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Great to be back in Tampa. Thank you all for coming. We got a great series of announcements today. I do want to start by recognizing some of our dignitaries. We have our Commissioner of Education Manny Diaz, we have State Board of Administration Director Chris Spencer, we have Senators Collins and in Golia, and we have Representatives Cheney, Gonzalez, Pittman and Owen. So I want to thank everybody for for being here. We in the state of Florida take
pride in in how we run things. I say we were doge before Doge was cool because if you look at the way we manage things and compare us to a state like New York, which is our closest a competitor in terms of population, although it used to be they had more people than us. Now we have millions of more people than New York State does. Yet New York State's budget is over twice the size of the state of Florida's budget.
But when people come down here, they tell me you have better services, roads, schools, all this other stuff. And so something is happening with that money. I know they're taxing a lot of people for it, but we do things a little bit different. And so I was just having been in this fight for a long time, working with our agencies, working with the legislature to make sure we're standing for
taxpayers. I was very pleased to see the emphasis by the Trump administration on this department of of Government account of efficiency, this dodge with Elon Musk leading the charge. Now, Washington is a much different beast than than Florida is because this has not been attended to for really many decades and this bureaucracy has grown to massive proportions.
The money that gets done in there is basically on autopilot as Congress does things like continuing resolutions and omnibus bills, and nobody reads this stuff and it's your money and the credit card and everything. And so it needed to be reined in. And so you have seen what they have done going in. They are pruning the workforce. You know, I'll tell talk about our workforce in a minute, but much different than how DC does it. They have exposed slush funds
like USAAID. They've rooted out hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts and grants that were intending to promote DEI, which we eliminated in Florida in our education years ago. But it's something that has been very pervasive in our country for the last few years. They even discovered that 10s of millions of dollars in FEMA funds were used by the Biden administration to put illegal aliens in nice hotels in New York City. I think a lot of people in the Tampa Bay area would like FEMA
to be more attentive to them. Except FEMA, they wouldn't go to people that had Trump flags in their home. And meanwhile they're showering all these benefits on illegals. One of the things, though, that I think that we are looking at with that because as I said, Florida is a different beast. We've had this focus certainly since I've been governor to make sure that the state is lean and as efficient as possible.
But one of the things that they're doing with these technology teams that kind of go in is they're leveraging things like artificial intelligence to be able to review payments, to be able to review contracts. So we have people that review these contracts. So for example, we review the contracts for DEI. If it's there, we don't allow it or grants, but to be able to have the, the AII think that's been an added tool. And that's one of the reasons why they've been able to expose so much.
So I think it's really good. I think taxpayers need to have a seat at the table in Washington. And for too long, nobody's cared about the taxpayers, much less the next generation who's ultimately going to have to pay for all of the mismanagement that we've seen over these many, many years. Now, as I said, in Florida, we were doge when no one is even talking about it before was even cool to do. We've worked hard to make this government as efficient and as
effective as possible. My first year as governor, we took a look at all the professional and licensing regulations and apparatus that have kind of grown almost like barnacles on a ship throughout Florida over these last many years and even decades. We brought in people from all around the state and say we want to find solutions. We don't want people bogged down, and we don't want to create barriers to entry for people who potentially could make a living in one of these things.
And so our licensing boards proposed a major overhaul. We were able to enact major legislation that was one of the biggest streamlining of government that we've seen in modern state history. It was called the most sweeping occupational license reform in all of Florida history because it it abolished requirements or or loosen them across more than 30 different boards and professions.
And so that's a huge, huge transfer of power away from bureaucracy and towards people being able to be successful in our state. We've also made it a priority to prune and eliminate spending, particularly spending that isn't appropriate or is wasteful. We want to make sure that people are good stewards of your hard earned dollars. And so just look year over year, what we're spending in this current fiscal year is billions of dollars less than what we spent in the previous fiscal year.
Imagine that you actually spend less money year over year in a government who, who's, who's ever seen anything like that? And notice what they talk about in Congress, you'll hear them say, oh, we're going to work on a deal for one 1 1/2 trillion dollars in cuts. Just understand that's Washington speak. It's not actually cutting year over year. What it is is they they project out 10 years, they project out massive increases in spending
over 10 years. And they basically say they're going to reduce the anticipated increases in spending over a 10 year period by 1.5 trillion. They don't actually cut 1 cent from the current baseline. The baseline will keep getting higher, just not as high as the forecasts are. So they are not cutting 1.5 trillion in this current year. I think when we do things and the certainly with the legislature, they're looking, what'd you do last year? What are you going to do this year?
We can't say, Oh yeah, we're going to cut spending and we'll project out 10 years. Nobody does business that way. You can't operate certainly your family's budget that way. I mean, imagine if you wanted to go on a spending spree during Christmas and you said, well, I'll just offset it with I'll, I'll reduce spending in the family budget, but I'm going to do it over a 10 year period, not right now while I'm actually spending the money. That wouldn't fly.
Nobody would say that that's something that's OK. So to actually reduce spending year over year is a really major thing. And we were able to do that here in Florida. And keep in mind, certainly since I've been governor, we've had explosive population growth. So just having just doing the normal things you do, you got to do more. You got to build more schools,
you got to do more roads. You have to do different things for the services to be there of the core things that everyone thinks government should do. And we've had the biggest period of inflation because of obviously what the guys have done in Washington, the Federal Reserve, all this stuff.
