What would Florida be like under Gov. Byron Donalds?

Feb. 18, 2026 by David Silverberg

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) will stepping down next year after eight years in office—and 39 people are running to replace him.

That’s according to the Florida Department of State as of Feb. 18. The cutoff date for candidates to qualify for the ballot is June 12 and there’s no telling how many more people will declare themselves candidates by then.

Of course, of the 12 Republicans, 11 Democrats and 16 candidates from other parties, non-party affiliates and write-ins currently declared, only a very small handful are considered serious, credible contenders for the seat.

Among these is Rep. Byron Donalds (R-19-Fla.). He is certainly the leading contender for the Republican nomination.

For the past four years Donalds has represented the 19th Congressional District of Florida, a coastal area running from Cape Coral at its northern end to Marco Island in the south.

Because this is the home of The Paradise Progressive and Donalds is the highest-ranking federal official in Southwest Florida, he has been the subject of considerable coverage in these pages, and that coverage can now help inform all Florida voters about the person who is seeking to lead them.

This article focuses only on Donalds, what kind of governor he would be and what policies he might pursue, rather than personal issues or scandals.

It is, as anything looking into the future must be, highly speculative; a sort of “thought experiment” as Albert Einstein would have called it.

The Republican race

The Republican assumption in this race is that the primary election, taking place on Tuesday, Aug. 18, will decide the contest.

Because Republicans have over a million-voter advantage in registrations, the candidates are clearly calculating that the primary will be the decisive election, with the general election on Nov. 3 a mere formality.

Accordingly, to date the Republican campaigns are clearly aimed at a narrow base of extreme, committed Make America Great Again (MAGA) party members who are certain to vote and who respond to Donald Trump-like appeals.

As a result, in imitation of Trump, the campaigns have been petty, personal and insulting. Candidates have attacked opponents’ failures, crimes and weaknesses. They are questioning each other’s loyalty to Trump himself, allegiance to his agenda and belief in his infallibility.

What is missing in this approach is virtually any discussion of running Florida, how the state will be managed, what policies will be pursued and how to handle the challenges it will face in the future.

Donalds has massive advantages in this race, chief among them Trump’s urging him to run before he declared in February 2025. Trump’s Feb. 20 X-post at that time was a “complete and total endorsement” after years of snubs, indifference and neglect.

*Donald Trump’s endorsement of Rep. Byron Donalds on Feb. 20, 2025.*

Trump’s blessing opened the endorsement and money floodgates.

That flood included endorsements from 17 members of the Florida congressional delegation, 27 sheriffs, three quarters of state Republican legislators and numerous donors—perhaps most importantly, Elon Musk.

It also included a cascade of cash. The campaign reported raising over $45 million during 2025.

Clearly, there’s a belief by many in the state that a Donalds victory is all but assured and they want to bask in his favor.

So what would Florida likely be like under Gov. Byron Donalds?

Goodbye Tallahassee, hello Mar-a-Lago

*The Tallahassification of Mar-a-Lago. (AI for TPP/ChatGPT)*

For all intents and purposes, under a governor Byron Donalds the capital of Florida might as well move from Tallahassee to Mar-a-Lago.

As Donalds puts it in his first priority listed on his campaign website: “Enact the Trump Agenda: Byron is committed to implementing President Trump’s agenda to Make America Great Again.”

Make no mistake: Donald Trump will be governor of Florida in all but name. That’s because Donalds has pledged his fealty to Trump so completely, extravagantly, and excessively that the idea of a shred of independence or autonomy or even a stray individual thought is unimaginable.

That’s not to say that Trump is likely to be deeply involved in the day to day running of the state. He’s got a whole world to run—and he’s still trying to prove that he won the 2020 election. It’s doubtful that he has much interest in insurance rates or water purity beyond the confines of property that he actually owns outright (Mar-a-Lago, Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter, Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, and Trump National Doral in Miami, plus adjacent properties and affiliated branded properties).

But it’s also unimaginable that Donalds would make any major move, take any major initiative or even breathe in any way contrary to the desires of Trump. What is more, this is an impression that Donalds himself has nurtured and promoted, especially with a non-stop stream of Trumpist social media posts, particularly on X. He has mounted an indefatigable and unrelenting defense of all of Trump’s most extreme excesses.

For MAGAs this will no doubt be cause for joy. They will be dwelling in the belly of the beast, a Trumptopia that is even more purely ruled by him than the nation he currently dominates. But it also means they will be even closer to the man himself and his rages, unpredictability, and sheer meanness and feel them even more acutely than elsewhere.

For those who oppose his hatred, prejudice and rage—or who are the targets of it—there will be no recourse, salvation or haven in the Sunshine State. A governor Donalds is unlikely to ever make an effort to protect them. The state will no longer effectively be independent—and woe to any state politician who dares to think anything other than Trumpthought or exhale a breath of heresy from Trump doctrine. Certainly no such heresy on any subject is likely to come from the governor himself.

A foreigner-free Florida?

*The new welcome to Florida under a governor Byron Donalds? (AI for TPP/ChatGPT)*

Given his blindly loyal Trumpism and reflecting his and the Florida Republican Party’s anti-foreigner sentiment, as governor Donalds will likely continue and intensify the state’s efforts against all foreigners of all origins and legal statuses on all fronts.

From the time he rode down the elevator in Trump Tower in 2015 Trump has been anti-foreigner. His first and most infamous declaration was that Mexicans were “rapists” and “criminals” and he has not deviated from those perceptions during his entire time in public life.

Trump considers immigration (other than by white, eastern European women he marries) as an invasion that has to be stopped and reversed. Accordingly, upon taking office his second time he began a nationwide purge, not only of undocumented migrants, but of immigrants of all kinds from virtually all other countries (especially, as he once put it, “shit hole” countries).

He is certainly seconded in this by his Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, of whom Trump once reportedly said “If it was up to Stephen, there would only be 100 million people in this country — and all of them would look like him.”

Certainly, both the legislative and executive branches of Florida’s government have enthusiastically joined this effort to date. Indeed, where there has been disagreement between the governor and the legislature it has been in differences over the severity of their anti-migrant, anti-foreigner measures. Florida has also been the most enthusiastic state in the union in forging bonds between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities, with all of its 67 counties and its cities signing 287(g) agreements, sometimes under duress from the state’s governor and attorney general.

Ironically, this comes in a state that before Trump was one of the most diverse in the nation and benefited from foreign contributions and investment. In Florida, especially Miami, immigrants and refugees from around the world flocked to find refuge and built businesses and communities that reflected their origins and enriched the state. In the state’s groves and fields migrants—many undocumented and minimally paid—picked its fruits and vegetables. They also built its buildings, staffed its hotels and resorts and were the sinews of a robust economy.

Beyond businesses and labor, foreign tourists and visitors were a key element in the state’s tourism industry, filling hotels, buying tickets and flocking to Disney World and Universal Studio in Orlando. Even here DeSantis pursued an anti-woke cultural crusade that succeeded in attacking the Disney corporation to the point where the company chose not to make a billion dollar investment in new facilities.

Donalds has proven himself a willing standard-bearer in Florida’s fight against foreigners of all sorts.

When the city council of Fort Myers in his district hesitated to sign on to the 287g program, Donalds was quick to condemn them.

“These officials that don’t understand their role, which is to implement a federal and state law, not circumvent and create sanctuary cities,” he said in an interview on the conservative NewsMax channel. “They simply need to be removed from office. They’re not going to follow the law. It’s that simple.”

He also ostentatiously defended the actions of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) directorate of the Department of Homeland Security.

On Jan. 21, after American citizen Renee Good was killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis, Donalds posted on X: “What Democrats are doing to obstruct, impede, and sabotage ICE is treasonous. The American people granted President Trump a mandate to deport illegal aliens and Make America Safe Again. As Governor, any Florida official who blocks these lawful actions will be removed from office.”

After Alex Pretti was killed by ICE agents on Jan. 24, Donalds told NewsNation: “Nobody wants to see any American lose their life like this…But we also have to be honest about what’s happening in Minneapolis. You have paid agitators. You have a coordinated operation going on in Minneapolis for the sole purpose of doxing ICE officers, impeding ICE officers, stopping them from following and executing federal law.”

While he denied saying that Pretti was a paid agitator he said, “I’m not saying that. I’m saying that what people are seeing on their phones and on news networks around the country is the result of paid protests and paid agitators.”

Ironically, for all its Trumpist loyalty, the state that created the Alligator Alcatraz concentration and detention camp to facilitate Trump’s anti-foreigner effort is also being shortchanged by that president. Despite spending $600 million to build camps and round up, detain and deport migrants, when it came to promised federal reimbursement, Florida’s state government is belatedly discovering another aspect of Trump management—his infamous welching on promises and commitments.

As governor Donalds will no doubt spend whatever he thinks—or is told—it takes for the state to curry Trump’s favor and carry out his wishes, no matter how extreme, harsh or unconstitutional. However, like so many others he will likely discover for himself that a Trump promise isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. Still, Florida taxpayers are unlikely to ever hear him complain or make an effort on behalf of the hard-earned dollars they pour into state coffers.

Public de-education

*The future of Florida’s public schools and universities? (AI for TPP/ChatGPT)*

Florida public education is unlikely to find a friend in a governor Byron Donalds. Indeed, it looks like it will be facing an enemy.

Public education is not something that is top of mind in the current gubernatorial race. Only Republican candidate James Fishback has mentioned it and that only to pledge that he would mandate student uniforms and local businesses should provide student meals.

Public education is not even mentioned on Donalds’ campaign website. But Donalds’ wife Erika has long been a campaigner for non-public education (or “school choice” in her parlance) and Donalds has echoed her arguments.

Public education is being squeezed from all sides in Florida. The current governor attacked it as part of his anti-“woke” crusade and reached down to remove, replace or endorse opponents of local school board members he didn’t like. Republican politicians inveigh against it. At every legislative session measures are introduced to restrict or regulate it, whether that applies to classroom content, teacher conduct or state funding. A private voucher program for parents to send children to non-public or parochial schools that came at the expense of public education was voted into being by the legislature and left Florida with $400 million in unused vouchers. Teachers are viewed with suspicion by vocal MAGA parents and even the teachers’ expressions of personal opinion—like heretical statements criticizing the late Charlie Kirk—have been cause for investigation and suspension.

A governor Donalds coming into this mix would likely add a massively anti-public education force. Donalds can be expected to always side with private, anti-public education activists, favor private, for-profit schools and shortchange funding for public education at every opportunity—and this would come on top of the end of federal standards and funding given the dissolution of the Department of Education.

Teachers’ unions can expect no favor, no support and no mercy from a governor Donalds’ office.

As Erika Donalds put it in a 2022 Fox Business interview: “Teachers unions are the enemy of our children when it comes to their education in America.” There’s no reason to believe that her husband holds any different opinion.

Nor would higher education likely be spared. Accreditation, tenure and board membership of Florida universities were all attacked under DeSantis for a variety of perceived sins, particularly for practicing diversity, equity and inclusion. He put very expensive cronies in charge of colleges, who in turn enriched their friends.

There is nothing to indicate that this would be any different under Donalds and in fact it would likely get worse.

Public un-health?

*A child with measles is examined by a doctor. (Photo: World Health Organization/Danil Usmanov)*

Florida is arguably the most regressive state in the nation when it comes to public health. Under a governor Byron Donalds it would likely regress to the Middle Ages.

As in the rest of the world, the COVID pandemic of 2020 to 2022 marks a break point in Florida’s history of public health provision. It was a time when a small but extremely vocal minority of people, encouraged by a dismissive President and a complicit governor, turned against science and the whole edifice of modern health protections, favoring instead unproven potions, quack prescriptions and conspiracy theories.

As a congressional candidate and then as a congressman, Donalds inserted himself into local debates over mask mandates (he was against them), vaccination mandates (also opposed), and consistently opposed federal efforts to protect the population at large from the ravages of COVID.

“Biden and the radical Left are coming for your freedom,” he wrote in a fundraising e-mail on Aug. 12, 2021, which warned that President Joe Biden might intervene against a mask mandate ban put in place by Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida. “They’re trying to use the federal government to FORCE Anthony Fauci’s anti-scientific mandates and lockdowns on Florida and take away our ability to make our own decisions.”

While never denouncing vaccines per se, Donalds did what he could to feed vaccine skepticism and fight all recommendations to protect the public from COVID and its variants. (For a full discussion of this, see “The Donalds Dossier: Anti-vaxxer or not?”)

Ironically enough, Donalds himself tested positive for COVID on Oct. 16, 2021, causing Trump to shun him and not even mention him in remarks when he came to Fort Myers that day. (Donalds recovered after a two-week quarantine.)

Nor has Donalds been any kinder to health care insurance and coverage for Floridians, whom he believes don’t need “full-blown, gold-plated” health insurance coverage.

“The biggest thing we need is we need a system where there are catastrophic health care plans … You can have a health care policy around catastrophic care, but that doesn’t really mean you need a full-blown gold-plated health care policy,” he said in a radio interview in October 2025.

He also said at the time that he wanted to get rid of the Affordable Care Act (better known as “Obamacare”)—this in a state that, with 4.4 million enrollees, has the highest number of enrollees in the country.

A big question is whether if elected governor Donalds would keep on the state’s current Surgeon General, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, who has been DeSantis’ anti-vaxx, anti-mandate, anti-public health right hand man. Ladapo announced in September 2025 that the state would be abolishing all vaccine mandates for schoolchildren—“Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and, and, slavery, okay?” he said of mandates, emphasizing all “are going to be gone for sure.”

It didn’t take long for measles, a previously suppressed disease, to break out in Florida, with one center being Ave Maria University in Collier County. That outbreak is still ongoing and appears to be increasing as of this writing.

So the record indicates that a Byron Donalds governorship would be devastating for Floridians’ health and healthcare—this at a time when previously suppressed or eradicated diseases are making a comeback, widespread vaccination is under attack and public health agencies are being dismantled at the federal and state levels.

The Sunless State?

*Florida’s future landscape? (AI for TPP/ChatGPT)*

On Thursday, Feb. 12, Trump and Lee Zeldin, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, announced that they were rescinding the “Endangerment Finding,” which held that greenhouse gases and fossil fuel emissions are dangerous to human health. The action opens the door to unrestricted air pollution and increased climate warming.

It joins a reinterpretation of Section 401 of the Clean Water Act on Jan. 13 to undercut state and local efforts to protect their waters from pollution.

In November 2025 Trump reversed a 10-year moratorium he had previously imposed on allowing oil exploration and exploitation in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, along with other sensitive locations. The moratorium was imposed in the runup to the 2020 election to gain the favor of Florida voters.

All of these are assaults on the natural environment and all will acutely affect the state of Florida—and they come on top of challenges to the environmentally sensitive state like climatic warming, intensifying storms and sea level rise.

Donalds is a member in good standing of the climate change-denying contingent in Florida, which includes the past and current governors and the Republican majority of the state legislature, which has gone so far as to outlaw the term “climate change” from state documents.

