Given Gov. Ron DeSantis’ penchant for political theater, full embrace of a far-right extremist agenda, and need for attention, it’s not surprising that he would attach himself to the Trump-Musk DOGE project.

Despite the utter chaos the project has created at the federal level, DeSantis recently announced the creation of a Florida version of the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE) task force, which he claims will target and eliminate “waste” in state government, save taxpayers money, and “ensure accountability” in Florida.

The Florida DOGE task force will work similarly to the “department” created by President Donald Trump and led by Elon Musk, the tech billionaire who is unelected and unaccountable to the American people. Musk and his minions have orchestrated the slashing of agency budgets since Trump came back into office on Jan. 20.

Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried’s response to the announcement captures the absurdity of DeSantis’ action.

“Republicans have been in total control of Florida’s government for nearly 30 years, and he wants to talk about government waste?” she said.

“Ron has consistently passed the largest state budgets in Florida’s history, illegally spent millions of taxpayer dollars to run political campaigns to take down Amendments 3 & 4, and just allocated $250 million to fund his political stunt on immigration. Don’t lecture us on wasting taxpayer dollars.”

Fried argues everyone knows “this isn’t about reigning in spending — it’s about Trump endorsing Byron Donalds instead of Casey DeSantis. Maybe Ron should have considered the political consequences before he decided to run against the leader of his party for president.”

DeSantis said the DOGE team will likely shutter 70 boards and commissions this year to cut costs. Meanwhile, the task force will review 900 positions in state agencies to ascertain whether they should be cut.

His intention to have the task force “identify potential wasteful spending in college and university operations” should be viewed as dubious after he signed legislation last year that banned public colleges and universities from using taxpayer money to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

Institutional memory

The governor’s hostility towards Black Floridians and his crusade to eradicate any programs to level the social, political, economic, and business playing fields continue unabated. It’s likely that DOGE will be just another tool to eviscerate any entity deemed a threat to DeSantis’ implementation of an arch-conservative imprimatur on Florida.

There is also the fear that Florida will lose experienced civil servants who not only carry out critical government functions but also carry with them critical institutional memory. As it has played out nationally, the DOGE carousel will distract state employees from focusing on the people’s work.

If past is prologue, this political power move will increase fear among employees that they may lose their jobs, inducing paralysis among the ranks.

Most of all, Florida government’s best employees may seek greener pastures to the detriment to the state’s people.

DeSantis said the task force will use artificial intelligence to reduce “bureaucratic bloat.” He said the DOGE team will be a continuation of the cost-cutting measures he has overseen during his six years in office. The governor boasted that Florida saved $3.8 billion in last year’s budget and has paid down 41% of state debt since 2019.

DeSantis’ plan comes even though Florida has the lowest number of government employees per capita of any state and $14.6 billion in cash reserves. Yet DeSantis is looking to slash 740 full-time jobs and scrap as many as 900 more related “off-the-books” positions.

Democrats pushed back by noting that Florida already has in place a voter-approved government efficiency task force created in 2006 that carried “an almost identical mandate;” Florida DOGE therefore itself is an example of unnecessary spending. The effort is really an attempt to flatter Trump and Musk to restore DeSantis to his party’s good graces.

GOP pushback

If Floridians are lucky, the significant pushback verbalized by the leaders of both of Florida’s Republican-supermajority legislative chambers may end up with DeSantis’ cockamamie plan being tossed to the trash pile.

“Let’s focus on what matters. Let’s pass actual reforms rather than symbolic gestures,” Daniel Perez, the Florida House speaker, told members on the legislative session’s opening day. “Let’s repeal government programs instead of reshuffling them. Let’s swing for the fences and not just try to get on base.”

Perez turned the knife a little deeper when he said that “DeSantis, a self-styled fiscal conservative, benefited from a 70% budget increase for the executive office of the governor over his six years in office.”

Senate President Ben Albritton, a member of the existing efficiency taskforce, said in remarks to the Senate that he was proud that Florida already “has a great framework for accountability,” and that he and other lawmakers had made a substantive number of recommendations “to improve flexibility [and] simplify processes.”

“The fact is we are a state and nation of laws that should be created by elected officials accountable to the people who elected them, not appointed professional staff,” he said.