So we had projects like major projects that everyone thinks are good, but then I had to go back like a year later and put 10s of millions of more dollars into it because the cost went up. So much fact, you look at the cost of some of these things, just go back five or six years. Some of these projects have gone up 50%, seventy, some of them have doubled in terms of how much it costs. And that's driven by supply chain, inflation, all these
other things. So we've had to deal with that big population growth and big increase and yet we're still able to bring in the budget billions of dollars less than we did the the year before. We also have by the end of this fiscal year, we will have. So Florida became a state in the 1840s, accumulated debt all the way until basically the the present time. So when I became governor, if he took all that debt up until 2019, we've now retired 41 percent of our state's total historical debt.
And I don't think there's any other state that can say that that's a major deal. And so our debt per capita dropped from 14157 dollars about 15 years ago. Now it's $664 per person in Florida. So that's a 54% increase. And just put that in perspective, your share as a Florida resident is less than $700.00 a person of our outstanding state debt. Your share of the federal debt as an American is over $100,000
per U.S. citizen. I mean, that is something that's a stark, stark difference in terms of what you do. We also have maintained a AAA credit rating, which not every state can say. And we have more than tripled our rainy day fund. We call it the budget stabilization fund. We have major, major plush reserves, which had not always been the case as well. And get this, you want to talk about efficiency.
Florida has the lowest number of state government workers per capita of any state in these United States. That is what you call a small government. And yet if you compare our services to peer states like New York and California, where would you rather go to the DMV? Would you rather go here or would you rather go there? Where would you rather open to try to open and start a business in Florida or some of these other places?
And so our services, even with that small footprint are actually better than what they're doing in these other states. And of course, when you're efficient and you're good stewards of the taxpayer dollars, returning money to the taxpayers in relief is something that's really, really significant. And so just this current year of the legislature was able to pass and I signed 1.5 billion in tax relief. Some of those are permanent tax cuts.
We, for example, recently, I think it was two years ago, we eliminated all sales tax on all baby items permanently. So you have a, you have a kid and you need to buy all these different things, the diapers, the cribs, everything that goes along with that. And it's expensive. You now do that tax free. So that saves families hundreds of dollars a minimum a year, probably more depending on how things are in this stuff gets more and more expensive every,
every single day. We also do toll relief. So we will have two straight years where we've done a 50% rebate for tolls for all of our commuters. So if you're a commuter, you're paying at a certain number of times a month. They just refund your bill 50% at the end of each month. That's say, Floridians, you know, families, hundreds of dollars a year as well.
And of course, we do do our special sales tax holidays, things like back to school disaster preparedness, our Freedom Summer tax holiday where you can do a lot of activities and outdoor stuff during the summer. In this coming year, I've actually proposed a Second Amendment summer where your ammunition and firearms are tax free from Memorial Day through July 4th. And I hope that the legislature includes that.
It's honestly not not big of a fiscal impact, but I think it's something that a lot of our sportsmen and gun enthusiasts will really appreciate, especially on the ammo because that gets more and more expensive as the supply has been pretty tight over these more recent years. So we have delivered record tax relief. I think every year, certainly for the last three or four years, we've delivered more tax relief than had ever been delivered in the history of the state of Florida.
Going forward, we're looking to eliminate another tax. So Florida's the only state in the country that charges tax on business rent. So if you start a business and you and you have to rent a place, an office, you have to have to pay tax. They pay tax on the rent going in and it just doesn't make sense. It's not a really good way to do do this. And so we've put a proposal, we've already reduced it a lot since I've been governor and that's been helpful.
But we've put that proposal in. So over 2 year period, we'll just simply eliminate the business rent tax entirely and that'll be very good for a lot of folks who are trying to start businesses. It's also just an inappropriate way to tax. I mean, if we're the only state, like, look, we lead and so we do things other states don't do. So I'm not saying we have to mimic other states by any
stretch of the imagination. Heck, you look at what we've done, we're the, we're the only state that's enacted all this, the legislation to crack down on the illegal immigration and to help people like Tom Holman remove illegals from the state of Florida. I mean, we need to do that. And so we went above and beyond on that. No other state is done. Maybe some other states will, because I think they see people like what? Like what we did, but the reality is we don't necessarily
follow suit. At the same time, there's a policy that's been in place for decades and nobody else is doing it. I then look and say, OK, no one else is doing this. We're a low tax state. If even California doesn't tax this, if even New York doesn't that, should we really be taxing him? So we said no. So, so we hopefully be able to get that done. I know we've had a lot of great success with the with the legislature on reducing that
anyways. But if we do do that and all the other tax relief proposals, including the Second Amendment summer, including the marine boating gas holiday where you wouldn't pay tax on marine fuel. And that's a huge deal for a lot of our our fishermen, a lot of our boaters. Coincidentally, I met with the new Secretary of Commerce, Howard Ludnik. He's a good guy and, and I showed him because commerce overseas, NOAA, which overseas the fisheries and we obviously have a nice, nice peninsula,
sunny peninsula. If you go on this side, if you go into the Gulf. We have been delegated in the state of Florida the ability to manage our red snapper population and to make sure people can go or not go depending on what it is. Obviously we want the population to be healthy. We're required to do that under the law. But we've been able since I've been governor to dramatically expand golf red snapper season. We now have like 100 and five days, I think, for golf red
snapper season. That's a huge, huge thing for so many people who are on the West Coast of Florida. Meanwhile, you go across the peninsula to the Atlantic Ocean, you know how many? And we don't manage the Atlantic red snapper that is managed by the federal government. So as we're doing 105 days for golf red snapper, you know how many days they gave us for Atlantic red snapper? One day. Are you trying to tell me there's only one day worth of fish?
And that of course not. And we know that the, the boaters that go out there, the fisherman that goes at least these fish are everywhere. That's what they were telling us about the, the, the Gulf. And that's why we did our overhaul and said we're going to do it. And the population is even healthier. So I told them, I said, listen, give us the ability to manage this. I was like, this is ridiculous.
