‘Doing the best we can’: Unemployment debacle shadows Ron DeSantis administration
Governor Ron DeSantis.

Ron DeSantis
It's a race against time for jobless Floridians and the Governor.

As the Governor shared in the President’s national media spotlight Tuesday, a key staffer was left behind to defend the slow fixes to the state’s unemployment process.

“We’re doing the best we can with the system we have,” Department of Management Services head Jonathan Satter confided Tuesday to Glenna Milberg of Miami’s WPLG.

Satter wouldn’t bury the man he replaced, Department of Economic Opportunity head Ken Lawson, when Milberg fed him a question about how he could do what Lawson couldn’t.

“I’m a private sector guy …we’ve broken through a lot of bureaucracy, cut a lot of red tape,” Satter said.

Satter did give a bit of news. “Guidance” will be provided on retroactive eligibility, which is something he’d previously told another local-market TV reporter would be provided going back to Mar. 9.

But the appearance, if the sequence of tweets is any indicator, will be one where Satter is allowed to project reassurance for the 1.94 million claimants who wait, as the month ends, for money to pay bills that are due.

For two of every five applicants, the $275 a week benefit for 12 weeks may be foreclosed to them for one disqualifying factor or another.

“We are going through back through … identifying how we can help those folks,” Satter counsels.

While Satter projects administrative confidence, it has been left to Gov. DeSantis to figure out how much outrage he should voice about the failed $77 million CONNECT website  at media availabilities.

DeSantis has been more comfortable, by and large, maligning the media for variously overhyping and discounting the threat posed by COVID-19. However, as days of dysfunction become weeks of woe, the Governor is increasingly vocal about the “jalopy … clunker” system that dates back to the Rick Scott administration.

“Before I was Governor, the state paid $77 million for this thing … no question about it, totally not worth $77 million,” DeSantis said in Tampa Monday.

DeSantis added that he wanted an investigation into the site’s procurement “once the dust has settled” to “just go and look and see what went on, why they paid this much.”

While DeSantis barely touched on the mechanics of how such an investigation would proceed, he spent much of Monday’s exchange with reporters discussing the site’s failures.

The Governor denoted “huge problems with this system that the state paid a lot of money for,” including “a lot of architectural problems” and “a capacity issue.”

He also repeated a contention that he was told “how great the site was,” one that turned out to be bunk.

While the announcement that Florida will begin a phased reopening of business will hearten some, appall others, and dominate the news cycle for the rest of the week, the unemployment catastrophe looks likely to haunt this Governor, and perhaps Florida Republicans, for much longer than that.

Unless the Governor takes control of messaging and the crisis in a timely way, the sins of his ideological forebearers may come back to haunt him ahead of 2022’s reelection.

A.G. Gancarski

A.G. Gancarski has written for FloridaPolitics.com since 2014. He is based in Northeast Florida. He can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter: @AGGancarski


5 comments

  • Christy Singh

    April 28, 2020 at 4:38 pm

    DeSantis has reached the Peter principle. He will not get my vote in the next election.

  • Michael

    April 28, 2020 at 8:42 pm

    There is no way this guy gets reelected. He has lied for months about the unemployment system and how they “fixed” it…it still is unusable after weeks and weeks of soapbox lies about it ….

  • BlueHeron

    April 29, 2020 at 1:51 am

    “Unless the Governor takes control of messaging and the crisis in a timely way, the sins of his ideological forebearers may come back to haunt him ahead of 2022’s reelection.”

    He can attempt to take control of messaging as much as he likes.It will change nothing. Time has already run out for him and his messaging. The people of Florida will not forget how they were thrown under the bus. Then they moved over us forward and back again to ensure that we would never recover. There is zero chance that I will vote for this man. I will also not vote for any Republican at any level of the government moving forward. They have “owned” us for far too long. Side note: While we are at our most vulnerable, it will be hurricane season. Then what? I am not comforted.

  • Frankie M.

    April 29, 2020 at 10:50 am

    Maybe their best isn’t good enough? Clearly the party of personal accountability does not practice what they preach. Do as I say not as I do.

  • Ocean Joe

    April 30, 2020 at 4:44 pm

    Did Deloitte Consultants, the creator of the site, make any contributions to Rick Scott, a PAC for him, or to the state Republican party? Was this a pay to play gone south?

Comments are closed.


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