The Florida GOP Wants to Keep DeSantis’ Taxpayer-Funded Jet Flights a Secret

The Florida Legislature that seemingly exists less as a deliberative body and more as an arm of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ looming presidential campaign is set to shield his official travel records from public records laws. 

The Florida Senate passed a bill on Wednesday that would exempt DeSantis and other top officials’ travel from accessible public records, including DeSantis’ use of the state-owned jet. Republicans argued that the measure was needed for security purposes for DeSantis. 

“Everything we do is monitored,” Senate President Kathleen Passidomo said Wednesday, according to Politico. “Bad actors can find out a lot… here we have a young governor who has young children, a young family. God forbid something would happen because information is out there.”

But there has never been any known threat to a governor based on travel records, and open government advocates have said the reasoning is flawed. “I can understand that there is a security issue for current travel or future travel,” Barbara Petersen, the executive director of the nonprofit Florida Center for Government Accountability, told the New York Times last month. “But how is there a security issue for travel that’s already occurred?”

Travel records of the state-owned plane are accessible via the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, and in the past have shown abuse of state resources for officials’ travel. In 2010, then-Gov. Charlie Crist used the state plane to fly to political fundraisers, which was later reported by the Tampa Bay Times using public records laws. 

But the bill passed in the Senate on a party-line vote with the supermajority necessary to amend Florida public records laws, according to Politico, and is likely to pass the Florida House as well. Republicans have supermajorities in both chambers as well as control of every statewide office, an indicator of how Florida has lurched even further right since DeSantis was first elected in 2018.

Beyond the travel records, the DeSantis administration has been notably resistant to public records access. For example, several state agencies including the state Department of Health, Department of Law Enforcement, and Department of Corrections forwarded more than 280 public records requests to DeSantis’s office for review in 2021, often gumming up the requests for months, an investigation by Orlando TV station WKMG found in February. 

Last September, DeSantis paid to fly migrants from San Antonio—more than 700 miles from the westernmost part of Florida—to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, as a statement against states and municipalities that have passed sanctuary laws for undocumented people. A Florida judge later ruled that the DeSantis administration was not following public records laws in its slowness to respond to public requests seeking information about those flights.

DeSantis has not officially announced he’s running for president, but he’s been making the rounds to several key states ahead of 2024, including Ohio and New Hampshire last week—while southern Florida experienced catastrophic flooding. 

Despite receiving enormous national attention as the most likely candidate other than former President Donald Trump to win the Republican nomination, however, DeSantis is badly trailing Trump in polling.

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