I was like so many people on the East Coast of Florida will be happy if we're able to do it. So hopefully we'll be able to get that delegation. We'll be able to expand Atlantic red snapper season. We obviously are have golf. I may be able to expand it even more. We're working on that. And we always, always tell these guys, I was like, give me more days, give me more days. So we may be able to do that again. We'll have an announcement on that shortly.
But this marine fuel holiday, that's going to save people a lot of of money. So hopefully the legislature will be supportive of that. I know there's a lot of their constituents that that really are doing that. So more relief for taxpayers, elimination. In our budget, we are proposing an elimination of 740 state
government positions. And so we already have the smallest footprint of any state and we're pruning even more and that's 740 on net because we do have to add positions in certain areas, for example, corrections, we need more people there. We need more folks to help with some of our Highway Patrol or lawn. But there's different things we have to do that everyone would agree have to do. So we look at that, what's the, what's the increase?
But then what's the decrease? And the net is going to be 740 fewer positions as a result of what we're doing. So we want to continue with these proposals. So, so this has been our frame of mind from the day I took office. I'm proud to be able to say that our state has never been in better fiscal health. When you're paying down 41% of the the state's debt that it's accumulated after 180 years, 100 and yeah, 180 years, that's a,
that's a huge, huge thing. Tax relief, all this stuff, very, very good, reducing spending, which no one else is really doing. But we always want to get better. And so we look to see what Musk is doing with the Doge in Washington DC. And the one thing I think that that they're doing that we need to incorporate is to utilize and leverage technology like artificial intelligence to be able to police the payments and the operations and the contracts that are done in government.
You know, for example, we have people that review these contracts and if there's DEI, they Nix it and things like that. But this is some high-powered stuff and I think would be able to provide us some good information. So, you know, we have already been doing this stuff. This will really help enhance
that. So today I'm pleased to announce that we are launching a comprehensive initiative to continue to streamline our government and to continue to eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy and to continue to ensure tax dollars are used in the most efficient way possible. We are creating a state DOGE task force that will implement a multi prong approach to eliminating bureaucratic bloat and modernizing our state government to best serve the people of Florida in the years ahead.
This will be. A1, just similar to the federal Doge. It's going to be a limited amount of time. It'll be a one year term. It will sunset following the completion of the mission. Now we've already been looking at things that we can do leading into this upcoming legislative session and we've already earmarked over 70 state boards and Commission for abolishment
and to sunset them. This will restore power and accountability to Floridians. I mean, I get all these boards and we have, I've gotten rid of some and then we get appointments to all this different stuff. And I'm like, well, why can't we just do that through the agency? Do we even need this? And so we've asked these questions over the last really couple years to tee up this major reform. So we will be proposing over 70 state boards and Commission to sunset and to get them off the
books. Again. I don't know that there's that many other states that are doing actually Iowa Governor Reynolds, I know she's sunset at a lot of agencies and that seems to have worked very well. There may be a couple examples around the country, but by and large that's not happening. We want to make sure that these boards and commissions aren't just continuing to grow without ever being reviewed for effectiveness.
So that's what we're doing. And I know there's a lot of support in the legislature to be able to eliminate some of these redundant entities. And, and we have been working on reviewing every single board and there's hundreds of these things. A lot of people never heard of any of these things, but they're there.
And we've examined the budgets, we've examined appointments, vacancies, the mission, trying to assess whether the mission still relevant, whether it overlaps with other boards or authorities, whether has been become obsolete over time. And there are some that actually serve their purpose. So they did what they had to do. They maybe they issued a report and so then you get it off the books. That's the way to do. Some of these boards haven't met
in recent years. Some of them haven't had appointments for many, many years, but we gathered feedback from state agencies as well as stakeholders. We wanted to make sure that we were doing this right. And this is part of a broader strategy to be able to streamline government. So a total of 900 positions, This is in addition to the ones I said will be eliminated that will be good for the state of Florida. So that's one thing that we've already found that we've already
proposed. We do need the legislature to ratify that and to enact those reductions. But I think that that we've gotten good feedback. I've spoken with both this this speaker and the Senate President. We also want to make sure that we're proactive and that we're doing all we can to make sure our State University and college system are being good stewards of your tax dollars. Now, we have not raised tuition
since I've been governor. You now have the the lowest tuition in the United States of America for a Florida resident. There's ways you can get that paid for if you're in bright future. So we're proud of that. But what we've also done over that period is we have increased appropriations to our State University system in really significant ways. And a lot of that has been really good. A lot of that has helped.
For example, we now give a pot of money for the universities, for the presidents to recruit faculty so they can bring in faculty. If you have somebody that's good at like MIT, you can offer them money, you can give them a position. We don't let the current faculty blackball anyone because they don't tow the ideological line.
We want people that are going to bring different perspectives, particularly with how stale academia has gotten, with just the intellectual vapidity that you've seen where they're basically parroting us similar ideology that's not good for university. So we've worked really hard to create different perspectives and I think it's been good, but that's money well spent if you're bringing in really high quality professors to be able to do this stuff.
So we're proud of that and there's so many other things that we've been able to do, but we also need to make sure that the money is being spent as wisely as possible. So yes, we do have the lowest undergraduate tuition and fees of any state in the country. It's about $6300. Most universities that are public are about 12,000 is the average. So we're almost half of what the averages. And there's some in these universities that that are over 20,000 even for in state.
