Scandal: A series examining corruption in leadership and its downstream consequences.
A grand jury says $10 million in taxpayer money was diverted into the Hope Florida Foundation, tied to Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis, the wife of Gov. Ron DeSantis, before $8.5 million of it later flowed into GOP political spending. It could not determine who made the original transfer decision.
A Florida grand jury found that Gov. Ron DeSantis’s administration misappropriated $10 million in taxpayer money from a Medicaid settlement by directing the money to the Hope Florida Foundation. The foundation then awarded two $5 million grants to outside organizations, and a forensic analysis later traced $8.5 million from the recipients into a political committee chaired by James Uthmeier, then DeSantis’s chief of staff and now Florida’s attorney general.
The panel could not determine who made the original decision to send the money to the foundation. It also found insufficient evidence to charge anyone criminally. “Despite our finding that the money was misappropriated, we find insufficient evidence to charge anyone criminally,” the report said.
The money came from a $67,048,611 settlement with the health care company Centene over alleged prescription-drug overcharges connected to the Florida Healthy Kids program. After years of inactivity, negotiations accelerated in September 2024. A Sept. 12 proposal would have returned roughly $62 million to Florida and sent $5 million to the Hope Florida Foundation, the nonprofit supporting an initiative championed by Casey DeSantis, the governor’s wife and Florida’s first lady. That allocation later doubled to $10 million, reducing the state’s share to roughly $57 million. CBS News Miami reported that no reason was given for the increase.
Jason Weida, then secretary of Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration, testified that he regarded the $10 million as a “bonus” above what Centene owed taxpayers. The grand jury rejected that view, concluding: “This money was part of the damages Centene owed to Florida taxpayers.”
“Laws are like spiders’ webs; the big flies get through, while the little ones are caught.”
— Honoré de Balzac, The Firm of Nucingen (1838)
Scandal is The Intellectualist’s series on political misconduct, institutional failure, elite impunity and the systems that allow powerful people to escape accountability.
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