Amid an escalating feud between Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Republican-controlled House, the chamber’s budget chairman on Friday sent letters to six state agencies seeking a broad array of documents as part of a probe into government spending.
The inquiry into DeSantis-administration spending, ordered by House Speaker Daniel Perez, R-Miami, has raised questions about potentially missing state-owned vehicles, agency leaders earning six-figure salaries while living in other states and millions of dollars of interest paid on a prison facility that has not been built.
The most high-profile issue involves a $10 million donation the state’s largest Medicaid managed-care provider made to the Hope Florida Foundation, Inc., a direct-support organization tied to a signature program of Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis. The donation from the Centene managed-care company was part of a $67 million settlement with the state Agency for Health Care Administration, with $57 million going to the agency and $10 million to the foundation.
The letters, sent Friday by House Budget Chairman Lawrence McClure, R-Dover, targeted the Agency for Health Care Administration, the Department of Education, the Florida State Guard, the Department of Management Services, the Department of Corrections and the Division of Emergency Management.
"We’re just looking for accountability and efficiency. That’s it. Nothing more, nothing," McClure told The News Service of Florida in a phone interview.
The requests focused on issues that arose as House budget panels began delving into ways to slash spending as lawmakers write a budget for the 2025-2026 fiscal year. The House and the Senate approved their proposed budgets on Wednesday, setting up negotiations on a final spending plan over the final weeks of the legislative session, which is scheduled to end May 2.
McClure gave the agencies until May 16 to respond to the requests for information, meaning the data likely won’t play a role in the upcoming budget talks.
The requests, in part, ask each agency to provide “all communications and documents related to settlement agreements with third parties” and all communications and documents related to the Hope Florida Foundation and to the Hope Florida program.
During a Wednesday meeting, House Health Care Budget Chairman Alex Andrade, R-Pensacola, grilled Agency for Health Care Administration Secretary Shevaun Harris about the $10 million settlement, repeatedly asking her what the money was spent on.
Harris said the foundation is a separate organization from the state Hope Florida program and was unable to provide such details. In a video posted hours later on social media, Harris called the meeting “an ambush” as DeSantis and other allies continued to clash about the issue with House leaders on social media and conservative media outlets.
DeSantis on Thursday defended the donation and called the $10 million settlement from Centene a “cherry on top” of the deal that was “100 percent appropriate.”
Friday’s letters reflected what Perez has called an increasing “frustration” over a lack of cooperation from some agencies and a dearth of information from others as the House attempted to dig into the DeSantis’ administration’s finances.
The letters pointed to a part of Florida law that gives the Legislature "the right and authority to inspect and investigate the books, records, papers, documents, data, operation and physical plant of any public agency in this state, including any confidential information."
Each agency is “accountable to the public for how it spends its funds,” McClure wrote to the heads of the six agencies.
“To this end, the House Budget Committee and its subcommittees have enjoyed productive meetings where we have learned more about the operations of our partners in the executive branch. However, certain information and records stemming from these discussions remain outstanding and are needed in order for the House to continue our oversight function of state agencies,” McClure wrote.
In addition to records related to Hope Florida and the foundation, the requests seek “all communications and documents” related to a swath of other issues.
As an example, the request to the Division of Emergency Management asks for “all communications and documents related to the issuance of executive orders declaring a state of emergency and any extensions thereof” dating back to July 1, 2017 — before DeSantis took office in January 2019.
In another letter, the House also is asking the Department of Management Services for 19 sets of records in categories including “remote workers,” “financial management,” “travel,” and “fleet management.” The request also seeks information “related to the 2,279 vehicles with acquisition costs totaling $57,046,583 that could not be found or located” in an auditor general report released this year.
It’s unclear whether the agencies intend to hand over to the House what could be a voluminous amount of records.
“Florida’s agencies have already spent hundreds of hours in meetings and document production — only to get hit with another performative request from the House. We’re focused on serving Floridians, while the House is seemingly focused elsewhere,” Molly Best, a DeSantis spokeswoman, said in an email Friday.
But McClure said the efforts to get information from the DeSantis administration could play a role in upcoming budget talks.
“We’re going to either get answers that help us solve the puzzle or we are going to be extremely conservative on what we’re willing to agree to and then we can talk about it next year,” he said in the phone interview.
Other information sought by the House includes records about the state’s school voucher programs. In part, the House wants the Department of Education to provide “records of requests for reimbursement of overpayments to scholarship-funding organizations” as well as “information on cross-checking processes to prevent duplicate funding for students” in voucher programs.
Andrade, an attorney, acknowledged that the requests to the agencies are broad but said they are dissimilar from public-records requests made by members of the public.
The Legislature is “a separate branch of government tasked with the direction and oversight of the executive branch,” Andrade said in a phone interview Friday.
“We want and we are entitled to everything. You (agency officials) need to actually act in good faith and help us understand what’s going on,” he added. “If we don’t get, we’ll have bigger questions and bigger issues.”