Certainly I know there's a bunch that are, but are like 18,000 for in state. And some of these are good schools, but still that's a lot different. If you have $6300, you don't need to take out one red cent and loan. You really don't. Between what the parents, even parents are very low income and can't afford a lot. You can work part time jobs. There's things that you can do to be able to get through there. So you can graduate with either no debt or at A, at the worst,
very minimal debt. You can 18,000 tuition, room, board, all that stuff. You're not going to probably be able to make enough in a part time job to be able to pay that. So you likely will take on debt. And that's even at some of these state universities, but not in Florida. We have some of the highest ranked public universities in
the country. We have 4 ranked in the top 50, University of Florida, Florida State, South Florida and Florida International University. Of course, Florida International. Now, as a new president, our former Lieutenant governor Jeanette Nunez got in installed there last week. There was some protest from left wing student and faculty and people said, oh, man, did you see the protest? I was like, good. I was like, if they're not protesting her, then I must have
done something wrong. So that's like a confirmation that she was the right choice to be able to do that. So, So we're happy with all that and we want to make sure that this has value. We have a lot of money earmarked in our budget for higher Ed. The legislature has been very supportive of our State University and college system, and I know they're very thankful of that. But we also want to make sure that this is going well.
So I'm announcing my As part of this initiative, universities in Florida will be subjected to an independent review and audit to study efficiency and effectiveness of their operations in finance and financing. This is the dozing of our State University system, and I think it's going to be good for taxpayers and it's ultimately going to be good for students as well.
We will conduct a deep dive of all facets of university operations and spending, including debt and financial management practices, and make recommendations to the Board of Governors to consider and implement pathways to eliminate any unnecessary spending now. This will include examining courses, programming and staff at the institution to ensure that Florida students are receiving an education that will best equip them to gain meaningful employment after
graduation. You know, there are certain subjects that you know, look, if you want to do some of this, go to Cal Berkeley, go to some of these other places. We don't really want to be doing some of this stuff in Florida. We want to do the core important subjects, not only with a, with a goal towards employment, because there's classical liberal arts subjects that are really important, can help you become a better thinker and ultimately see the world in, in,
in better ways. So, so there's a whole host of things. It's not like it's rigid, but some of the ideological study stuff, we just want to prune that and get that out. And we want to make sure that these universities are really serving the classical mission of what a university should be. And that's not to impose ideology. It's really to teach students how to think and to prepare them to be citizens of our Republic.
Now examining the institutions administration, which we will do, will help ensure that no excess or bloat of personnel is is there that doesn't have a meaningful impact on students. We also want to make sure we did things. We were the first state in the country to eliminate DEI in higher education. You're now seeing a lot of that being done at the federal level here in 2025, but we did this
couple years ago. The problem is, is I think what you see in some bureaucracies is they say, oh, we can't do DEI, so they just rename it and continue to do it just kind of under a different banner. And we are going to be looking to see whether that's going on because obviously the university top is not going to be able to get away with doing it.
We know that. But you know, you have so many programs that are embedded and we we want to be able to see, we want to be able to unleash the audit on that. And then if there is, then we need to sunset that. You can't simply say you're following our law to eliminate DEI by just simply recharacterizing it using different terms. You're still violating the law. And if we find that, we will absolutely hold accountable. So we look really forward to this.
I think it's very, very important that we do. We may need to work with the legislature to tweak some statutes to make sure that this goes as strongly as possible. But this is something that I know our taxpayers will appreciate very much. Now state agencies, I am ordering that Allstate agencies and they we always audit, we are always constantly doing this, but we are going to add these IT and technological tools that the federal DOGE is using.
So we're going to use artificial intelligence that we're going to have people that have strong IT going in there and looking from that vantage point because it's just a different vantage point than how you do normally. And I think that's going to be a great supplement to our efforts. So, for example, we stop any contract that is DEI, but you know, AI, maybe they know ways around people, how to use different language.
AI picks up on that, flags it for us, and then we can put the kibosh on it. So I'm really looking forward to amplifying our current efforts with the use of artificial intelligence. Now local governments, it's interesting, I don't know that there's very many local governments in Florida that have reduced their budgets like we have at the state level. Maybe there are. You can tell me. I don't think in this area there's been very many that have done that.
So the question is, is I think a lot of these local budgets have have ballooned in recent years. I think there's been a lot of spending. I don't know that the taxpayers have always had a seat at the table. I don't know that the visibility on how money has been spent has been very good. But we're going to find out. State of Florida, we have focused on lowering the budget, paying off debt as well as by delivering tax relief. We know many local governments have done the opposite.
They've opted to increase their own budgets and even subject their citizens to higher taxes, such as higher property taxes to pay for these spending habits. And you know, these property taxes, It's like you, you buy a home, you buy land. You maybe you buy the home outright, but maybe you pay off a mortgage over 30 years and then, OK, you've paid off the mortgage, you bought the land, you've been taxed many times. It's like, is it your property or not?
Just for being on your property, you got to write a check to the government every year. So you're basically paying rent to the government to live on your own property. And our homestead exemption is not strong enough to help these folks because the property gets assessed so high.
And that's the thing. If you buy a home for $300,000 and you know there's certain tax, well then what, 10 years later they say it's worth 700,000 And so and then they say, you know, there's homestead stuff that helps protect you to a certain extent, but you're paying more and a lot of people can't afford that. So I think that that's a big
issue. And I know we're going to be really looking at ways to bring people relief from that because I think it's been really something that's pinching a lot of homeowners, particularly seniors on fixed income. But the reality is, is people have seen, and this is not the state, we don't control this. You know, we've not allowed any
of that stuff to happen. We've been cutting taxes, but people have seen their property tax, property tax liability go up over these last years because the property is being assessed higher and higher. And the reality is, is you don't really know how much your home is worth until someone offers you money and and is willing to pull the trigger on a sale.
