Good news and bad news from the Florida Legislature as regular session ends
Commentary and news for thoughtful Floridians
The regular session of the state Legislature is over. Some truly horrible legislation—like restrictions on voter registration and renaming Palm Beach County’s airport after Donald Trump —passed. Others, like eliminating vaccination mandates, fell by the wayside, thankfully. Here’s a roundup, courtesy of the staff writers at Florida Phoenix, the non-profit news agency based in Tallahassee.
Florida’s 60-day regular session has ended — without a state budget and just 234 bills passed out of 1,896 filed.
That’s 12 percent.
Although lawmakers will return to Tallahassee in mid-April to hammer out dollar specifics for the 2026-2027 fiscal year — the budget is the only bill the Legislature is legally required to pass each year — signs of dysfunction between chambers were blatant from the beginning.
House Speaker Daniel Perez repeatedly expressed “frustrations” with his Senate counterpart, President Ben Albritton, lobbing shots at Gov. Ron DeSantis (“Whether the governor wants to be petulant and not shake the hand of a partner, that’s on him.”) The governor exacerbated the situation by consistently praising the Senate while putting down the House.
The legislative leaders, too, both Republicans, presided over the extended 105-day session last year. They’ll give up their posts following the November elections. DeSantis is in his final term.
“Everybody’s in their last year, everybody’s in their last weeks, and the big change there’s going to be next year is we’re not going to have the same people with the same grudges coming back to the same place to try to do the same things in the same way,” Sen. Don Gaetz, a Republican from Crestview and former Senate president, said.
“I think all of us can learn from a bad example. And the example is not the governor, or the speaker, or the president. The bad example is a polluted chemistry that does not appear to allow people to work together.”
DeSantis scored some wins with the passage of a state-level SAVE Act, an anti-teacher union bill, and the confirmation of two agency heads affiliated with the Hope Florida Foundation scandal. Other, flashier measures also passed, including renaming the Palm Beach airport the Donald J. Trump International Airport, naming a South Florida roadway “Charlie Kirk Memorial Avenue,” allowing the governor to deem certain organizations “domestic terrorist groups,” and light regulation of AI data centers.
But a priority for the governor, the “medical freedom” bill to repeal vaccine mandates for school children, died, when the House failed to consider the proposal. The Senate passed it anyway.
Speaker Perez saw some of his priority bills pass, including a proposal that increases the amount of money people who are injured by government agencies can receive in compensation. It’s been one of the most hotly contested bills in the Capitol for the past three years.
A quick look at what failed this session
DeSantis made headlines when he proposed eliminating homestead property taxes. And while he spoke about it incessantly leading up to the 2026 session, the governor said the issue should be addressed during a special session. Worth noting though: He never shared any plan to eliminate the taxes.
Undeterred, the House passed a joint resolution that put in motion a possible constitutional amendment that would eliminate non-school related property taxes for homesteaded properties beginning on Jan. 1, 2027. The Senate never proposed or even considered a companion measure.
OTHER PRIORITIES
There was no rebirth this session for Albritton’s Rural Renaissance proposal. This carry-over from the 2025 session never received House consideration.
Albritton on Friday acknowledged, “Sure I wish it had made it.” He continued: “What I learned in this process, for various reason, that was a big piece of legislation and it had a lot of stuff. Sometimes it just takes time, right?”
Conversely, the Senate never considered Perez’s priority to revamp Florida’s wrongful-death litigation landscape by eliminating the so-called “free kill” provision that bans parents of single, childless, adult children aged 25 and older from filing medical malpractice suits. The bill also would have allowed adult children to file wrongful death claims for single parents who died from medical malpractice. DeSantis vetoed identical legislation in 2025.
Along those same lines, bills that would have granted personhood to fetuses and allow would-be parents to sue for wrongful death died too.
HEALTH
Omnibus Medicaid bills meant to implement provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBA) fell casualty to the overall ill will. The bills would have gone beyond what federal law requires, though.
Both bills proposed mandatory Supplemental Nutrition and Assistance employment and training requirements for people up to age 65, which is not required by federal law. And the Senate, working with the DeSantis administration, moved to place Medicaid work requirements on about 111,000 poor, elderly, and disabled people who aren’t required under the OBBA to work.
The House bill also proposed defunding Planned Parenthood, which is allowable under federal law. The Senate bill did not.
EDUCATION
Despite a $4 billion accounting error revealed in a state audit, the Legislature did not pass Gaetz’s bill to increase accountability in the universal school voucher program.
A bill requiring teachers to take an oath to the Florida and U.S. constitutions and to non-partisanship was temporarily postponed in advance of its first Senate committee hearing in the second week of session and never seen again.
Both chambers entertained putting a constitutional amendment on the ballot to reaffirm statutory commitments to freedom of religious expression in schools, but the Senate never took it up on the floor after the House passed it.
The House passed a provision that would have defined how school library materials may be “harmful to minors,” but the Senate didn’t budge, killing the measure for a second consecutive year.
What did pass this session?
There’s usually an unexpected issue that emerges during legislative sessions. This year, it was the AIDS Drug Assistance Program, which faces a deficit of as much as $120 million.
To prevent the Department of Health from eliminating as many as 16,000 people from the program, which it moved to do without advising lawmakers, the Legislature agreed to appropriate nearly $31 million to keep the agency from making cuts through June 30.
The Legislature gave final approval to Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson’s legislative wish list, also known as the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services bill.
Following an involved committee path in each chamber, the most controversial provision, allowing lawsuits for food libel, was amended out before final passage.
That doesn’t mean the bill is without controversy; it still includes a provision allowing sales of state conservation lands for agriculture and language addressing commercial drivers licenses and door-to-door sales.
NET ZERO
The chambers were able to come together to pass legislation banning government entities from enacting, enforcing, or instituting by resolution, ordinance, rule, code, or policy any net zero policies to reduce greenhouse emissions. The emissions are the primary driver of climate change.
The measure follows a 2024 bill declaring that the state no longer be required to consider climate change when crafting energy policy.
DEI
The Legislature approved legislation to ban local governments from funding, promoting, or taking official actions related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
The bill says locally elected officials who violate the ban on DEI “commit” misfeasance or malfeasance in office. If signed into law as expected, the bill would allow the governor to remove local government officials from office if they violate the law. It allows a resident to sue a local government official for violating the law. If successful, the resident could recoup their attorneys’ fees.
Florida Phoenix staff writers Liv Caputo, Mitch Perry, Christine Sexton, and Jay Waagmeester contributed to this story, which was republished here on Tropic Press with permission of Florida Phoenix.
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:
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A couple of comments. First, I hope that when Trump is gone the original name of the Palm Beach airport can be restored as well as what ever name the now “Charlie Kirk Memorial Avenue,” was called.
Allowing the governor to deem certain organizations “domestic terrorist groups,” is dangerous. Just what are the guidelines for such a designation?
Finally I'm concerned about this so-called light regulation of AI data centers and whether that means that we will somehow see an increase in our utility bills to keep these centers operational. I'm also concerned about how much of our dwindling natural environment will be destroyed to build these large footprint facilities.
I like your stuff and appreciate the florida reporting, but I'm really turned off by the AI imagery in the thumbnails