Buried in the budget: Mike Huckabee, Donald Trump and Newsmax

As Florida lawmakers begin work on a new state budget, a quick look at three especially ugly earmarks that have already made it into initial drafts of the state spending plan.

Photo credit: Michael Rivera

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Republican leaders in the state House and Senate just revealed their proposed budgets for the next fiscal year, and lawmakers will now spend much of this week in Tallahassee debating the dueling versions of the state spending plan.

The Orlando Sentinel, Tampa Bay Times, Florida Phoenix, and Politico Florida all have helpful stories exploring some of the high-level differences between the two chambers and previewing some of the big-ticket battles ahead as legislators try to negotiate a final deal.

There are some serious issues to be resolved, like funding for AIDS medication and the fate of the slush fund Ron DeSantis used to build an immigrant prison in the middle of the Florida Everglades. There are some sillier spats coming, too: Like whether and how much Florida taxpayers should spend helping build a baseball stadium for the homebuilding billionaire and Florida Republican megadonor who is now the majority owner of the Tampa Bay Rays.

But I wanted to put a spotlight on three smaller items that are already in one version of the budget or the other — and that are, in my view, especially ugly.

Let’s start with the House budget.

Just a few pages in, partway through the Department of Education section of the spending plan, there’s a $725,000 line item for what’s described in the document only as “History of Communism Curriculum.”

This money, budget request records show, would be paid to a company called eSpired that peddles a line of propaganda-like educational books for children (check out the “Rumble special offer”). More specifically, eSpired would be hired to produce instructional materials for public schools to use under a new state law requiring Florida students be taught about “the rising threat of communism.”

The company is affiliated with Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and current U.S. Ambassador to Israel, who pocketed more than $60,000 in fees from eSpired in 2024, disclosure records show.

This earmark made its way into the House budget after a related company — Learn Our History LLC, which was co-founded by Huckabee and is directly connected to eSpired — made at least $50,000 in campaign contributions to key lawmakers just before this year’s session began.

Those donations included $10,000 to House Speaker Danny Perez (R-Miami); $5,000 to Rep. Jenna Persons-Mulicka (R-Fort Myers), who chairs the House budget committee in charge of the PreK-12 education budget; and $5,000 to Rep. Mike Redondo (R-Miami), the sponsor of the funding request.

Seeking Rents first reported back in January that this earmark was in the works. Note that the request is for $1.45 million in total — which means that the $725,000 of taxpayer money set aside right now may just be a placeholder for a bigger number.

Switching over to the Senate budget, tucked in the middle of a long list of local government infrastructure projects is a $2.75 million for “Palm Beach County Airport renaming.”

This line item is linked to a pair of bills (Senate Bill 706 and House Bill 919) moving quickly though the Legislature this session that would change the name of Palm Beach International Airport to “Donald J. Trump International Airport.”

The budget request records — which were filed just one day before the Senate released its budget to the public — show this money would be spent plastering Trump’s name all over the facility and on related marketing materials. That would include erecting new signs around the terminal, airfield, and surrounding roadways, developing a new logo, and redesigning merchandise.

And this, too, looks like a placeholder for a bigger number. The budget request is for $5.5 million in taxpayer money, double the amount in the Senate spending plan right now.

Perhaps the billionaire president could pay for this himself rather than letting Florida taxpayers foot the bill?

Then there’s section 108 of a budget-related bill proposed by the House that would forbid state agencies from contracting with any vendor that does business with a fact-checking organization or a media-monitoring firm that rates news outlets based on their accuracy and ethics.

It’s a scheme meant to choke off potential clients for NewsGuard Technologies, a company co-founded by a former Wall Street Journal publisher that produces media credibility ratings for clients such as search engines, AI developers, news aggregators and brand-sensitive businesses that don’t want their advertisements to appear on disreputable websites.

And it comes from Newsmax, the right-wing cable news network that grew in popularity by promoting false election-fraud allegations after the 2020 presidential election (and then ended up paying more than $100 million to settle defamation claims).

Republican leaders in the state House had this same language slipped in last year’s budget-implementing bill at the last minute of the 2025 session. Records obtained by Seeking Rents after the 2025 session ended showed that they secretly worked on the issue with lobbyists for Newsmax — which scores very poorly on NewsGuard’s reliability ratings and has long complained that those ratings deter advertisers from buying on its platforms.