When asked in 2023 if he thought there was a correlation between heat waves and climate change Donalds simply replied “No, I don’t.” He has opposed what he called “weaponization” of Section 401 and fought efforts by President Joe Biden to stop water pollution.

In the case of oil drilling, Donalds did sign on to a letter along with seven other Florida representatives disapproving of Trump’s action, saying that drilling would interfere with operations at Eglin Air Force Base in the Panhandle. It was his only action to protect the Florida environment from Trump’s drive to encourage pollution, despoliation and exploitation in the service of the fossil fuel industry.

As governor—and as a submissively Trumpist governor at that—Donalds cannot be expected to defend Florida’s natural environment, protect its waters or safeguard its Gulf shores from oil pollution and defilement. He will most likely go along with Trump’s insistence that climate change is a “hoax” and do everything he can to eliminate measures to contain, restrain or prepare for it.

This comes on top of a strong movement in the Florida state government to “pre-empt” local governments’ efforts to take immediate steps to prepare or counteract the undeniable effects of climate change in their immediate areas.

Indeed, the pre-emption movement affects a broader swath of life in Florida. Driven by developers, many of whom are also state legislators, it is designed to eliminate all local barriers to development and exploitation.

Adding to this is an assault on the funding sources of local government by the governor and his allies to end property taxes. Florida Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia is seeking the power to overhaul local budgets and remove officials in the name of his Florida Agency for Fiscal Oversight (FAFO, a deliberate play on a profane definition). Ostensibly intended to root out fraud, waste and abuse in local government financial matters, in fact it appears to be an attempt to end all local autonomy.

The logical end result of these efforts and the state over which a governor Byron Donalds would preside, would be a fully paved over Florida, run entirely from the governor’s office at Trump’s direction, with no local autonomy of any kind. There would be no conservation of the natural environment and the air, land and sea would be completely polluted. Natural barriers or wetlands would likely be paved over and no longer protect the population, which would be utterly at the mercy of intensifying hurricanes and rising waters.

Further, Florida would likely cease to be a major citrus-producing state, its trees ravaged by citrus greening, its reliance on citrus imports destroyed by Trump’s tariffs and its groves sold to developers for housing developments.

Ironically enough, Florida’s great natural renewable energy resources, its sun and wind, which might at least mitigate climate change would not only be neglected but would likely be actively opposed by both Donalds and Trump.

Trump is known for his pathological fear and hatred of wind turbines for generating energy. There are currently no wind farms in Florida or offshore, so this is a phantom menace and there certainly wouldn’t be any built under a governor Donalds.

But Florida was making efforts to develop its solar generation capabilities and this too Donalds has opposed.

There can be no clearer statement of his attitudes on this subject than the headline on a 2023 op-ed under his byline for the Fort Myers News-Press: “The Dishonest Fantasy of Wind and Solar.”

“In sum, I’m not opposed to wind turbines and solar panels, but if we seriously want an affordable, reliable, secure ‘green energy’ grid, we cannot rely on the dishonest fantasy of utilizing spiky intermittent energy sources like wind and solar,” he argued. “Instead, we must embrace nuclear power and include nuclear in future green alternative energy discussions. Ultimately, we must base our future energy-related decisions on logic and objective facts—not politics.”

The high likelihood is that this op-ed wasn’t really written by Donalds but by a nuclear energy lobbyist—because in his second term, Donalds signed on as a shill for the nuclear power industry.

In the 2023 Congress Donalds sponsored 14 bills related to the nuclear power industry, mostly deregulating it or in some way favoring it, often in a highly technical manner. None had anything to do with his district, the concerns of its residents, or fell within his usual areas of expertise. (The nuclear industry also didn’t get much for its investment since none of his bills went anywhere.)

Donalds benefited greatly from fossil energy industry political action committees (PACs) and seven of them contributed a total of $25,500 to his campaign in the 2024 cycle. Fossil fuel PACs included those from the companies Sinclair, Valero, Marathon and Exxon Mobile as well as NextEra Energy, a utility infrastructure company, and Duke Energy, an energy holding company. Also contributing was the overall trade group for fossil fuels, the American Fuels and Petrochemical Manufacturers Association PAC.

The race card

*Michelle and Barack Obama depicted as apes in a Xerias_X video reposted by President Donald Trump on Feb. 6. (Image: Truth Social via Laura Loomer on X)*

If elected, Byron Donalds would be Florida’s first black governor.

It’s not a precedent or breakthrough that he’s playing up. On the contrary, he’s doing all he can to get Floridians to overlook his race.

In an atmosphere where racism is condemned and merit emphasized, this would be unremarkable. However, that’s not the current atmosphere.

On Feb. 6, Trump re-posted a 55-second artificial intelligence-generated video by the extreme X-site Xerias_X depicting former President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle as apes. The video didn’t end there: it depicted a variety of other Democratic figures as African animals, including US House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-8-NY) as a meerkat or lemur, former President Joe Biden as a baboon and former Vice President Kamala Harris as a tortoise. At the end of the video, all the animals bow before Trump as a lion king.

*The animal-politicians bow before Lion King Trump in the Xerias video reposted by the White House. (Image: Truth Social via Laura Loomer on X).*

The video was a clear display of Trump’s utter contempt for other politicians, the public, and his blatant, undisguised racism—with the exception of the unfailingly devoted and politically useful cover of Byron Donalds.

Most of the country exploded in outrage, including numerous Republican politicians.

However, the reaction among Florida Republicans was muted, when it wasn’t supportive. Lt. Gov. Jay Collins (R), who is also running for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, stated that the controversy was fomented by the political left and the news media. Candidate James Fishback wrote that “President Trump did nothing wrong.” (By contrast, Democratic gubernatorial candidate David Jolly said that “every other candidate in this governor’s race should have condemned racism this weekend and not fallen silent.”)

But of all the Republicans, the one black candidate, the person who stood most to be offended, whose outrage was most to be expected, was silent. His office released a statement to the Tampa Bay Times that “Team Byron Donalds has called the White House and learned that a staffer had let POTUS down”—accepting uncritically the White House explanation that the posting was the work of a staffer, who remains unnamed to this day.

And that was all there was.

Donalds’ reaction—or non-reaction—is instructive of his likely actions and attitudes if elected governor. Florida’s minorities, of all kinds, will find no aid, assistance or support from this governor if they face challenges or prejudice. Racism will go unanswered. And any Trump excess or outrage will not only be uncritically accepted, it will likely be defended, rationalized and when directed, implemented by this governor.

Indeed, Donalds’ whole political career is built on a gargantuan contradiction that will be unavoidable if he accedes to the highest office in the state.

“I am everything the fake news media tells you doesn’t exist,” Donalds stated in his opening campaign video when he first ran for Congress in 2020. “A strong, Trump-supporting, gun-owning, liberty-loving, pro-life, politically incorrect black man.”

He hasn’t changed positions since making that statement. But increasingly, holding to that Trumpist faith means accepting authoritarian coups, mob and state-sanctioned violence, concentration camps, constitutional violations, mind-boggling corruption, election rigging, dictatorial dominance and increasingly overt and extreme racial prejudice.

Byron Donalds would not be in a position to seek the governorship of a state that was once slave-holding and secessionist, segregationist and lynching-prone if not for the giant steps away from that barbarity over the last 160 years. If not for Emancipation, he would be a slave. If not for Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, he would not be able to vote. If not for the Civil Rights Act, his children would be consigned to second-class schools and separate water fountains. If not for repeal of Florida’s miscegenation law in 1969, he would not have been able to date—much less, marry—his current spouse. If not for the election of Barack Obama, who showed that Americans could accept a capable black man and elect him president, he could not aspire to the state’s highest political office or even the highest office in the land.

Instead, he has embraced a movement and man who wants to go in exactly the opposite direction, to return to a time when in his view America was “great.” But when was that time? Was it before the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1857, which ruled that a black man could never be an American citizen? What is more, this is a president who is ferociously and aggressively turning back the clock and trying to bend the arc of history to an imagined time when prejudice reigned, racial violence was common, and intolerance ruled—and there was no place in that world for an ambitious black man like Byron Donalds.

As a loyal, submissive, Trumpist governor, this is what Byron Donald can be expected to bring to Florida.

Donalds may well win the Republican nomination on Aug. 18. But when Florida voters go to the polls in the general election on Nov. 3, they will have a choice. Assuming the election is held as scheduled, assuming every legitimate voter is allowed to cast a ballot, and assuming that the votes are counted fairly, accurately and reported truthfully, the people of Florida can chart a very different destiny for their Sunshine State—if they dare.

To see all The Paradise Progressive’s past coverage of Rep. Byron Donalds, click here.

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After Alligator Alcatraz: A modest proposal

Aug. 25, 2025 by David Silverberg

On Thursday, Aug. 21, Judge Kathleen Williams of the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida ruled that the state of Florida’s concentration, detention and deportation camp, Alligator Alcatraz, had to cease operations and be dismantled within 60 days, which falls on Oct. 21.

The State of Florida appealed the ruling within an hour of the decision’s announcement. That appeal is now pending and could go up to the Supreme Court.

However that appeal plays out, it is not too soon to begin thinking about what should happen to the site of what had previously been the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport.

This essay recommends that the site be converted into the “William J. Mitsch Memorial Wetlaculture Experiment and Everglades Restoration Project.”

The article will review the court ruling and explain the proposal.

The ruling and reaction

In her ruling, Williams found that the State of Florida, in its haste to set up Alligator Alcatraz, had violated federal laws requiring an assessment of the camp’s environmental impact.

The most relevant law was the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), “which requires that major federal actions significantly affecting the human environment undergo environmental review processes.”

While state and federal officials (Defendants) acknowledged possible “deficiencies” in their haste to establish the camp, they argued that any injunction should be vacated while the case made its way through the judicial process (i.e., the camp should be allowed to continue functioning throughout legal deliberations).

Williams was having none of it. Indeed, so blatant was the state’s indifference to due process and the rule of law that Williams’ scorn comes through even in the dry language of a court ruling.

“Here, there weren’t ‘deficiencies’ in the agency’s process,” she wrote. “There was no process.” [Emphasis ours.]

She continued: “The Defendants consulted with no stakeholders or experts and did no evaluation of the environmental risks and alternatives from which the Court may glean the likelihood that the agency would choose the same course if it had done a NEPA-compliant evaluation.”

(The full, 82-page text of William’s ruling can be read here and is also available for viewing and download at the end of this article.)

The ruling also dealt with issues of venue, finding that the Southern District of Florida was the proper court to consider the case; the degree of permanent environmental harm the camp was causing; and responsibility for the camp’s establishment and operations (the State of Florida rather than the federal government).

Because of its violations of law and environmental impact, Williams issued an injunction that prohibited the defendants from installing any new lighting “or doing any paving, filling, excavating, or fencing; or doing any other site expansion, including placing or erecting any additional buildings, tents, dormitories, or other residential or administrative facilities,” although modification of existing buildings is permitted for the sake of safety or environmental mitigation.

New detainees cannot be brought to the camp.

The order applies to everyone involved in camp operations, whether state or federal.

According to the order, “No later than sixty (60) days,” which falls on October 21, state and federal officials have to remove the fencing, lighting and “all generators, gas, sewage, and other waste and waste receptacles that were installed to support this project”—essentially, returning the site to its prior state and giving Miccosukee Tribe members complete access to the area.

Lastly, the plaintiffs were required to post a token, $100 bond.

Not only was an appeal of the order immediately filed in the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, Ga., but it was predictably denounced by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).

“This is a judge that was not going to give us a fair shake,” DeSantis said the day after the ruling during remarks in Panama City. “This was preordained, very much an activist judge that is trying to do policy from the bench.”

He continued: “This is not going to deter us. We’re going to continue working on the deportations, advancing that mission,” referring to President Donald Trump’s roundups and deportations.

The state is proceeding with plans for a “Deportation Depot” camp west of Jacksonville, Fla.

“We’re not going to be deterred; we’re totally in the right on this,” DeSantis said. “But I would also note, because of the success of Alligator Alcatraz, there’s demand for more.”

While appealing the ruling, Florida officials may simply ignore the judge’s order. There is precedent for this.

In that case, Williams was the judge whose order was defied by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier. In April she issued an injunction against enforcing a Florida law making it a misdemeanor for undocumented migrants to enter the state. Uthmeier sent a letter to police chiefs and sheriffs saying that the injunction was legally wrong and he could not force them to obey it. In June, Williams found Uthmeier in contempt but his only punishment was to produce biweekly reports on enforcement actions.

“Litigants cannot change the plain meaning of words as it suits them, especially when conveying a court’s clear and unambiguous order,” Williams wrote at the time. “Fidelity to the rule of law can have no other meaning.”

It remains to be seen if those words will have any impact on the dismantlement of Alligator Alcatraz.

A modest proposal: Restoration and renewal

*Bill Mitsch in his natural habitat, 2021. (Photo: Bill Mitsch)*

William Jerome Mitsch was one of the world’s foremost scientific experts on wetlands like the Everglades and did much of his work at Florida Gulf Coast University. In 2022 he retired after a 47-year career and passed away in February of this year at the age of 77.

(To see a full profile of Mitsch and his work see: “On a personal note: An appreciation of Bill Mitsch, a wetlands warrior.”)

In 2018, Mitsch proposed a solution to the problem of pollution affecting the Everglades.

He called it “wetlaculture.”

The concept was that pollution could be defeated by creating new wetlands and this could be done by planting sawgrass, which is native and thrives in this area. The sawgrass would filter out contaminants while letting water flow. These new wetlands could be created on previously cultivated land. He believed that the grass would create soil so fertile that nitrate fertilizers would be unnecessary.

He calculated that new wetlands could be created over a 10-year time period. At the end of that time, the soil would be flipped and used for farming for 10 years. Then, it could be flipped again to lie fallow for another 10 years and so on, indefinitely.

A small-scale Wetlaculture experiment is already under way in Freedom Park in Naples, Fla. There, 28 bins hold sawgrass and researchers experiment with different levels of water and nutrients in the different bins as the sawgrass grows. Scientists measure nutrients in the soil and see if nitrates and phosphorous are being removed. When the soil is deemed to be clean and fertile enough they’ll plant crops and see how well they grow.

*A sign marks the spot of the current Wetlaculture experiment in Freedom Park in Naples, Fla. (Photo: Author)*

Now the time has come to attempt a Wetlaculture experiment on a grander scale—perhaps the scale of the 39-acre site of Alligator Alcatraz.

Commentary: A better future

If Alligator Alcatraz is in fact closed and dismantled the “William J. Mitsch Memorial Wetlaculture Experiment and Everglades Restoration Project,” would be a most fitting replacement.

The concrete, asphalt and especially the runway could be scraped and removed and in its place be planted with sawgrass with an eye to flipping it after 10 years, or whenever scientists deem it appropriate. The plantings would likely restore water flow, cleanse pollution and prepare the soil for crops in their turn.

