New 🧵: Aides to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis quietly devised a plan to kick as many as 100,000 Floridians off their health insurance — including mothers of children as young as six years old, according to records obtained by Seeking Rents...

1/x The Republican governor’s proposal was intended to cull Medicaid, the safety net healthcare program that provides insurance to impoverished families and disabled Floridians...

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Republican leaders in the Florida Legislature just revealed their proposed budgets for the next fiscal year, and there are already some ugly earmarks slipped inside.

Here are three – involving Mike Huckabee, Donald Trump and Newsmax.

🧵... Let’s start with the House budget.

Just a few pages in, partway through the Department of Education section of the spending plan, there’s a $725,000 line item for what’s described in the document only as “History of Communism Curriculum"...

New: Companies linked to a multibillion-dollar investment firm in New York have amassed more than 80,000 acres of land across north Florida – and are now lobbying Florida lawmakers to make that land more appealing to real-estate developers.

Quick 🧵... Since 2017, companies linked to a multibillion-dollar investment manager in New York have spent at least $230 million buying up more than 80,000 acres across north Florida — amassing giant tracts of largely rural land near Jacksonville, St. Augustine, and Panama City...

New: Florida lawmakers may soon give the state’s powerful sugar industry the legal leverage to sue its critics into silence.

🧵... A provision in the “farm bill” in the Florida Legislature would make it easier for U.S. Sugar & Florida Crystals to wage defamation suits against environmental groups, news outlets and others who criticize the companies over issues like Everglades restoration and air pollution...

A 🧵 about more big government overreach in Florida by Gov. Ron DeSantis and state lawmakers in Tallahassee:

A few months ago, the village council in Wellington, a wealthy enclave in Palm Beach County, voted to allow gasoline-powered boats on community lakes and canals... Nobody, it seemed, supported the move. Not even the village commissioners who cast the votes.

“I know everyone is mad about it, and I get it. I’m mad, too. But we don't have any choice,” Mayor Michael Napoleone told the audience at an August council meeting...

A top Florida politician – a guy who was just endorsed by President Donald Trump – is now pushing a plan to help agriculture companies sue MAHA activists, environmental groups, news organizations, and others who criticize the ag industry...

🧵... The idea is buried inside a 60-page "farm bill" just filed in the Florida Legislature that is being spearheaded by Florida Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson.

It would expand what is known as Florida's "food libel," "food disparagement" or "veggie libel" law...

Last September – as Ron DeSantis was spending Florida taxpayer money on advertisements attacking citizen-led constitutional amendments that would have protected abortion rights and legalized marijuana – his administration made a $1.525 million payment for TV commercials.

🧵... The payment was made by DeSantis’ Agency for Health Care Administration to a small Tallahassee marketing firm called Strategic Digital Services.

And invoice records show that it paid for an ad buy across all 10 media markets that reached an estimated 11.4 million viewers...

Ron DeSantis is actively helping some of the state's biggest developers – and Ron DeSantis donors – exploit a new state law that was supposed to ensure communities could rebuild after hurricanes...

🧵... Last month, the head of the Florida Department of Commerce – a political appointee who briefly served as DeSantis' chief of staff – explicitly threatened commissioners in Manatee County if they moved forward with a plan to raise a local tax on homebuilders...

A few weeks ago, the Governor’s Office ordered two cases of bug spray to be shipped to the immigration detention camp it opened earlier this summer in the middle of the Florida Everglades.

🧵... This was a tiny transaction for a state with a $117 billion budget. The cases of bug spray were bundled together with a few refrigerators, surge protectors and extension cords, and the entire order totaled less than $2,500...

The Trump and DeSantis administrations are trying to open up a legal loophole as they keep immigrants locked in cages in the middle of the Florida Everglades.

Let's walk through it:

🧵... Let's start with a quick bit of background.

First, the the president has sweeping authority to set the nation’s immigration policy and carry out programs like mass deportation.

And courts have relatively little power to review the president’s immigration decisions...

A top aide to Ron DeSantis just admitted that the administration is breaking the law by hiding contracts connected to “Alligator Alcatraz,” the immigration detention facility it built in the middle of the Florida Everglades.

🧵... This came up at a press conference Ron DeSantis held this morning at the Everglades detention facility, where Florida is now locking up hundreds of immigrants in cages and tents...