None of this may matter though, because DeSantis has his eyes firmly set on running for the White House in 2028, which necessitates rebuilding the frayed ties with Trump and his loyal supporters, as well as positioning his wife Casey to run for governor when he sets down in 2027.

Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.

The misshapen world that Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, Leonard Leo, and other MAGA extremists are attempting to cement into every aspect of American life is deeply rooted in racism, sexism, and ethnonationalism.

As governor, DeSantis has arrogantly manipulated the instruments of political and legislative power not just to deride and disparage African Americans, but also to disassemble Florida’s relationship with the Black population while propagating lies about white European victimhood.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida (ACLU) notes that “throughout his tenure, this governor has used the power of his office to subjugate and control the lives of Black people in Florida. The administration of Gov. DeSantis has demonstrated a disdain for Black people and their lives in Florida. His actions as governor demonstrate that under his governance, the lives of Black people are expendable.”

DeSantis sows distrust of Black people in ways not seen so blatantly since the Jim Crow era. As the ACLU’s Joey Francilus explains: “Black people in Florida are endangered by the whims of this same governor who, using the levers of his power, greatly diminished the last citizen-led Amendment 4 campaign to expand voting rights to nearly a million formerly incarcerated Floridians. This is the same governor who chilled Black protesters in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.”

Francilus adds that DeSantis is “the same governor who used his power to eliminate a Black-access congressional district in North Florida. This is the same governor who removed the only Black woman state prosecutor from office, replacing her with an acolyte. This is the same governor who sought to censor Black history in classrooms and called slavery ‘beneficial’ for Black people.”

Racial hierarchy

DeSantis has waged his war on Black people for several reasons, including to bolster his cred when he ran for president and because it’s a central feature of the far-right wing Republican Party’s culture wars. DeSantis isn’t alone, with Republican leaders of at least 18 states hopping on the retrenchment bandwagon.

The governor, and those who share his viewpoint, are “fixated on returning the country’s social order to its antebellum racial hierarchy” and seeks “to reimagine slavery as a benign institution, Francilus argues.

Issues of race percolate into every aspect of our lives — in schools, businesses, in our homes, communities, and neighborhoods. In the past, as now. DeSantis seeks to use race to bludgeon African Americans into compliance.

Florida has a repugnant history of harm against its Black residents as they sought to live their lives, working to block their attempt to exercise their legal and democratic right to vote, live where they want, pursue a quality education and good jobs.

For about 20 years, I lived, worked, and earned degrees in community college and university settings in Miami and Tallahassee. I saw the racial damage and trauma on individuals and systems up close.

I grew up in the U.K. and Jamaica but learned a great deal about Florida and Southern history from my African American friends, historians, griots, politicians, and close watchers of the state’s and region’s social, economic, and political storylines. It has never been easy to be a Black person in places where just below the surface racism festers.

African Americans and other Black residents faced barriers to employment, health care, quality education, and continuing problems with law enforcement.

Despite certifiable social, legal, and economic progress by Black people, the shadow of the confederacy and depraved racism continues to hang heavily over Florida. Men, women, and children endured ghastly behavior from defenders of the American apartheid system. Folks were murdered, raped, debased, spat upon, and brutalized merely for the color of their skin.

Unaccountable

Female friends shared stories of their childhood in the South and having to always keep an eye out for random white men and boys who routinely kidnapped and raped young girls, teens, and women. One friend spoke of barely escaping predators who attempted to snatch her off the street several times.

Rarely, if ever, were these brutes ever held accountable for their crimes. Black people were unprotected and knew not to look to the vast majority of sheriffs, police, or judges for protection or justice because they stood squarely on the side of the transgressors.

Redlining and other measures ensured that Black people lived in segregated communities where local and state governments routinely under-investigated anti-Black crime. Often, Black residents in these communities couldn’t obtain credit or loans; they were forced to accept substandard jobs for considerably less wages and salaries; and their schools couldn’t compete with those in white communities because of the withholding of financial support because of in lower property taxes in their school districts, which resulted in inferior schools.

Examples of redlining can be found in several financial services, including mortgages, student loans, credit cards, and insurance. Although the Community Reinvestment Act was passed in 1977 to help prevent redlining, critics say discrimination continues to occur.