Instead of destroying the natural environment, the “William J. Mitsch Memorial Wetlaculture Experiment and Everglades Restoration Project” would restore it. Instead of the constant floodlights, the area would be restored to the darkness that made it part of Big Cypress’ International Dark Sky Park. Instead of noise and traffic, there would be quiet and calm. Instead of harming wildlife, animals could thrive. Instead of fencing out the public and the Miccosukee Indian Tribe, all would have access.

As for the expense, it would be far less than the $450 million expected to cost Florida taxpayers to run Alligator Alcatraz this year alone. It would also cost Florida and the nation far, far less to maintain in every subsequent year. Moreover, because it would be a scientific experiment, it would be eligible for academic and research funding.

Most of all, it would replace a concentration camp that is likely to be a blot and a stain on Florida’s history and on the history of the United States. Rather than a disgrace, Florida and the Everglades would have a site that improves the future, addresses environmental challenges and would be in harmony with the land, water, plants, animals, people and climate. Instead of punishment, the Mitsch Memorial Experiment would be a place of possibilities.

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it,” Yogi Berra, the Yankee baseball catcher famous for his malapropisms, supposedly said. Along the old Tamiami Trail, right on the Collier County-Dade County line, Florida and the American people have come to a fork in the road. One path leads to a concentration camp of deliberate human suffering, oppression and brutality. The other path leads to a restoration of nature’s balance, a hopeful future and great potential benefits.

The time has come to take the fork in the road. A “William J. Mitsch Memorial Wetlaculture Experiment and Everglades Restoration Project” is clearly the better path to follow.

*The Everglades. (Photo: National Park Service/Robert Krayer)*

To read all of The Paradise Progressive’s coverage of Bill Mitsch, click here.

Click the button below to read and download the full 82-page text of Judge Kathleen Williams’ decision.

Alligator Alcatraz closure order 8-21-25 Download

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On a personal note: An appreciation of Bill Mitsch, a wetlands warrior

Bill Mitsch in his natural habitat, 2021. (Photo: Bill Mitsch)

March 30, 2025 by David Silverberg

On Feb. 12 of this year, Prof. Bill Mitsch passed away at the age of 77.

William Jerome Mitsch was one of the world’s foremost scientific experts on wetlands like the Everglades and did much of his work in Southwest Florida at Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU).

Although no one can stop the march of time and the toll it takes, Mitsch’s passing does leave a gap in the expertise and knowledge so critical to the environmental health of Southwest Florida. His knowledge of wetlands was awe-inspiring and encyclopedic.

Mitsch’s legacy of environmental activism is particularly relevant now as fights over control of wetlands and maintenance of their health flare anew under the regime of President Donald Trump.

The work Mitsch did and the causes he advocated should not be forgotten with his passing.

Mitsch first became interested in water and wetlands growing up in Wheeling, West Virginia, where he explored a nearby creek as a young boy.

“The creek, that must be where I started getting interested in aquatic science,” Mitsch, said at a 2022 presentation in Naples. “We knew everything about this creek, where the deep areas were, where the shallow areas were and how the creek meandered. We learned all this by chasing balls into the creek.”

A 1969 graduate of the University of Notre Dame, he was inspired by the first Earth Day celebrations in 1970 to pursue graduate environmental studies at the University of Florida. He pursued his doctorate under Howard Odum, a pioneering ecologist, at the university’s Center for Wetlands.

From there he pursued an active academic career studying, researching and analyzing wetlands. Among his many books, he was chief author of the standard textbook, Wetlands, now in its sixth edition. He held multiple faculty positions, sponsored over 85 master and doctoral students, published extensively and served on numerous boards.

Locally, Mitsch joined the faculty of FGCU in 2012 when he served as Eminent Scholar and Director of the Everglades Wetland Research Park, located in the Kapnick Center next to the Naples Botanical Garden. (The Park is now part of FGCU’s Water School.)

Mitsch was no ivory tower academic; he literally got his feet wet. And that didn’t just apply to swamps; it also meant the swamp of politics.

No sugarcoating

I first got to know Mitsch after moving full time to Naples in 2013. He was a source on several stories I worked on for Gulfshore Business magazine.

The word that springs to mind when I think of Bill Mitsch is “crusty.” He could be curmudgeonly, gruff and impatient. He was direct and brooked no bull. Even so, I always enjoyed talking to him. He was secure in his scientific expertise and fearless in speaking out about the truths it revealed.

Our first encounter came when I was researching an article for Gulfshore Business on water (“The Trouble with our Water”) in the January 2014 issue. (No longer available online.)

Mitsch provided background information for the article—but then he continued about the sugar industry’s interference in wetlands and water research to the point where I drafted a separate article to cover everything he provided.

In particular, he recalled an incident from 1992 when was distinguished professor and head of Ohio State University’s wetland research park. Along with Thomas Fontaine, then director of the Everglades Systems Research Division of the South Florida Water Management District, he was putting on the fourth international wetlands conference at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. It was sponsored by the International Association for Ecology. Only registered participants were supposed to be admitted.

Just before the conference began Mitsch was suddenly startled by Fontaine banging on the glass door to his office.

“They’re here!” Fontaine shouted when Mitsch got to the door. “They’re filming us and if you don’t get rid of them I’m taking my people and walking!”

“They” were people from the Florida sugar industry.

Mitsch rushed with Fontaine into the large, dark auditorium where the conference was going to be held and high up in the gloomiest murk of the highest seats he could see a tiny red light. He climbed the rows and sure enough, there were two men with a camera.

“I said, ‘I guess you guys are filming this event?’ and they didn’t argue,” Mitsch told me. They acknowledged that they worked for a company in Miami hired by sugar interests. “They were clearly there to hear every word that every state and federal official said.”

Mitsch had to get a legal opinion from the university before he could ask the cameramen to leave – and if they hadn’t departed he had the authority to have campus security throw them out. As it was, they did agree to depart but he also had to request that anyone in the audience turn in any recordings of the proceedings, which forced one poor graduate student to yield his tape recording.

That was hardly the only information he had to share. He plied me with allegations of Big Sugar interfering in research into the sources of pollution from Lake Okeechobee, to the point of industry agents breaking into laboratories to physically destroy notes and material. They blackballed scientists and targeted anti-pollution politicians. Regrettably, juicy as it all was, little of it was verifiable, so the article never appeared. But it was valuable in providing me with an understanding of the stakes and the extremism that water could inspire in this swampy realm.

Mitsch helped me formulate wetlands and Everglades policy positions when I worked as communications director for congressional candidate David Holden who ran in the 19th Congressional District in 2018.

That was also the year that Southwest Florida experienced the Big Bloom, a nasty, persistent red tide off the coast that was coupled with an intense blue-green algae outbreak in the Caloosahatchee River.

The Bloom continued for months, starting around October 2017 and persisted well past the 2018 election. Its cause seemed mysterious and unlike previous blooms, it showed no sign of dissipating.

On Jan. 10, 2019, Mitsch delivered a lecture at FGCU at which he pinpointed what he believed to be the causes, based on his research.

Bill Mitsch pinpoints the causes of 2018’s Big Bloom in a lecture to an audience at FGCU. (Photos: Author)

The cause, he said, was nitrate fertilizer—after years of debate and finger-pointing, it was the first time the source had been so authoritatively identified.

He also said that nitrate-laden rainfall, much of it caused by cars using I-75, leaking septic tanks, and pollution flowing from the Mississippi River drifting across the Gulf of Mexico, fed the naturally-occurring Karenia brevis organisms.

At least in part due to Mitsch’s findings, the state, some counties and towns enacted rules regulating fertilizer use in an effort to cut down the pollution and combat the red tide. To this day Lee and Charlotte counties in Southwest Florida ban fertilizing from June 1 to Sept. 30. In Collier County the cities of Naples and Marco Island do as well.

The birth of ‘wetlaculture’

Mitsch didn’t just chronicle and analyze problems, he also proposed fixes.

At the same lecture where he focused on nitrates as the cause of the Big Bloom, Mitsch argued for a solution to the pollution plaguing the Everglades and all the water that slowly flows south from Lake Okeechobee.

He called it “wetlaculture.”

The concept was that pollution could be defeated by creating new wetlands, which would filter out contaminants. These new wetlands could be created on previously cultivated land. Furthermore, they would create soil so fertile that nitrate fertilizers would not be necessary.

“Wetland restoration and creation are not easy,” Mitsch warned in his lecture. “They require attention to Mother Nature (self-design) and Father Time (projects take time to reach their potential).”

Further, he argued, wetlaculture had to be implemented on a massive scale. He estimated it would take 100,000 acres of wetlaculture to ensure clean water to the Everglades, 14 times more than that provided in Everglades restoration reservoir plans—of which he was very skeptical.

“They’re not digging a hole at all,” Mitsch said of the reservoir in a 2022 Naples Daily News interview. “They’re just putting up a gigantic wall around this rectangle and fill it with 34 feet of water. Nature doesn’t use squares and rectangles. They’re hoping the water will be clean enough but there are not enough [stormwater treatment areas] to put a dent in the nutrients.”

However, his preferred solution required time—10 years for new wetlands to establish themselves, in Mitsch’s estimation. For 10 years the soil would be used for agriculture. At the end of that time, the soil would be flipped and left fallow for 10 years to serve as a wild, cleansing wetland. Then, it could be flipped again, and so on, indefinitely.

It would also take a lot of money—much more than state government could provide, in Mitsch’s view. That meant it would take a federal commitment.

“We need the feds to keep an eye on our state government,” he said.

A wetlaculture experiment was actually implemented in May 2018 and it can be seen to this day. It’s in a fenced area at the back of Freedom Park in Naples that anyone can visit.

It actually doesn’t look like much. There are 28 kidney-shaped bins in the ground with sawgrass growing out of them. All of them will sit while the sawgrass grows. Researchers experiment with different levels of water and nutrients in the different bins. They measure nutrients in the soil and see if nitrates and phosphorous are being removed. When the soil is deemed to be clean and fertile enough they’ll plant crops and see how well they grow.

It wasn’t clear when the experiment started whether the cleansing process would take just a few years or 10 years, as Mitsch estimated.

But whatever it ultimately takes, in those quiet, stationary bins, Mitsch may just have launched a wetlands revolution.

The wetlaculture experiment in Freedom Park in Naples, Fla., in 2019. (Photos: Author)

A dark day

On the night of Jan. 24, 2020, I happened to be surfing the Internet and went into LinkedIn, which I rarely checked. By pure coincidence I discovered a blistering, infuriated screed from Mitsch, that had been posted minutes earlier.

The day before, Jan. 23, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under President Donald Trump had rolled back federal protections for wetlands and American waters and Mitsch was outraged.

Trump had boasted: “I terminated one of the most ridiculous regulations of all: the last administration’s disastrous Waters of the United States rule.”

“This is the darkest day for Federal protection of wetlands since it first started 45 years ago. This is a horrible setback for wetland protection in the USA, ” Mitsch wrote.

“I have followed this tug of war for all these years between those who appreciate the many ecosystem services that wetlands provide including cleaning our waters, sequestering and permanently storing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and providing the best habitat for hundreds of threatened and endangered species, and the industrial-scale agricultural, energy, and real estate giants.”

He followed with a call to action: “It has always been a David vs. Goliath. I am calling for those of us who appreciate some of the good things that nature has provided for us, whether you are Republican, Democrat, or Independent, to speak out about the rape of our landscape that will surely follow this action. I especially call upon those who are in the business world to help establish environmental bonds, local and state ordinances, and novel approaches to save our remaining wetlands. I also call upon the children and young adults, who are much more knowledgeable about wetlands than their parents and grandparents, to join the ‘silent majority’ who appreciate the role of wetlands to move forward, with or without our Federal government, to save our planet.”

Knowing that this was unlikely to be covered by any other media outlet in Southwest Florida, I wrote up the story for The Paradise Progressive: “FGCU wetlands professor blasts Trump water rules, calls for citizen action.”

The David versus Goliath struggle would continue for the next four years, with battles in courts and appropriations committees.

It reached its next inflection point on June 9, 2021 when the EPA under President Joe Biden reversed Trump’s wetlands decision.

Mitsch was ecstatic: “It’s a good move,” he told me when I called him. “I’m happy because it’s the right direction.”

The EPA’s announcement was made in coordination with the US Army Corps of Engineers.

“I’m delighted both agencies have stepped forward,” said Mitsch. “This, in my view, is a good turn for Southwest Florida and especially the Everglades.”

Still, Mitsch had reason to be cautious. “This is déjà vu all over again for me,” he said. “It’s the same issue that keeps coming back. It’s quite contentious.”

The core of the dispute was the definition of “waters” and “wetlands,” which had twice been defined in different ways.

“I hope they don’t get on a third definition that’s political and not scientific. I hope they have the stamina to go through with it,” he said of current efforts. “There is no such thing as a [legitimate] political definition of a ‘wetland’—otherwise we might as well throw out all our scientific books.”

Mitsch opposed the State of Florida’s efforts to take over wetland permitting and environmental protection. That authority was transferred to the state in December 2020 in one of the last official acts of the first Trump administration.

Mitsch’s hope was that the environmentally-aware Biden administration would keep control of permitting.

“I’m very much afraid of Florida taking wetland management away from the feds. What the feds are doing is great but I’ve seen it before,” he said. “There’s no question why [the state] wanted to take over water regulation; it was for development.” While he said he was discouraged that “the train is out of the station in Florida, I hope the momentum of this [new federal rule] spills into Florida somehow.”

As Mitsch predicted, the battle continues.

On the one hand the federal government won a round on Tuesday, March 25, when the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the US Army Corps of Engineers and against the sugar companies. While the sugar growers sought a larger water allocation than the Corps was providing and sued to get it, the court sided with the Corps, keeping the water flowing for Everglades restoration.

Mitsch would have approved.

However, with Trump back in office, Florida is again trying to seize control of the state’s wetlands.

In 2024 a US District judge vacated the 2020 Trump decision to hand permitting authority to the state, ruling that the transfer violated the Endangered Species Act. The ruling came in response to a 2021 lawsuit filed by Earthjustice, an environmental organization. That lawsuit argued that the state of Florida was still trying to evade the Endangered Species Act restrictions. The lawsuit aimed to force compliance.

The latest twist in the saga will come on May 5. That’s when arguments over permitting authority between Florida and the EPA will be heard in the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

Regrettably—or perhaps mercifully—Bill Mitsch will not be present for the latest developments.

Mitsch retired in 2022 after a 47-year career, but he remained alert and interested in his field to the end.

In Southwest Florida, a land so critically dependent on its wetlands, which are extremely endangered and likely to be even more assaulted, it’s worth remembering Mitsch’s work and the enormity of his scholarship and innovations.

But especially at this time it’s particularly important to never forget his activism and his fearlessness in conducting good science, speaking the truth and acting on it. He did that despite controversy and opposition and big forces arrayed against him.

