By Gray Rohrer and Ana Goñi-Lessan, The News Service of Florida
Gov. Ron DeSantis has grown frustrated at pieces of his agenda being thwarted by the GOP-led House, and lashed out at Speaker Daniel Perez on Thursday.
“When you have people that got elected on our back, like the Speaker of the House, get in and do the opposite of what the voters expected us to do, I’m going to call that out,” DeSantis said during an event to unveil a statue of James Madison in Madison County. “I’m going to let people know that that’s what he’s doing.”
The comments came two weeks after the House rejected DeSantis’ push to pass bills to expand vaccine exemptions for children entering public schools and to install consumer-friendly regulations on artificial intelligence products and companies.
Moreover, lawmakers are engaged in budget negotiations, where the House is refusing to fund several of DeSantis’ priorities.
In the latest round of budget offers Thursday evening, the House didn’t include money for two programs championed by First Lady Casey DeSantis – a cancer research innovation fund and a food testing program.
Rep. Alex Andrade, R-Pensacola, the House’s lead health care budget negotiator, said he hadn’t seen any justification for the $30 million the Senate wants to put into the cancer research fund, noting the budget already includes $60 million for existing cancer research programs.
“I’d need to see exactly what that additional funding would do to increase any funding for cancer research, but we do have significant amounts of money in both the House and Senate right now for cancer research innovation already,” Andrade said.
He also pointed to the state’s existing food testing and safety program within the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services to defend the House’s refusal to fund Casey DeSantis’ food testing initiative.
“We have a great food testing program at FDACS right now, it’s unclear why we’d need to duplicate services,” Andrade said.
The governor’s budget proposal, announced in December, suggested $5 million going to the food testing program within the Department of Health. Casey DeSantis modeled the program, which aims to expose toxins and heavy metals in food, after U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again agenda.
Andrade is used to clashing with the DeSantis administration. He led a probe last year into the divergence of $10 million from a settlement with a Medicaid vendor into a charity backing another Casey DeSantis initiative, Hope Florida.
The money was routed into political committees opposing proposed constitutional amendments headed by DeSantis’ then-chief of staff James Uthmeier, whom DeSantis later appointed Attorney General.
DeSantis, though, kept his ire trained at Perez, R-Miami, slamming him for saying no House member filed a bill related to the vaccine exemption during the special session two weeks ago, so it couldn’t get a vote.
“Do you believe nobody filed a bill or were they told not to file a bill? So he’s basically holding his members under the bus, saying that they were too lazy to file legislation. I don’t believe that’s true,” DeSantis said.
In budget talks Thursday evening, the House continued to rebuff Senate attempts to spend $3.9 million for the Florida State Guard, another DeSantis priority. But it did put $5 million into the Job Growth Grant Fund, a program used by DeSantis to pay for infrastructure and job training projects, up from its initial offer of zero funding but still far below the $50 million DeSantis and the Senate want.
