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The Hope Florida scandal, explained
Trump's DOJ will look the other way. But that doesn't mean there aren't consequences.
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After his presidential run crashed and burned, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been in the news much less. It turns out Republicans preferred the uniquely blustering viciousness of Donald Trump rather than the workaday viciousness of DeSantis.
Just as DeSantis was a wan, pale copy of Trump on the campaign trail, he’s now a wan, pale copy of Trump when it comes to using his elected office to grift. So, while Trump and family have a crypto company selling access to the president, with the family fortune increasing by at least $2.9 billion in the last six months, DeSantis only managed to divert $10 million to his wife’s nonprofit.
That’s weak sauce even in comparison to other Florida GOP elected officials. Sen. Rick Scott crimed so hard in the healthcare sector before running for office that he had to pay the largest fine for Medicare fraud ever — a cool $1.7 billion.
The story of how Casey DeSantis, Ron’s wife, came into $10 million for her Hope Florida program, $10 million that then made its way to DeSantis-related PACs, is predictably messy. Let’s start at the beginning.
Follow the money
The governor and the first lady started Hope Florida in 2021. It was yet another in a long line of conservative initiatives to strip needy people of government aid and instead rely on churches and nonprofits.
Two years later, the DeSantis administration created the Hope Florida Foundation, a charity to receive donations to distribute to churches and other nonprofits. The state would also have “hope navigators” (ugh) that would connect people to community resources, with an explicit mission of getting them off of government aid such as Medicaid.
(This is somewhat beside the point, but it’s grimly hilarious that rather than simply providing government assistance directly, Florida now has this Rube Goldberg monstrosity, a state-created charity accepting private donations that it then gives to private charities.)
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The $10 million at issue here was part of a settlement that Centene, Florida’s biggest Medicaid contractor, paid to the state. Centene had overbilled the state by millions and, in September 2024, agreed to pay $67 million to settle the matter. Those millions were to be returned to state and federal coffers. Only $57 million made its way back to the state, however. $10 million was sent to the Hope Florida Foundation, run by Casey DeSantis.
You might be wondering how DeSantis could divert $10 million of Medicaid settlement money to his wife’s version of Be Best. The answer is most likely that he couldn’t, but did it anyway. DeSantis tried to say that the $10 million was an additional donation from Centene to Hope Florida above and beyond the $67 million owed, but that was just a lie.
After Hope Florida got that $10 million, it then turned around and gave $5 million each to Secure Florida’s Future and Save Our Society from Drugs, both of which had applied for grants, conveniently, just a couple of weeks after the $67 million settlement was finalized. Neither of those organizations is required to disclose their donors. Those organizations then gave $8.5 million to Keep Florida Clean. Keep Florida Clean just happened to be run by James Uthmeier, who was DeSantis’s chief of staff at the time. Keep Florida Clean was created to oppose Amendment 3, a ballot initiative seeking to legalize recreational marijuana.
Over the next few months, Keep Florida Clean sent $10.5 million to Florida’s state Republican Party, which was also campaigning against recreational weed. In addition, it gave Ron DeSantis’s Florida Freedom Fund $1.1 million. Both DeSantis and his wife campaigned extensively against Amendment 3.
And that’s how money designed to make taxpayers whole after Centene’s overbilling instead ended up helping Ron DeSantis kill the prospect of legal weed in the state.
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Even if Hope Florida had just hung on to the $10 million, this would still be bad, and not just because it should never have been diverted to them in the first place. It’s also because Hope Florida does not seem to actually do very much.
When news of the $10 million was bubbling up, the DeSantises did a joint press conference to boast that Hope Florida liaisons were in all 67 sheriff’s offices in the state. However, 13 offices contacted by the Tampa Bay Times said they had no Hope Florida personnel at their office, and their work with Hope Florida was limited to providi