It set a good example and one that has never been more important than now.

He was truly a wetlands warrior.

To read all of The Paradise Progressive’s coverage of Bill Mitsch, click here.

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Milton the storm and Milton the man: Who was Florida’s suicidal governor and what lessons does he hold for today?

*Florida Gov. John Milton. (Oil painting over photograph, Claribel Jett, Fla. Dept. of State)*

Oct. 10, 2024 by David Silverberg

When “Milton” came up on the National Hurricane Center’s list of hurricane names, it hardly seemed appropriate for a killer storm.

Rather, it seemed nerdy, best suited for an owlish accountant. It evoked Milton Berle, the slapstick comedian who had his heyday in the early days of television (for people who remember him).

But for those with a sense of Florida history, it was a creepy evocation of a volatile governor who was so completely tied to the Confederate cause that he could not bear its defeat. A hurricane bearing his last name aimed at Florida seemed a coincidence ripe for the hauntings of Halloween—and very ominous for those following the storm’s track.

So, who was John Milton and what happened to him and what did he mean for the state of Florida? And could there be a cosmic meaning in what was otherwise a complete coincidence of timing and names?

Origins of a reluctant Floridian

The most famous John Milton was the seventeenth century English Puritan poet who penned the epic poem Paradise Lost about the revolt of the angel Satan against God and his subsequent exile to the depths of Hell.

As it happens, Florida’s John Milton was related to that John Milton. Indeed, he was part of a family distinguished both in England and the United States. His great grandfather, also named John Milton, was a hero of the Revolutionary War and a presidential candidate in 1789, when he ran as a Federalist from Georgia and received two electoral votes. His son, Homer Virgil Milton, was a hero of the War of 1812.

The John Milton who became governor of Florida was born on April 20, 1807 near Louisville, Ga., and grew up in Georgia, “reading” law (a less formal education than a degree and one also pursued by Abraham Lincoln).

Milton practiced law in Georgia and in 1830 he married Susan Amanda Cobb, with whom he had a son and two daughters. They subsequently lived in Georgia, Alabama and New Orleans.

He married a second time (presumably on the death of his first wife) and had two sons and seven daughters by his second wife, Caroline Howze.

Florida had been acquired by the United States from Spain in 1821. While it attracted immigrants as a land of opportunity then, as it does to this day, Milton, who was described by The New York Times in his youth as “gay and dashing” went there driven by a different motivation: he killed a man in a duel over a lady and had to flee Louisiana.

Wealthy by the time he moved to Florida in 1846, he bought a 7,000-acre plantation near the town of Marianna, about 65 miles northwest of Tallahassee. Named Sylvania, it was worked by an enslaved population.

When the Third Seminole War broke out in 1855, Milton served as captain of volunteers until the conflict ended in 1858.

But Milton made his real mark in politics.

Success and secession

In the presidential election of 1848 Milton served as a presidential Elector, voting for Democrat Lewis Cass.

Florida’s Democratic Party was split between Conservatives, who favored states’ rights and Whigs who favored the union. Milton turned out to be an effective orator and a fiery Conservative. In this he followed the thinking of John Calhoun and South Carolinians who argued that states had the right to “nullify” federal laws with which they disagreed.

By 1849 the question of slavery was beginning to roil national politics. In 1852 it suddenly moved to the forefront of the national debate when Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published.

As a wealthy slave owner and states rights advocate, Milton became a defender of slavery and a proponent of secession. Elected a state senator in 1850, he obsessively pursued the idea, making emotional, intense speeches in its favor. In this he closely resembled another southerner, planter and author Edmund Ruffin of Virginia, who also fanatically advocated secession.

The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 brought the question of union, secession, state rights and slavery to a head.

In 1860, Florida had only 140,424 inhabitants. Most worked in agriculture in some way and settlement was largely in the northern part of the state with the exception of Key West, which at the time was America’s richest city, built on salving wrecked shipping. As small as the state’s population was, it had expanded exponentially in the years since the United States had acquired the territory.

Of the population, according to the 1860 census, 41,128 were white men, 36,319 were white women, 31,348 were black male slaves and 30,397 were black female slaves. There were only 454 free black men and 478 free black women.

The electorate was tiny. Only white men had the vote. When debate began over secession in 1860—in what may be surprising to modern readers—there was strong unionist sentiment in the state legislature and about half the state’s population.

Milton’s fiery oratory won him the Conservative nomination for governor. His opponent was Edward Hopkins, who led the Constitutional Unionists. The ultimate vote was small and extremely close: 6,994 for Milton and 5,248 for Hopkins, a difference of only 1,746 votes, but enough to make Milton governor.

It was the same election that made Abraham Lincoln president. Across the South secessionists prepared for war. The outgoing governor, Madison Perry, was authorized to spend $100,000 in arms and munitions for state forces.

Milton continued to push for secession and Edmund Ruffin of Virginia traveled to Tallahassee to add his support.

At Milton’s strenuous urging, on January 10, 1861 the state legislature passed an ordinance of secession by a vote of 62 to 7, becoming the third state to secede. The seven dissenters unsuccessfully tried to have the ordinance submitted to a general referendum but failed.

A minority of partisan politicians prevailed and declared Florida a “sovereign and independent nation.”

Civil War

Milton was such a secessionist that he didn’t even want Florida to join the Confederate States of America. He even resisted the Confederate Secretary of War’s call up of the state militia to serve in the Confederate army.

Nonetheless he realized, however vaguely, that the rebellion would take a common effort. Still, with Florida’s tiny white male population, people were not going to be its greatest contribution to the cause.

Instead, Florida contributed the fruits of its agriculture, especially cattle and salt, to the Confederacy and Milton was instrumental in organizing its collection and shipment to the north. It briefly made Florida, if not the breadbasket of the confederacy, certainly its meat monger.

During the war the Union took note of this supply and tried to stop or impede it.

In February 1864 Union troops marched out from Jacksonville, which they held, to disrupt the food supply. Their commander, Gen. Truman Seymour, decided to exceed orders and take Tallahassee. Confederates from Florida and South Carolina sought to stop him and they met in battle at the town of Olustee. The Confederates beat the Union troops who retreated back to Jacksonville.

*A contemporary illustration of the Battle of Olustee, which has been criticized for various inaccuracies. For example, neither side fought from behind fortifications. (Art: US archives)*

Battle even came to Fort Myers, which in 1865 was an actual fort, whose surrounding community was home to around 400 pro-Union Floridian refugees.

The fort, which was largely a wooden blockhouse, housed the 2nd Florida Cavalry, largely made of pro-Union Floridians, a company of New York volunteer infantry and the 2nd United States Colored Infantry. The troops raided surrounding ranches, depots and grazing lands to cut off Confederate supplies.

*Fort Myers in 1865. (Art: Leslie’s Illustrated)*

On February 20, 1865 about 500 Confederates approached the fort, which was manned by about 275 Union troops, and demanded their surrender. When the Union commander refused, battle commenced and after four hours of fighting the Confederates withdrew. In March the Union forces abandoned the fort on their own volition.

It was barely more than a skirmish but has gone down in history as the southernmost battle of the Civil War.

A shot in Sylvania

As the southern cause declined so did Milton’s will and determination and he was reportedly worn down by the cares of office.

In March 1865 he left Tallahassee for his plantation in Marianna but not before he sent a message to the state legislature. In it he stated that Union Army leaders “have developed a character so odious that death would be preferable to reunion with them.”

By the dawn of April the Confederacy was on its last legs and the capital, Richmond, was about to fall.

Apparently unable to face the prospect of a Union victory, Milton committed suicide at his home plantation, Sylvania, on April 1, putting a bullet in his brain.

The next day Richmond fell. Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia on April 9. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on April 15. And Edmund Ruffin, Milton’s fellow secessionist, also committed suicide on June 17.

To the best of this author’s ability to determine, John Milton was the only American governor ever to commit suicide in office.

Commentary: Omens or oddities?

Aside from the oddity of having a storm hit Florida that bore the name of one of its governors, the story of Gov. John Milton revives the specter of the causes he favored, which were otherwise laid to rest by the civil war and subsequent history.

There was the idea of nullification; that a state could simply “nullify” a federal law it didn’t like by calling it unconstitutional.

In 1830 this was the argument South Carolinians made over a federal tariff they opposed. John Milton supported their rejection of federal law and policy.

In 2023 Collier County, Fla., passed its own nullification ordinance, the misleadingly named “Bill of Rights Sanctuary” ordinance, giving itself the right to nullify federal law if a citizen deems a federal law unconstitutional. With the passing of Hurricane Milton, this ordinance may come back to haunt the county as it deals with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which operates, of course, under federal law.

There was the idea of secession, of pulling out of the federal compact altogether.

In 1860 this is what John Milton energetically propounded and vigorously pursued, eventually succeeding in leading Florida out of the federal union.

Today, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has pursued what has been called “soft secession,” defying federal mandates, rules, regulations and policies as he serves his own political ambitions. He has defied the federal government in matters large and small ranging from COVID mandates to extraditing Donald Trump to other states to answer for his crimes. He even made a point of snubbing President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris when they visited or called to offer or coordinate assistance with hurricanes Helene and, yes, Milton.

No doubt DeSantis will continue to pursue his version of secessionism through the November election and after, especially if its results don’t favor his opposition to abortion rights and the election of Harris.

But as John Milton—and January 6th—helped to show, secessionism and insurrection don’t end well and they’re not likely to end well this time.

The storm named Milton also throws into relief Florida’s determined denial of the reality of climate change. From then-Gov. Rick Scott informally banning the term from state government to the legislature and DeSantis officially striking it from state legal and official documents, climate change denial is embedded in the state’s leadership mentality—even when climate change-induced storms pummel the state they govern with increasing force.

Perhaps the coincidence of an extremely powerful, destructive, climate-change fueled storm called Milton and the legacy of a fanatical but destructive governor named Milton provides a kind of poetic lesson that Floridians should heed.

And that lesson is simply this: Denying climate change is…well…suicidal.

Liberty lives in light

*Hurricane Milton seen from the International Space Station. (Photo: NASA)*

Project 2025 denies climate change, strangles weather science, would cripple storm predictions

In this satellite view, two storms churn in the Atlantic Ocean at the same time that Milton spins in the Gulf of Mexico (lower left). This photo was taken about one hour before Milton was officially declared a hurricane. (Photo: NASA)

Oct. 8, 2024 by David Silverberg

Southwest Floridians know the drill when a hurricane is on the way: buy bottled water, stock up on batteries and canned foods, put up the storm shutters, fill the car and if necessary, get out of town.

But whether hunkering down at home or hitting the road, all eyes turn to news of the storm, whether on television, the Internet, mobile devices, weather apps or social media.

Much of the information on those media is the same—because it all comes from the federal government, which has the resources, the organization and the technology to provide it like no one else. And then there are the periodic updates from the National Hurricane Center, the National Weather Service, and the Hurricane Hunters who fly into the storms, that are treated like gospel from on high.

But if Project 2025 is implemented, all that information, which is now provided free to the public, would come at a price. The federal government agencies that collect and interpret the data would be broken up. And even the famous Hurricane Hunters would be shunted into a government agency that buys desks and manages the government’s real estate.

The fact that Project 2025 targets the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for elimination has caused public alarm and prompted criticism.

But what is it that Project 2025 actually seeks to do? What does Project 2025 specifically say when it comes to meteorology and government research? And what would be the results for everyday Americans if Project 2025 was actually implemented?

For all Americans, especially those living on the vulnerable, hurricane-prone Gulf “Paradise Coast” of Florida, the future of government meteorology is no academic concern.

Increasingly, it’s a matter of life and death.

Project 2025’s denial of climate change

Project 2025 is the sweeping, 887-page volume of very specific policy recommendations for presidential and legislative changes to be made under a conservative president, in this case, upon the election of Donald Trump. Increasingly infamous, it is a continuation of the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership program that has been issued every four years since 1980.

Project 2025’s weather and climate recommendations are contained in its chapter on the Department of Commerce, the agency where the weather services reside. The chapter appears under the byline of Thomas Gilman, who served as the Commerce Department’s chief financial officer and assistant secretary for administration during the Donald Trump administration. Prior to taking that position, which required Senate confirmation, Gilman worked for over 40 years in the automotive industry. There, he was employed by the Chrysler Corporation. He rose to be chief financial officer for its lending and financial arm, Chrysler Financial. In 2011 he oversaw Chrysler Financial’s sale to TD Bank Group.

*Thomas Gilman in 2019. (Photo: Dept. of Commerce)*

Most of the public’s attention—and alarm—has focused on Project 2025’s intention to do away with NOAA.

Project 2025 does indeed intend to eliminate NOAA and states so quite explicitly at the outset of the chapter (page 674): “The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.”

But that is not where Project 2025 will have its most damaging impact.

Rather, it is the fact that Project 2025 views itself at war with what it calls “the climate change alarm industry” and sees NOAA as “a colossal operation” that is “harmful to future US prosperity.”

Throughout the document, Project 2025 proposals are clearly aimed at eliminating independent, science and data-based conclusions that investigate, measure or confirm climate change. Instead it seeks to ensure that government conclusions come into line with administration policy rather than scientific evidence.

Project 2025 holds that NOAA, as a main driver of the “climate change alarm industry,” has a “mission emphasis on prediction and management [that] seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable. That is not to say NOAA is useless, but its current organization corrupts its useful functions.”

But more than just eliminating NOAA, Project 2025 believes that science should bend to policy.

A key recommendation is that a new administration should: “Ensure Appointees Agree with Administration Aims. Scientific agencies like NOAA are vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims if political appointees are not wholly in sync with Administration policy. Particular attention must be paid to appointments in this area.”

In another section it argues that NOAA’s office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research “is… the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism. The preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded.”

When it comes to the work of the National Hurricane Center and the National Environmental Satellite Service, Project 2025 admits that the offices “provide important public safety and business functions as well as academic functions,” but it argues that “Data collected by the department should be presented neutrally, without adjustments intended to support any one side in the climate debate.”

Project 2025’s organizational mandates

In addition to changing the entire focus, tenor and scientific independence of government climatological and meteorological efforts, Project 2025 recommends extensive organizational changes.

To understand these recommendations and their impact, it is helpful to be familiar with the current system.

NOAA consists of six main offices:

The National Weather Service (NWS);
The National Ocean Service (NOS);
Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR);
The National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service (NESDIS);
The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS); and
The Office of Marine and Aviation Operations and NOAA Corps.

Ironically, it was Republican President Richard Nixon who in 1970 consolidated the Coast and Geodetic Survey, the Weather Bureau and the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries into NOAA, which was made an office of the Commerce Department (although he wanted to make it a full-fledged Cabinet department). This occurred in the wake of 1969’s horrendous Hurricane Camille, which devastated the Louisiana Gulf coast and then—like Hurricane Helene—went north; ultimately dumping its accumulated moisture far from any coast in Nelson County, Va.

