DeSantis says Florida is ‘returning' $900 million to the feds. Not really.
'Almost a billion dollars of your taxpayer money saved,' Musk touted.
The claim was misleading. The money DeSantis said he was returning was for two federal programs that Florida never asked for in the first place. One of them was more than a year old.
Those details were left out of the governor's Friday night announcement on X, which was viewed 33 million times. In the post, DeSantis said that Florida was trying 'for years' to return money to the federal government, but President Joe Biden's administration 'couldn't even figure out how to accept it.'
'Today, I met with @elonmusk and the DOGE team, and we got this done in the same day,' DeSantis wrote, referring to President Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency.
DeSantis included a screenshot of the top half of a governor's office memo notifying the U.S. Treasury Department that Florida was 'formally returning $878,112,000.00 in taxpayer dollars.'
But the rest of the memo — with the details of what was being returned — was not released. His spokespeople did not respond to text messages or emails asking for the entire memo.
DeSantis' announcement caught the immediate interest of legislative leaders, who are actively crafting their proposed budget for the next fiscal year. Nearly $1 billion would be a significant hole that they would potentially have to patch up.
A spokesperson for Senate President Ben Albritton, R-Wauchula, said in a statement Monday that leaders asked DeSantis' office for the details Friday.
'This morning, we inquired again and learned that the $878 million was related to unspent federal drawdown authority for two programs, refugee resettlement and carbon reduction,' the spokesperson wrote. She noted that Senate officials had received the information over the phone and not in writing.
A copy of the memo obtained by the Times/Herald states that $320 million as part of Biden's carbon reduction program was 'formally rejected' by Florida's Department of Transportation in December 2023. The state 'has yet to receive confirmation' that funds have been withheld, the memo states.
Only $49 million of that was given to the state, according to the memo, and was being returned to the federal government through a wire transfer.
The money was part of an Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act program to help states reduce vehicle emissions. Florida's Department of Children and Families was also 'returning' the authority to spend $557,725,139 in federal dollars on 'refugee social service grant funding.' The federal Refugee Admissions Program resettles people in the United States who are unable to safely return to their home countries.
DeSantis was asked for the details Monday while campaigning in Idaho to pass an amendment to the U.S. Constitution requiring Congress to produce balanced budgets.
He said 'refugee money' was returned to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. And about $350 million was to go to the U.S. Department of Transportation for road projects that were attached to 'DEI and woke policies, which were totally contrary to our state's policy.'
'We had kind of led the fight against that stuff,' DeSantis said. 'Now, it's more fashionable to be against it.'
DeSantis has struggled to tie himself to Musk's DOGE efforts since the tech billionaire's team began taking an axe to federal government spending programs in the Trump administration. DeSantis announced in February that he was forming his own DOGE team to investigate waste in state government, but further details haven't been released.
State lawmakers have since been delving into spending by his agencies and grilling DeSantis officials over their findings.
'If the governor had really wanted to be DOGE, then the budget he submitted to us several months ago would have been DOGE,' Rep. Vicki Lopez, R-Miami, told reporters last week. 'What we are finding is the Legislature is actually doing the DOGE efforts.'
DeSantis also refused to return billions of dollars in federal COVID relief funding during the pandemic, despite Republicans including Sen. Rick Scott calling on states to do so.
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