That's how a market works. You can say it's worth this much, but if no one's cut and no one's willing to come and offer you that much, then why, why should you pay taxes on that amount? And so there's a lot of things
that need to be done with that. But as part of our DOGE initiative, our state task force will look into local government expenditures by utilizing publicly available county and municipal spending records so that we're able to provide this information in a digestible way for the taxpayers throughout the state of Florida. I am also going to request, and I've spoken with the leaders of both chambers, Speaker Perez and President Albrighton about legislation to be able to give
the DOGE team enforcement power so that these municipalities and counties have to comply with these audits. So right now we're basically, I can request information of any of these entities as governor that can be a back and forth. Sometimes they're not very eager to to respond. And then you need to, you know, judicial procedure. There's a lot of things that can happen. It can kind of take time. But if we get legislation there, you know what? And we wouldn't do it
permanently. It'd be like a year like they're doing federally. But for the next year, you know, doge teams can show up and they can show up the county and they can audit and they can use AI to be able to do some of the things that we're seeing at the federal level. I think that'd be really healthy. I think people would probably be surprised at some of the things, you know, that the money is is being spent on.
I mean, the fact that FEMA in the midst of an active hurricane season was spending 10s of millions, probably more than that to house illegals in these nice hotels in Manhattan instead. And then how? I mean, they haven't been great for a lot of people in Tampa Bay and you just have to scratch your head. But I think they'll be things that are going to be found out. So, so we're going to be looking to do that.
I think we can have strong legislative effort to be able to provide with an ability to doge at the local level, be able to give the citizenry very good information about how their money is being spent. Finally, we want to aid what they're doing in Washington to save taxpayers money. So we want to help claw back some of the ideological spending
under the Biden administration. Under my leadership, state of Florida has actually rejected billions of dollars in federal funding because they had ideological strings attached. They wanted us to change our behavior. So you accept the money from them and then you give them power over how the state conducts operations that I refuse to do. I am not going to let them come in and contort our operations just so we can get some crumbs from some of these massive federal spending programs.
And the reality is, is, you know, a lot of that stuff, it really shouldn't have been enacted to begin with. I mean, that's just the reality. So this included, we were the only state in the country to reject money from the Biden Infrastructure Initiative. We turned down $320 million because if you accepted that money, it would have forced us to track the tailpipe emissions of personal vehicles and implement other Green New Deal style policies to limit carbon
emissions from our vehicles. I don't want to be policing your tailpipe. I think it's ridiculous. I have a budget surplus. We don't need the 320 million. That 320 million is not even close. I mean, the behavior they want us to do, I mean, that is nothing. That's peanuts to expect us to do that. So we didn't do that, and we were the only state in the country to reject the money coming from Biden. But here's the thing. We rejected it. We said we're not playing your
game. We're not doing it. We want to give the money back. We use it to reduce the debt, use it to reduce the deficit. But Despite that, the Federal Highway Safety Administration could not find a way to accept the repayment because there's no mechanism in place to allow a return of funds. How ridiculous is that, that they can't even accept money that we don't want to spend?
We've also through our Department of Children and Families, we are able and we're attempting to return almost $600 million to the federal government and funds that we did not need to execute the use for programs because we've done it more efficiently and effectively. We are asking the Trump administration, let us return some of this unused or surplus amounts of federal funds, apply that to the DOGE savings, apply that to reducing the debt.
And the reality is, is my view as governor, even though a lot of the stuff that goes on in Washington with Congress, I think is insane, if there are federal programs that can help, whatever levers are there, I try to use and help. So when we have the disasters, you know, we ask for FEMA to unlock different things. People get individual assistance, all this stuff. And that's fine.
But when you start conditioning this on us changing who we are as a state and embracing really noxious concepts and policies, and we're not going to do that. And we're going to make sure that we continue representing the people in the way that they elected us to represent them. So we do have money that's available, even though we have used in other instances when there's no strings attached on this one, on some of these, it
created problems. So we can between between both DCF and transportation, that's close to a billion dollars that we can return to, to the federal coffers and luck our we're running $2 trillion plus annual deficits. It's a really, really bad picture. I'm not saying that this billion dollars is going to make or break the fiscal viability of the Republic at this point.
But I also am not one of the people like you have a lot of people in the media that will say, oh, USAID, it's only 40 billion like that's nothing compared to the deficit. Well, that way of thinking that leads it to get to two 2 trillion. If you actually said no, a billion dollars is real money. And Washington say it's not real money, you know, it's real money. Let's save it here. Let's say 5 billion here, let's
say 50 billion there. Eventually you create a culture and that's what we've done in Florida. I mean, we've really worked hard to make sure we have strong finances and strong operations of the government. So I'm excited about this effort to to take some of what we've seen in Washington that they're doing with Elon Musk and apply it to Florida, both our local governments, our universities.
And then particularly looking at how we have been auditing ourselves and doing this over many number of years. And of course, that's how we got the 70 boards to eliminate. But applying some of the technology and artificial intelligence, I think it's going to help us do even better going forward. So I want to thanks to everybody who's been involved in in helping with this. I do think there's something that can be very meaningful and
will continue leading the way. And the bottom line is, yeah, you see what they need to do in Washington to try to right the ship. If they just make America operate like Florida, we will be in much better situation. OK, Chris Spencer, come on. Well, thank you, Governor DeSantis for having me here today for this very important announcement. I'll start first. Florida has among the lowest tax burden per capita in the entire
country. And yet Despite that, that has not stopped any of the transformative investments that the state has made and things like Everglades restoration, traffic congestion relief, infrastructure improvements and support for law enforcement. And Florida has a proven track record of always doing more with less. And the governor's already made the comparison to the state of Florida versus the state of New York.
