’ dollars to between 55 and 83 companies owned or operated by political allies, friends, and donors.

Over a year, DeSantis repeatedly dipped into Florida’s Emergency Preparedness and Response Fund — described by Democratic and other critics as a slush fund — to finance his anti-immigrant operation, circumventing regular channels and ignoring checks and balances.

Since 2023, DeSantis manipulated the process by waiving more than 24 state laws and regulations and extending the 60-day emergency more than 20 times. All to pave the way to erect “Alligator Alcatraz,” the detention camp on land sacred to the Miccosukee Tribe. Critics are deeply concerned that there has been no accountability to the legislature or the public and everything was conducted in secret.

Human cost

DeSantis’ vanity project came at a tremendous human cost. He boasts that his agents have seized almost 22,000 undocumented immigrants. Hundreds disappeared into the detention network, all dehumanized and mistreated.

Amnesty International paints pictures of cruelty and despair. Human beings forced to endure calamitous living conditions: trapped in cages; no AC in sweltering heat; overflowing toilets; and routine flooding during severe weather.

When it comes to the public’s money, DeSantis and most of those in the political class act as if the supply is infinite and that he has the right to use it for projects that harm the very people they purport to serve.

Sea change

Also of widespread concern is DeSantis’s use of taxpayers’ money to subvert higher education while enriching his MAGA buddies, as well as the manner in which he has hijacked higher education.

“This is a conservative capture of Florida’s public higher education,” said Robert Cassanello, a University of Central Florida history professor who is president of the United Faculty of Florida union. “It’s all ideological, and politically driven.”

As the Florida Tributary’s Michael Vasquez reports, DeSantis has used an army of loyalists to build a conservative higher-ed empire.

“With only a year left in office, Gov. Ron DeSantis has a limited window of time to wield power in Tallahassee. But on college campuses across Florida, DeSantis continues to expand his army of political loyalists — both college presidents and university trustees, who are poised to dominate for many years to come, no matter who is elected governor in 2026,” Vasquez wrote.

“As a result, higher education could become DeSantis’ enduring political legacy. And the governor’s final year in office will provide still more opportunities to push academia in a conservative direction.

Vasquez reports that DeSantis’ hijack is “intertwined with the conservative Heritage Foundation … which authored the controversial Project 2025 blueprint to guide the Trump administration’s efforts to reshape Washington.”

“With President Donald Trump term limited as well, aligning with Heritage could benefit DeSantis politically in the future,” Vasquez explained. “This Heritage-inspired sea change has outraged alumni and the communities surrounding Florida’s college campuses, some of whom view DeSantis’ allies as interlopers — many of the leaders DeSantis has installed have no previous connections to the schools they now run, limited experience in higher education, or live out of state. Those limitations have not stopped these new leaders from burrowing deep into the universities’ affairs, according to public records obtained by The Tributary, from micro-managing the materials presented in individual classrooms to replacing signs on bathrooms.”

Well-placed allies

Guided by the Heritage Foundation, DeSantis, Christopher Rufo, and a coterie of far-right allies on the boards of trustees and elsewhere in the higher education firmament have engineered the changes.

DeSantis has forced out progressive and forward-thinking university presidents and replaced them with men and women carrying the anti-Black, anti-woman, anti-LGBTQ+ banner. They willingly manipulate curricula, erase Black history, dismantle DEI and affirmative action programs, and impose a cold, sterile, far-right conservative syllabus across campuses.

Meanwhile, allies on trustee boards engineered exorbitant paydays for each president installed at public state universities.

The takeover began when DeSantis and his allies dismantled New College of Florida. Since 2023, former House Speaker and close DeSantis ally Richard Corcoran has run the Sarasota university. His base salary is $699,000, while his total annual compensation frequently exceeds $1.2 million, including perks like an $84,000 housing stipend, a $12,000 car allowance, and lucrative performance/retention bonuses.

In February, he received a $200,000 bonus performance award for the third year in a row, and that was followed by another $600,000 bonus days later for an “accrued retention payment” for continuing “uninterrupted service” for the past three years.

He is feasting at the public trough despite New College having a student population of fewer than 700.

Former Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nuñez was named sole finalist during the search for president of Florida International University. She’d served as interim and was voted in as permanent last summer. Nuñez has an annual base salary of $925,000 as part of her five-year contract and she is eligible to receive annual performance bonuses of up to $400,000.

