Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration diverted more than $35 million in taxpayer funds as part of its brazen agenda last year to defeat two ballot amendments he staunchly opposed, a Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times investigation has found.
Much of the state money was intended to assist needy Floridians, including children. Instead, it paid for political consultants, lawyers and thousands of advertisements that helped DeSantis and his supporters win at the ballot box, in amounts far greater than the diverted Hope Florida Medicaid funding that has ensnarled top administration officials and the governor’s wife in scandal this year.
The ads purchased with the diverted money blanketed TV, social media and radio stations in the weeks before the election. They defended Florida’s six-week abortion ban and made exaggerated claims about the dangers of marijuana. Along the way, the governor’s administration bent state spending laws and obscured millions in government spending, records and interviews show.
The findings shed new light on the DeSantis administration’s marshaling of state resources to finance his fight against political causes supported by a majority of Florida voters. Amendment 3 would have legalized recreational marijuana. Amendment 4 would have overturned the six-week abortion ban pushed by DeSantis. Both fell just short of the 60% needed to pass.
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The most visible cog in his campaign — the use of the state’s Hope Florida charity — is the subject of a grand jury investigation. In that case, nearly $10 million from a Medicaid settlement was steered to a political committee controlled by the governor’s chief of staff.
The new findings show that the spending was more than three times greater.
Spokespeople for DeSantis and five state agencies that report to him did not respond to questions for this story.
The Times/Herald investigation expands upon work done by former Orlando Sentinel reporter Jason Garcia, who publishes the Seeking Rents newsletter on Substack. In an October report for that newsletter, Garcia reviewed internal state records to estimate the state spent between $35 million and $40 million on the campaigns.
The diversion of state money came at a time when the term-limited governor’s deep pool of donors had begun to dry up after a failed presidential campaign. Without the cash needed to wage the all-out blitz to defeat the amendments, he turned to taxpayer money to air what he called “public service announcements” to educate Floridians.
Such announcements are common for broad, state campaigns that encourage people to wear safety belts or to avoid texting while driving — topics that tend to steer clear of politics.
But emails and vendor records indicate last year’s effort was meant to influence the outcome of the election, targeting higher-propensity voters and raising concerns from officials in Washington. To place ads, state agencies used a subcontractor tied to a firm working with the Republican Party of Florida to defeat the amendments.
After reviewing the Herald/Times analysis of how the DeSantis administration used state money before the 2024 election, lawmakers and former state officials said that, at the very least, the ad spending skirted state law.
Professor emeritus Kenneth Goodman, who for decades directed medical ethics at the University of Miami, said the state’s campaign — specifically its reliance on child welfare funds — amounted to “undermining the will of voters by diverting resources intended for a vulnerable population.”
“This is corruption at the expense of children,” he said.
Money came from healthcare funds
To uncover the extent of the DeSantis administration’s campaign, the Herald/Times spent months reviewing thousands of pages of emails, vendor receipts, ad records and state payments. Reporters delved into the state’s accounting and budgeting system, which traces the source of every penny in last year’s $116.5 billion state budget.
Of $36.2 million in taxpayer money tapped by the administration, the analysis shows at least $21.2 million moved through an intricate web of financial transactions across five state agencies to a handful of vendors.
Because state agencies did not record nearly half of the spending in the state’s online contracting database, reporters tracked the money by tracing 29-digit account codes and 6-digit object codes across three state databases.
The public can’t know the precise amounts spent by the state because the administration has not turned over key documents requested through the state’s open records law, such as invoices and the ads themselves.
The records the Herald/Times have been able to obtain show that to pay for ads, DeSantis officials repeatedly tapped into money meant to help vulnerable Floridians.
The Department of Children and Families, which has struggled for decades to protect kids in foster care, devoted $1.1 million from its child protection program to place ads. The money came from federal grants that mostly went to organizations that help kids in foster care or offer services and counseling to parents so that they don’t lose custody of their children.
An invoice states the ads were about “Mothers, Babies, and Children,” indicating they were for the abortion ads.
The DeSantis administration took another $4 million from the state’s opioid settlement trust fund and directed it toward the campaigns. State lawmakers last year assigned $18 million from the trust fund for “prevention and media campaigns” but stated they “must target communities that are disproportionately impacted by opioid or other substance misuse.”
