Ron DeSantis has vetoed funding for black history programmes and targeted Donald Trump’s backers in a record-high state budget aimed at bolstering his 2024 presidential pitch.
The Florida governor vetoed $511 million (£400 million) in proposed funding while preserving billions of dollars to advance his conservative agenda, in what his Republican critics called a “mean-spirited” attack on his opponents.
The cuts included slashing $5 million for gun violence prevention; $160,000 for Orlando’s Black History Month celebration and $200,000 in funding for Florida’s Black Music Legacy, a project highlighting the state’s contributions to black music.
Mr DeSantis also vetoed $20 million for a nursing campus at a university in a district represented by a Republican congressman who has backed Mr Trump in the 2024 Republican primary.
Joe Gruters, the former chairman of the state Republican Party, said he believed Mr DeSantis was scrapping the nursing development in retaliation.
He told the Miami Herald: “It’s mean-spirited acts like this that are defining him here and across the country.”
‘People come first for Trump’
Mr Gruters added the move highlighted the difference between Mr DeSantis, 44, and the former president, 77, who understands “that people come first”.
Mr Trump, who is also a Florida resident, claimed his “support is almost universal in Florida” after he received endorsements from nearly half of Florida’s Republican congressional delegation in Washington earlier this year.
Mr DeSantis has received about 100 endorsements from Republicans in his state legislature, where he wields extraordinary control, but very few from Florida’s lawmakers in Congress.
The state budget was unanimously approved by the Republican-controlled state legislature last month, and Mr DeSantis’s cuts to some GOP lawmakers’ priorities is likely to rankle some party members.
However, the cuts are drastically smaller than the record $3.3 billion Mr DeSantis cut from last year’s budget.
The massive budget – roughly $117 billion – represents a 6 per cent rise on the current year’s spending plan and stands in contrast to Mr DeSantis’s regular boasts of fiscal restraint.
The governor had come under pressure from Florida TaxWatch, a business-backed non-profit, to veto 38 projects – but left 29 of them in.
Announcing the budget on Thursday, Mr DeSantis touted a “record” environmental spending and pay increases for police officers and teachers.
Florida budget
He justified the size of the Florida budget by contrasting the state’s spending with federal levels, saying: “We’re good fiscal stewards.”
Beyond the cuts, the state budget injects millions into Florida’s higher education institutions to shore up their conservative ideology.
It includes $30 million for a new conservative think tank affiliated with the University of Florida and another $25 million for the “institutional overhaul” of a small liberal arts college on Florida’s west coast into a new model for a conservative public university.
Education has been a key battleground for Mr DeSantis who has made resisting the rise of woke policies in the United States a key plank of his agenda.
Another of Mr DeSantis’s signature policies – flying and busing migrants from Florida to liberal states – has been assigned $12 million.
More than $10 million is also allocated to various agencies to defend the administration from the inevitable lawsuits that will challenge the constitutionality of his policies.
