Editor's note: This story was originally published by The Florida Trib.
Outside Florida’s Department of Children and Families office in Kendall, people stood in line for three to four hours in the South Florida heat, waiting to learn why their Medicaid or food assistance had been cut off and what they could do about it — something the letters the state mailed them often didn’t say.
Many arrived before the doors were open and had already tried the phone with no luck, said Jared Nordlund, the state director for UnidosUS in Florida, an advocacy group that provides assistance to people trying to navigate state agencies.
For years, the organization had been tracking the long waits families across the state had been suffering while trying to figure out why they lost their benefits. Florida runs a single call center for more than a million people on public assistance, and in federal court its own numbers told the story: More than half of all calls were dropped. The 313 agents on the line had six to seven minutes per caller and the screen in front of them couldn’t show the income limit that decides whether a family qualifies.
“Something’s wrong here,” Nordlund told The Florida Trib he remembered thinking at the time. “It shouldn’t take this long.”
These signs of dysfunction became apparent to Nordlund and other policy experts in 2023. That was when the federal government stopped mandating that states provide expanded Medicaid coverage that took effect during the pandemic, and Florida began rechecking the eligibility of Medicaid enrollees and booting roughly 1 million people off the rolls — an arduous task for a chronically understaffed, underpaid agency.
That was also the year DCF began propping up Hope Florida, first lady Casey DeSantis’ signature initiative launched in 2021 with considerable fanfare as a way to shift the burden of public assistance from the state onto churches, charities, and nonprofits — a conservative reimaging of the welfare state.
Its staff, called Hope navigators, would guide Floridians toward self-sufficiency, Casey DeSantis publicly pledged.
Some legislators and critics say Hope Florida is instead a black box: DCF has yet to share meaningful evidence that Casey DeSantis’ initiative is helping people as intended. But budget and position records reviewed by The Florida Trib show that Hope Florida has nonetheless come with a steep price.
To staff up Hope Florida — far beyond what the Florida Legislature has authorized — DCF officials quietly cannibalized the agency’s own workforce, moving jobs out of the offices that determine eligibility for benefits like Medicaid and food assistance and building Hope Florida from the inside out: Roughly 70 percent of the care coordinators in the 2020 pilot program that preceded Hope Florida were already DCF employees, as were 63 percent of Hope navigators in 2022.
And as of April 2025, the Legislature’s analysts wrote, no law authorized the expansion of Hope Florida, or its functions, beyond the relatively small pot of money and staffed positions lawmakers set aside in 2021.
Hope Florida became politically toxic over the past year after a Republican lawmaker and reporters at the Tampa Bay Times and Miami Herald found that Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration diverted $10 million in Medicaid settlement funds into the program’s private foundation, which ultimately ended up in the hands of political committees in 2024 that were working to defeat a proposed constitutional amendment that would have legalized recreational marijuana. A Leon County grand jury has since found the funds were misappropriated “as part of a sophisticated scheme to fund political activities.”
But that controversy has overshadowed the shifting of priorities within DCF that has left the agency unable to handle the basic functions necessary to administer public assistance programs, as detailed in excoriating court rulings, a state audit and federal error data. The staffers who remain have less training and are poorly paid, sometimes qualifying for public assistance themselves, while their counterparts within Hope Florida make on average thousands more.
Today, the DCF division Hope Florida was built on top of is failing by nearly every federal measure.
Florida’s error rate in calculating food assistance hit 15.1% in 2024, the fourth-worst in the nation, and its 2025 rate of 12.97 percent would put the state on the hook for roughly $1 billion a year under the federal One Big Beautiful Bill Act. A scathing state audit also found cases in which the department wrongly cut off Medicaid for eligible children, failed to send legally required termination notices, and stalled the auditors’ own access to its records.
“Not only did they divert $10 million, but they also dramatically eroded the effectiveness of a state agency that’s supposed to be supporting families and kids, and the kids are suffering because of it,” said Holly Bullard, chief strategy and development officer at the Florida Policy Institute.
Neither DCF nor Gov. Ron DeSantis’s office responded to multiple requests for comment and detailed questions The Florida Trib provided. Public records requests the Trib filed with DCF for this story remain pending.
Five positions, 144 jobs
Agency records show that as DCF’s traditional employee ranks shrank, Hope Florida’s grew substantially — and without legislative approval.
In the 2023-24 budget year, the legislature set aside five full-time positions and $324,370 for Hope Florida. State records for that same year show 144 established positions under a Hope Florida organization, budgeted at $9.15 million in salaries and benefits.
A Trib analysis found that as Hope Florida’s ranks swelled, the division responsible for processing Medicaid and food-assistance benefits lost the positions that filled those roles.
The largest group, 101 new Hope navigators classified by the state as senior human services program analysts, came out of local eligibility offices. A year earlier they were frontline jobs in Florida’s safety net: 20 in Miami-Dade, 16 in Hillsborough County, dozens more at service centers from the Panhandle to South Florida. Seventeen state positions classified as government operations consultants and 11 more as management consultants followed, most from the same field offices.
And of the 93 Hope navigators on the payroll today, 54 were already working for DCF before the program launched in September 2021.
Once the program existed, it grew.
The next year, in 2024, Hope Florida added 17 positions and nearly $2 million in salary costs. Today it holds 161 positions, with 150 currently filled, and costs $11.7 million a year, 36 times what lawmakers set aside for it in 2023.
At the same time, the economic self-sufficiency services division, the core DCF department tasked with determining eligibility and fielding questions from public assistance recipients, shrank. Over five budget years, the division outside of Hope Florida shed 211 positions.
In 2025, a legislative staff analysis reached three conclusions: no law authorized Hope Florida; DCF had staffed it with positions established for other work the Legislature had directed; and House staff could not determine how many state employees worked for the program, because DCF did not turn over the documents that were requested.
The number of Hope Florida employees, House staff wrote, was “unknown.” But at DCF alone, the state’s own position records show at least 161.
Lawmakers never got even that count, said state Rep. Alex Andrade, who led the House’s 2025 investigation into the Hope Florida Foundation.
“That type of granular detail has never really been provided to the legislature,” he told The Florida Trib. The closest thing to a roster he ever saw, he said, came from the foundation’s own expense records, which showed bonuses paid to employees labeled Hope navigators that “didn’t go through payroll at all.” The foundation, he said, “just cut checks.”
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