The state had won the money in 2022 by suing drug makers and distributors. It was supposed to help drug-addicted Floridians.
The Department of Health directed $970,000 from its community public health promotion program to the campaigns.
Top GOP lawmakers wanted money from that program to go to projects such as $185,000 for a clinic to help children learn to feed and swallow and $500,000 on a Tampa Bay program aimed at reducing emergency room visits. But DeSantis vetoed them, leaving the money unspent.
DeSantis was not the only Republican against the amendments. His predecessor, U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, was “adamantly opposed” to the initiatives, his spokesperson said. Scott, however, took issue with the administration’s spending tactics.
“The allegations of diverting tax dollars from critical populations in our state toward political consultants and ads — especially money from the agency that helps foster kids, domestic violence survivors and abused children — are deeply concerning,” his spokesperson said in a statement.
Ad campaign dubbed ‘health services’
State officials have flexibility in how they spend state money. Former government officials and others the Herald/Times spoke to were mixed on whether the DeSantis administration’s spending broke state law.
But by spending public money on a political effort, several agencies bent the rules, observers said.
The Department of Health, for example, diverted $2 million from its grants and donations trust fund to the campaign. The department billed it from “research services” in the medical marijuana regulation program.
State healthcare agencies on six separate occasions cited the same legal exemption from competitive bidding requirements for companies involved in the ads, saying the ads were providing “health services involving examination, diagnosis, treatment, prevention, medical consultation, or administration.”
The Department of Health has cited that exemption more than 5,000 times since 2020, using it to pay for doctors, vaccines, health screenings and other services, contracting records show. Only one other time has the department used it for “media placement and fulfillment” and that was to combat a meningitis outbreak in 2022.
Whether agency spending complies with state laws and rules is up to the Department of Financial Services, which audits and approves expenditures and cuts the checks. It’s led by the state’s elected chief financial officer.
At the time, that was Jimmy Patronis, who has since been elected to Congress. His spokesperson said he couldn’t answer questions about the spending because he no longer had access to the state’s system.
He referred questions to the department, which is led by Blaise Ingoglia. DeSantis appointed Ingoglia, a former state senator, to the position this summer. A spokesperson for Ingoglia noted that the department receives an average of 290,000 requests for payment each month, and she referred questions about the spending to state agencies.
It is the office’s responsibility to ensure payments are made according to the Legislature’s budget or the specific terms of the trust fund. It doesn’t appear that has been happening, said Alex Sink, a Democrat and banker who served as CFO from 2007 to 2011 and who reviewed the financial transactions at the Herald/Times’ request.
“These payments are highly questionable and most likely should not have been approved,” Sink said. She said she’d need to consult a lawyer to know whether they broke the law.
“You have to be really, really careful about the ways trust funds are used,” she said. “At best, this might be a very liberal interpretation of appropriate uses of trust fund monies.”
Campaign targeted likelier voters
The Department of Children and Families described its anti-marijuana ads as “educating Floridian families and youth about the dangers of marijuana, opioid, and drug use.”
The ads made claims with little or no citation. Teen marijuana use “increases the risk of psychotic disorders, like schizophrenia, by more than 1,000%,” one said. Another asserted that marijuana “increases the risk of depression and anxiety by 30%” for teens and young adults, and that “rapid onset psychosis, addiction and schizophrenia” were “common” side effects of powerful strains.
Studies show that frequent marijuana use can contribute to the development of schizophrenia for high-risk people, such as those with a genetic predisposition toward mental illness, said Madeline Meier, an associate professor of psychology at Arizona State University who has studied the harms of marijuana use.
But she said she couldn’t evaluate the claims because the ads didn’t include any citations.
‘There are concerns that this is political’
On Oct. 4, an official with the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration emailed Florida’s transportation department about an ad running on Facebook and television.
“DUI crashes increase in states with legalized marijuana,” the ad stated.
“There are concerns that this is political in nature,” the federal official wrote, noting there was a ballot measure related to marijuana.
She added that while the ad was about marijuana, it incorrectly bore the federal agency’s “Drive Sober” drunk driving logo.