One thing is quickly becoming clear about “Alligator Alcatraz,” the immigrant detention camp that the state of Florida just opened in the middle of the Everglades:

The politicians running the place are bigger lawbreakers than many of the immigrants they’re locking up.

🧵... The DeSantis administration, for instance, is staffing the facility with private correctional officers who haven’t had to submit to fingerprinting, pass a physical exam, or pass background checks...

It took a month longer than expected, but Florida lawmakers are about to finish their 2025 legislative session in the exact same place they have ended most sessions in recent years:

Stuffing businesses full of tax breaks — and leaving table scraps for everyone else.... GOP leaders in the House and Senate finally concluded negotiations on a new state budget on Friday, ending a tortured set of talks that had turned what was supposed to be a 60-day blitz into a 105-day slog...

Here's a particularly wild exchange from yesterday's era-defining Board of Governors meeting in Florida, in which a bunch of political appointees rejected the appointment of former University of Michigan President Santa Ono as the new president at the University of Florida... ...During the meeting, BOG member (and former Florida Power & Light chief) Eric Silagy used some shrewd questioning to expose the fact that fellow BOG member (and former state House Speaker) Paul Renner tried to get himself hired as the University of Florida's next president...

In mid-April, amid a rapidly escalating feud with Republicans in the state House of Representatives, Ron DeSantis flew to central Florida to make a surprise appearance at the Ocala Breeders’ Sales Company’s annual spring auction of two-year-old racehorses.

🧵... The governor used the event to criticize legislation pushed by House GOP leaders that would have let Florida’s two main thoroughbred tracks — Gulfstream Park and Tampa Bay Downs — end live racing without losing licenses to run other gambling operations like slots and poker...

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier is using his office to do the dirty work of a bunch of car dealers – while taking tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from those very same dealers.

Here’s how:

🧵... Back in February, a group of Volkswagen and Audi dealership owners sued Scout Motors, a VW-backed startup that is developing a new line of electric SUVs and pickups that the company intends to sell directly to consumers over an app.

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There is someone who appears at both the beginning and the end of the still-unfolding “Hope Florida” scandal:

James Uthmeier, who was Ron DeSantis’ chief of staff during the entire sequence of events (and who is now Florida's attorney general.)

🧵... To recap: The DeSantis administration had a Medicaid contractor make a $10 million “donation” to the Hope Florida Foundation, a charity founded by Casey DeSantis.

It was part of a $67 million legal settlement with Centene Corp., after the company overbilled the state.

(2/x)

The appointee picked by Ron DeSantis to run elections in Orlando last year spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer money on campaign-style self-promotion, contracts with personal friends, and payments to allies of the Republican governor and other GOP leaders.

🧵... During a 10-month stint as Supervisor of Elections in Orange County, records show Glen Gilzean steered work to an assortment of businesses and organizations run by Republican operatives — ranging from DeSantis' former communications director to state Rep. Susan Plasencia.

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Last fall, as Ron DeSantis was raising money to fight a ballot measures to legalize marijuana and end a statewide abortion ban, Florida’s governor turned to an odious source for help: Philip Morris, the Big Tobacco company best known as the maker of Marlboro cigarettes.

🧵...1/x Records show DeSantis took $500,000 from Philip Morris International in the closing weeks of last year’s campaign, making the tobacco company one of the top contributors to the fundraising committee DeSantis used to oppose the marijuana and abortion-rights ballot measures.

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So earlier this year, commissioners in Orange County (Orlando) voted 4-3 to to block a sprawling subdivision that would have been built on 1,800 acres of largely rural land.

That developer is now spending tens of thousands of dollars on this year's county elections.

🧵... Records show a Texas company behind the development – called "Sustanee" – has in recent weeks donated at least $4,500 to a political committee that Steve Leary has been using to attack Democrat Kelly Semrad in Orange County’s District 5 county commission race.

With early voting underway, the DeSantis administration has ordered nearly $1 million more in taxpayer-funded advertising as it campaigns against Amendment 3 (legal marijuana) and Amendment 4 (abortion rights).

The latest buy was made Oct. 24 through the Department of Health. This brings DeSantis' total estimated taxpayer spending on its campaigns to keep abortion banned and marijuana illegal to ~$19.3 million