Since its creation, NOAA has evolved until it assumed its current form with different offices to deal with different aspects of weather, climate and technology.

Project 2025 sees this evolution in a negative light, especially from a budgetary standpoint.

“NOAA garners $6.5 billion of the department’s $12 billion annual operational budget and accounts for more than half of the department’s personnel in non-decadal Census years (2021 figures),” it notes. The offices, as noted previously, “form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future US prosperity. This industry’s mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable. That is not to say NOAA is useless, but its current organization corrupts its useful functions. It should be broken up and downsized.”

It continues: “NOAA today boasts that it is a provider of environmental information services, a provider of environmental stewardship services, and a leader in applied scientific research. Each of these functions could be provided commercially, likely at lower cost and higher quality.”

Project 2025 wants to make NWS (National Weather Service) a revenue-generating operation. It argues that since studies have found that consumer-oriented forecasts and warnings are better provided by local broadcasts and private companies like AccuWeather, NWS “should fully commercialize its forecasting operations”—i.e., charge for its products. This, it states, would bring in revenue, make it compete in a commercial weather marketplace and the profits could be invested in more research and data tailored to customers’ needs.

NWS would become a “performance-based organization,” which in management parlance means it would have measurable goals, set metrics and performance standards—i.e., it would take on the characteristics of a for-profit company rather than a scientific laboratory.

OAR (Oceanic and Atmospheric Research) would be reduced since Project 2025 views much of its work as duplicative of the National Hurricane Center. All of its laboratories, undersea research and other research efforts “should be reviewed with an aim of consolidation and reduction of bloat.”

NOS (National Ocean Service) would have its functions transferred to the US Coast Guard and the US Geologic Survey. While Project 2025 doesn’t say so explicitly, this would presumably result in its disestablishment.

The Office of Marine and Aviation Operations, which provides the ships, planes, drones and other hardware used by NOAA agencies, including the famous Hurricane Hunters, “should be broken up and its assets reassigned to the General Services Administration or to other agencies.”

Analysis: Organizational changes

Project 2025 decimates the current structure of weather science and reporting by the US federal government—as it’s intended to do.

The end of the Hurricane Hunters?

*The men and women of the NOAA Hurricane Hunters with a P-3 Orion, one of their primary aircraft. (Photo: NOAA)*

Ever since a pilot flew his training aircraft directly into the eye of a hurricane on a bet in 1943, hurricane-hunting pilots and air personnel have been taking up the challenge of measuring storms.

Today they’re known as the Hurricane Hunters and they’re the stuff of legend: the best pilots in the world flying in the most dangerous and challenging weather, bringing back precious, life-saving data.

Project 2025 does not explicitly state that it would abolish the Hurricane Hunters. However, it would break up the NOAA air fleet and reassign its assets to other agencies, most notably the General Services Administration, which oversees the contracting, purchasing and management of the civilian federal government—i.e., science and meteorology is not its main mission.

This would be tantamount to ending the Hurricane Hunters. The whole structure of the Office of Marine and Aviation Operations is designed around the NOAA mission and operates according to its needs. To disperse this elaborate, intricate—and effective—organization, its people and its assets, which include aircraft, vessels, drones, other technologies and their support network, would for all intents and purposes destroy or at the very least disrupt a vast swath of American scientific capabilities when it comes to weather and climate.

And when it comes to hurricanes and dangerous storms, it would create a gaping hole in the public’s awareness and preparedness that could prove deadly just at the moment the nation needs it most.

Crippling research and ignoring the oceans

Project 2025 takes particular aim at oceanic research. OAR and NOS would be broken up and OAR likely eliminated altogether. This targeting appears to be caused by more than just the expense of maintaining these institutions—it is likely the result of oceanic research being a major source of data proving the existence of climate change

This would not only eliminate a vital source of research about the state of the oceans in general, it would also likely eliminate data of critical use to the US Navy, Coast Guard, Merchant Marine and mariners of all types. It would harm national security and impact attempts to enforce maritime borders and provide coastal protection to say nothing of private boating safety.

For-profit weather

It is in Project 2025’s intention to turn the National Weather Service into a for-profit entity that everyday Americans who turn to their television stations and apps for weather information would be impacted.

Accurate, useful government-provided weather data accessible to all Americans is essentially something people have purchased with the tax dollars they pay to the federal government. Suddenly demanding payment for this data would be a form of robbery, taking from them vital information that they already purchased with their taxes.

Free access to government-gathered weather data has also made possible a robust industry of repackaging, interpreting and disseminating that data. It’s behind every weather broadcast and specialized media like the Weather Channel as well as countless apps, blogs and individual weather efforts.

All of this would now be jeopardized as the US government sold its products to the highest bidder.

That sale, or auction, would likely put government weather data in the hands of a few extremely wealthy corporations or individuals—like Elon Musk—who could then repackage it, resell it or withhold it at will. It would destroy the credibility of government-collected weather data and potentially give rise to warped or distorted reporting in the service of private political or commercial aims rather than objective reality.

It would also put a cost on weather data whose price could then be manipulated by the individuals or corporations that owned it. Further, it would create a fragmented and unequal view of the state of the weather and climate, reducing the credibility and reliability of information on which every human being on the planet depends.

Whatever husk of NWS that would remain after its dismantlement by Project 2025 would have to have profit goals, not scientific aims or objectives, as its priority. That would result in a warping and distortion of NWS’ critical, primary mission pursuing realistic, objective science, which it might no longer be able to meet.

Analysis: Climate change denial and the Florida model

Bryan Koon, Florida’s Emergency Management Director, tries to respond to state senators’ questions without mentioning the term “climate change” in a 2015 exchange. Then-Gov. Rick Scott had informally forbidden use of the term in state government. The entire discussion can be seen in a 2-minute, 12-second video on YouTube. (Image: Fox13)

At the core of Project 2025’s goals in re-engineering American meteorology is the intention to deny the reality of climate change.

In this, Americans can see a preview of a Project 2025’s end result in the state of Florida.

Over and over again, as concern over climate change rose nationally and its consequences impacted the state with increasing severity, Florida officials responded with increasingly vehement denialism.

In 2015 then-Gov. Rick Scott (R) informally banned use of the term in state government.

His successor, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), initially reversed much of Scott’s anti-environmentalism. However, when DeSantis began a run for the presidency in 2023 on an “anti-woke,” anti-Green New Deal platform, he fully embraced climate denialism.

Ultimately, the state legislature, seeking to curry favor with DeSantis and add to their own denialist credentials, officially banned use of the term in official state documents. In March 2024 the legislature passed House Bill 1645, which struck the term “climate change” from Florida law and official documents.

“Radical green zealots want to impose their climate agenda on people through restrictions, regulations, and taxes,” DeSantis stated at the time he signed the bill.

All of this official denialism did absolutely nothing to stop the onslaught of climate-change induced weather, disasters and challenges. (As this is written, Hurricane Milton is advancing on the Florida peninsula as a Category 5 hurricane, immediately following the ravages of Hurricane Helene.) In fact, official state climate denialism has impeded local efforts to prepare and reverse the effects of climate change in communities’ own front yards, as can be seen in flooding, storms, eroding beaches and wild, unpredictable weather over a fragile and vulnerable landmass.

As DeSantis wanted to “make America Florida” as he put it in his campaign slogan, so Project 2025 would make climate denialism a pillar of American policy. Project 2025 views efforts to respond, reduce or resist climate change as “the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable.”

When added together, it is clear that Project 2025 seeks to alter or censor government climatological and meteorological science and research in order to deny climate change. NOAA agencies would not be following the data and drawing conclusions from it; they would be following administration directives and tailoring their findings to accommodate political policy.

This should not be surprising given former President Donald Trump’s past dismissal of climate change as a “hoax,” his withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords or his effort to alter the cone of a hurricane with a Sharpie. Nor should it be surprising given that Gilman, the chapter’s author, spent 40 years working in the fossil fuel automotive industry.

Project 2025 would leave the United States naked, vulnerable and at the mercy of climate change, without the research, resources or will to meet its challenges.

And that would result in countless devastated communities and potentially millions of dead Americans.

Science in service to the nation—or not

Since colonial days Americans have been concerned with weather. As a nation of farmers, they were at its mercy and they needed some way to predict its patterns.

Two of America’s founders were, in a way, weathermen. Benjamin Franklin provided long-range forecasts that farmers used for planting in his Poor Richard’s Almanack, a very popular bestselling annual book. Thomas Jefferson, a planter, regularly took weather measurements and recorded them. On July 4, 1776 he noted that the temperature in Philadelphia reached a high of 76 degrees Fahrenheit.

In 1870, seeking to create a national weather measuring system and communicate it by telegraph, Congress created a weather office in the US Army’s Signal Division “for the Benefit of Commerce.” In 1890, following a presidential request, Congress transferred weather reporting responsibilities to a civilian US Weather Bureau in the Department of Agriculture.

Ever since then the United States government has invested in and steadily expanded meteorological and climatological research and technology. The fruits of that steady, sometimes painful, 154-year investment and effort have resulted in the most scientifically advanced, accurate, and capable weather and climate establishment in the world.

The federal government has also organized and refined its weather and climate offices to reflect changing conditions and improve their capabilities.

And throughout this period, just as the weather and climate affected everyone in the territory of the United States, so the US government freely shared its findings and results with all its citizens and the world.

Today people ordinarily think of weather forecasting in personal terms: Will it rain tomorrow? Should I bring an umbrella? Or, more importantly: Where will the storm hit?

But beyond just tomorrow’s predictions, increasingly accurate and sophisticated weather reporting and forecasting has been an incalculably powerful force multiplier for the American military, which can plan operations around it. It has enabled American agriculture to become the most productive in the world. It has made transportation more efficient and it is absolutely essential for air travel and the movement of goods by all modalities. It has, as the first weather office intended, benefited commerce.

The products of American meteorological prowess are everywhere and pervasive. As a rising tide lifts all boats, weather awareness and knowledge benefits all recipients.

Government meteorological efforts have protected Americans from the ravages of the most extreme weather. They have helped to make cities more resilient and enabled planning, whether in agriculture, construction or trade. Indeed, entire commodities markets depend on weather information provided by government research and monitoring.

Right now America is in a crisis as the climate alters due to human influence.

One response is to adapt, take measures that build resilience and preparedness, try to slow global warming, and raise awareness so that every individual can make some small effort to protect and preserve human life on the planet.

The other response is to deny that climate change is happening, to outlaw mention of “climate change,” to twist science to meet preconceived notions, or to ignore it altogether. It’s a response as likely to be successful as the Inquisition’s attempt to stamp out the Copernican solar system by banning the books that explained it.

This is the approach of Project 2025, which puts it into detailed, specific bureaucratic recommendations. If implemented by a second Donald Trump administration, it would cripple science, make Americans vulnerable, destroy cities and accelerate the very processes it seeks to deny. It would also dismantle the greatest research and applied science endeavor in history, one that has been of incalculable benefit to the United States, its citizens and the rest of the world.

Just as they have a choice between two candidates and between democracy and dictatorship in this year’s elections, when they cast their votes, Americans have a choice between ignorance, denial and disaster or knowledge, realism and progress.

On that choice on every ballot hangs the fate of the federal government’s weather and climate enterprise—and arguably, the future of human life on this planet.

This is one of a series of examinations of the implications of Project 2025 for Southwest Florida and the nation. Other articles in the series are:

Project 2025 would end federal flood insurance, devastate Southwest Florida and coastal communities

Project 2025 remake of FEMA would hit communities hard after disasters

Project 2025 takes aim at education—and Collier County, Fla.

Liberty lives in light

Project 2025 remake of FEMA would hit communities hard after disasters

Southwest Florida would face fiscal blow after nature’s damage

*A victim of Hurricane Ian in Venice, Fla., hugs a federal officer in gratitude for his help as part of the national response after the storm in 2022. (Photo: CBP/ Glenn Fawcett)*

Aug. 1, 2024 by David Silverberg

Updated Aug. 2.

While the head of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 has departed, the ideas his Project proposes for completely remaking the federal government remain and could be implemented if Donald Trump is elected president a second time.

These changes would directly affect Southwest Florida in the event of a disaster like a hurricane—and one may be on the way as this is written. Today, Aug. 1, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) declared a state of emergency in 54 of Florida’s 67 counties in anticipation of a storm coming from the Caribbean Sea.

Among Project 2025’s proposals are changes to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which would impose new and heavily burdensome costs on local governments and reduce federal support.

Changes at Project 2025

Project 2025 is a sweeping, 887-page tome of recommendations for presidential and legislative changes to be made under a conservative president, in this case, upon the election of Donald Trump. It is authored by the conservative, Washington, DC-based Heritage Foundation think-tank. The proposals were accompanied by a drive that included recruitment of personnel, training for those people and a 180-day Playbook for immediate implementation should there be a change of administrations.

As people become familiar with its contents, it is increasingly a target for Democrats and critics alarmed by its radical proposals.

Although Trump campaign operatives repeatedly called on the Heritage Foundation to stop promoting Project 2025 as part of the campaign, the Heritage Foundation did not do so, leading to a rift between the camps.

On Tuesday, July 30, Paul Dans, head of Project 2025 stepped down from his position under pressure from Trump and his campaign.

“Friends and patriots: to every thing there is a season. We completed what we set out to do, which was to create a unified conservative vision, bringing together over 110 leading organizations united behind the cause of deconstructing the administrative state,” Dans wrote in an email to Heritage and Project 2025 staff.

“This tool was built for any administration dedicated to conservative ideals to utilize. The work of the project was due to wrap with the nominating conventions of the political parties. Our work is presently winding down, and I planned later in August to leave Heritage. Electoral season is upon us, and I want to direct all my efforts to winning bigly,” Dans wrote.

Despite Dans’ departure, the work of Project 2025 is expected to continue, as confirmed by Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation.

“Project 2025 will continue our efforts to build a personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels—federal, state, and local,” Roberts stated in an X posting.

While Trump has denied and dismissed Project 2025, much of it was written by former officials in his administration and it is endorsed by Sen. James David “JD” Vance (R-Ohio), his vice presidential running mate. Vance wrote the foreword to an upcoming book written by Roberts based on Project 2025.

Moreover, if Trump is elected, his army of loyalists, enablers and aspirants will no doubt use Project 2025 as their policy roadmap regardless of what he says—and therein lies its potential impact on Southwest Florida.

Targeting FEMA

If changes proposed by Project 2025 are made to FEMA, Southwest Florida cities and towns would incur a far heavier financial burden for disaster preparedness, response and recovery than at present.

The proposals would especially impact this region vulnerable to hurricanes, algal blooms, wildfires and other natural disasters. This is especially relevant in the midst of what is expected to be a very active hurricane season.

Under Project 2025’s proposals, Southwest Florida communities—and all American communities—would have to bear a far larger proportion of the expense of a disaster or meet deductibles, as in the private insurance market.

