A Leon County grand jury found that the DeSantis administration misappropriated $10 million in taxpayer money owed to Florida's poorest sick children, then concluded it could not charge anyone with a crime because no witness would say who made the decision. The panel signed its report in January. It sat under seal for seven months, and Floridians only learned what was in it this week, after a copy leaked to CBS News Miami.

The document runs 19 pages. It says the money came out of a Medicaid overbilling settlement, went to the Hope Florida Foundation, moved through two nonprofits, and landed in political committees that spent it fighting Amendment 3, the 2024 recreational marijuana initiative. The jurors did not soften that. They also did not charge anybody, and that distinction matters.

What the grand jury actually wrote

The panel voted in August 2025 to open the inquiry, the report says, after state Rep. Alex Andrade, a Pensacola Republican who chairs the House Health Care Budget Subcommittee, alleged several crimes at an April 24, 2025 hearing and the matter went to the State Attorney for the Second Judicial Circuit. Andrade had spent that spring pulling foundation officials in to testify under oath. Finding 15 is the conclusion everything else builds toward: "We find that the $10 million in question was misappropriated."

Finding 16 is the one that keeps anyone out of handcuffs. The jurors say the original misappropriation was the decision to send the money to Hope Florida in the first place, and that "no witness would take responsibility for making the decision or had any memory of who made it." They add a line that reads like a shrug and a warning at the same time: "Virtually everyone involved is a lawyer and acted on the advice of other lawyers."

A settlement that sat for 19 months, then funded in seven days

On February 7, 2023, Centene Corporation offered Florida $67,048,611 to settle claims that it overbilled the state's Medicaid pharmacy program. Other states took similar deals quickly and put out press releases about the recovery. Florida did nothing for a year and a half.

Then, per the report, state officials agreed on September 27, 2024 to a version that sent $57,048,611 to the state and $10,000,000 to the Hope Florida Foundation, the charity supporting First Lady Casey DeSantis' welfare-navigation initiative. Centene wired the $10 million on October 4. The jurors did the arithmetic on the calendar: "Once reached, it took a mere 7 days to fund. We believe the rush was due to the impending election which was just 45 days away." The state gave Centene more than a year to pay the taxpayers back. Hope Florida got seven days.

There was no press release. There was no notice to the Legislature. Both omissions are listed in the report as reasons the jurors reached the conclusion they did.

Florida's own campaign finance database confirms the grand jury's math

Hope Florida had the money for about three weeks. Its board approved a $5 million grant to Secure Florida's Future, an arm of the Florida Chamber of Commerce, and chairman Joshua Hay approved a second $5 million grant to Save Our Society from Drugs on his own. Both applications stated the groups would not use the funds for political activity. Both groups then wired most of it to Keep Florida Clean, the political committee chaired by James Uthmeier.

You do not have to take the grand jury's word for the amounts. Florida's Division of Elections campaign finance database is public, and the filings match the report to the dollar. Secure Florida's Future reported giving Keep Florida Clean $2,000,000 on October 17, $1,500,000 on October 24 and $250,000 on October 29, totaling $3,750,000. Save Our Society from Drugs reported $1,600,000 on October 23, $2,650,000 on October 24 and $500,000 on October 28, totaling $4,750,000. That is $8,500,000, the exact figure in the forensic accountant's chart.

One number does not line up, and readers should know it. The grand jury's forensic accountant traced $7,000,000 moving from Keep Florida Clean to the Republican Party of Florida in October 2024, with $2,000,000 coming back on October 31. The committee's own expenditure filings report five payments to the party over that same stretch totaling $11,500,000. The report notes the accountant's work was "hindered by Secure Florida's Future's bank (Bank of America) not responding to subpoenas for bank records," which may explain part of the gap. It may not. Nobody has reconciled it publicly.

The $800,000 nobody is talking about

Buried at Finding 14 is a detail that got almost no coverage. "We find that of Centene's proposed settlement amount of $67,048,611, the State of Florida only recovered $56,248,611, which meant $800,000 of Medicaid reimbursement and taxpayer money was not recovered from Centene."

The jurors also found that AHCA Secretary Jason Weida's decision to round the carve-out down from $10.8 million to an even $10 million "was made to circumvent Florida Statute Section 45.062," which requires legislative notice on settlements above certain thresholds. Section 216.216 is blunter still: money the state receives in settlement "shall be placed in the General Revenue Fund." The panel rejected Weida's description of the $10 million as a "bonus," calling that explanation "not credible."

The grand jury named Uthmeier and still could not name who decided

Finding 12 places James Uthmeier, then the governor's chief of staff and now Florida's attorney general, "in a position of authority over those involved in settling with Centene," says testimony identified him as directing the money after it reached Hope Florida, and calls his committee "the prime recipient of the majority of the $10 million taxpayer funds." Amy Ronshausen of Save Our Society from Drugs testified he texted and called her on October 11, 2024 telling her to apply for a grant.

Here is the part that should bother everyone. Uthmeier was never called to testify. Neither was DeSantis. Neither was then-Attorney General Ashley Moody, whom the jurors found had "authorized" chief deputy John Guard to sign the settlement. Guard signed despite what the report calls "reservations," having told the panel he "esoterically" agreed the $10 million belonged to the state of Florida. He is a state appeals court judge now.

What DeSantis, Uthmeier and Moody said this week

DeSantis did not dispute the report's authenticity. He said Thursday it "was legally sound. It was appropriate. And it was consistent with the state's mission," repeated that the affair is a hoax, and said whoever leaked the sealed document would face consequences. Uthmeier called it "a politically motivated witch hunt." Moody posted that her office "had no knowledge of how funds would be spent." The quotes come from WKMG in Orlando and the Associated Press. Notice what is missing from all three. Not one of them says who decided to move the $10 million, which is the single question that would have produced an indictment.

A Republican started this, and Republicans should finish it

Alex Andrade is a Republican. He chairs a Republican-controlled subcommittee in a Republican-controlled Legislature, and he is the reason any of this is known. Sen. Rick Scott, another Republican, held up Guard's federal judicial nomination over it and posted on social media that "millions in tax dollars for poor kids have no business funding political ads." The grand jurors themselves recommended two fixes, both aimed at their own state government: put every dollar the state receives into General Revenue with real penalties for violations, and write clear rules with tracking and consequences for how organizations like Hope Florida spend public money.

The charity's IRS Form 990 shows what a $10 million pass-through looks like on paper. Hope Florida Foundation reported $850,053 in revenue for the fiscal year ending June 2024 and $11,187,210 for the year ending June 2025. Hay testified the largest gift the foundation had ever received before Centene was $100,000.

Nobody was charged. Nobody was indicted. Nobody was convicted, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. But a citizen grand jury sat through months of testimony from the people who ran this, looked at the bank records, and wrote down that taxpayer money meant for sick poor kids was misappropriated to win an election. Uthmeier is on the ballot in November. The report was never supposed to be. Voters can read all 19 pages of it before they decide, which is more than the people named in it wanted.

Hero image: Gov. Ron DeSantis speaking at a Hope Florida event in Lake County, Florida. Photograph by the Office of Governor Ron DeSantis, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.