round of budget offers<\/a> Thursday evening, the House didn\u2019t include money for two programs championed by first lady Casey DeSantis \u2014 a cancer research innovation fund and a food testing program.<\/p>\nRep. Alex Andrade, R-Pensacola, the House\u2019s lead health care budget negotiator, said he hadn\u2019t seen any justification for the $30 million the Senate wants to put into the cancer research fund, noting the budget already includes $60 million for existing cancer research programs.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d need to see exactly what that additional funding would do to increase any funding for cancer research, but we do have significant amounts of money in both the House and Senate right now for cancer research innovation already,\u201d Andrade said.<\/p>\n
He also pointed to the state\u2019s existing food testing and safety program within the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services to defend the House\u2019s refusal to fund Casey DeSantis\u2019 food testing initiative.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have a great food testing program at FDACS right now, it\u2019s unclear why we\u2019d need to duplicate services,\u201d Andrade said.<\/p>\n
The governor\u2019s budget proposal, announced in December, suggested $5 million going to the food testing program within the Department of Health. Casey DeSantis modeled the program, which aims to expose toxins and heavy metals in food, after U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy\u2019s Make America Healthy Again agenda.<\/p>\n
Andrade is used to clashing with the DeSantis administration. He led a probe last year into the divergence of $10 million from a settlement with a Medicaid vendor into a charity backing another Casey DeSantis initiative, Hope Florida.<\/p>\n
The money was routed into political committees opposing proposed constitutional amendments headed by DeSantis\u2019 then-chief of staff James Uthmeier, whom DeSantis later appointed Attorney General.<\/p>\n
DeSantis, though, kept his ire trained at Perez, R-Miami, slamming him for saying no House member filed a bill related to the vaccine exemption during the special session two weeks ago, so it couldn\u2019t get a vote.<\/p>\n
\u201cDo you believe nobody filed a bill or were they told not to file a bill? So he\u2019s basically holding his members under the bus, saying that they were too lazy to file legislation. I don\u2019t believe that\u2019s true,\u201d DeSantis said.<\/p>\n
In budget talks Thursday evening, the House continued to rebuff Senate attempts<\/a> to spend $3.9 million for the Florida State Guard, another DeSantis priority. But it did put $5 million into the Job Growth Grant Fund, a program used by DeSantis to pay for infrastructure and job training projects, up from its initial offer of zero funding but still far below the $50 million DeSantis and the Senate want.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TALLAHASSEE \u2014 Gov. Ron DeSantis has grown frustrated at pieces of his agenda being thwarted by the GOP-led…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":272770,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[28,29,266,115,139,141,140,99,109],"class_list":["post-272769","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-orlando","tag-florida","tag-florida-news","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-orlando","tag-orlando-headlines","tag-orlando-news","tag-politics","tag-social"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272769","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=272769"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272769\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/272770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}