MEDIA ARTICLE: How Hope Florida quietly hollowed out the state’s safety net for lower-income families (Sun Sentinel, 9-24-26)

Florida first lady Casey DeSantis and Gov. Ron DeSantis at a May 20, 2025, news conference in Tampa. State records show the controversial initiative Hope Florida shifted priorities away from the Department of Children and Families eligibility division that has since failed federal standards and left Florida families cut off (Jefferee Woo/The Tampa Bay Times/TNS) 

How Hope Florida quietly hollowed out the state’s safety net for lower-income families

Florida records show the controversial initiative shifted priorities away from DCF’s eligibility division that has since failed federal standards and left Floridians cut off

By Sharmila Venkatasubban | Florida Trib

PUBLISHED: September 24, 2026 at 12:10 PM EDT

Outside Florida’s Department of Children and Families office in Kendall, people stood in line for three to four hours in the South Florida heat, waiting to learn why their Medicaid or food assistance had been cut off and what they could do about it — something the letters the state mailed them often didn’t say.

Many arrived before the doors were open and had already tried the phone with no luck, said Jared Nordlund, the state director for UnidosUS in Florida, an advocacy group that provides assistance to people trying to navigate state agencies.

For years, the organization had been tracking the long waits families across the state had been suffering while trying to figure out why they lost their benefits. Florida runs a single call center for more than a million people on public assistance, and in federal court its own numbers told the story: More than half of all calls were dropped. The 313 agents on the line had six to seven minutes per caller and the screen in front of them couldn’t show the income limit that decides whether a family qualifies.

“Something’s wrong here,” Nordlund told The Florida Trib he remembered thinking at the time. “It shouldn’t take this long.”

These signs of dysfunction became apparent to Nordlund and other policy experts in 2023. That was when the federal government stopped mandating that states provide expanded Medicaid coverage that took effect during the pandemic, and Florida began rechecking the eligibility of Medicaid enrollees and booting roughly 1 million people off the rolls — an arduous task for a chronically understaffed, underpaid agency.

That was also the year DCF began propping up Hope Florida, first lady Casey DeSantis’ signature initiative launched in 2021 with considerable fanfare as a way to shift the burden of public assistance from the state onto churches, charities and nonprofits — a conservative reimaging of the welfare state.

Its staff, called Hope navigators, would guide Floridians toward self-sufficiency, Casey DeSantis publicly pledged.

Some legislators and critics say Hope Florida is instead a black box: DCF has yet to share meaningful evidence that Casey DeSantis’ initiative is helping people as intended. But budget and position records reviewed by The Florida Trib show that Hope Florida has nonetheless come with a steep price.

To staff up Hope Florida — far beyond what the Florida Legislature has authorized — DCF officials quietly cannibalized the agency’s own workforce, moving jobs out of the offices that determine eligibility for benefits like Medicaid and food assistance and building Hope Florida from the inside out: Roughly 70% of the care coordinators in the 2020 pilot program that preceded Hope Florida were already DCF employees, as were 63% of Hope navigators in 2022.

And as of April 2025, the Legislature’s analysts wrote, no law authorized the expansion of Hope Florida, or its functions, beyond the relatively small pot of money and staffed positions lawmakers set aside in 2021.

Hope Florida became politically toxic over the past year after a Republican lawmaker and reporters at the Tampa Bay Times and Miami Herald found that Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration diverted $10 million in Medicaid settlement funds into the program’s private foundation, which ultimately ended up in the hands of political committees in 2024 that were working to defeat a proposed constitutional amendment that would have legalized recreational marijuana. A Leon County grand jury has since found the funds were misappropriated “as part of a sophisticated scheme to fund political activities.”

But that controversy has overshadowed the shifting of priorities within DCF that has left the agency unable to handle the basic functions necessary to administer public assistance programs, as detailed in excoriating court rulings, a state audit and federal error data. The staffers who remain have less training and are poorly paid, sometimes qualifying for public assistance themselves, while their counterparts within Hope Florida make on average thousands more.

Today, the DCF division Hope Florida was built on top of is failing by nearly every federal measure.

