Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign is pushing back on media reports this week linking Hurricane Idalia’s walloping of Florida’s Big Bend region with the governor’s decision earlier this year to veto funding to establish a federal rebate program for energy-efficient appliances.
On Wednesday afternoon, just hours after the Category 3 Hurricane made landfall on Florida’s Gulf Coast between Tampa and Tallahassee, the New Republic posted a story linking the storm to DeSantis’s June line-item veto of a $5 million federal grant. That grant could have been used to establish a program so Floridians could access more than $340 million in federal rebates to make their homes and appliances more energy efficient.
“The Florida governor rejected millions in climate funding. Now his state is suffering from a storm fueled by climate change,” the subhead on the story read.
The piece doesn’t say how the funding could have protected Big Bend residents from the storm.
“When it comes to environmentalism, the left operates this way: ‘Support my radical government overreach or else I will blame nature on you,’” campaign spokesman Bryan Griffin told National Review in an email. “Ron DeSantis rejects the left’s climate alarmism and Biden’s Green New Deal. Instead, he has standardized successful and efficient hurricane responses, promoted improved building codes, and championed our natural resources through smart and innovative conservation efforts.”
Christina Pushaw, the campaign’s combative rapid-response director, mocked the New Republic piece on the social media site X. “Wow, I didn’t know that the federal government could stop hurricanes in Florida for the low price of $350 million. Why have you been hiding this information from us??” she wrote Friday morning.
She followed that up with a note to the “Propaganda Press.”
“It’s easy to stop a hurricane, just bribe it with $350 million. Then Florida can go back to never having hurricanes again, just like it was 100 years ago… oh wait,” she wrote.
The New Republic wasn’t the only national media outlet writing about DeSantis’s veto on the day that Idalia hit Florida, though it was the most blatant in linking it to the storm.
Politico seems to have gotten the ball rolling, publishing a piece at 4:30 a.m. on Wednesday, a few hours before Idalia made landfall, with the headline, “DeSantis tells Biden: Keep your [Inflation Reduction Act] money.” Forbes followed it up with a story that afternoon headlined, “DeSantis Under Fire For Rejecting Millions In Home Energy Funding From Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.”
The veto in question involved a $5 million federal grant that Florida could have used to set up a program to manage about $347 million in federal rebates for residents to buy energy-efficient appliances and to make other energy-efficient improvements.
Politico said the rebates “underpin the [Biden] administration’s climate agenda,” and noted that DeSantis is the only governor so far who has signaled that he will block the rebates. The state has until next August to reapply for the money.
Congressman Darren Soto, a Democrat from Orlando, told Politico that DeSantis’s decision to reject the federal rebate program is “senselessly making the state more vulnerable.”
While the New Republic didn’t specifically state how the rebate program would have specifically helped Big Bend residents to prepare for or recover from Hurricane Idalia, it reported that the “intensifying storm can be directly attributed to climate change” and that DeSantis has “terrible climate-related policies.”
DeSantis has generally received positive reviews for his response to the hurricane. On Thursday the Wall Street Journal editorial board, in a piece titled “Hurricane Ron DeSantis,” credited the governor for being “in command of the details” in the storm’s aftermath, and wrote that he appears to be in his element when he is “examining the figures, the emergency response plans, the Covid-19 statistics, and then synthesizing it into government policy.”
DeSantis also received high marks for his response to Hurricane Ian last September.