Lee County communities just went through the trauma and uncertainty of retaining a discount for flood insurance, which if lost would have been extremely costly to local homeowners. The Project 2025 proposals would be similarly costly to local governments, which would have to pass on the costs to residents in new taxes to provide the funding for recovery.

A quick primer on the current system

To fully understand the impact and nature of Project 2025’s proposals, it helps to be familiar with the existing FEMA system of disaster response and support for individuals and communities.

The current FEMA system is fundamentally based on the belief that the American government has a duty to assist its citizens and communities when disasters occur that are beyond their immediate ability to handle. While it regards this as an integral role for the federal government, it relies on states and localities to first respond to the degree they can before relying on federal help.

The Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act is the law that defines and determines what officially constitutes a disaster. It also sets out the authorities and responsibilities of different federal agencies in responding to disasters.

The law was first passed by Congress as the Disaster Relief Act of 1974 and then substantially amended by then-Sen. Robert Stafford of Vermont in 1988. It has been amended further as definitions were refined and different forms of disaster added.

(Of relevance to Southwest Florida has been the effort, started under then-Rep. Francis Rooney in June 2019, to include harmful algal blooms as officially designated disasters. Rooney’s successor, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-19-Fla.), although reintroducing the bill as the Combat Harmful Algal Blooms Act (HR 1008), has not pursued it with any effort during his time in office.)

When a disaster strikes, state and local officials determine if they need federal assistance. If they do, they put in a request for aid and the President (actually, FEMA and the Office of the President) approves the request and makes a disaster or emergency declaration. A major disaster declaration allows a wide variety of assistance, while an emergency declaration provides federal supplements for local efforts, for example to stave off a worse disaster or protect property and public health.

There are three types of federal assistance:

Individual Assistance helps individual survivors with immediate needs like shelter and repairs.

Public Assistance is a government-to-government program. It provides federal grants to state, local, tribal and territorial governments. It helps with a wide variety of activities like restoring public infrastructure and providing life-saving emergency protection.

Hazard Mitigation helps with the rebuilding of communities to be stronger, more resilient and prepared for future hazards.

Of great importance to Southwest Florida is federal assistance for debris removal, which has been a major expense for all communities hit by hurricanes.

After the immediate response, FEMA aids communities with their rebuilding and recovery. This is guided by the National Disaster Recovery Framework.

The Lee County experience

The impact and importance of federal support can be seen in Lee County in the aftermath of 2022’s Hurricane Ian.

The Lee County government put the estimated cost of Hurricane Ian in the county at $297.3 million. Over half of this was for debris removal, whose cost came to $156.3 million.

According to Lee County, FEMA approved $477.7 million in Individual Assistance. That included $299 million for repair and replacement assistance and $6 million in rental assistance for 23,704 households. Moreover, 775 households were approved for direct housing assistance.

When it came to Public Assistance, Lee County received $293.9 million in funding. This aided in repairing the Fort Myers Beach Water Reclamation Facility, lift stations for sewage flow, repairing the Lee County Sports Complex and Jet Blue Park, and the Bonita and Lover’s Key beaches.

Looking toward the future from 2023 when Lee County’s report was written, it was estimated that improving and rebuilding Lee County communities would cost $293.9 million, which would be covered under the FEMA Hazard Mitigation Grant Program.

These were substantial funds provided to Lee County by FEMA. They have made the rebuilding of communities like Fort Myers Beach possible at a much faster pace than would be otherwise possible.

Project 2025 would change that.

What Project 2025 would—or wouldn’t—do

The changes to FEMA are contained in the section of Project 2025 that covers homeland security, since FEMA is part of the Department of Homeland Security.

This section appears under the byline of Ken Cuccinelli.

Project 2025 observes that while FEMA is the lead agency for preparing and responding to disasters, “it is overtasked, overcompensates for the lack of state and local preparedness and response, and is regularly in deep debt.”

Project 2025 blames the Stafford Act for a shift in disaster response from the states and localities to the federal government and complains that FEMA is too “state-friendly.”

In particular, it takes aim at a “per capita indicator.” The indicator gives FEMA the authority to set a threshold below which states and localities are ineligible for public assistance, i.e., the level under which a community won’t get FEMA assistance if its damages are too small.

FEMA, argues Project 2025, sets the indicator so that most communities will get FEMA assistance.

What is more, it states, the indicator has “failed to maintain the pace of inflation and made it easy to meet disaster declaration thresholds. This combination has left FEMA unprepared in both readiness and funding for the truly catastrophic disasters in which its services are most needed.”

Project 2025’s solution is to make it tougher to get federal aid.

“FEMA should raise the threshold because the per capita indicator has not kept pace with inflation, and this over time has effectively lowered the threshold for public assistance and caused FEMA’s resources to be stretched perilously thin,” it states.

If the indicator can’t be raised there’s another option: “Alternatively, applying a deductible could accomplish a similar outcome while also incentivizing states to take a more proactive role in their own preparedness and response capabilities.”

“In addition, Congress should change the cost-share arrangement so that the federal government covers 25 percent of the costs for small disasters with the cost share reaching a maximum of 75 percent for truly catastrophic disasters.”

In other words, states and localities should bear the greatest financial burden for disaster preparation, response, recovery and resilience and that’s where Project 2025 would put it.

For Southwest Florida, this would be…well, in a word…a disaster.

The impact

Under Project 2025 communities already reeling under the devastation of a disaster would be hit with far higher costs and financial burdens for response and recovery than at present. They could look to FEMA for assistance but that assistance would be much lower and more grudging than at present.

FEMA would go from “state-friendly” to “state-stingy.”

Imagine Lee County in the wake of Hurricane Ian under Project 2025 guidelines.

Lee County would have had to bear the cost for most of the $297.3 million in damages from the hurricane. It would have been a staggering burden; in fact, it could have driven the county into bankruptcy—or at the very least the recovery would be even slower and more painful than at present. People would suffer longer. As it is, Lee County’s recovery has been agonizingly slow for some people. Under Project 2025, it wouldn’t recover for decades.

The other Project 2025 alternative, having communities pay deductibles, would be equally burdensome. At a time when their communities were flattened by hurricanes or tornadoes and digging out, towns and cities would be ineligible for aid at the very moment they need it most unless they met arbitrary deductible thresholds.

Lastly, imagine a system in which “small” disasters get only 25 percent in federal support. Was Hurricane Ian a “small” disaster or a “truly catastrophic disaster?” Anyone on the ground knew it was truly catastrophic—but in the full spectrum of disasters handled by FEMA it might not be considered such and so would not have gotten the support for a full recovery. Every new disaster would leave devastated populations wondering: was this “a truly catastrophic disaster” that will get federal help?

The evolution of caring

In 1927 President Calvin Coolidge included this in his annual message to Congress:

“The Government is not the insurer of its citizens against the hazard of the elements. We shall always have flood and drought, heat and cold, earthquake and wind, lightning and tidal wave, which are all too constant in their afflictions. The Government does not undertake to reimburse its citizens for loss and damage incurred under such circumstances. It is chargeable, however, with the rebuilding of public works and the humanitarian duty of relieving its citizens from distress.”

Coolidge was writing in the midst of a truly horrendous Mississippi River flood that devastated the states along its banks and displaced millions of people.

Throughout that disaster, which lasted over months, he refused to visit the site of the floods, wouldn’t request additional appropriations from Congress, wouldn’t make any appeals for voluntary donations and for all intents and purposes ignored the whole event.

It’s a response unthinkable today. But he was reflecting the attitudes of the time. People were on their own, he was saying, and so were their towns, counties and states.

That attitude changed with the Great Depression and the New Deal.

The Great Depression was a natural disaster only in that evoked natural feelings of panic and fear. But it was a disaster that overwhelmed people and even their best individual efforts had virtually no effect.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt altered the national attitude. For the first time the federal government felt an obligation to aid its citizens in their times of need, when they couldn’t cope with a disaster with the tools at hand. (For a full history, see the author’s book, Masters of Disaster: The Political and Leadership Lessons of America’s Greatest Disasters, available on Amazon Kindle.)

More specifically, each natural disaster has led to greater federal involvement to help people crushed by overwhelming events.

In 1950, Congress passed the Federal Disaster Relief Act authorizing federal assistance if a governor requested help and the president approved by declaring a major disaster.

In 1968 the National Flood Insurance Act was signed into law to aid people afflicted with flooding (and which is another program that Project 2025 proposes ending. For more details see “Project 2025 would end federal flood insurance, devastate Southwest Florida and coastal communities.”)

In 1974, after tornadoes struck across 10 states resulting in six federal disaster declarations, Congress passed the Disaster Relief Act.

Then, in 1980, after Mount St. Helens erupted and blanketed parts of the West in volcanic ash, for the first time the federal government assumed 75 percent of the cost of the recovery.

The capstone was the 1988 passage of the Stafford Act, which has been updated since.

Commentary: Project 2025 makes Americans vulnerable again

Project 2025 is critical of FEMA from a banker’s perspective. It correctly points out that FEMA’s emergency fund sometimes gets low. In the Project’s view, that is because FEMA is overly generous to states and localities.

But when this last happened, in August 2023, it was because FEMA was handling multiple disasters including Hurricane Idalia—which especially hit Florida—and wildfires in Maui, Hawaii. As a result its funding had to be replenished by an emergency appropriation of tax dollars.

(It should also be noted that Southwest Florida’s congressman, Rep. Byron Donalds, has consistently voted against appropriations bills that would replenish FEMA funding.)

What the Project 2025 analysis neglects is that FEMA is not a bank. It does not operate a profit and loss balance sheet. It doesn’t charge interest.

FEMA’s mission is to “help people before, during and after disasters.” That means assisting them when they’re in need and usually at the worst times of their lives. It’s not a loan or a handout.

Federal disaster assistance is one of the greatest benefits of being an American citizen.

What’s more, it is what a citizen’s taxes buy. As has been said in these pages before, taxes are a two-way street. A citizen pays into the general pot but gets appropriate benefits as needed.

In this case people’s taxes buy them help when they need it as a result of a natural disaster.

There’s nothing wrong with that, nor is there anything wrong with replenishing FEMA’s emergency funds when there are so many disasters that those funds run low.

Lastly, as for FEMA failing to promote state and local preparedness and response, as Project 2025 charges, the Project’s authors might ask the city officials of Cape Coral, Bonita Springs, Fort Myers Beach and Lee County whether FEMA insists on local preparedness, readiness and resilient rebuilding.

Project 2025 wants to leave American citizens, states, territories, tribes, counties, cities and towns financially naked and vulnerable to natural disasters. It wants to go back to Calvin Coolidge’s cold indifference to Americans’ suffering and return to a time when there was no federal help of any kind.

Moreover, it wants to do this at a time when climate change is making disasters of all sorts more frequent, more intense, and more devastating—and there is no longer any reversing this, it is the new normal. The state of Florida may think it can eliminate climate change by banning mention of it in textbooks and official documents but that’s not the way reality works, as its current state of emergency demonstrates.

Project 2025 is correct in one assertion: FEMA is indeed “overtasked.” But far from gutting FEMA and its capacity to help Americans and their towns and cities, FEMA needs buttressing and support. It already has a big mission and that mission is only going to get bigger.

If Donald Trump is elected and Project 2025 implemented by his sycophants, enablers and loyalists, when it comes to disasters they won’t make America great again.

Instead, they’ll make it weaker, more vulnerable and more devastated— and they’ll do it in Southwest Florida just as much as they’ll do it everywhere else they can.

That is, unless the American people stop Project 2025 at the ballot box this November.

To subscribe to FEMA’s Daily Operations Briefing, click here. This free service provides a daily overview of American disasters, hazards and FEMA responses. (It’s especially informative during hurricane season.)

Liberty lives in light

Project 2025 would end federal flood insurance, devastate Southwest Florida and coastal communities

*Florida National Guardsmen evacuate flood victims in Arcadia, Fla., in the wake of Hurricane Ian on Oct. 3, 2022. (Photo: US Army/Spc. Samuel Herman)*

July 7, 2024 by David Silverberg

Project 2025, a blueprint for post-election decisionmaking in a second Donald Trump administration, is recommending termination of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP).

All of Southwest Florida and its residents rely extensively on NFIP for affordable insurance in the face of events like hurricanes, storm surge and flooding.

“The NFIP should be wound down and replaced with private insurance starting with the least risky areas currently identified by the program,” states Project 2025.

It’s a radical proposal that could have a devastating fiscal impact on Southwest Floridians.

A quick primer on Project 2025

Project 2025 is a sweeping, 887-page tome of recommendations for presidential and legislative changes to be made under a conservative president, in this case, upon the election of Donald Trump.

The Project is actually a continuation of an effort by the conservative, Washington, DC-based Heritage Foundation think-tank that began in 1981. Then, the Foundation published a book called Mandate for Leadership with conservative policy recommendations. These were largely adopted by President Ronald Reagan, who handed out the book at his first Cabinet meeting.

Since then, a Mandate has been published every four years.

Project 2025 is a continuation of the Mandate series, only broader, more comprehensive, more radical and entirely Trumpist. It has also expanded beyond just the book and policy recommendations to include recruitment of personnel, training for those people and a 180-day Playbook for immediate implementation should there be a change of administrations.

Because of the radical nature of its current recommendations and Trump’s avowed pursuit of retaliation, revenge and retribution, Project 2025 is getting much more attention than previous Mandates.

It is sweeping in that it includes a complete reorganization of the federal branch, installment of ideological loyalists in place of non-political civil servants and reorientation of government toward unchecked presidential rule.

A quick primer on the National Flood Insurance Program

In 1968 Congress passed the National Flood Insurance Act, spurred by losses in Florida and Louisiana caused by Hurricane Betsy and its storm surge. The bill was signed by President Lyndon Johnson and led to establishment of the NFIP to protect Americans from the financial hardships of flooding.

The program, which is administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), takes three forms.

One is mapping flooding risk along rivers and coasts. By 2018, the fiftieth year of the program, NFIP had mapped all of the nation’s populated areas, or 1.1 million miles. Among other things, these maps help mortgage lenders determine flood insurance requirements.

A second goal is to mitigate risk by supporting local flood prevention and management measures. The program’s managers estimated this saves the country over $1.6 billion each year in flood losses.

The third pillar—and the one closest to everyday property owners in Southwest Florida and across the country—protects insurance policyholders from financial flood losses. In 2018, 5 million people held NFIP policies in 22,000 communities across the country.

Under NFIP, homeowners who meet its requirements can get flood insurance for most buildings and dwellings of all sorts, including condominiums, mobile homes on foundations, rental units and more. Policyholders are charged lower than market rates to make it affordable. Many commercial insurers don’t offer flood insurance and NFIP is the only option.

While homeowners are not required to purchase the insurance, some federally-backed mortgages require it if the building is in a Special Flood Hazard Area—places especially prone to flooding.