Florida’s error rate in calculating food assistance hit 15.1% in 2024, the fourth-worst in the nation, and its 2025 rate of 12.97% would put the state on the hook for roughly $1 billion a year under the federal One Big Beautiful Bill Act. A scathing state audit also found cases in which the department wrongly cut off Medicaid for eligible children, failed to send legally required termination notices, and stalled the auditors’ own access to its records.

“Not only did they divert $10 million, but they also dramatically eroded the effectiveness of a state agency that’s supposed to be supporting families and kids, and the kids are suffering because of it,” said Holly Bullard, chief strategy and development officer at the Florida Policy Institute.

Neither DCF nor Gov. Ron DeSantis’s office responded to multiple requests for comment and detailed questions The Florida Trib provided. Public records requests the Trib filed with DCF for this article remain pending.

Five positions, 144 jobs

Agency records show that as DCF’s traditional employee ranks shrank, Hope Florida’s grew substantially — and without legislative approval.

In the 2023-24 budget year, the Legislature set aside five full-time positions and $324,370 for Hope Florida. State records for that same year show 144 established positions under a Hope Florida organization, budgeted at $9.15 million in salaries and benefits.

A Trib analysis found that as Hope Florida’s ranks swelled, the division responsible for processing Medicaid and food-assistance benefits lost the positions that filled those roles.

The largest group, 101 new Hope navigators classified by the state as senior human services program analysts, came out of local eligibility offices. A year earlier they were frontline jobs in Florida’s safety net: 20 in Miami-Dade, 16 in Hillsborough County, dozens more at service centers from the Panhandle to South Florida. Seventeen state positions classified as government operations consultants and 11 more as management consultants followed, most from the same field offices.

And of the 93 Hope navigators on the payroll today, 54 were already working for DCF before the program launched in September 2021.

Once the program existed, it grew.

The next year, in 2024, Hope Florida added 17 positions and nearly $2 million in salary costs. Today it holds 161 positions, with 150 currently filled, and costs $11.7 million a year, 36 times what lawmakers set aside for it in 2023.

At the same time, the economic self-sufficiency services division, the core DCF department tasked with determining eligibility and fielding questions from public assistance recipients, shrank. Over five budget years, the division outside of Hope Florida shed 211 positions.

In 2025, a legislative staff analysis reached three conclusions: No law authorized Hope Florida; DCF had staffed it with positions established for other work the Legislature had directed; and House staff could not determine how many state employees worked for the program, because DCF did not turn over the documents that were requested.

The number of Hope Florida employees, House staff wrote, was “unknown.” But at DCF alone, the state’s own position records show at least 161.

Lawmakers never got even that count, said state Rep. Alex Andrade, R- Pensacola, who led the House’s 2025 investigation into the Hope Florida Foundation.

“That type of granular detail has never really been provided to the Legislature,” he told The Florida Trib. The closest thing to a roster he ever saw, he said, came from the foundation’s own expense records, which showed bonuses paid to employees labeled Hope navigators that “didn’t go through payroll at all.” The foundation, he said, “just cut checks.”

First lady Casey DeSantis speaks alongside Gov. Ron DeSantis at a July 29, 2024, news conference in Tampa. They handed out multiple checks to local churches as a part of their Hope Florida program. (Dylan Townsend/Tampa Bay Times/TNS)

The jobs nobody wants

The job of deciding whether a Florida family can buy groceries this month or keep its health coverage falls to DCF’s frontline caseworkers, known as economic self-sufficiency specialists.

But retention rates for new caseworkers are prohibitively low in part because of poor training, policy analysts say, and because of low salaries that have had few increases in the past decade, including a raise to $15 per hour, due to an increase in the state’s minimum wage, set to take effect this month.

On that salary alone, a caseworker supporting two children would qualify for the same food assistance the caseworker is deciding on.

DCF records show that a median frontline eligibility caseworker earns about $37,000. Ninety-seven percent earn less than $40,000. Hope Florida staff earn a median of about $42,000, and not one earns less than $40,000. A Hope Florida employee with 10 years of state service makes about $6,400 more than a caseworker with the same experience.

Publicly available payroll records also show a workforce that keeps starting over. Half of all eligibility caseworkers have been on the state payroll less than two years and seven months, and 638 of them, more than a third, were hired within the past 12 months. Hope Florida’s staff, by contrast, have been with the state a median of 5½ years.