Neither state nor federal officials would say how the disagreement was resolved.
In court, the state argued that the ad didn’t violate the state’s election code because it didn’t mention Amendment 3. A judge agreed, and the case is on appeal.
In public, DeSantis and his spokespeople said the state had a duty to educate Floridians about the amendments.
“It is not electioneering,” DeSantis said in September last year. “It’s things that can absolutely be done through these public service announcements. And I’m glad they’re doing it.”
The media-tracking firm AdImpact labeled about a quarter of the state’s television ad spending, about $1.5 million by the Agency for Health Care Administration, as political.
The agency’s ads, which were co-sponsored by other departments, appeared to directly address political ones aired by Amendment 4’s sponsors. The state’s ads mentioned “lying” and “misinformation” and referred viewers to the state-run price transparency website claiming that Amendment 4 “threatens women’s safety.”
“To me, it sure sounds like they took money intended for other purposes and clearly used it to advocate for a desired outcome for these amendments,” said Chris Brimer, a partner at Atlanta-based ad placement firm Canal Partners Media.
Florida law makes it a misdemeanor for an employee or officer of the state to use their official position to interfere with an election or influence someone’s vote. The penalty is up to a year in jail. In a lawsuit last year, a Leon County judge wrote that state agencies have “budgetary authority to spend funds on public service commercials.”
To carry out the campaign, the Agency for Health Care Administration and departments of Education, Health and Children and Families all turned to the same company: Strategic Digital Services.
Invoices and state payment data show the four agencies all reached agreements with the company within three days of each other. Collectively, they paid the firm at least $16.4 million, according to the Herald/Times analysis.
Records also show the state and the Republican Party of Florida were using related companies to place their ads.
Secrecy surrounds spending
None of the records the state has released give specific information about its strategy against the abortion initiative.
The $36.2 million of spending identified by the Herald/Times includes the administration boosting the marketing budget for the Florida Pregnancy Care Network by $5 million to run ads explicitly against Amendment 4. The board of the network of anti-abortion clinics refused and instead chose to run more neutral ads about the organization’s services and touting Florida’s services to pregnant women and families in the leadup to the election. Afterward, DeSantis proposed stripping the network of funding.
What effect the state’s ads had on voters is unknown. Uthmeier’s committee and the Republican Party of Florida together spent $24 million against the marijuana amendment and $26 million against the abortion amendment on television and cable, according to AdImpact.
AdImpact data shows state agencies spent $3.1 million against the marijuana amendment and $2.9 million against abortion on broadcast television. That does not include expenses like creating ads and running them on social media platforms.
The state only provided journalists invoices for a third of the agencies’ spending. Those records detail $4.9 million for digital advertising.
The state’s ads had an outsized financial impact. Because broadcasters did not classify them as political, the state received heavy discounts to air at least some of them. The Florida Association of Broadcasters, for example, guaranteed the Department of Transportation a minimum of $4 of air time for every $1 it spent, a standard rate when it works for state agencies and nonprofits.
The committee behind the pot amendment estimated that by late October last year, the state had aired 13,000 TV ads, 5,000 radio spots and ads on other platforms against them worth more than $50 million.
Campaign had lasting effects
Republican National Committee chairperson and Sarasota state Sen. Joe Gruters called the DeSantis administration’s use of taxpayer dollars in the campaign “undemocratic and a violation of Florida law” last year. In a recent interview, he said he stood by his statements.
“It’s just wrong,” he said.
DeSantis has acknowledged that a majority of Floridians supported the two amendments on last year’s ballot. But he took credit for defeating both of them, saying in October that he wasn’t about to sit back and do nothing.
“We dug in,” he said. “We barnstormed the state.”
The timing of the advertising spots underscores the precise, targeted nature of DeSantis’ barnstorming effort. Television ad records reviewed by the Herald/Times show that the Agency for Health Care Administration, the Department of Health and the Department of Children and Families ramped up their ad buys in late September of last year, as election season hit high gear and voters began receiving mail-in ballots.
By Election Day, those ad buys had come to an end.
Herald/Times Tallahassee bureau reporter Romy Ellenbogen contributed to this report.