Given Florida’s susceptibility to storms, its flat terrain and its extensive coastline along the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, NFIP is crucial to protecting Floridians and making life affordable.

In Southwest Florida, the City of Naples and Everglades City joined NFIP in 1970. Charlotte County joined in 1971. Collier County followed in 1979. Lee County joined in 1984 when it did its first flood insurance study and created maps to establish flood zones and determine elevations. Today, there are 51,103 NFIP policyholders in Lee County (statistics are unavailable for Collier and Charlotte counties).

Participation in the program “is crucial for coastal communities such as Lee County because most standard homeowner’s insurance policies do not cover flood damage, and without access to NFIP coverage, property owners would have to bear the full financial burden of flood-related losses or pay higher premiums from private insurers,” states the Lee County website.

Project 2025 versus NFIP

Project 2025 has no use for NFIP.

In its chapter on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), it deals with FEMA and dismisses NFIP in a single paragraph on page 153:

“FEMA is also responsible for the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), nearly all of which is issued by the federal government. Washington provides insurance at prices lower than the actuarially fair rate, thereby subsidizing flood insurance. Then, when flood costs exceed NFIP’s revenue, FEMA seeks taxpayer-funded bailouts. Current NFIP debt is $20.5 billion, and in 2017, Congress canceled $16 billion in debt when FEMA reached its borrowing authority limit. These subsidies and bailouts only encourage more development in flood zones, increasing the potential losses to both NFIP and the taxpayer. The NFIP should be wound down and replaced with private insurance starting with the least risky areas currently identified by the program.”

Project 2025 has numerous authors and, as Edwin Feulner, founder of the Heritage Foundation, is proud to point out in an afterword, it draws on the expertise of 360 experts and 50 organizations. The recommendation to terminate NFIP is under the byline of Ken Cuccinelli.

Cuccinelli has long been known as an ideological extremist. He ran for governor of Virginia in 2013, losing to Democrat Terry McAuliffe. He had a tempestuous tenure as Virginia’s attorney general from 2010 to 2014 where he denied climate change and fought research into it, even launching an investigation of a climate scientist whom he accused of fraud for his scientific conclusions. In this case, Cuccinelli was rebuffed by the Virginia Supreme Court.

He’s an anti-immigration hardliner who has advocated repeal of birthright citizenship. Under Trump he was appointed acting director of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services directorate of DHS. However, his appointment was disputed and resulted in suspension of all his directives. At the same time he was appointed acting deputy secretary of DHS but this too was determined to be improper by the Government Accountability Office. He was the subject of whistleblower complaints for his decisions regarding handling DHS intelligence.

After Trump’s departure from office, Cuccinelli joined the Heritage Foundation as a visiting fellow and last year in Florida he launched the Never Back Down Political Action Committee on behalf of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential bid.

Analysis: A fiscal fiasco

Termination of NFIP would be as fiscally catastrophic for Southwest Florida as the worst, most destructive hurricane—in fact, much worse. It’s not enough that Florida is facing an insurance crisis anyway—this would dump yet another cascade of woe and expense on homeowners.

It would immediately impoverish existing homeowners who wouldn’t be able to afford commercial flood insurance—if companies even offered it. More than likely, most would have to leave the state for less expensive areas.

It would create two classes of Floridians: the uninsured and the ultra-rich. The uninsured would be wiped out every time there was a storm or flooding event because they would have no backstop or support. The ultra-rich, already paying high premiums for property insurance, would be the only ones able to afford what would be staggering flood premiums at commercial rates. Not even the merely wealthy would be able to keep up.

Flood insurance for Southwest Florida’s most flood-prone areas, its barrier islands like Gasparilla, Pine, Captiva and Sanibel, would be astronomical. Rates for property on larger islands like Estero and Marco would hardly be better.

This would come amidst the ravages of climate change, which is incontrovertibly causing more frequent and intense storms, greater storm surge, sea level rise, tidal inundation and more frequent flooding—and nowhere is this truer than in Florida, which is perhaps the most climatically vulnerable state in the union.

Lee County is already in a crisis because it failed to meet FEMA requirements for permitted rebuilding after Hurricane Ian and faced the loss of its discount under the Community Rating System. That’s a FEMA program providing discounts on flood insurance premiums to communities that exceed NFIP minimum requirements.

Without the discount, affected homeowners are looking at hikes of $300 to $500 in their insurance bills. Potential loss of the discount has caused distress, fear and anger among Lee County property owners and officials.

NOW IMAGINE THE COST IF THERE IS NO FEDERAL FLOOD INSURANCE AT ALL! THAT’S WHAT PROJECT 2025 IS PROPOSING.

This disaster wouldn’t just affect Southwest Florida: the end of NFIP would hit every community on every body of water that could flood: oceans, lakes, rivers, streams, even canals. Even places inland and as landlocked as South Dakota, Nebraska, Arizona and New Mexico would be affected.

In 2018 FEMA estimated that 13 million Americans lived in flood zones. However, that same year a study, “Estimates of present and future flood risk in the conterminous United States,” by seven scientists called the FEMA estimates too low. They put the number at 41 million. That has probably risen in the years since and is expected to rise even further in the years ahead.

The scientists also noted that “…It is evident that the absolute value of assets on the Floridian floodplain is also particularly high at $714 billion: Florida is thus a hotspot of flood exposure.”

Imagine over 40 million Americans stripped of access to affordable, government-backed flood insurance as Project 2025 envisions.

Project 2025 is scornful of NFIP’s “subsidies and bailouts” that “only encourage more development in flood zones, increasing the potential losses to both NFIP and the taxpayer.”

However, there’s another way of looking at this: NFIP policyholders are getting the benefit of the tax dollars that they paid to the US Treasury.

It always needs to be remembered that taxes aren’t a one-way street. The taxpayer puts money into the national treasury—but the taxpayer also gets benefits from the taxes he or she paid and those benefits take many different forms.

In this case, taxpayers living in flood zones get the benefit of their tax dollars in the form of subsidized federal flood insurance at lower than commercial rates. It isn’t a handout or a bailout; it’s a purchase made through taxes.

As for encouraging building in flood zones, as Lee County residents have discovered, FEMA is very strict and alert to building and construction in flood plains and communities participating in NFIP have to rigorously adhere to FEMA standards.

Rather than encouraging unregulated building, NFIP provides an incentive for communities and individuals to prepare for climate change, build resilience, strengthen homes and adhere to firm standards.

Commentary: The consequences of Project 2025

In the past, presidents and political parties didn’t rely out outside entities like Project 2025 for these kinds of sweeping proposals. Instead, they laid out their ideas for the entire electorate to see in the party platforms that they adopted through consensus and party input at their national political conventions.

In 2020 the Republican Party surrendered its political platform to Donald Trump, not bothering to adopt a set of proposals from Party members as it had in the past. Instead it stated that “the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda.” It adjourned without adopting a new platform “until the 2024 Republican National Convention.”

In the absence of a Party platform, there is Project 2025 to provide the world with a roadmap of Republican intentions.

As alarm has spread over the Project’s recommendations, Trump has disavowed any knowledge or awareness of it.

“I know nothing about Project 2025,” he posted on his Truth Social platform on July 5. “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

However, as Edwin Feulner noted in his afterword to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation Mandates have had Trump’s attention since 2016. That one “earned significant attention from the Trump Administration, as Heritage had accumulated a backlog of conservative ideas that had been blocked by President Barack Obama and his team.”

Feulner continued: “Soon after President Donald Trump was sworn in, his Administration began to implement major parts of the 2016 Mandate. After his first year in office, the Administration had implemented 64 percent of its policy recommendations.”

Since it’s safe to say that Trump lies with every breath he takes, his protestations of ignorance of Project 2025 and its origins ring hollow. Furthermore, since his word is worthless, so is any pledge he makes not to implement Project 2025.

Even if Trump has not or will not read all 887 pages (hard to imagine him reading anything longer than an X posting!), his cultists will be looking to Project 2025 for guidance if he’s elected. In keeping with the Heritage plan, they’ll seek to implement its proposals in the first 180 days of his administration, many through executive action.

This article looks at just one small slice of Project 2025 that directly affects Southwest Florida. But if implemented as a whole, Project 2025 will be a disaster for all of America. Coupled with the total presidential immunity just granted by the Supreme Court, it will result in a radical reordering of the United States and American society. It’s a roadmap aimed at enabling a total dictatorship of unchecked power enforced by advanced technologies. Or as Winston Churchill put it when speaking of the Nazis, “all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”

The world knows America is at an inflection point. The battle is on between democracy and dictatorship. Project 2025 makes clear what’s at stake—for every Southwest Floridian and every American citizen.

This is the first in an occasional series of articles examining the implications of Project 2025 for Southwest Florida and the nation.

Liberty lives in light

Make sure you’re ready to vote—despite the hurricanes

*A lone American flag flies over a devastated Fort Myers Beach in the days after Hurricane Ian. (Photo: U.S. Air National Guard /Jesse Hanson)*

May 29, 2024 by David Silverberg

As has been well publicized by now, this year’s hurricane season, which officially begins Saturday, June 1, is predicted to be an especially active one.

There are already reminders in various media for storm preparation: buy batteries, flashlights and water, make a plan and know your evacuation zone, among other measures.

But it also makes sense to plan to vote despite any hurricanes that hit—because this year there’s so much at stake and every vote counts, whether in primary or general elections.

What’s more, in Florida there’s an extremely important primary election on Aug. 20—the date when the hurricane season traditionally kicks into high gear.

“Now, storms can get going before Aug. 20, but this is typically about when they start,” Philip Klotzbach, a famous hurricane forecaster at Colorado State University told the Christian Science Monitor in 2011.

This primary will be a “closed” primary, meaning that only registered members of a particular political party can vote for the party’s candidates. But there will also be important “universal” races at stake, where all voters can make a choice and some of the races may be decided at that point. All voters, regardless of party, should be registered and eligible to vote on these universal ballot measures. (The universal measures will be covered in a later posting.)

This article will provide links and information to check your registration and apply to vote by mail in Collier, Lee and Charlotte counties. It will then provide some historical background regarding elections and hurricanes in Florida.

Bottom line on top: Voting by mail is your best option. Make sure you do what’s necessary. Now.

Registration and vote-by-mail applications

To vote in the Aug. 20 primary, you must be registered to vote by July 22.

Check to make sure you’re properly registered. This is worth doing because there have been allegations in the past of misregistrations. To check, click on the links below and fill out the forms:

The deadline to request a mail-in ballot for the Aug. 20 primary election is Aug. 8 at 5 pm (and that hourly deadline is very important! Nothing after that will be accepted.)

The form for mail-in voting applies statewide. An English-language PDF from the Collier County Supervisor of Elections can be accessed and downloaded here. A Spanish-language version can be accessed here.

You can apply to vote by mail:

In Collier County:

By phone: (239) 252-VOTE (8683)
By email: MailBallot@CollierVotes.gov
By fax: (239) 252-2630
By mail/In person: 3750 Enterprise Ave, Naples FL 34104

(Supervisor of Elections Melissa Blazier provides a 3-minute, 40-second video on the vote-by-mail process and ballot tabulation here.)

In Lee County:

This webpage starts the process.

In Charlotte County:

This webpage starts the process.

Why vote by mail?

There are several advantages to voting by mail, especially in hurricane-prone Florida.

One is that you don’t have to vote by mail once you have the ballot. You can mail it back, put it in a drop box or take it to a polling station and hand it in there.

This is especially useful if voting is disrupted by weather. It gives you the flexibility to return your ballot several different ways and over a longer period of time.

Another advantage is that once you receive the ballot in the mail, you have the time and leisure to research and ponder items that you may not have previously considered, like judicial elections, amendments or more obscure, down-ballot races.

Also, by and large, voting by mail is reliable. You usually receive your ballot in the mail in a timely fashion and you can reliably return it and be confident that it will be received and properly counted—and you can check online that it has been received.

Even if storms strike, even if mail delivery is disrupted by a storm, voters can get their ballots into the system. The US Postal Service (USPS) makes strenuous efforts to deliver mail even in the wake of severe disasters.

Indeed, there have been times after disasters when the arrival of a USPS delivery truck or mail carrier on foot was the first indication of recovery and a return to normal. This dedication is a much-underappreciated aspect of USPS operations.

The Lee County Supervisor of Elections makes the point on his website that under a new Florida statute that went into effect in April, mail-in ballots will not be forwarded to an address other than the one on the voter’s registration.

(So, in other words, if you’ve requested a mail-in ballot and you’re away from your Florida address when the mail-in ballots go out, you will not receive it at any other address.)

This applies statewide.

Voting by mail only became controversial in 2020. That year it provided a safe way for people to vote despite the COVID pandemic. Then-President Donald Trump went to great lengths to disparage it as “rigged” despite no evidence that it encouraged fraud or tampering. Ironically, in prior elections, voting by mail had actually favored Republicans in Florida since so many were seasonal residents and voted from second homes in northern states. While the Republican Party tried to conceal or contradict Trump’s discouragement of mail-in voting, he created a deep suspicion of the practice that lingers to this day. So far this year he is encouraging voting by mail.

The storms of August

There are plenty of historical examples of hurricanes striking on or around Aug. 20.

In 1969, it was from Aug. 17 to 22 that Hurricane Camille, one of the most destructive storms in history, rampaged through the western Gulf coast. (For more details on this and other disasters, see the author’s book Masters of Disaster: The Political and Leadership Lessons of America’s Greatest Disasters.)

As bad as August can be, even the general election on Nov. 5 is not immune from the influence of hurricanes. For example, in 2018 Hurricane Michael struck the Florida panhandle on Oct. 10, just before that year’s midterm elections and disrupted voting. Then, just two years ago in 2022, Hurricane Ian made landfall in Southwest Florida on Sept. 28, a day short of a month before early voting began in the general election.

In both cases, voting was disrupted as people tried to dig out and recover. No doubt voting was far from their minds in the immediate aftermath of the storm. A study of Hurricane Michael found that after the storm voting rates dropped the further voters had to travel to reach operable polling places.

In the event of disasters the governor can authorize special voting arrangements like mobile polling places and emergency election stations. Following Hurricane Ian, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) issued an executive order to officials in Sarasota, Charlotte and Lee counties giving them authority to open polling places wherever feasible.

Given the threat being predicted for the 2024 hurricane season, it’s time for everyone to start preparing. We’re not just protecting our homes and communities; this year like no other, we also need to protect our democracy from all threats foreign, domestic— and climatic.

Liberty lives in light

Denial, delusion and disaster: Ron DeSantis and Florida’s climate change

*A building destroyed by Hurricane Ian on Fort Myers Beach, Fla., four months after the storm came ashore in September 2022. (Photo: Author)*

May 19, 2024 by David Silverberg

One month after the earth experienced the hottest April in history, 16 days before the start of what is expected to be an extremely active 2024 hurricane season, five days after Tallahassee was hit with its worst recorded tornado outbreak ever, and three days before Southwest Florida was put under an extreme heat advisory, the government of Florida formally banned use of the term “climate change” in state statutes.