But the drill that down a little bit further, the city of New York, NY City's budget is roughly equivalent to the current year budget for the state of Florida. And obviously, as the governor said, there's a lot more people in the state of Florida than in the state of New York and a lot more people than in the state or in the city of of New York as well. This strong track record of fiscally conservative fiscal management has proven very successful for the state of Florida.
As the governor said, Florida's credit rating among the all the major credit rating agencies, including Moody's, Fitch and S&P, is the highest that it can be, and it's higher than the credit rating for the federal government. And this translates into material benefit for the state, which also means better cost savings for Florida taxpayers.
As the governor's highlighted, under his leadership and with the support of the Legislature, the state of Florida has had an accelerated debt repayment program. And that's important to to to note even further to drill down. That means not just paying down the debt of the state, but accelerating the pay down of the debt of the state at a time when Washington largess has been driving the national debt to historic highs. So, Governor, I want to thank
you for this initiative. I think it's very, very important. And it's always prudent to regularly assess opportunities for further efficiencies in government. As Executive director of the State Board of Administration, we see this drive for efficiencies and all the private enterprises that we invest in on a regular basis. And it's just common sense. Those who are entrusted with scarce taxpayer resources should always be looking to optimize those taxpayer resources.
And I'm already a part of this initiative, Governor, and looking forward to hitting the ground running and to deliver great taxpayer savings for Floridians. Thank you. OK. Thanks, Manny. Good morning and thank you Governor for having me here today. As the governor mentioned, Florida has led the nation in fiscal responsibility and providing high quality education that is focused on education and not indoctrination. While other states spend beyond their revenues and rack up
budget deficits. Under the leadership of Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida has built up reserves while paying off records amount of debt. While other states have raised tuition at their universities and colleges. Florida has made earning a higher education degree affordable. As you, as the governor mentioned the lowest tuition in the country and by keeping that tuition low and also funding the Bright Futures Scholarship program to help students based on merit.
Together we have worked to reduce spending on programs that do not have outcomes on students like DEI and critical race theory and shifted our education buck budget back to the main focus of providing quality education of our students. The Governor has focused on educational programs with high return on investment, expanding workforce education programs that lead to high demand, high wage jobs that actually help Floridians support themselves and their families.
This is why Florida has ranked number one in education for two years in a row and ranked number one in higher education for eight years in a row. The Governor has also taken steps to reduce extraneous spending on programs that have no educational value. In 2023, the Governor signed Senate Bill 266, which prohibited institutions from spending federal or state funds on discriminatory initiative
initiatives and DEI programs. To further comply with this statute, the Florida College System and the State University System began a review of all the courses listed in general education. In January, the State Board of Education approved the updated General General Education course list from all 28 colleges. This updated list represents a reduction of 57% of the number of courses under general
education. So improving the focus of our foundational skills and transferability of courses instead of spending money on courses and programs that just do not work. Some of them were just dormant as well. But we know we can't rest on our laurels and when it comes to providing high quality education, our public institutions and reducing administrative blow. That is why I wholeheartedly support the Governor's mission to review higher education
spending. We will review every dollar spent at our public institutions, ensuring that all programs and administrators are laser focused on improving student outcomes, which is what the money should be spent on. The programs that are higher Ed institutions should provide our students with a strong foundation rooted in the principles of our country, what it was founded upon, which leads students to a long lasting career.
While other states have pushed students into degrees, as as the governor often likes to mention in zombie studies, Flora's focused on the workforce and the needs of our economies. While Florida has made great strides in refocusing our higher education system on educating students for their future, we must continue to dive into administrative spending and reduce blows to our record of success may continue.
It is a great time to review higher education spending with a fine tooth comb, particularly when it comes to programs that do not contribute to the students future success in the job market. Our students rely upon us to keep higher education affordable so that they do not have to take mounds of debt before they even enter the workforce. And to accomplish that goal, we must keep spending manageable and focused on driving student success.
And as we go into the out years, as the governor's mentioned it, this this review is incredibly important because you remain lean and regardless of what happens in the out year with the budget, it's always not going to be a rosy picture. And so we have to make sure that we are focused on the main things and I would have this extra spending. So, Governor, thank you very much. I look forward to participating in this initiative and keeping Florida efficient. Great.
And and look, we, we very we could, we wouldn't, we don't really need to be. I mean we've already have a record where we can say we're the best in the country and all this and you could rest on your laurels, but that's just not the way we roll. We want to figure out how we can do it even better. I I look forward to leveraging
some of the technology. I look forward to look looking what's going on with, you know, the universities nationwide if you go back and it really tracks almost perfectly for when you had the gusher of student loans. You know, it used to be like a loan was something that was a little rarer, wasn't something then it just kind of became like and people are like the students are told, oh, don't get a job, don't do anything, just just take out more loan money. And that's not worked out well.
But but it's interesting. As more money was available for universities nationwide in the form of these loans, has it improved the actual education? I don't think so. What has changed? No question. You've seen an explosion and administrative staff since that money has gone into the universities. You go back decades, it's shot up dramatically. And that's not what we're looking to do. And we're going to see kind of where Florida ranks and all that stuff. But it, but it's important.
I don't anticipate us, even though we've been doing this, even though we're going to try to find other more innovative ways to supplement the efforts. And I don't think you're going to see in Florida the stuff that you've seen in Washington. I mean, in Washington, you'll have massive buildings in DC that nobody's been to in four years. The people just, they quote work from home. But what ends up happening is you got some of these folks that are basically in the bureaucracy in DC.
