Florida has finally figured out how to give back money it didn’t want to appropriate during the Joe Biden administration.
“For years, Florida has been trying to return federal funds to the federal government due to the ideological strings attached by the Biden Administration—but they couldn’t even figure out how to accept it. Today, I met with Elon Musk and the DOGE team, and we got this done in the same day. Other states should follow Florida in supporting DOGE’s efforts,” posted Gov. Ron DeSantis to Musk’s X on Friday.
More than $848 million is headed back to Washington, according to a letter from the Governor.
The Governor’s recent claims that the previous administration couldn’t figure out how to take money differ from what he was saying when Biden was in office, when his predecessor pressed him and others to send the money back. If DeSantis asked Scott how that should be done, it was never publicized.
In 2022, U.S. Sen. Rick Scott was asked about DeSantis continuing to “deploy” COVID-19 relief funds for priorities not related to the pandemic. Scott said leaders with extra funds should return them to defray the federal debt.
“What every responsible state and local official should do is they should say ‘Hey, I’m going to send that money back. We need to pay down this $30 trillion worth of debt.’ We can’t waste money,” Scott said.
“If there’s something that we needed to do to deal with the COVID crisis, I get it,” Scott added. “But you’re sending money to states that they can spend basically any way they want, or to local governments. It makes no sense. Somebody’s going to pay that money back.”
Scott offered a similar appeal in 2021: “Send it back! We’re all American citizens. Don’t waste the money,” the Naples Republican urged on America’s Newsroom.
When rolling out the $116 million Civic Literacy Excellence Initiative in 2021 in Scott’s hometown of Naples, DeSantis suggested he had complete discretion on how to allocate the federal pot.
“We got this money dumped,” DeSantis said in March 2021. “I could have just spent it and said it was emergency spending.”
The Governor took issue with the funding formula, suggesting it has served as “a bailout for blue states, poorly managed states.” He also has described the allocation process as “Washington at its worst.” And he said before running for President that there was no point in giving the overage back to the federal government.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” said DeSantis, as reported by POLITICO Florida. “If Florida were to send the money back, (Treasury Secretary Janet) Yellen is going to send it to Illinois, California, New York or New Jersey. I don’t think that would make sense for Floridians — for us to be giving even more money to the blue states.”
The money returned is just a fraction of what the Biden administration sent to Florida.
Billions of dollars worth of that cash went to the Sunshine State, and the Governor made no moves to return it to the federal government.
The office of Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis noted that “the Coronavirus Relief Fund … provided $150 billion in direct assistance across the nation to State, territorial, local and Tribal governments.”
“Of this amount, the State of Florida was allocated $8.4 billion: $5.86 billion was deposited into the State Treasury as General Revenue and approximately $2.47 billion was allocated to 12 of the largest counties directly by the U.S. Treasury,” the CFO office noted. Those large counties include Brevard, Broward, Hillsborough, Duval, Lee, Miami-Dade, Orange, Palm Beach, Pasco, Pinellas, Polk and Volusia counties.
The Florida Housing Finance Corporation received $250 million. Smaller Florida counties got $1.137 billion from the CARES Act as well.
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