DeSantis ready to return nearly $1 billion to federal government

Governor Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump are nowhere near as friendly as they were before the 2024 election cycle, but DeSantis continues to help push Trump’s agenda.

To that point, DeSantis has just announced that he wants to return nearly $1 billion that Florida received from the federal government during the Biden administration.

DeSantis Pushes Immigration Reform

After Donald Trump was elected, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was among the first to step in and push his state legislature to start passing legislation that would fall in line with Trump’s proposed agenda.

At first, the legislature started to flex against DeSantis, but the legislation was eventually passed.

DeSantis, at the time, stated, “Today, the Florida Legislature has passed the strongest legislation to combat illegal immigration of any state in the entire country.

“We are ahead of the curve on ending the illegal immigration crisis.”

DeSantis Hits Judges

Everyone with an ounce of common sense knew that Democrats would fight Donald Trump’s executive orders, and those orders would likely face injunctions every time they went before a Democrat-appointed judge.

While many people are looking at Justice Roberts to fix the issue in the lower courts, DeSantis and I are on the same page looking for Congress to fix this issue.

To that point, DeSantis stated, "Congress has the authority to strip jurisdiction of the federal courts to decide these cases in the first place. The sabotaging of President Trump’s agenda by ‘resistance’ judges was predictable — why no jurisdiction-stripping bills tee’d up at the onset of this Congress?"

Like me, DeSantis suggested adding the legislation to a spending bill that would be passed via reconciliation if they can figure any way to justify adding it to a budget bill, but that will be a challenge. Regardless, I would think it benefits both sides of the aisle to streamline the review process of executive orders so taxpayers are not wasting money and they are not wasting time during the appellate process.

DeSantis Returning Money

The big headline stealer for the Trump administration has been DOGE, and DeSantis just added a bit more fuel to that fire while also taking a nice shot at the Biden administration.

DeSantis announced that he will be returning $878 million to the federal government, money he claims he wanted to return to Biden but was unable to do so.

DeSantis stated, "For years, Florida has been trying to return federal funds to the federal government due to the ideological strings attached by the Biden Administration—but they couldn't even figure out how to accept it.”

The best part of this is that now people start asking what other states were given money along the same lines, and how much is sitting out there that is unspent and should be returned. Remember, every penny helps right now to trim that national deficit, so DeSantis just did Trump a huge favor.