Targeting African Americans in the present is a noxious game that DeSantis, MAGA, and far-right elements of what used to be the Republican Party have weaponized. It is part of their putrid narrative of white victimhood and pervasive gaslighting.

No different

One of the ironies of life as a Black person in America is that, if asked, they would tell you that, at the end of the day, they are no different from any other American. They want to be treated like human beings and desire the same things to which others here aspire — freedom from police occupation of their neighborhoods, brutality and murder; access to decent, well-paying jobs; a quality education; affordable housing and health care.

But it’s specifically because they are Black that they continue to incur wrath from DeSantis, Donald Trump, and a society that has been fed a steady diet of damaging lies, stereotypes, distortions, and half-truths. The wider society is told Black people are criminals; lazy; uneducated; simple-minded; oversexed; savage; in need of white sympathy, pity, and guidance.

DeSantis, attorney and talk show host Dean Obeidallah explains, is a purveyor of toxic white-identity politics. He and his MAGA supporters are crusaders for racial domination by the proportionately shrinking white population in the United States.

Since DeSantis ran for president, the country has supposedly moved further to the right and, with Project 2025 and Elon Musk, white nationalist extremists have launched all-out, multipronged assaults on Black history, civil rights, DEI, EEOC, affirmative action, and other programs, policies, and initiatives, all with the intention of dragging the country back to the Jim Crow era.

As Obeidallah notes, despite intense criticism, lawsuits, and protests, DeSantis’ primary concerns are to position himself to run for president again in 2028 by showing white people that he’s standing up for them and their interests.

Unfortunately, we will continue to be lectured about morality and patriotism by a man who possesses neither. The state will have to continue to endure the rantings of a menace and a bully. Past is prologue: There’s no commitment to fairness, no obligation to redress past ills, and no acknowledgement of the theft of Black lives, jobs, and resources as a direct result of white racism and bigotry.

Expect little or nothing to change. Florida’s Black residents be damned.

Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.

Gov. Ron DeSantis and his abettors in the Legislature have been at each other’s throats, trying to see who can summon up the most repulsive legislation to further punish undocumented immigrants in the Sunshine State and shamelessly take credit for it.

They’ve settled on a common approach now, but DeSantis was steaming after House Speaker Daniel Perez and Senate President Ben Albritton ignored his instruction for them to meet in special session to pass a migrant crackdown. They convened as ordered but promptly adjourned without acting and gaveled in their own session, passing their own version.

“… In a big about-face, the Legislature shifted authority over state-level immigration enforcement from the governor to the commissioner of agriculture, which is currently held by Wilton Simpson, a Trilby Republican,” as the Florida USA Today Network put it.

In a new special session that began on Tuesday, the governor and legislative leaders agreed to accept many of the Legislature’s proposals, including money to hire new law enforcement officers and bonuses for those who help federal enforcement officers, adding a provision making it a crime to enter Florida without the legal documents.

Additionally, the Florida Cabinet, comprising independently elected state officials — the state attorney general, chief financial officer, and agriculture commissioner — will together supervise immigration enforcement.

Will that make the bad blood go away? Miffed at the Legislature’s original plan, DeSantis had, for days, bitterly denounced his antagonists. On social media, he beat up Simpson, saying he has “voted to give drivers licenses and in-state tuition to illegals.” He also took to national conservative media outlets to blast Simpson, as well as Albritton and Perez.

And in a post on X and elsewhere DeSantis said he intends to unleash the financial power of the Florida Freedom Fund, a political committee he used in 2024 to grease the wheels in ways that helped spread lies and disinformation leading to the defeat of constitutional amendments on abortion rights and recreational marijuana.

Sidling up to Trump

Both sides are working overtime to sidle up to “47” — bend the knee and secure his blessing for the most inhumane and odious laws in an effort to show how tough on immigration these people are.

This activity comes against the backdrop of a dizzying array of actions against undocumented immigrants locally and nationally. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has dramatically stepped up arrests and detentions all over Florida, including Miramar, Fort Lauderdale, and Miami plus Escambia, Indian River, Leon, and Santa Rosa counties.

Despite Donald Trump publicly calling for Dreamers to be protected during these immigration sweeps, legislators have added uncertainty for these young people — about 6,000 in number — by trying to more than triple the tuition they pay to attend a Florida public college or university.

