FL Senate 2025

It’s been a wild session for the Florida Senate and House this year.

While I had initially started compiling a list of important bills to keep an eye on, things quickly devolved once the session began. Of the 974 Senate bills that were proposed this session only 205 total bills between the two chambers have been ordered enrolled. Everything else has either been stalled in committee, laid on table, or simply introduced and never moved after that.

Considering how past sessions have gone, this is jarring to say the least of it.

So, what happened?

To put it plainly, the governor diverted funds. He diverted them so hard and straight into his wife’s charity account. The money was then used on an ad campaign during the 2024 elections.

The timeline and parties involved paint a pretty clear picture of how things went down. A brief overview:

– The Department of Children and Families (DCF) reached a settlement with Medicaid provider Centene Corp for overpayment of $67 million. $10 million of this goes to the Hope Florida Foundation – Casey DeSantis’ direct support organization that uses private donations to fund Hope Florida. All $67 million should have been returned to the Agency for Healthcare Administration (AHCA) as they are the agency responsible for Medicare and Medicaid payouts.

– This $10 million was then split to two different groups: Save Our Society from Drugs and Secure Florida’s Future – both organizations seek to use the money to try and defeat Amendment 3 during the 2024 election season. Amendment 3 was the recreational marijuana referendum, which unfortunately did not meet the 60% majority vote required for adoption.

– The Miami Herald and Tampa Bay Times reports on the issue first and a probe is opened up mid-session. Once this is revealed, an investigation begins and this eats up the rest of the session. Senators and Representatives from both sides of the aisle agree to not pass anything related to the budget, while actively stymieing the passage of any laws that DeSantis had hoped to get through this session.

– With no budget set for fiscal year 2025, the Florida Congress will be entering special session in the coming days to hopefully agree upon a budget. They have until July 1 to pass a budget, send it to the Governor for line-item vetoes, and then either accept the results or overturn those vetoes with a two-thirds majority vote in both chambers. It will be a costly and lengthy battle that we can only hope resolves on time.

This isn’t to say that absolutely nothing was passed this session. As with any session, there were some positives and some negatives. I encourage you to take a look at the House of Representatives list of bills that were passed as I’ll only touch on a few here.

HB 1143 – Outlining factors that need to be considered before allowing drilling, exploration, or extraction of oil and gas. Prohibits those activities within a certain distance of a national estuarine research reserve and requires DEP to consider if natural resources of nearby bodies of water/shore areas are adequately protected from potential accident.

HB 255 – Requires law enforcement to post names of individuals who have violated specific animal cruelty provisions and sets out sentencing multipliers for aggravated animal cruelty offenses.

HB 549 – Requires all state agencies and instructional/library media to reflect the new federal designation of the “Gulf of Mexico” to the “Gulf of America”.

As some of the articles above have mentioned, these are not the worst or the best of the session. These are merely the ones that I found interesting while researching. Many of the bills that I had planned to present at the start of session did not make it into law or past committee.

Given the ongoing nature of this years legislative session, I will be back with updates when they’re available. Let’s hope that whatever stalemate between the Congress and the Governor can come to a resolution in favor of the hardworking state employees, and that swift legal action is taken against Hope Florida, the Governor, and those involved in the diverting of taxpayer funds.

Until then, stay safe and sane!