Jesse Scheckner
A game of musical chairs began Thursday, when Gov. Ron DeSantis announced his appointment of Attorney General Ashley Moody to the U.S. Senate and his Chief of Staff, James Uthmeier, as her replacement.
That left a vacancy in the Governor’s Office, and inside sources tell Florida Politics there are five candidates short-listed for Uthmeier’s old job.
Here they are.
Atop the list is Alex Kelly, for whom the Chief of Staff job would be something of a homecoming.
Kelly served as DeSantis’ Deputy Chief of Staff from April 2021 to May 2023, when the Governor tapped him to lead the Department of Commerce, where Kelly still serves as Secretary.
He returned to the Chief of Staff job briefly in August 2023, when Uthmeier took a leave of absence to manage DeSantis’ short-lived presidential campaign.
Kelly previously served as Chief of Staff to former Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran and held the same role in the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice and Florida House, where he worked as Staff Director for the Redistricting Committee and as a Chief Analyst for the Select Policy Council on Strategic and Economic Planning.
Other past roles include Vice President of the Foundation for Excellence in Education, a school choice advocacy group founded by former Gov. Jeb Bush, and Legislative Affairs Director for Florida’s Corrections and Elder Affairs Departments.
Jason Weida, now entering his second year as Secretary of Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA), is also high on the list. He previously worked as the agency’s Chief of Staff.
A lawyer by training, Weida’s work history includes stints with the U.S. Department of Justice as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Boston and as counsel to the Office of Legal Policy in Washington.
In 2018, he was part of a temporary assignment by the Office to assist in the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. His effort earned him the U.S. Attorney General’s Distinguished Service Award, the second-highest honor for employee performance.
In November 2023, he was one of five people DeSantis named to Florida’s Government Efficiency Task Force, a voter-approved panel responsible for devising ways to improve state operations and funding.
Weida drew criticism from progressives last year after the AHCA published an anti-abortion website, which he promoted on his personal X account as combating “the lies and disinformation surrounding Florida’s abortion laws.”
A government communications pro for well over a decade, Taryn Fenske got her start under former Gov. Rick Scott and has worked since 2019 as the Communications Director of his successor.
In between those jobs, she was the top spokesperson for Republican U.S. Rep. John Rutherford and Florida Communications Director for the Republican National Committee.
Under DeSantis, Fenske served for close to two years as Director of Communications and External Affairs at the Florida Department of Education, leaving in April 2021 to take over the Governor’s comms.
Like Kelly, Fenske followed DeSantis into the 2023 Republican Primary fray to work for the Never Back Down super PAC backing his White House bid.
She also briefly worked as a spokesperson for another pro-DeSantis PAC, Fight Right.
Eyes are also on DeSantis’ current Deputy Chief of Staff Anastasios Kamoutsas, who last year demonstrated he has no issue taking his work home with him.
Kamoutsas, who will celebrate 11 years Florida Bar membership in April, joined the Governor’s Office in the latter half of 2023. He left a prior gig as Chief of Staff at the Department of Education, where he previously served as the agency’s top lawyer and played a key role in fights between the state and school districts over local mask policies during the pandemic.
When Kamoutsas made the jump, Uthmeier called him an “invaluable member of the Governor’s administration (who was) instrumental in putting wins on the board for Floridians.”
While pursuing his Juris Doctor at the Regent University School of Law, Kamoutsas interned with the A21 Campaign in Greece on anti-human trafficking efforts.
He said at the time that he hoped to return to Miami after graduating to work at the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office. By 2018, he was working as a lawyer for the Dade County Police Benevolent Association and ran unsuccessfully that year for a Miami-Dade Community Council seat.
David Dewhirst is a sleeper candidate for Chief of Staff, a position for which he’s arguably overqualified.
For the better part of a decade, Dewhirst skipped around the U.S. and across the pond for high-ranking public and advocacy jobs. In May 2023, he left his then-post as Chief Deputy Attorney General of Idaho to work as a senior adviser to DeSantis.
Shortly thereafter, he joined Project 2025, where he has worked “on a range of initiatives” to strongly situate the GOP to take over the federal government this year. But he has also continued to work for the Governor.
Dewhirst’s résumé includes two years as Montana Solicitor General and two years as General Counsel at the U.S. Department of Commerce during President-elect Donald Trump’s first term. He also spent for close to four years at the conservative Freedom Foundation think tank, where he litigated constitutional, labor and campaign finance cases before federal and state courts and administrative agencies. He left the organization in mid-2018 as Chief Litigation Counsel.
While pursuing his law degree at the George Washington University Law School, Dewhirst studied constitutional history with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and was the symposium editor for the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy.