Former Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. was ensconced as president of the University of West Florida with a lavish total annual compensation package of $946,040. This includes a $674,000 base salary, up to $107,840 in annual performance-based incentives, a $60,000 housing allowance, a $14,000 car allowance, and an $89,000 retirement supplement.

As has become commonplace in this process, Diaz was approved in a single-candidate competition — despite clear rules intended to require “more than two” finalists for trustees to consider.

Diaz has been a chief architect of the state’s retooling of public higher education with support from both DeSantis and members of the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Phoenix columnist Diane Roberts captures the greed with which these people operate.

UF trustees chair Mori Hosseini, a real estate magnate, rules the University of Florida the way DeSantis has operated in the Sunshine State, she writes: “No part of the university is free from his influence. He pushed UF’s distinguished College of Medicine to hire the state’s science-challenged surgeon general. Now UF pays Dr. Joseph Ladapo more than $300,000 per year — not that he does anything so pedestrian as actually teach classes.”

Few of those in DeSantis’ orbit aren’t enjoying exorbitant paychecks at the public’s expense, Roberts added.

“A trustee who hasn’t been identified had a hand in arranging an adjunct gig at UF’s law school for Florida’s attorney general [James Uthmeier]. The average pay for an adjunct professor is between $3,000-$7,000 per course. Uthmeier’s getting $100,000 for two hours of instruction per week.

“The AG doesn’t see the problem.”

Uthmeier recently staged an event to announce a statewide audit: He wants to “combat public corruption” and root out “bribes, kickbacks, conflicts of interest, evidence of money being spent on special interests, personal interests, personal gain,” Roberts wrote.

Critics have not taken all this lying down. Students, faculty and labor unions have fought back against the corruption of the process, several have filed lawsuits, but DeSantis and crew have sidelined or ignored detractors and continued on their merry way.

The profound hostility that Florida’s politicians have towards universities and their insistence on using ideological purity tests to choose their leaders not only “makes Florida look stupid,” as Roberts points out, but it is also jeopardizing the futures of the next generation.

See you soon

I hope you found it thought provoking. If so, please feel free to share it with friends.

Our democracy as we’ve known it for 250 years is at risk. To save it, we will need a groundswell of support from voters in the coming midterm election.

The purpose of this newsletter—and the accompanying Tropic Press website—is to encourage that engagement through original reporting and commentary as well as shared stories such as today’s.

Currently, Tropic Press reaches more than 700,000 subscribers in Florida and elsewhere, which is great, but there are literally millions of Florida Democrats and independents we are not reaching yet.

You can help spread the word.

Please like this post. Comment if you are so inclined. But, please, also take a moment to share it with people you know.

With mid-term elections on the horizon, the more people we reach, the more effective we can be in helping turn our state and this country around. You can play a vital role in that effort.

Thanks.

J.C. Bruce

Today’s sponsor: The Strange Files

Alexander Strange wants to get to Florida in the worst way. So, he arrives in a coffin. Chilling in its own right but made more so by the prediction of a New Orleans soothsayer that he soon will face death. Little does he know how true that will be. But he’ll find out soon enough at the Devil’s Millhopper.

Book Two of the Strange Files series takes our favorite weird news reporter on a bizarre scavenger hunt all over the Gunshine State. Join him in his journey here:

Tropic Press Books

Corruption by Any Other Name (Part I)

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 10:02:38 GMT

Courtesy WUSF

By Barrington Salmon

“Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.” – Margaret Atwood

Republicans have long held a stranglehold on the political levers of power in Florida. Yet, in one of the surest signs of hubris, the longer they’ve controlled the direction of state politics, the more they’ve demonstrated the belief that only they have the prudence, political instincts, or sagacity to properly run the state.

In almost three decades of one-party rule, Florida has become a swamp where haughty men and women strut in costumes of arrogance and condescension, foisting partisan political beliefs on the majority; stuffing their pockets and those of their wealthy, connected friends; and protecting the well-heeled while disregarding the will of the people.

“The effects of decades of Republican rule in Florida — accelerated by a legislative supermajority under Gov. Ron DeSantis — have transformed the state into a national laboratory for conservative governance, the Hill reports. “This approach has led to starkly polarized outcomes, marked by significant economic and population growth on one side, and intense legal, cultural, and educational battles on the other.”

And Florida is the worse for it.