“Florida rejects the designs of the left to weaken our energy grid, pursue a radical climate agenda, and promote foreign adversaries,” Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) stated in a May 15 posting on X.

“Global elites want to reduce the standing and influence of America and the west. Florida says no!” stated a graphic that accompanied the posting.

On that day, DeSantis signed House Bill 1645 into law, which rescinded language in state laws that tried to address or reduce factors contributing to climate change.

As the governor’s statement put it, the law repeals “Obama-era” climate policies. No longer will the state set clean energy goals or take climate change into account in setting state energy policy. It will no longer make an effort to take a leading role in promoting energy conservation or attempt to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. No longer will state agencies try to hold meetings in facilities that acknowledge climate change and try to be environmentally responsible. No longer will state schools, agencies or local governments try to buy reduced-carbon vehicles.

Moreover, local governments are now prohibited from taking environmental actions on their own to reduce energy use or cut down on carbon emissions.

Gas appliances? They can’t be touched by laws or regulations. In fact, the law promotes the use of natural gas.

And don’t think of putting up a wind farm. That’s prohibited along Florida shores (not that Florida has any at the moment).

All this comes a year after DeSantis rejected $354 million in federal funding for improved energy efficiency.

At the time, Rep. Kathy Castor (D-14-Fla.), who had chaired the US House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, accused DeSantis of “pickpocketing Floridians, making the cost of living more expensive. We’re already paying higher property insurance than anywhere else in the country, higher electric bills. He has been a disaster for clean energy and environment in Florida.”

Florida’s latest anti-environmental measures are especially ironic—and self-defeating—given that they apply to a state that is probably the most climatically vulnerable in the country and the most impacted by climate change.

What’s more, they’re out of synch with the perceptions and sentiments of a majority of Floridians.

Facts and the future

In February the Environmental Defense Fund, a global, non-profit think-tank, specifically focused on Florida and the likely impacts of climate change, presenting its findings in a graphic, interactive presentation titled Florida’s Climate Future.

Spoiler alert: all the impacts are bad. Thanks to climate change, when it comes to energy, Floridians can expect greater demands on the electric grid, rising electricity costs and inducing greater unreliability as the climate disrupts the supply. As it is, Florida is already the third-highest energy consuming state in the nation.

*A graphic presentation of the energy impact of climate change on Florida. The fully interactive version can be accessed here.*

Given rising heat, there will be more deaths from heat, more wildfires and hotter sea temperatures. As of last August, Collier County had over 80 days with a heat index over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Lee and Charlotte counties had between 70 and 80. If current trends continue, in 26 years, 2050, Collier County will have 126 days a year with temperatures over 100 degrees, Lee will have 112 and Charlotte will have 111. (And all this comes after the legislature banned cities, towns and counties from mandating heat breaks for outdoor workers.)

*A graphic presentation of the heat impact of climate change on Florida. The fully interactive version can be accessed here.*

But the worst impacts will likely come in storms and floods. “Extreme rain events” like hurricanes are increasing in frequency and intensity and there’s no reason to expect that will change any time soon. The state’s flatness and extensive coastlines already make it uniquely vulnerable to flooding and storm destruction. Hurricane Ian in 2022 was the first hurricane to result in over $100 billion in estimated damages. This is all exacerbated by warming sea temperatures, rising seas and a moister atmosphere.

*A graphic presentation of the impact of storms and floods due to climate change in Florida. The fully interactive version can be accessed here.*

These projections are not lost on property insurance companies who game out the state’s prospects into the far future. In addition to massive losses and payouts insurance companies have had to make for past disasters, the companies’ actuaries are telling their bosses that due to climate change, risks are rising with no prospect for change in the future. It’s a key reason that established insurance companies have fled the state and rates for Florida homeowners are skyrocketing.

A table from the Actuaries Climate Index showing the rising level of risk in the Southeast Atlantic region, which includes Florida. The red bars represent extreme weather events in each particular season. The black line is the level of risk. Note the frequency of the red bars after 2015. The interactive version of the chart can be accessed here.

Insurance companies aren’t swayed by the governor’s denials, the legislature outlawing climate change, or the votes of blindly fanatical climate deniers. They—and every other entity that has to weigh realistic choices—make decisions based on objective, scientific facts and rationally-determined risk.

By any calculation, the odds are very bad. So the companies have fled the state or are avoiding it altogether, to be replaced by less-established, questionable providers. Meanwhile, rates continue to rise for policyholders.

Analysis: Why the delusion?

In a state so subject to such obvious climatic changes, why does its elected leadership so resolutely refuse to acknowledge what is clearly underway?

Some answers seem obvious to even the most casual observer and they’re rooted in basic human nature.

There’s simple inertia, a refusal to acknowledge change in any form. There’s denial, the resistance to facing uncomfortable facts. There’s helplessness, a sense that no action will have any effect anyway.

Added to those are some political reasons peculiar to Florida.

There’s a fear of offending a constituency that’s older and resistant to change—which is also Republican.

Every spring and fall, Florida Atlantic University conducts a Florida Climate Resilience Survey to assess public attitudes on climate.

This year the survey, released on Tuesday, May 14, one day before the governor’s bill signing, found that belief in human-caused climate change had fallen among Florida Republicans from 45 percent to 40 percent—meaning that 60 percent of Republicans don’t believe human activity is a factor in climate change. That’s the 60 percent of Republican voters that Florida lawmakers need to win their primaries.

It also found that older voters are less likely to believe that human activity causes climate change than younger ones (50 percent of Floridians over 50 years of age don’t believe in climate change compared to 66 percent of Floridians under 50).

Given that older Republicans have a preponderant sway in primary elections, it’s far easier for Republican politicians to pander to this demographic than to serve the entire population of the state or do anything to halt or mitigate climate change’s ravages.

As DeSantis’ May 15 posting revealed, opposition to acknowledging climate change is also ideologically rooted. Climate-denying Republicans are still warring against the Green New Deal, a concept that sprouted in 2019 but has been moribund ever since, although it serves as a useful specter to scare a credulous base.

DeSantis has his own special anti-woke crusade that he had hoped to ride to the presidency this year. In his view, anything that smacks of concern for the environment or the planet or acknowledges climate change is lumped together under “wokeness” and is to be denounced and opposed.

DeSantis’ anti-environmentalism is somewhat poignant in that upon taking office in 2019 he drew a sharp distinction from his gubernatorial predecessor, Rick Scott (now senator). Scott had banished the term “climate change” from state government and resisted meeting with scientists to discuss the subject. (He ultimately met them, but only briefly.)

By contrast, DeSantis declared in his inaugural speech on Jan. 8, 2019: “For Florida, the quality of our water and environmental surroundings are foundational to our prosperity as a state—it doesn’t just drive tourism; it affects property values, anchors many local economies and is central to our quality of life,”

He continued: “We will fight toxic blue-green algae, we will fight discharges from Lake Okeechobee, we will fight red tide, we will fight for our fishermen, we will fight for our beaches, we will fight to restore our Everglades and we will never ever quit, we won’t be cowed and we won’t let the foot draggers stand in our way.”

Of course, all that was before his presidential ambitions fueled a culture war against everything “woke” including concern for the environment and the climate.

Now there is a new/old factor driving Florida’s climate change denial: Donald Trump.

Trump has long dismissed climate change as a “hoax.” He took the United States out of the Paris Climate Accord as president. In April, according to an account in The Guardian newspaper, he met with over 20 fossil fuel executives at Mar-a-Lago and promised to give them massive tax breaks and roll back environmental and climatic measures. These included barriers to drilling, a pause on gas exports, and new rules to cut car pollution—but there was an ask: he wanted $1 billion in campaign contributions in exchange.

“Meatball Ron,” having now bent the knee to Trump, has assumed Trump’s anti-environmentalism as well and so climate change denial is in full force in Florida.

Ironically, attitudes among the population of Florida are moving in a polar opposite direction. According to the Florida Climate Resilience Survey, 90 percent of Floridians believe that climate change is happening—even more than in the rest of the US population, where 72 percent believe it.

What is more, Floridians want state and federal government to do more to combat climate change: 68 percent of all respondents wanted more state government action and 69 percent wanted more from the federal government.

“Floridians support strengthening our resilience to the effects of climate change because they are experiencing it. The urgency to act means debate over causes is largely irrelevant,” professor Colin Polsky, founding director of Florida Atlantic University’s environmental school, stated when the survey was released.

While Republicans’ belief in human-caused climate change fell, that recognition surged among political independents, 64 percent of whom believe it, up 11 percent since the last survey in September 2023.

Republican rejection of climate change evidence is more pronounced in Southwest Florida than in the state as a whole.

There have been two regional surveys of public opinion regarding climate change. Both were conducted under the auspices of the Conservancy of Southwest Florida. One was conducted a year after Hurricane Irma and released in 2019. The other was released in April 2022—but it was conducted before Hurricane Ian struck in September.

The 2022 Climate Metrics Survey of Southwest Florida found that “People who identify as Republicans are increasingly harder to engage with and persuade on issues of climate. Meanwhile, people who identify as Democrats continue to express significant concerns around climate change and support for solutions.”

Despite these partisan divides, “A total of 87 percent of adults say that climate change is happening either due to human activities (26 percent), natural causes (24 percent), or a combination of both human activities and natural causes (37 percent).” This was an increase from 2019, when 75 percent believed climate change was happening.

However, in 2022 there was greater cynicism about government’s ability to deal with the problem, less inclination toward taking action and greater fatalism toward stopping the change.

For all that, 85 percent of respondents favored modernizing the electric grid, 74 percent favored charging corporations for pollution they caused and 56 percent wanted their city or town to prepare for the impacts of climate change.

Did Hurricane Ian change any minds in Southwest Florida? It will be very interesting to see the next survey that measures attitudes after that storm—and after the 2024 hurricane season.

So taken together, all public opinion research indicates that the vast majority of Floridians believe there’s climate change, they’re acutely aware of it, they want something done about it, they believe government should take action to slow or mitigate it, and they believe humans are causing it to some degree.

However, in true Florida fashion, the state’s governor, its legislators and its whole top political echelon are moving in the exact opposite direction.

But facts are stubborn things. The governor, the legislature, climate-deniers and Donald Trump, Florida’s denier-in-chief, can deny that the climate is changing, they can legislate it out of existence in Florida law, they can prohibit speaking the words and they can (literally) stick their heads in the sand all they like—but the storms keep coming, the heat keeps increasing and the seas keep rising.

It seems that they won’t acknowledge the reality until the water is up to their eyeballs—and starts to boil around them.

Can everyday, sweltering Floridians make a difference? Of course they can, at the ballot box.

Climate change is a reality that no amount of propaganda, denial or delusion can erase. It’s up to Floridians who recognize that reality to reject candidates who deny it and vote like their lives depend upon it—because they do.

*A lone American flag flies over a devastated Times Square in Fort Myers Beach immediately after Hurricane Ian. (Photo: U.S. Air National Guard /Jesse Hanson)*

Liberty lives in light

Reps. Donalds and Diaz Balart vote to allow pollution of SWFL waters

*Fish killed by red tide on the beach in Naples, Fla., on March 6, 2023. (Image: NBC2 News)*

March 14, 2023 by David Silverberg

Last Thursday, March 9, Southwest Florida congressional representatives voted to roll back protections and allow increased pollution, which would have a direct impact on the region’s waters.

The vote was on House Joint Resolution (HJRes) 27, which passed by a vote of 227 to 198, largely along party lines.

The resolution changed the definition of the Waters of the United States (WOTUS) to potentially allow greater water pollution. It seeks to return to the status of regulation under former President Donald Trump.

Protecting the purity of water is a priority for Southwest Florida, which is currently suffering a major red tide bloom.

Both Reps. Byron Donalds (R-19-Fla.) and Mario Diaz-Balart (R-26-Fla.) voted for the resolution. Rep. Greg Steube (R-17-Fla.) did not vote, still absent due to an accident he suffered on Jan. 18. One Republican, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-1-Pa.) voted against the resolution. Nine Democrats voted for it.

Neither Donalds nor Diaz Balart issued statements explaining their votes. Donalds did not mention his vote in his weekly newsletter to constituents.

The House action is unlikely to take effect given Democratic dominance in the Senate and a pledge by President Joe Biden to veto the Republican House measure if it reaches his desk.

The water issue

The Clean Water Act of 1972 regulates US waters to prevent pollution, giving primary enforcement responsibility to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

In 2015, WOTUS was put in place under President Barack Obama to protect a variety of streams, rivers and wetlands that serve as sources for larger bodies of water, in an effort to reduce pollution. In particular, the rule covered water sources that run intermittently or underground. The rule particularly affected Southwest Florida whose streams and wetlands impact much larger bodies of water like the Caloosahatchee River and the Everglades.

In January 2020, President Donald Trump rolled back WOTUS with his own administration’s “Navigable Waters Protection Rule,” which eliminated many of the previous protections. Developers and industries were no longer required to get permits under the Clean Water Act before dumping waste and pollutants like pesticides and fertilizers into water sources like creeks and streams. Essentially, the Trump administration held that if a body of water wasn’t “navigable” anti-pollution measures wouldn’t apply.

“I terminated one of the most ridiculous regulations of all: the last administration’s disastrous Waters of the United States rule,” Trump boasted when he ended the protections. “That was a rule that basically took your property away from you.”

“This is a horrible setback for wetland protection in the USA,” wrote Bill Mitsch, a globally recognized wetlands expert and eminent scholar and director of the Everglades Wetland Research Park at Florida Gulf Coast University at the time. (Mitsch has since retired.)

“I have followed this tug of war for all these years between those who appreciate the many ecosystem services that wetlands provide, including cleaning our waters, sequestering and permanently storing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and providing the best habitat for hundreds of threatened and endangered species, and the industrial-scale agricultural, energy, and real estate giants” Mitsch wrote. “It has always been a David vs. Goliath [battle].”

In June 2021, President Joe Biden’s administration restored the previous anti-pollution restrictions of WOTUS. Both the EPA and the US Army Corps of Engineers made the announcement.

“It’s a good move,” Mitsch told The Paradise Progressive in an interview when the rule was reapplied. “I’m happy because it’s the right direction.”

Mitsch continued: “I’m delighted both agencies have stepped forward. This, in my view, is a good turn for Southwest Florida and especially the Everglades.”

With its vote last Thursday, the Republican-dominated US House voted to remove the Obama-Biden protections and allow Trump-era pollution.

Although the measure is unlikely to take effect, Southwest Florida’s waterways and wetlands remain under threat since the state took over the permitting process from the federal government in one of the Trump administration’s last acts.

“I’m very much afraid of Florida taking wetland management away from the feds. What the feds are doing is great but I’ve seen it before,” Mitsch said at the time. “There’s no question why [the state] wanted to take over water regulation; it was for development.”

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