The Florida Legislature is back. So are the billionaires who expect lawmakers to do their bidding.

Florida in Five: Five stories to read from the past week in Florida politics.

Mar 02, 2025

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Welcome to another installment of Florida in Five: Five* stories you need to read from the past week in Florida politics.

Back in November, on the day he was sworn in as new speaker of the state House, Danny Perez delivered a short speech in which he pointedly refused to spell out any of his personal priorities for the next two years. “I understand the game,” the Miami Republican told his chamber. “I am opting not to play.”

But in a speech that was intentionally devoid of policy specifics, a few lines stood out — like one in which Perez obliquely attacked “guaranteed income.” That’s a type of benefit program that provides consistent, no-strings-attached payments to people in need, and, in doing so, establishes an economic floor below which no one can fall.

“The people of Florida believe in the promise of the open road,” Perez said at the time. “They expect the government to maintain the road, but they aren’t looking for handouts or no-interest loans or income guarantees.”

House Speaker Danny Perez delivers his swearing-in speech on Nov. 19, 2024. (Source: The Florida Channel)

So it came as little surprise last week when a pair of new bills suddenly surfaced in Tallahassee meant to banish guaranteed income from Florida. The legislation, filed just a few days before Florida lawmakers open their 2025 session, would specifically prohibit a city or county from making any kind of payments to people through a guaranteed income program.

There are, it should be noted, no government-run guaranteed income programs in Florida. But the goal is to stop any before they might start.

That’s part of the point, anyway.

The other point of these bills is to please a few billionaires and superrich right-wing donors who are funding lobbying efforts around the country meant to crush any kind of independent support systems for working people.

These new Florida bills — House Bill 1193, sponsored by Rep. David Borrero (R-Sweetwater), and Senate Bill 1772, sponsored by Sen. Jonathan Martin (R-Fort Myers) — are little more than copies of near-identical bills that have also been filed this year in Kansas, Mississippi, Montana, Texas and Tennessee, among other states. They are all essentially clones of bills that passed last year in Idaho, Iowa and South Dakota.

Excerpts from Senate Bill 1172 in Florida, Senate Bill 382 in Tennessee, and House Bill 530 in Texas.

The campaign against guaranteed income is being coordinated by the Foundation for Government Accountability, the far-right think tank that you might remember as the organization that secretly wrote legislation last year to weaken Florida’s child-labor laws. (That was also part of a national blitz; and the bills are back again in Florida this year, too.)

The FGA, which has worked closely with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has also orchestrated campaigns to cripple state unemployment systems, impose obstacles to food stamps, and block expansion of public health insurance. An FGA executive even urged Congress to cut Medicaid during testimony earlier this month.

But the FGA is just one member of a larger mob.

Last week also saw Republican Reps. Jenna Persons-Mulicka (R-Fort Myers) and Dean Black (R-Jacksonville) and Sens. Blaise Ingoglia (R-Spring Hill) and Randy Fine (R-Melbourne) file a quartet of bills meant to make it far harder for public employees to organize into unions and collectively bargain for better pay and benefits.

Records obtained by Orlando journalist McKenna Schueler show that key parts of those bills came from the Freedom Foundation, an anti-union advocacy group that has been pushing these exact same proposals in state Capitols across the country.

Another new pair of bills — House Bill 1067, sponsored by Rep. Kelly Holcomb (R-Spring Hill), and Senate Bill 1130, sponsored by Sen. Bryan Avila (R-Hialeah Gardens) — would pave the way for “portable benefits” accounts.

They’re basically a kind of savings accounts that lobbyists sell as a way to help gig workers — but which are really meant to protect the growing number of corporations, from Big Tech app developers to office-cleaning companies, that are skipping out on providing benefits by classifying their workers as “independent contractors” rather than employees.

That one is a national priority for Americans for Prosperity. Similar portable benefits bills have been filed this year in more than half a dozen other states, including Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, and West Virginia.

These may look like discrete groups each with their own different issues. But the Foundation for Government Accountability, the Freedom Foundation, and Americans for Prosperity — along with an entire constellation of right-wing think tanks, research institutes, and advocacy groups — are, to a large extent, funded by the very same donors. So much of their money ultimately traces back to the same small network of billionaires and family dynasties, tycoons like Dick Uihlein, Charles Koch, and the DeVos family (buttressed, increasingly, by similar organizations founded by a new generation of superrich tech investors.)

And, of course, it’s always working-class people who get hurt in the end.

Which brings us back to guaranteed income.

Guaranteed income programs work by distributing money at regular intervals to people in a specific population of need, like families living in poverty or new mothers. The cash comes without any conditions; there aren’t bureaucratic hoops to jump through nor any nanny-like restrictions on how the money can be spent. That makes guaranteed income programs especially efficient and easy to administer — and it’s one reason the concept has been supported by some unlikely advocates over the years, including the conservative economist Milton Friedman.

There have been something like 150 guaranteed income projects tested in communities around the country. They’ve had some powerful impacts — everything from higher employment to greater neighborhood mobility. Recipients have even reported lower rates of intimate partner violence, as victims have increased ability to exit abusive relationships.

And while there aren’t any government-funded guaranteed income programs in Florida, there are a few philanthropically funded ones — like “Just Income” in Gainesville, which provides unconditional, $800-a-month payments for one year to formerly incarcerated residents of Alachua County.

It, too, has shown promising results. A new study released last month by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that the Gainesville program led to improved financial stability, food security and mental health for recipients — and reduced recidivism.

And yet, despite the growing evidence of how much guaranteed income helps working people, here comes Florida’s Republican-controlled Legislature, ready to kill the movement in its cradle — and to once again do the bidding of billionaires.

*To paraphrase Barbossa, five is more what you’d call a guideline than an actual rule.