Nationally, allies of Trump are deeply involved in speeding up asylum hearings, rolling back eligibility to remain here, and removing a raft of deportation protections implemented by President Joe Biden.

Outside of the sheer malice and vindictiveness of DeSantis and the Legislature, their heartlessness towards undocumented immigrants will have far-reaching economic consequences across the state. It’s aggravating to see Florida Republicans being so bearish on an issue that continues to damage the state’s agriculture, construction, and hospitality industries.

When DeSantis engineered a draconian bill targeting immigrants in 2023, farm owners and migrant activists agreed the effects of the law were immediate. Families who had worked in Florida for 20 years and more voted with their feet and fled the state. Severe labor shortages meant fruits and vegetables went unpicked and rotting, with prices ratcheting upwards.

According to the Florida Policy Institute, the 2023 immigration law could cost the state economy as much as $12.6 billion in its first year.

Mari Marks, advocacy and policy manager for the Council on American-Islamic Relations Florida chapter, outlined how much the state depends on immigrant labor in a column for the Tallahassee Democrat.

“The Florida economy depends on workers in the agriculture, service and hospitality sectors. The Migration Policy Institute reports there is an estimated 455,000 undocumented immigrants working in Florida, who are currently employed,” Marks wrote.

“What would happen if these workers suddenly disappeared out of our workforce? I’ll tell you. A state that prides themselves on tourism would be in serious jeopardy. These jobs are not being stolen by undocumented workers; they are holes being filled in our society, jobs most Americans would not dream of taking.”

Ignoring immigration’s benefits

A favorite, yet tired, canard that American tax dollars are unfairly being taken to pay for the livelihoods of these asylees and undocumented workers Marks characterizes as a lie.

“The new inconvenient truth is that they play a significant role in the success of this country,” she wrote.

In 2022, Marks added (citing the American Immigration Council), 747,000 documented and undocumented immigrants paid an estimated $1.8 billion in local and state taxes, contributing $27 billion in consumer spending.

In addition, these human beings “are shopping in your stores, eating in your restaurants, renting houses from you, buying cars, buying gas, paying out of pocket for medical appointments, braces for their children, attending shows, movies, concerts, playing sports with your kids, shopping at your grocery stores, worshipping and paying tithes in your churches, getting haircuts. … The list goes on and on,” Marks wrote.

Despite being scapegoated by DeSantis, immigrants in Florida have contributed tens of billions of dollars in taxes. For example, immigrant-led households in the state paid $23.2 billion in federal taxes and $8.5 billion in state and local taxes in 2018. In addition, in 2018, undocumented immigrants in Florida paid an estimated $1.3 billion in federal taxes and $588.3 million in state and local taxes, according to the American Immigration Council.

Marks and other observers warn that Florida is already in trouble and it’s about to get considerably worse.

“This state is not in trouble because of undocumented human beings who give their all to our society, it is because politicians who ignore the real needs and crises, in favor of political stunts,” she concluded.

Even as lawmakers poison the water for those seeking solace in Florida, activists and advocates who see the train hurtling towards chaos have questions:

Who will plant and harvest, wash clothes, cut lawns, clean hotels, help raise children? What will happen to the next generation of lawyers, doctors, and professionals? How will the state fill the labor gap and replace the money lost?

Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.

In November 2018, 64.5 percent of Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment that would automatically restore voting rights to 1.4 million Floridians weighed down by felony convictions but who had completed the terms of their sentences.

However, that hard-earned victory by social justice activist Desmond Meade and groups including the ACLU and the Brennan Center for Justice was short-lived. Why? Because by that summer, Gov. Ron DeSantis and Republican lawmakers pulled a bait-and-switch when the Legislature passed a bill, which DeSantis eagerly signed.

The bill, SB 7066, placed one more hurdle before this much maligned constituency, demanding that they pay all their legal obligations, including restitution, court costs, fines, and fees in full before being allowed to vote.

A federal trial court initially ruled the “pay-to-vote” system unconstitutional but U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit — one of the most conservative courts in the country — reversed the lower court’s decision.

In 2023, the problem remains unsolved because Republicans legislators don’t view resolution as a priority and, as has become common, have ignored the will of the 5.1 million Floridians who voted for Amendment 4 in 2018.