In public, the department has told a different story. “Even in community hearings, when we’ve had lawmakers quote a report, the DCF staff will say, ‘Oh no, the wait time is like five minutes,’” Nordlund, the UnidosUS advocacy director, said. “And we’re just like, there’s just no way that’s possible. You call right now.”

Nordlund suspects the problems are connected. “It kind of feels like they probably gutted a lot of the DCF infrastructure and pushed it over to Hope Florida,” he said, “and that’s where a lot of the institutional knowledge probably resides.”

Andrade said many Hope Navigators are “really just existing employees that have been told their job is now to act as, you know, some unlicensed social worker.” In his understanding, the work often amounts to taking down a person’s information, entering it into CarePortal, a third-party referral website, and emailing them what information it produces. “And then they call it a day,” he said.

Bullard, at the Florida Policy Institute, sees the cost from the other side: Low pay and thin training produce turnover in exactly the jobs that require experience, and the workers who remain absorb the blame. “They’re blamed for everything,” she said.

The cost to Floridians

The consequences of this Hope Florida expansion go beyond shifting numbers on a spreadsheet.

When federal pandemic protections ended on March 31, 2023, Florida began rechecking eligibility and cut off Medicaid coverage for more than 1.8 million people over the next year, according to the numbers the state reported to federal regulators. A federal judge in Jacksonville later said the termination notices DCF mailed them were so confusing, vague and contradictory that they violated the Constitution. This summer, the state’s Auditor General found cases in which the department cut off eligible children through employee error and never told some families their coverage had ended.

Some who uploaded documents to the state’s MyACCESS portal to prove they still qualified got letters weeks later saying DCF had no record of them, Nordlund said.

Food assistance failed on its own measures. In 2019, Florida decided applications within the legal deadline 98.15% of the time, fourth best in the nation. By 2024 it managed 63.3%, and its payment error rate had climbed to 15.13%, fourth worst in the country, while most states improved.

That failure now comes with a high cost. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, states with error rates of 6% or higher must start paying a share of their residents’ food assistance in October 2027, a bill that for Florida could approach $1 billion a year. “It’s recurring,” Bullard said. “Every year we have to have a low error rate — unless they change the law.”

Asked by legislators to explain the errors, the department pointed partly at itself. It attributed about nine of its 15 points to taking applicants’ word about rent and expenses under pandemic and hurricane waivers that have since ended, and about five more to staff turnover, training problems, clerical mistakes and an eligibility computer system too old to show caseworkers what they need.

Andrade made the point bluntly on the House floor when he presented his budget. “We didn’t have this problem when Rick Scott was governor,” he said. He noted that DCF has “shown some improvement,” bringing its error rate down in the most recent data, and said he hopes federal officials give the state more time to get its act together under a new administration “and hopefully we aren’t expected to come up with a billion dollars in general revenue next year.”

Documents that don’t exist

Through all of it, the department has declined to show its work.

Between Feb. 26, 2025, and March 17, 2025, House staff asked DCF six times for its tax filings, accomplishments, and sworn statements about how it invested its money, records the law requires the department to submit, according to a House staff analysis.

DCF sent a list of five board members and a copy of the foundation’s bylaws. But on March 17, Sam Kerce, who was then DCF’s deputy chief of staff, told lawmakers the department could not provide data supporting its own public claims about what Hope Florida had accomplished. The Hope Florida Foundation’s required audit, due to the Auditor General March 31, 2025, never arrived. And the first finding in the Auditor General’s Medicaid audit is that department management significantly delayed the auditors’ access to records.

At the same time, lawmakers on the House Human Services Subcommittee were weighing whether to enshrine Hope Florida in state law. Its members, Andrade said, “were never getting information.”

DCF has also failed to fulfill public records requests quantifying Hope Florida’s impact on decreasing or eliminating reliance on public assistance programs — requests The Florida Policy Institute had been filing for a year-and-a-half, said senior policy analyst Cindy Huddleston.

“To this day, we’ve had no response from DCF, and we have reason to be concerned,” she told the Trib. “We’re struggling to understand the long-term impact of the program to get people out of poverty.”