They're told you don't have to show up to the office. So then they go buy a home in like Tennessee, which is cheaper to live than Washington, but they still get cost of living for being in Washington. So they're getting that cost of living and pocketing it, not having to show up to the office. And look, I, I just don't think that works. I don't know how you can sustain that.
But that's basically been the rule up there for the last four years, even at the we and we were at the White House on on Friday, Saturday. And they have a there's a building right next to the White House called the Old Executive Office Building, Eisenhower Executive, I think they call it now. And so, you know, you do meetings there. So yeah, I had some meetings in the white, but then I had some there and people were telling me that before January 20th, no one had really even been in there
for the last four years. It was like a ghost town. Like, this is like a key part for like, the administration, the White House staff to utilize, and they just weren't doing it. So it's all just, hey, just, you know, stay at home in your pajamas. And, you know, I'm somebody that the default for me is, you know, you got to show up to work, right? There may be times where work from home can make sense.
I'm not saying you can never do it, but I think what's happened in our federal government is they created under Biden almost an entitlement to not show up to work. So that if you're told to go into the office, that's like a big imposition. And there's some people that have already moved far away from Washington, DC and they're told to work. And now it's it's going to be a little bit more difficult for them to show up because some of
the choices they made. So, so some of the stuff that we've seen in these practices, I think I've been really, really bad. I'm glad that doge is is, is uncovering a lot of this federally. I mean, honestly, Congress should have been uncovering this years ago. That's their job to do. You really shouldn't even need to have, you know, the doge, but but it is what it is. So I'm looking forward to this. I think we're going to have some some good opportunities here.
And I'm also excited to be down here. We've got spring training is starting. I know Steinbrenner feels gotten improved. That looks great. We're going to see how it does over the course of the regular season when the Rays are playing there and imagine that they'll probably be a lot of interest and and going to those games since you don't have to now cross the bridge over to Pinellas if you're here in Hillsboro. So they'll probably probably do pretty well in terms of the attendance.
But it's a good time of year to be in Florida. We've got spring training kicking up. We've got the the golf tournaments. You know, we've got four weeks of golf tournaments, including Copperhead here in the Tampa Bay area. And it's just that we had the Daytona 500 couple weeks ago. So so it's a good time. Seems like everybody, you know, they say Canadians aren't going to come because of the tension with the US. I'm not seeing any downtick in that. I'm seeing massive numbers of
people here. I mean, it's hard. You know, we're we're accelerating so many infrastructure projects. We're going to have some more announcements on that this week. It's hard to keep up with with the flow and the traffic and everything that's coming down. So enjoy these particularly these next couple months. I think you're a great time to be to be down here in Florida. OK, do we have any questions? Yes. You know, my view is, is Donald Trump just got into office.
I want these congressmen focused on enacting his agenda. They haven't done very much yet. They're not putting his executive orders into place. We'll see what they do on the spending. But we have such a narrow majority that to be trying to campaign other places and missing these votes, I think is not something that's advisable at all. And so the reality is, is, you know, we've we've achieved victories in Florida. We need to start achieving those victories up there.
So I think people look at it and say, you know, you got a guy like Byron, he just hasn't been a part of any of the victories that we've had here over the leftover these last years. He's just not been a part of it. He's been in other states campaigning, doing that. And that's fine. But OK, we'll then deliver results up there. You know, that's what I want to see.
I want to see them delivering results for the people of Florida. We deliver it here all the time for the people of Florida. And that's what we need to be doing. And so, you know, I've, I've said I'm going to be, you know, raising money.
We're going to be looking to have somebody that's going to be able to continue and build off the success that we've had here in Florida. I think a lot of people think somehow the battles been won and you don't have to worry about it. We could revert very quickly. That could happen 100%. And so it really needs to be OK. Are you going to be somebody that's going to fight for people, especially when it's not easy?
Have you been willing to get in and, and, and get involved in these big battles that we've had and have won over these many years? And if you're not willing to do that, then I, I think we are going to see this state revert. So I would not take anything for granted. I know people have been been, we've had hundreds of thousands of people move here specifically because of the policies that we have. And, and I think that that's something that you should not take for granted.
This is not necessarily something that just goes on autopilot. And it's just something that I think is really, really important. So my thing is, is yes, we've achieved these victories. We have more to do, but you got to solidify that and then you got to take it, take it to the next level. And that's really what, what the name of the game is. I, I haven't really thought about the Lieutenant governor as much. I'm going to wait on that.
We're working through this legislative session that's going to start next week. We also, I think they'll be a position for chief financial officer starting at the end of March. We'll wait on that till after the legislative session as well. We want to we want to focus on what's it's really important. I also want to be able to watch how how different people are able to perform over the next couple weeks. I'm in the legislature and some
out of the legislature. So we'll look at that as we get out of, you know, the the thing. And so in terms of this now, you know, people ask me all the time about our wonderful first lady who has done a fantastic job as first lady of Florida. And there's been a lot of people, you know, I was asked on it on, on Fox the other day about, you know, all these people are chattering about, about her running. And what I said was, you know, that's not, she's never angled
for anything, right? Because that's just not who she is. I mean, she kind of, you know, does what she does. But I will tell you this, you know, you're talking about somebody like her. I won by the biggest margin that any Republicans ever want a governor's race here in Florida. She would do better than me. Like there's no question about that that would happen.