Advocates have been fighting to ensure that returning citizens are not permanently disenfranchised, especially with evidence from one of the lawsuits indicating that most with felony convictions had some unpaid fines or fees after completing the other parts of their sentence.

Critics characterize the demand to square the financial payment requirement as a modern day “poll tax.”

Poll taxes were one of several tools once used by segregationists in Southern states to limit African Americans’ voting rights. Targeting potential Black voters and implementing calculated obstacles is favorite tactic, beginning post-Reconstruction and extending through segregation and the Jim Crow era.

Reconstruction 2.0

Republicans in 2023 are on a campaign to emulate what occurred during Reconstruction by disenfranchising African Americans, engaging in severe gerrymandering so that the odds are turn in their favor in 2024.

Their harsh and uncompromising position on abortion is costing them support and has led to losses in primaries. But the GOP’s political strategy is explained by former President Donald Trump, who has said the quiet part out loud: Republicans will never again win elections if democratic reforms make voting easier.

Voter suppression and subversion exploded in 2013 after the Supreme Court gutted a portion of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA). Within days of the ruling, cities and states enacted a wave of voter discrimination laws intended to restrict the rights of people of color, those with disabilities, students, and others most likely to vote Democratic.

North Carolina illustrates the strategy. In 2016, the NAACP and other voting rights groups won a three-year legal battle against the state when federal judges struck down House Bill 589. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit invalidated most of that 2013 law, enacted the day after the Supreme Court’s ruling. The Circuit Court criticized provisions it said deliberately “target[ed] African-Americans with almost surgical precision” using “one of the largest restrictions of the [voting] franchise in modern North Carolina history.”

The circuit judges said lawmakers sought to “impose cures for problems that did not exist.”

The law, dubbed the “ Monster Bill,” included a strict ID requirement and an assortment of additional voting restrictions, significantly shortening early voting; eliminating same-day registration; outlawing the counting of out-of-precinct provisional ballots; tossing out a pre-registration program for 16- and 17-year-olds; shuttering one-third of early voting locations; and making it easier to challenge voters.

Republicans nationally say they’ve imposed tough voter-ID measures to prevent what they characterize as widespread voter fraud. But that claim isn’t supported by the facts. A Loyola University Law School study of voting patterns between 2000 and 2014 found only 31 credible instances of voter fraud out of 1 billion votes cast. And a 2015 Brennan Center report found that the challenges are primarily “targeted at voters of color, student voters, and voters with disabilities.”

Furthermore, the Brennan report’s authors found, many states’ laws challenging voters “are susceptible to abuse.” The voter ID and other restrictions now law in almost 24 states have had the desired effort of diminishing African American turnout, the report said.

‘Key civil rights issue’

The disenfranchisement of returning citizens is “one of the key civil rights issues of our time,” said Leah Aden, deputy director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund in an CNBC News report.

Despite Republican statements to the contrary, Aden said, in 2006 Congress compiled documents totaling more than 15,000 pages showing that voter suppression still exists across much of the United States. In 2019, 30 states, including Florida, had laws that required ex-offenders to pay at least some of their fines and fees before they could vote.

Meade — president of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition and architect of the largest expansion of voting rights in 50 years – said in an interview that blocking the amendment is “an obstruction of democracy … and larger than a poll tax. … It is our state actually doing something to block the expansion of democracy, which is a sin.”

The sin, Meade explained, is the state forcing citizens to choose between putting food on their kid’s table and voting or paying rent or voting.

But rather than continuing to wait on politicos, Meade and fellow activists have been raising money to help pay outstanding fines and fees of those entangled in this legal web. Basketball star Michael Jordan, Meade said, donated $500,000 to his organization, and basketball superstar LeBron James through his More Than a Vote project donated $100,000.

Meade received $16 million from former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. It will help pay the fines and fees of almost 32,000 Black and Hispanic voters in Florida with felony convictions and financial obligations.

Meanwhile, the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, which organized the Amendment 4 campaign, has used money donated by celebrities and other donors to pay almost $27 million in outstanding court fines and fees for close to 40,000 returning citizens, according to The Hill.

Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Diane Rado for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com. Follow Florida Phoenix on Facebook and Twitter.