News broke on Friday, Oct 7 about Polk County, Florida, losing out on $6.2 million in grants. Right after this news broke, it became clear that Polk County weren't the only Floridians who were missing out on Florida grants. In total, $175 million, which was a budget surplus to be used mostly on Florida grants, goes back into the state's general budget. So, what happened here to cause Florida to miss out on delivering these grants? Governor Ron DeSantis missed a deadline to sign them into law. Of course, this was way back on June 30, but the news is just now breaking because this is when Polk County was supposed to be receiving the grants. In other words, the people of Polk county had no idea that they were not receiving these grants, until it was time to receive them and they were told that the grants were off the table. It really is nasty business and a bad way to find out that the government has ignored you.

What makes this even more egregious is that Florida has the money for these grants. They had everything worked out via the state's general budget, and there was nearly $200 million in surplus, mostly from the federal government's CARES Act of 2020, to be used for grant programs. Other grants did manage to go out, however. The Legislative Budget Committee voted to send 238 local support grants to a range of different services in Florida. Some of these grants will go out, but most will not, thanks to DeSantis missing the deadline over the summer, which hamstrings the committee here and does not allow them to reward the money.

Among the grants that would have been funded, along with Polk County's grants, include: $450,000 for the Aerospace Center; $250,000 for Fort Meade; $100,000 for the Lakeland police and youth mentoring program; $800,000 for the New Beginnings High School Innovation Labs; and half a dozen more organizations.

Florida is a Political Mess

DeSantis will bear all of the blame for this, as he is the Governor and the buck stops with him. However, Florida is really a political mess right now, a state that's barely tipping Republican. Over the past year, DeSantis has signed a controversial parental rights law for schools, he has cracked down on mail-in and absentee voting, and he has made national headlines by shipping out illegal immigrants from Florida and flying them to Martha's Vineyard. The Democrats in his state, which are numerically practically even with Republicans, have been dead-set on ruining DeSantis' governorship for years now. So, what you find when you dig into this funding isn't just a bunch of money for kids or $1,000 bonuses for first responders.

Just like congress in Washington loves loading up their spending bills with pork, a lot of Florida's budget surplus money was to be given away for immigrant centers in locations where Floridians did not request them; LGBT school initiatives in a state where DeSantis is trying to give parents more control than the government, etc. The point being: While people are going to read a story about how badly DeSantis failed Floridians by allowing a grant deadline to expire, what you won't read is that most of this spending was just for liberal pet projects that a majority of Floridians don't want.

It's More Common Than You'd Think

Politics is a dirty game, and neither side is clean. This practice of deceptive spending is something that has gone on in America so long that most assume it's been happening since the nation's founding. The idea is to load up a spending bill with a bunch of stuff that your political opposition will disagree with. In the event that the opposition party fails to pass the spending legislation, the party that wrote the spending bill can say that they don't care about kids, or the elderly, etc. This gives one party political capital. If the party does pass the spending bill, then all the better, because now those pet projects are funded. This is common; this is the status quo. The media will tell you "Republicans vote against low-price insulin" but don't tell you that $100 million was to be used to help more immigrants enter small Texas towns, against the will of the citizens.

This may stick to DeSantis and dirty him up before he faces off in the general election against Charlie Crist. Then again, most Floridians probably understand that this was the entire point from the start.