And and she's somebody that has, I think the that the intestinal fortitude and the dedication to conservative principles that, you know, anything we've accomplished, she'd be able to take to the next level. And I remember back in the day, this is man, this is years ago now, probably my first or second year as governor. We were down in Palm Beach and we were at a dinner and we were sitting next to Rush Limbaugh, who's, who's a, who's a good friend of mine and is a good
supporter. And, and the first lady's just holding court with Rush about conservatism and all this other, all this other stuff. And you can see, like, Rush, his eyes are lighting up because, you know, Rush would always say the spouses are more liberal. And it pulls the office holder to the left. And on this case, he's saying, like, that is not true. And so at the end of the dinner, he's like, put his finger in my chest. He's like, do you only person I would rather have as my governor
than you is her. And he pointed to her. And I was like, that's a pretty good endorsement there. Anyone else? Well, I'd say a couple things, just just one. You know, how do we perceive of the proper role of government? And do you think it's fine that you buy property, you buy a home, you own it outright free and clear, and yet you have to continue to pony up money to the government just for the courtesy of using your own property? That's not, we don't tax like that in almost any other
instance. You know, if you want to go buy a car, they can tax you on the sale. There's other ways you buy a house. They do a doc documentary, stamp tax as part of that. And so it's really an anomaly. So you could have someone that's done everything right, maybe a senior citizen on fixed income. The value of the home keeps getting appraised higher. Even with Homestead, that doesn't insulate you entirely
from that. And then you're having to to write these checks to the government and that's a burden on people. And that's pinched a lot of people, particularly as home values have been assessed higher in Florida. So that's something I recognize and and I want to be able to help folks.
The other thing is, just as you've seen with so much stuff that's more costly now, when you look at the cost of groceries, you look at all these other things that have gone up and everything's gone up in the last four, 4 1/2 years. The taxes are one thing that we can control through a referendum on the ballot, through basically government action. And yeah, you're right, the legislature couldn't do it. You'd have to put on the ballot all this stuff to be able to
give people relief. But we can control that. There's nothing we can do in Florida to directly just cut the price of eggs by 50%. If I could, I would. But that's just not the way that there's things in the private economy that are happening beyond what we're able to, you know, what we can control. We don't control the economy. We can have an impact on it for sure. And we've done that in different respects.
So this is pinching people and I think that's something that that you should look at. I also think that we're in a unique situation as a state because we could choose to offload more of our tax burden to visitors and to non residents if we wanted to. That's just, I mean, you have some people that are seasonal residents, how you handle their property. You have some of these investors that will buy different pieces of property and homes.
You have people that are tourists and they rent and then they go to the hotels, all the stuff. So I actually think that that you could do it to give major relief to people who are Florida residents and they have a homestead here and and probably not Mississippi, but that's one of the reasons we want to doge the local governments because some of these budgets have ballooned and they'll say, oh, well, we need all these taxes. But the question is, do you need
to be spending all that? Obviously we're going to have police forces and fire departments in the core. But if you look, there's a lot of other things that that some of these governments are spending money on. And so people are going to be able to look to see, OK, we can talk about taxing. We want tax relief. I know some of them probably want higher taxes. Let's have that debate. But let's also have a debate about the spending. And, and are you spending too
much? Can you deliver the same services at less? And I got to think the answer that's yes, because we deliver the core services in Florida with a budget that's less than half of New York's budget, even though we have millions of more people. And when you say we have millions of more residents than New York, that's true. But like at this time of year, we have probably millions on top of that.
Right. Who are here using the roads and doing all this stuff and yet we find a way to make it work. So I just think we what we can control in terms of the things that are really pinching folks are, are the, are the property taxes. We have to do it through the Constitution. We can't just do it at state. It is a local function. But people do need relief. The homestead exemption is not enough for people. Their their assessments are going up.
They're having to pay more and and we don't we don't want to see that. You know, we've, we've taken action on sales tax relief, we've taken action on all these other things. You know, we did the, it took a while for the legislature to, to, to move it, but they did move it the end of 22 to shore up the insure property insurance. And that's been a big issue. It's gone up. But last year in 24, it's gone
up everywhere. By the way, the S&P Global rated Florida as having the smallest increase in the country. You know, you have others that are people are leaving the state and other states. We've had 12 companies move in, in the last year, 13 months. No one thought that was possible. People thought the whole thing was just going to implode because we were having these storms like EN and, and Idalia. But even with doing that and, and, and people have said the market's stronger.
The reinsurance was down last year. All this stuff, we, we don't control those. And I can't just say, yeah, let's pass a law, reduce it by 50%. If you try to do that, then you end up what happens in California. But the taxes, that's purely a government function. So if the taxes are pinching people, then let's, let's do something about it. And so I look forward to seeing what they're doing. The legislature, I think our DOGE audits can be very, very instructive.
And hopefully, you know, we'll do what, what we can with the public available. But if they are able to take the, the legislation, provide some teeth to the auditing so that we can kind of do a doge on, on some of these local governments, I think it's going to be very positive. I think the taxpayers are really going to like it and I think it's going to really increase transparency. So we'll be producing that list shortly. We're working with the legislature on that.
I think by and large, they're, they're in agreement of I think almost all of them want to make sure that that everything is, is good. So, so that'll be coming for sure. And yes, stay tuned for, for us putting putting some folks together. You will see, I know Chris Spencer will be involved, Ben Watkins, our bond finance will be involved in and these are guys that have a lot of wherewithal.
They will be leveraging the IT and the tech that I think can really help us take these initiatives to the next level. OK, thank you. God bless. Hey, thank you so much for listening today. I really do appreciate your support. If you could take a second and hit the subscribe or the follow button on whatever podcast platform that you're listening on right now, I greatly appreciate it. It helps out the show tremendously and you'll never
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