DeSantis is the tip of the spear. He has run roughshod over anyone standing in his way — using political muscle to force unpopular conservative policies into law while trying to intimidate those who oppose or criticize him. He has targeted educators, activists, labor unions, political and corporate leaders, young people, Democrats, civil and human rights advocates, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. DeSantis has not been above using cops, the courts, and compliant state employees to achieve his ends.

The governor — now at the tail end of his second term — has glorified culture wars, injecting a toxic stew of anger, resentment, and anti-immigrant bias into the political discourse. He has tried to upend as much of the state’s political infrastructure as possible and reshape it into what he hopes becomes a permanent far-right footprint.

At a time when Floridians are being hammered by inflation — driven in large part by the unprovoked U.S. attack on Iran — runaway rents, and crushing insurance costs, if you can get any, DeSantis and his administration have been on a taxpayer-supported spending spree. They have been appallingly cavalier with taxpayers’ money.

While trying to project himself as the nation’s immigrant crusader, DeSantis has squandered more than $1 billion on immigration detention camps he set up in Florida.

A recent Miami Herald investigation estimates that he misused more than $990 million on these facilities, guiding taxpayers’ dollars to between 55 and 83 companies owned or operated by his political allies, friends, and donors.

Checks and balances

Over the course of a year, DeSantis used the state’s Emergency Preparedness and Response Fund — intended to support natural disaster relief — to pay for his anti-immigrant operation. He circumvented regular channels, ignored or removed checks and balances, and awarded contracts in a no-bid process. Since 2023, DeSantis waived more than 24 state laws and regulations and extended a 60-day emergency to justify access to the emergency fund more than 20 times.

All to pave the way to erect “Alligator Alcatraz,” the detention camp in the Everglades on land sacred to the Miccosukee Tribe. Critics are deeply concerned that there has been no accountability to the Legislature or the public.

Following a tour of the Everglades facility, Democratic U.S. Rep. Maxwell Frost called it a project to “funnel our taxpayer money to corporations,” labelling the over-the-top immigration expenses as an “almost criminal use” of tax dollars while Floridians “struggle to afford housing, healthcare, and insurance.”

Jeff Brandes agreed. “State leaders are going to spin it as a success, of course, but it’s all spin. Nobody can say that taxpayer money was well spent,” said Brandes, a former Republican state lawmaker who now leads the nonpartisan Florida Policy Project.

The Miami Herald found that the state signed off on $210 million to three companies affiliated with the Miami-based CDR Cos., whose executives, Carlos Duart and Tina Vidal-Duart, are DeSantis allies and donors to his failed presidential bid. Duart is a DeSantis appointee to Florida International University’s Board of Trustees and Vidal-Duart is a former board member of the Hope Florida Foundation, the embattled charity created in support of Casey DeSantis’ anti-welfare initiative.

Most of the money directed to CDR was for medical facilities and “site prep” at Alligator Alcatraz, according to contracts. Another $100 million was to a new joint venture CDR formed with the private prison company GEO Group late last year to provide staffing for “Deportation Depot,” in Baker County. Other contracts for the sites include $112 million to IRG Global Management, $83 million to Garner Environmental Services, and $79 million to GardaWorld, a company that donated $5,000 to a political committee backing DeSantis’ presidential run.

None of these dozens of contracts were negotiated through a competitive bidding process to ensure the state was getting the best deal.

‘Necessity’

DeSantis has argued that the state-run detention centers were crucial to carrying out Donald Trump’s mass deportation plans.

“I’m doing it out of necessity. I’m not doing it because I just think we should just do it for a press release. We had nowhere else to put these folks. [The Department of Homeland Security] did not have any place to put them. Now they’ve had [a] place to put them and that’s been very, very positive.”

But some experts say the cost of DeSantis’ detention project is much higher than the federally operated immigration detention facilities, and largely on Florida taxpayers’ dime.

Emergency managers told FEMA that it would take $1.7 billion — enough to give every teacher in Florida a $6,000 bonus — to operate both facilities. Since 2022, the Legislature has injected $4.8 billion into the emergency fund. Now the fund’s coffers have dwindled to $6.9 million. During the last legislative session, Republicans allowed the Legislature to add an extra $250 million into the account this fiscal year.

The Phoenix reports that, in total, about $405 million was spent on immigration through the first half of the year alone — considerably more than in previous years, when the total was $49 million. Most of the money went to private contractors through 83 contracts, including multimillion-dollar deals with companies providing toilets, emergency management, and environmental services.

