Jesse Scheckner
Amber Mariano Davis, who became the youngest person ever elected to the Florida Legislature in 2016, will now help craft federal education policies under President Donald Trump.
Mariano Davis, 29, was sworn in Monday as an appointed policy adviser at the U.S. Department of Education.
She previously worked as Director of State Government Affairs at Code.org, an education technology nonprofit headquartered in Seattle.
Mariano Davis announced the move Thursday on LinkedIn. She said she was “honored” to take the job.
“I am so excited to help President Trump implement his America First agenda,” she told Florida Politics by text.
The daughter of Pasco County Commission Vice Chair Jack Mariano, Mariano Davis was still a student at the University of Central Florida (UFC) when she upset Democratic incumbent Amber Murphy for the House District 36 seat in 2016.
Trump took the district by 21 percentage points that year, leading some to attribute Mariano Davis’ narrow victory to a “Trump tsunami.”
But Mariano Davis’ prioritization of higher education issues, like allowing Bright Futures scholarship money to be used for Summer classes, continued to resonate with voters. She won re-election by massive margins in 2018 and 2020 before opting not to run for a fourth and final term two years later.
Mariano Davis discussed her 2016 run in a Cosmopolitan article titled, “I Got Rejected from Harvard. Then I Won a State Election.” Its opening sentence reads, “I’d always said I wanted to be President — I still do.” She also recalled how members of her opponent’s team mocked her age at polling sites, calling her “little girl.”
Her Democratic opponent in 2018, Linda Jack, offered a similar critique, describing Mariano Davis as “too young to have this job” in an interview with the Tampa Bay Times. Mariano Davis trounced her by 16 points.
That year, Mariano Davis was one of two civilian greeters — along with then-Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, Trump’s current pick for U.S. Attorney General — invited to meet Trump and Air Force One ahead of a rally he held in Tampa that July.
Bills Mariano Davis sponsored include legislation to reduce financial burdens on students, require state colleges and universities to switch accreditation agencies between cycles, improve data-tracking in opioid litigation and expedite fire system repairs.
She also carried measures to allow nursing home plaintiffs to keep all lawsuit awards and boost funds for waste-to-energy facilities. One of her more talked-about efforts, aimed at dissolving Port Richey in the wake of multiple City Hall scandals, ended when she withdrew the proposal.
Notably, she voted against the Parental Rights in Education law, which detractors called “Don’t Say Gay,” criticizing the bill’s vague language as potentially obstructive to classroom discussion on sex, sexual orientation and gender identity.
Legislation lawmakers passed in 2023, after Mariano Davis left the Legislature, expanded the bill’s restrictions on LGBTQ-inclusive topics to all grade levels, but specified the strictures applied to classroom instruction rather than discussion.
Mariano Davis received a bachelor’s degree in political science from UCF, then earned a master’s degree in political science and government from the University of West Florida.
She is married to accountant-turned-lawyer Scott Davis. The couple welcomed a baby boy in July 2023.
Mariano Davis, a Pensacola resident, is listed as Chair of Protecting Florida’ Future, a state-level political committee that last year donated $12,500 to the Republican Party of Palm Beach County. It also gave $14,000 to the Citizens Alliance for Florida’s Economy, a political committee run by her old campaign consultant, Anthony Pedicini.
She said she’ll be moving to Washington, D.C., for the new job.