The administration has repeatedly cited one stat: Hope Florida has helped 30,000 people off public assistance. Gov. Ron DeSantis repeated it again this month, Andrade said. “That 30,000 number hasn’t changed in two years,” Andrade said. “They’ve never been able to provide the information to say how they get to that number, and the fact that it hasn’t changed in two years … makes me think it’s a made-up number.”

Andrade stopped short of calling Hope Florida an ideological project. To him it looked more like carelessness at the top.

“It was like someone without any understanding of how these programs actually worked thought they knew better,” he said — “this kind of ham-fisted, top-down injection” of an idea that wasn’t ready. “It feels like a PR apparatus that never had any real meat to it.”

Bullard pointed to 211, a statewide information and referral line run by private organizations. Hope Florida, Bullard said, is “profoundly duplicative” of it. “We could have just said, hey, we want to invest also in 211 to ensure that we have this safety net,” she said.

Nordlund’s network of Hispanic nonprofits — most with someone on staff who will walk a stranger through a MyACCESS application — reached the same conclusion when the Hope navigator job description first circulated. “We already exist,” he recalled them saying. “It seems like it’s a duplicate of services.”

Nordlund says Hope Florida at times referred people to nonprofits within UnidosUS Florida’s network — organizations tasked with helping public assistance recipients understand the bureaucracy of state agencies. In other words, a state program housed inside DCF was sending Floridians to volunteer nonprofits whose job is to help them get back into DCF, he said, calling it “a big shell game.”

That’s the part of Hope Florida Bullard wishes more people understood — not the $10 million that made the headlines, but the agency underneath it, and the families who depend on it.

“That’s what I’m most upset about out of all of this, versus any other scandal people are bringing up,” she said. “We’re taking the eye off the ball of the well-being of children in Florida.”

Sharmila Venkatasubban is The Trib’s senior editor and health reporter and a Report for America corps member. You can reach her at sharmila.venkatasubban@floridatrib.org.

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MEDIA ARTICLE: Maxwell: Florida hid insurance industry’s lies — and tried to stop us from revealing them (Orlando Sentinel, 9-22-26)

When the Orlando Sentinel and South Florida Sun Sentinel obtained a report that showed Florida insurance companies made misleading claims about losing money, the Florida Senate threatened the newspapers with legal action if they revealed the truth. The journalists did not buckle. 

Maxwell: Florida hid insurance industry’s lies — and tried to stop us from revealing them

By Scott Maxwell | smaxwell@orlandosentinel.com | Orlando Sentinel

PUBLISHED: September 22, 2026 at 1:55 PM EDT | UPDATED: September 22, 2026 at 6:18 PM EDT

This past weekend’s newspaper carried a blockbuster exposé about how insurance companies — some of which jacked up premiums after claiming they were losing money in Florida — had been playing shell games with their profits.

Records obtained by the Orlando Sentinel and South Florida Sun Sentinel revealed that about 50 companies that claimed to have lost a collective $432 million from 2017 to 2019 had actually sent $1.3 billion to affiliated companies elsewhere.

Theoretically, companies can set up and bill separate companies to do work for them. But the damning detail in this story is that the state’s own consultant determined that least 20 of these companies paid their affiliates more than the “fair and reasonable” amount allowed under state law.

So they were breaking the rules while shifting more than a billion bucks elsewhere and then crying poor here in Florida, according to a report taxpayers spent $150,000 to produce.

But the story got even slimier.

First, the state tried to hide all this information from the public — even while approving rate hikes for supposedly struggling companies and while passing laws that make it harder for homeowners to sue insurance companies that stiff them out of benefits.

Second, after the Sentinel and Sun Sentinel got ahold of this information that exposed the truth, the state tried to stop us from sharing it — with threats.

Specifically, the general counsel for the Florida Senate threatened the two newspapers with “civil or criminal” action if we didn’t destroy the documents and “shred all physical copies.”

We did not comply.

Why? Because unlike the politicians and bureaucrats who run this state, we’re not in the business of hiding information from the people who live here.

We’ll talk more about the damning details from the report in a moment. But first, I wanted to share how we got here — what led us to the point where the state was threatening our journalists with third-degree felonies.

