A new investigation reveals Florida used millions of taxpayer dollars to fund campaigns against amendments during the 2024 election.
The report comes as a Leon County grand jury is considering whether Gov. Ron DeSantis' administration diverted $10 million from a Medicaid settlement through a charity known as Hope Florida.
But the Tampa Bay Times and Miami Herald investigation reveals the state used much more — at least $36.2 million.
This included the money from Hope Florida. The funds were supposed to go to a variety of things, like helping kids in foster care and fighting opioid addiction.
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The investigation said the administration used this money to "influence the outcome of the election" in a fight against amendments that received a majority of the votes but failed to reach the 60% needed to pass. Amendment 3 would have legalized recreational marijuana and Amendment 4 would have enshrined abortion rights.
According to the report, the money was used to pay political consultants, lawyers and advertisements. DeSantis' office maintains its efforts were "public service announcements" to educate the public.
On "Florida Matters Live & Local," Times-Herald Tallahassee bureau reporter Alexandra Glorioso and Times reporter Justin Garcia gave more details about their investigation and whether the administration's actions were a violation of state law.
The interview below was edited for clarity and brevity.
What did you find out, and what's at stake here?
GLORIOSO: In our latest story, we discovered that the DeSantis administration's spending on Amendments 3 and 4 went beyond the $10 million that was diverted from the Medicaid settlement last year and included $21.2 million of state agency spending through an intricate web of financial transactions.
What was this taxpayer money initially allocated for?
GARCIA: It was allocated mostly from health care funds and also from child welfare funds for children who needed protection in the foster care system. And most of it ended up going to ads, consultants, and the overall campaigns against Amendments 3 and 4 last year.
GLORIOSO: Regarding child welfare, they diverted $1.1 million from a federal grant trust fund, and it's essentially supposed to help children stay in their homes, stay with their families, stay with their parents. It's part of the Department of Children and Families' family safety and preservation services program.
Most of the money in that fund goes to organizations that do just that. They help kids stay with their parents. They provide counseling and other programs that parents need in order to safely keep their kids at home.
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Regarding the other money that we found ... $970,000 came from a community health program in the Department of Health. This was from a grant-and-aids trust fund, the research component of that trust. And other programs that were supposed to be funded ... include $185,000 per clinic to help children learn to feed and swallow, [and] $500,000 on a Tampa Bay program aimed at reducing emergency room visits.
We're not saying that they paid for the campaign from that money that was supposed to go to those two programs, but it shows the administration's priorities. Lawmakers wanted to fund those programs from the same grants-and-aids fund in the community public health program, but the governor vetoed those programs and also paid for a vendor to campaign out of that fund.
Would this be a violation of state law?
GARCIA: The experts we talked to and the lawmakers we spoke with were kind of mixed on that.
The governor and the administration do have discretion on how they spend state funds, but several people saw it as bending procurement laws, and also as kind of just morally and ethically bankrupt.
And as far as the total amount of money goes, we make a note toward the end of the story that this is likely an undercount of the total amount that was spent.
We were kind of conservative in our estimation, because we didn't include contracts that looked like they could have gone to the campaign. And so the amount we estimated could be less than what the state actually spent in total.
For the departments the money was taken out of, does that mean they had to cut certain things? Did it hurt these departments in a real way?
GARCIA: To be clear, we haven't got any kind of official response from any of these agencies.
As Alex broke down, it did take funds that could have gone to these services for needy Floridians, including children, but we reached out several times to these agencies, and they didn't respond.
Although after we've published the story, there have been some communications, people from these agencies just kind of defending the behavior — not denying it at all — but defending it.
Were you able to see any of these ads and compare them to what could be a PSA versus a campaign against something?
GLORIOSO: We discovered they are not public service announcements because public service announcements are free. And the campaign paid for these ads. That's why so much money was spent toward them.
The distinction between what the DeSantis administration is calling the public service announcements and the political ads is that they just didn't have the call to action, but they had all of the context.
ALSO READ: Hope Florida: A timeline of how a DeSantis-backed state charity was accused of wrongdoing
They were part of the ecosystem, they were participating in the election, and it's a very kind of a Wild West for advertising. There's very few rules, so that's why it's difficult to discern whether they really broke the law.
But experts that we talked to, who do ad buying and are involved in political ad buying, said that it looked to them like these so-called public service announcements were purchased to influence the outcome of an election.
GARCIA: It's also important to note that because they pass them off as public service announcements, they got four to one buying power. Meaning, they got four times the ads for one single purchase because they were billed as public service announcements.
But public service announcements are usually not anywhere tangentially political, right? Usually, it's about like wearing your safety belt or stop speeding.
Have you heard from anybody since your investigation came out?
GARCIA: There's been a lot of feedback, and politicians have been commenting on it publicly.
However, we haven't heard anything from the governor or his administration. Although I did point out earlier some communications people who work for these agencies have publicly been kind of just defending using that money for these campaigns.
GLORIOSO: The governor's administration has been pretty quiet, and so have both of the chambers, and that seems to largely be due to the grand jury trial that's going on right now.
That's into Hope Florida, our other reporting, and I think that most people are waiting for the results of that grand jury trial that's supposed to come out imminently.
You can listen to the full interview in the audio player above. This story was compiled from interviews conducted by Sky Lebron for "Florida Matters Live & Local." You can listen to the full episode here.