Records show that emergency staff working around the clock spent at least $166,000 on food at more than 50 restaurants and nearly $717,000 on travel, including private jets and hotel stays. Officials say the food was for emergency staff and one expensive jet flight was described as rescuing Floridians in Israel. In addition, DeSantis and the state used the emergency fund to shell out more than $1.7 million to outside law firms fighting lawsuits over environmental rules and detainees’ rights at immigration facilities. If the feds opt not to reimburse Florida, taxpayers will likely be stuck with the bill.

Democratic Senate Leader Lori Berman of Boca Raton offered a proposal to restrict how much the governor’s agencies could pull from the trust but it failed along party lines, the Phoenix’s Liv Caputo reports. “The amendment said that if the governor wants to repeatedly call for the use of emergency funds for anything other than a natural disaster, the Legislature’s joint budget commission would have to approve it. That’s a House-Senate panel that reviews interim spending requests,” Caputo wrote.

“I support the right of the governor to use emergency trust fund dollars to protect our state from hurricanes, natural disasters, and real emergencies,” Democratic Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith of Orlando said. “But that’s not what we have seen. We don’t have the appropriate guardrails on the emergency trust fund. And as a result, the spending has been off the rails.”

As long as Republicans control supermajorities in both legislative chambers, they can ignore calls for accountability and moderation. DeSantis and allied lawmakers and have swatted away every attempt by Democrats to erect guardrails.

Power has gone to the heads of MAGA Republicans in Florida, who have completely embraced Florida’s flirtation with tyranny. DeSantis’ behavior signals America’s descent into a hellish existence. There is no fig leaf, no pretense of civil liberties or due process. Alligator Alcatraz is closing, but detention camps aren’t going away. They are a national multi-billion-dollar enterprise targeting Black and brown people.

For now.

Human costs

DeSantis has never cared about the human cost as detailed by detainees and immigration advocates: the chain link cages, lack of air conditioning, abysmal physical conditions, worms in the food, toilets that didn’t flush, floors flooded with fecal waste, mosquitoes and other insects everywhere.

What is even more infuriating is that after the devastating harm inflicted on largely innocent immigrants, DeSantis announced on June 25 that the administration was closing down the facility because it “had served its purpose.” He claims that the detention center, opened in July 2025, was always only meant to be temporary.

Now, undocumented immigrants and the occasional citizen will be kidnapped by the state and deposited in one of the vast network of detention centers that the Department of Homeland Security and ICE are setting up.

God help us all.

Tomorrow: Corruption by Another Name (Part II)

See you soon

I’m on a two-week sabbatical but will be back before the Florida primary election. In the meantime, I hope to use this space to share articles of interest from guest contributors from time to time, such as today’s piece by Barrington Salmon.

I hope you found it thought-provoking. If so, please feel free to share it with friends.

Our democracy as we’ve known it for 250 years is at risk. To save it, we will need a groundswell of support from voters in the coming midterm election.

The purpose of this newsletter—and the accompanying Tropic Press website—is to encourage that engagement through original reporting and commentary as well as shared stories such as today’s.

Currently, Tropic Press reaches more than 700,000 subscribers in Florida and elsewhere, which is great, but there are literally millions of Florida Democrats and independents we are not reaching yet.

You can help spread the word.

Please like this post. Comment if you are so inclined. But, please, also take a moment to share it with people you know.

With mid-term elections on the horizon, the more people we reach, the more effective we can be in helping turn our state and this country around. You can play a vital role in that effort.

Thanks.

J.C. Bruce

Today’s sponsor: The Strange Files

Book Two of the Strange Files series takes our favorite weird news reporter on a bizarre scavenger hunt all over the Gunshine State. Join him in his journey here:

Tropic Press Books

The Florida property tax blast radius nobody is talking about--but we should

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 10:03:44 GMT

By Jeff Brandes

Everyone is talking about property taxes. Almost nobody is talking about power.

That’s strange because power, not taxes, is what this debate is really about. The sales pitch is simple: property taxes are unpopular, homeowners are angry, government has grown, and cutting tax bills will provide relief. Who doesn’t like that? But there is a difference between cutting taxes and changing who controls government. Florida is not debating a tax cut. Florida is debating a fundamental redesign of how local government is financed.

For more than half a century, Florida has embraced home rule. The idea was simple: Local communities should make local decisions. If a city council spends too much, voters can replace it. If a county commission raises taxes, voters can replace it. The people making spending decisions are accountable to the people paying the bills. That system is imperfect, but it is transparent. If your local government fails, you know exactly where to direct your frustration and exactly who to vote against.