It started about a year ago when Florida’s two Tribune Publishing-owned newspapers decided to team up to investigate Florida’s costly and secrecy-shrouded insurance market.

Now, we have quite a few journalists who’ve written stories about the insurance industry through the years, led by the Sun Sentinel’s veteran insurance reporter Ron Hurtibise. I’ve also written a good deal about the issue.

But many of our pieces did more than just raise red flags. They raised more questions.

Yes, about companies using questionable accounting methods. But also about CEOs pocketing as much as $21 million right after the industry claimed it could barely make ends meet.

And about policy prices that rose for nine consecutive quarters right after Florida Republicans passed so-called “reform” measures that they promised would lead to relief.

I was also surprised and disturbed to learn that some companies were peddling policies to homebuyers, even when the state wasn’t sure the companies had the ability to pay all their claims if a major disaster struck. (Even more concerning: The state wouldn’t tell homeowners which companies had failed the state’s financial “stress tests.”)

So the papers embarked upon a year-long crusade for answers.

The papers’ former editor, Julie Anderson, and her husband, Lars, made that crusade possible by making a grant to help fund the investigation. (Via our “Community News Funds” at orlandosentinel.com/donate and sunsentinel.com/donate)

Anderson said Tuesday that she and her husband had read the brow-raising stories and heard first-hand from frustrated Floridians who wanted answers. “We knew that only community newspapers could do this,” she said.

Three reporters — Hurtibise, along with Skyler Swisher from the Orlando Sentinel and David Fleshler of the Sun-Sentinel — then started pulling records and doing research.

That’s when, as part of a public records request, the Florida Senate turned over the 2022 report that showed companies were paying excessive fees to their own affiliates.

One company reported $11 million in losses while sending $166 million to an affiliate. Another reported $81 million in losses but paid sibling companies $174 million. It went on and on.

Well, the Republican-controlled state senate didn’t want those numbers shared or that story told. So it threatened the newspaper.

Let’s pause here to appreciate the severity of all this — government officials threatening journalists with possible arrest for publishing information meant to help taxpayers and consumers.

Also, keep in mind: That threat came on the heels of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration ordering the Orlando Sentinel to “cease and desist” from reporting on the governor’s Hope Florida scandal. (Again, we did not comply.)

And on the heels of DeSantis’ appointed attorney general, James Uthmeier, suggesting that other Florida journalists could be arrested if they kept reporting on the grand jury report in the scandal.

Do not go numb to these unprecedented, authoritarian attempts to control speech and journalism in the supposedly “Free State of Florida.”

Also, though, do not underestimate the courage or conviction of journalists in this state.

The Republican controlled Senate claimed it made a mistake in releasing the report on the insurance companies’ financial shell games.

But it has little legal or logical ground to stand on.

First of all, this was a report — paid for with tax dollars — that Senate staff freely handed over in response to a legal records request. Also, these aren’t some random internal financial transactions we’re talking about. These were transactions specifically flagged by the state’s own contracted consultant as being made in possible violation of state law. And these people want to protect the rule-breakers?

The editors of both papers stood firm in defending our right to publish. “The First Amendment guarantees our right to publish these findings, and we will not allow the Florida Senate’s threats to prevent us from reporting,” they said in a joint statement. “Homeowners deserve to know this important information that hits their pocketbooks.”

A-freakin’-men.

Listen, there’s no doubt that Florida’s insurance market is a troubled one — or that it makes sense that costs in this hurricane-prone state would be higher than elsewhere.

But when public officials spend public money on reports and supposed solutions, taxpayers deserve total transparency about how and why that money’s being spent.

Imagine if the politicians and bureaucrats in this state went as aggressively after the insurance companies that break the rules and deny valid claims as they do the journalists who expose it all.

https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2026/09/22/florida-legislature-threatens-newspapers-over-property-insurance-reporting/?lctg=cec4067f939df0228e8632405f98f2ef&active=yesD&utm_campaign=trib-orlando_sentinel-breaking_news-nl&utm_content=alert&utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_cluster=TRIB&utm_profileID=6a5eab07705c2554fcadfa02

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