From marijuana ads to academic freedom: A look at some of the policy changes Florida lawmakers may bake into the next state budget

House and Senate leaders in Florida's Republican-controlled Legislature are negotiating a lot more than line items as they try to finalize a roughly $115 billion state spending plan.

Photo by Rick Proctor on Unsplash

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On New Year’s Eve, the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis rushed into place a sweeping new set of restrictions on the ways that medical marijuana companies can advertise their products to patients in Florida.

The new rules forbid marijuana companies from using celebrity sponsors or online influencers, require them to register social media accounts with the state, and prohibit ads that promote marijuana use for “enjoyment,” among other changes. They were announced just 12 hours before the DeSantis administration was set to lose some of its authority to regulate the medical marijuana industry under a law passed last year by the Florida Legislature.

But state lawmakers may erase the last-minute marketing restrictions.

Republican leaders in the Florida House of Representatives want to attach a provision to the next state budget that would force DeSantis’ Department of Health to repeal its New Year’s Eve advertising rules. If the Senate agrees, the maneuver would effectively resolve a legal challenge filed by marijuana companies who say that Florida’s anti-weed governor is trying to unilaterally undermine the industry.

It is but one of many major policy decisions that the Florida Legislature may bake directly into the 2026-27 budget, the long-delayed spending plan that lawmakers are now trying to finalize during a three-week special session in Tallahassee.

Florida’s roughly $115 billion budget is more than a spreadsheet of line items and numbers. The document also comes with reams of written instructions that are typically known as “proviso” (if the instructions are linked to a specific earmark) or “back of the bill” language (if they are, well, written at the back of the budget bill).

The Senate, for instance, wants to use proviso to create a program testing municipal wastewater for drugs and other “contaminants.” The House is trying to use the back of the bill to hijack funding originally set aside for the Florida Wildlife Corridor.

The budget also comes with an accompanying “implementing bill,” which is a sprawling piece of temporary legislation that is only in effect for one fiscal year. The implementing bill is the vehicle the House would use to repeal DeSantis’ marijuana-advertising restrictions. It’s also where the Senate is trying to block a local battery-recycling law in Broward County.

And then are always at least a few budget “conforming bills,” which are bills that are meant to tweak state statutes to conform with spending decisions the House and Senate make as they hammer out a final budget.

Conforming bills are the most dangerous part of budget negotiations — a process known as “budget conference” — because they make permanent changes to state law and legislative leaders frequently use them to sneak major policy changes into place with minimal public scrutiny.

This year, for instance, House leaders have proposed using both the implementing bill and an education conforming bill to give the Board of Governors— the group of political appointees who oversee the state university system — more control over the general education curriculum that undergraduate students must complete in order to graduate.

The new proposal follows a nearly three-year campaign by Ron DeSantis and other Republican leaders in Tallahassee to ban sociology as a core course option in all state colleges and universities.

Part of the reason it took so long for GOP leaders to excise sociology — and relegate it solely to elective status — is that individual schools develop their own general education programming to supplement a state-approved list of courses. And most Florida universities initially kept sociology as a core option on those local lists.

A 2023 state law gave the Board of Governors the authority to accept or reject core course lists submitted by an individual university. But House leaders want the agency to have the power to “amend” those lists, too — which means the political appointees who run the agency could delete specific courses they don’t like or, potentially, add classes that school adminstrators don’t want.

The Florida Board of Education, a separate body of political appointees that oversees Florida’s community colleges, would also get the power to amend core course lists.

A spokesperson for the House said the idea comes from Board of Governors itself.

There are many other examples peppered throughout the conference “offers” that House and Senate budget negotiators have been periodically exchanging throughout the Legislature’s special session, which began May 12 and is currently scheduled to end May 29.

The Senate, for instance, has proposed proviso language that would force Florida taxpayers to continue paying for security for Ron DeSantis and his family even after the governor leaves office in January 2027

The House hasn’t agreed to that yet. But the lower chamber has suggested making taxpayers fund security for the Republican and Democratic candidates in this year’s governor’s race once they secure their parties’ nominations.

This appears to be the substance of a bill that failed to pass during the Legislature’s 60-day regular session earlier this year. House leaders are now trying to revive the idea by sticking it into the implementing bill

Both chambers have agreed to insert yet another provision into the implementing bill that would require local police departments to collect and submit to the state fingerprints of anyone they stop who is subject to a detainer issued by U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement.

The proposal — another idea resurrected from a bill lawmakers rejected during the regular session — would also require the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to add the prints and other information about the detainee into a statewide database.

Lawmakers aren’t expected to finish their work on budget for at least another week, which means there is still plenty of time remaining for more eleventh-hour policy changes to pop up in the Capitol.

There are, for instance, persistent rumors that lawmakers may try to slip a DeSantis-backed plan to cull the state’s Medicaid health insurance rolls into a healthcare conforming bill.