Now imagine a different system. Imagine counties and cities that can no longer fund themselves. Imagine local officials traveling to Tallahassee not to seek a grant for a new project, but to keep deputies on patrol, firefighters in stations, and ambulances on the road. At that point, who is really running local government? The answer is not the county commission. The answer is not the city council.

The answer is whoever controls the money.

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That is the part nobody wants to discuss. Property taxes are not simply a revenue source. They are the mechanism that allows local governments to govern themselves. Remove enough of that revenue and local governments do not disappear. They become dependent. And dependency changes behavior. A business dependent on one customer changes its behavior. A nonprofit dependent on one donor changes its behavior. A county dependent on Tallahassee changes its behavior. The money moves. The incentives move. The accountability moves. And eventually, the power moves.

There is an irony here that should give conservatives pause. A proposal intended to shrink government could ultimately centralize it. When counties and cities become financially dependent on Tallahassee, the governor effectively becomes the mayor of communities he was never elected to run. Imagine a future governor deciding which counties receive funding for deputies, which cities receive support for fire services, and which communities must wait. Local government becomes less local. Home rule becomes a slogan instead of a governing principle.

Supporters frame this debate as a battle between taxpayers and government. That is the wrong framework. The real question is whether Florida wants independent local governments or dependent local governments. Because independent local government means paying your own bills.

The numbers involved are staggering. Property taxes generate tens of billions of dollars each year for local governments. State economists have modeled scenarios creating roughly an $18.3 billion hole. Municipal governments receive approximately 43 percent of their general fund revenue from property taxes. Property taxes account for roughly 79 percent of municipal tax revenue. Those are not trimming-around-the-edges numbers. Those are rebuild-the-engine-while-the-plane-is-flying numbers. Yet much of the public discussion proceeds as though this is simply a tax cut. It isn’t. It is one of the largest transfers of financial responsibility in modern Florida history.

Maybe it works. Maybe local governments become dramatically more efficient. Maybe new revenue sources emerge. Maybe the state permanently assumes a larger role. But if that’s the plan, let’s be honest enough to say so. What we should not do is pretend the consequences stop at the property tax bill.

State economists are already projecting structural deficits beginning in fiscal year 2027-28 and growing in the years that follow. If Florida itself is heading toward tighter budgets, is this really the moment to shift even greater responsibility for local government onto the state? Florida may be creating a future where local governments are increasingly dependent on a state government that is itself under growing fiscal pressure.

Then there are the people largely missing from this conversation. Nearly one-third of Floridians rent their homes. If local governments replace property taxes with higher fees, assessments, utility taxes, sales taxes, or state transfers, renters will still pay. Businesses will still pay. Consumers will still pay. The bill does not disappear. It changes addresses.

Milton Friedman often reminded people that government has no money of its own. Every dollar government spends comes from somebody else. That remains true today. The question is not whether Floridians will pay for local government. The question is how. And more importantly, who will decide.

That is the blast radius nobody is talking about.

Because once the dust settles, Floridians may discover they did not merely change a tax system. They changed the balance of power between local communities and the state itself. And unlike a tax bill, that is a change that will be far harder to reverse.

Jeff Brandes is President of the Florida Policy Project, a nonpartisan public policy research organization focused on Florida’s biggest challenges, including affordability, housing, transportation, and insurance. He served for 12 years in the Florida Legislature, including service in both the Florida House and Senate.

This article originally appeared in Florida Trident and is republished here with their permission. The Trident is an investigative news outlet focusing on government accountability and transparency across Florida. It is a publication of the Florida Center for Government Accountability. You can support this work by donating here:

Please share this post

Our democracy as we’ve known it for 250 years is at risk. To save it, we will need a groundswell of support from voters in the coming midterm election.

The purpose of this newsletter—and the accompanying Tropic Press website—is to encourage that engagement through original reporting and commentary and shared stories such as today’s article first published in Florida Trident.

Currently, Tropic Press is reaching more than 700,000 subscribers in Florida and elsewhere, which is great, but there are literally millions of Florida Democrats and independents we are not reaching yet.

You can help spread the word.

Please like this post. Comment if you are so inclined. But, please, also take a moment to share it with people you know.

With mid-term elections on the horizon, the more people we reach, the more effective we can be in helping turn our state and this country around. You can play a vital role in that effort.

Thanks.

J.C. Bruce