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.” 

The jobs nobody wants

The job of deciding whether a Florida family can buy groceries this month or keep its health coverage falls to DCF’s frontline caseworkers, known as economic self-sufficiency specialists. 

But retention rates for new caseworkers are prohibitively low in part because of poor training, policy analysts say, and because of low salaries that have had few increases in the past decade, including a raise to $15 per hour, due to an increase in the state’s minimum wage, set to take effect this month. 

On that salary alone, a caseworker supporting two children would qualify for the same food assistance the caseworker is deciding on.

DCF records show that a median frontline eligibility caseworker earns about $37,000. Ninety-seven percent earn less than $40,000. Hope Florida staff earn a median of about $42,000, and not one earns less than $40,000. A Hope Florida employee with ten years of state service makes about $6,400 more than a caseworker with the same experience.

Publicly available payroll records also show a workforce that keeps starting over. Half of all eligibility caseworkers have been on the state payroll less than two years and seven months, and 638 of them, more than a third, were hired within the past 12 months. Hope Florida’s staff, by contrast, have been with the state a median of five and a half years.

In public, the department has told a different story. “Even in community hearings, when we’ve had lawmakers quote a report, the DCF staff will say, ‘Oh no, the wait time is like five minutes,'” Nordlund, the UnidosUS advocacy director, said. “And we’re just like, there’s just no way that’s possible. You call right now.”

Nordlund suspects the problems are connected. “It kind of feels like they probably gutted a lot of the DCF infrastructure and pushed it over to Hope Florida,” he said, “and that’s where a lot of the institutional knowledge probably resides.” 

Andrade said many Hope Navigators are “really just existing employees that have been told their job is now to act as, you know, some unlicensed social worker.” In his understanding, the work often amounts to taking down a person’s information, entering it into CarePortal, a third-party referral website, and emailing them what information it produces. “And then they call it a day,” he said.

Bullard sees the cost from the other side: Low pay and thin training produce turnover in exactly the jobs that require experience, and the workers who remain absorb the blame. “They’re blamed for everything,” she said.

The cost to Floridians

The consequences of this Hope Florida expansion go beyond shifting numbers on a spreadsheet.

When federal pandemic protections ended on March 31, 2023, Florida began rechecking eligibility and cut off Medicaid coverage for more than 1.8 million people over the next year, according to the numbers the state reported to federal regulators. A federal judge in Jacksonville later said the termination notices DCF mailed them were so confusing, vague and contradictory that they violated the Constitution. This summer, the state’s Auditor General found cases in which the department cut off eligible children through employee error and never told some families their coverage had ended.

Some who uploaded documents to the state’s MyACCESS portal to prove they still qualified got letters weeks later saying DCF had no record of them, Nordlund said.

Food assistance failed on its own measures. In 2019, Florida decided applications within the legal deadline 98.15 percent of the time, fourth-best in the nation. By 2024 it managed 63.31 percent, and its payment error rate had climbed to 15.13 percent, fourth-worst in the country, while most states improved.

That failure now comes with a high cost. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, states with error rates of 6 percent or higher must start paying a share of their residents’ food assistance in October 2027, a bill that for Florida could approach $1 billion a year. “It’s recurring,” Bullard said. “Every year we have to have a low error rate — unless they change the law.”

Asked by legislators to explain the errors, the department pointed partly at itself. It attributed about nine of its fifteen points to taking applicants’ word about rent and expenses under pandemic and hurricane waivers that have since ended, and about five more to staff turnover, training problems, clerical mistakes and an eligibility computer system too old to show caseworkers what they need.

Andrade made the point bluntly on the House floor when he presented his budget. “We didn’t have this problem when Rick Scott was governor,” he said. He noted that DCF has “shown some improvement,” bringing its error rate down in the most recent data, and said he hopes federal officials give the state more time to get its act together under a new administration “and hopefully we aren’t expected to come up with a billion dollars in general revenue next year.”

Documents that don’t exist

Through all of it, the department has declined to show its work.

Between Feb. 26 and March 17, 2025, House staff asked DCF six times for its tax filings, accomplishments, and sworn statements about how it invested its money, records the law requires the department to submit, according to a House staff analysis. 

DCF sent a list of five board members and a copy of the foundation’s bylaws. But on March 17, Sam Kerce, who was then DCF’s deputy chief of staff, told lawmakers the department could not provide data supporting its own public claims about what Hope Florida had accomplished. The Hope Florida Foundation’s required audit, due to the Auditor General March 31, 2025, never arrived. And the first finding in the Auditor General’s Medicaid audit is that department management significantly delayed the auditors’ access to records.

At the same time, lawmakers on the House Human Services Subcommittee were weighing whether to enshrine Hope Florida in state law. Its members, Andrade said, “were never getting information.”

DCF has also failed to fulfill public records requests quantifying Hope Florida’s impact on decreasing or eliminating reliance on public assistance programs — requests The Florida Policy Institute had been filing for a year and a half, said senior policy analyst Cindy Huddleston. 

“To this day, we’ve had no response from DCF, and we have reason to be concerned,” she told the Trib. “We’re struggling to understand the long-term impact of the program to get people out of poverty.” 

The administration has repeatedly cited one stat: Hope Florida has helped 30,000 people off public assistance. Gov. Ron DeSantis repeated it again this month, Andrade said. “That 30,000 number hasn’t changed in two years,” Andrade said. “They’ve never been able to provide the information to say how they get to that number, and the fact that it hasn’t changed in two years … makes me think it’s a made-up number.”

Andrade stopped short of calling Hope Florida an ideological project. To him it looked more like carelessness at the top. 

“It was like someone without any understanding of how these programs actually worked thought they knew better,” he said — “this kind of ham-fisted, top-down injection” of an idea that wasn’t ready. “It feels like a PR apparatus that never had any real meat to it.”

Bullard pointed to 211, a statewide information and referral line run by private organizations. Hope Florida, Bullard said, is “profoundly duplicative” of it. “We could have just said, hey, we want to invest also in 211 to ensure that we have this safety net,” she said. 

Nordlund’s network of Hispanic nonprofits — most with someone on staff who will walk a stranger through a MyACCESS application — reached the same conclusion when the Hope navigator job description first circulated. “We already exist,” he recalled them saying. “It seems like it’s a duplicate of services.”

Nordlund says Hope Florida at times referred people to nonprofits within UnidosUS Florida’s network — organizations tasked with helping public assistance recipients understand the bureaucracy of state agencies. In other words, a state program housed inside DCF was sending Floridians to volunteer nonprofits whose job is to help them get back into DCF, he said, calling it “a big shell game.”

That’s the part of Hope Florida Bullard wishes more people understood — not the $10 million that made the headlines, but the agency underneath it, and the families who depend on it.

“That’s what I’m most upset about out of all of this, versus any other scandal people are bringing up,” she said. “We’re taking the eye off the ball of the well-being of children in Florida.”