Guest Author
Florida just reopened its My Safe Florida Home program. This year, another $280 million was earmarked to help homeowners “harden” their homes: install hurricane-impact windows, reinforce roofs, replace exterior doors. The goal sounds noble.
The problem is, we’ve seen this movie before. And the ending never changes.
The program has all the trappings of government benevolence: urgency, good intentions, and a catchy name. But look closer, and what you find is an inefficient, bureaucratic maze that distributes aid like a lottery ticket, not a serious public policy. You apply. You wait. You get inspected. You track down contractors. You submit paperwork. You wait some more. Maybe — just maybe — you get reimbursed. By the time it’s all approved, your roofer has retired, and the hurricane has a name.
And if you don’t get picked this year? Get in line for next year. If there is one. Even then, your odds depend on where you live, how fast you apply, and whether your home qualifies. Renters? Excluded. Landlords? Mostly out of luck. Small businesses? Not eligible. In a state of 22 million people, the program helped just 23,000 households last year. That’s one for every 950 Floridians. There’s been no serious independent evaluation of the program’s effectiveness. No actuarial analysis. No public-facing ROI. To be honest, they likely don’t want to know.
But we should care, because every dollar the state hands out is a dollar it first takes in. And in this case, it’s taken by taxing the very thing we claim to promote: safety. Florida applies sales tax to hurricane-resistant windows, doors, and roofing materials, the essentials of storm resilience. Instead of removing financial barriers, we create them, then layer on bureaucracy to manage the consequences. As Milton Friedman once said, “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”
So let’s run the numbers. Eliminating the sales tax on storm-hardening materials would cost the state about $308 million a year in forgone revenue, just slightly more than the $280 million it now spends annually on this grant program. But here’s the difference. A tax exemption requires no applications, no inspections, no paperwork, and no bureaucrats. Everyone benefits: homeowners, renters (through landlord upgrades), small businesses, churches, and nonprofits. No one waits.
That policy change wouldn’t just be simpler. It would be more powerful. When the price of resilience drops, more people make the investment. That means more homes with reinforced roofs and impact-resistant windows. That means fewer total losses during storms, and lower insured losses translate to downward pressure on premiums across the board. Insurers notice when risk declines system-wide.
And here’s what the bureaucracy misses. Local contractors, roofers, window installers, and manufacturers all win under a broad-based exemption. Demand becomes steadier, not grant-dependent. That means more full-time jobs, fewer cancellations when funding dries up, and more predictable hiring. A sales tax exemption doesn’t just make homes safer; it makes jobs stickier.
By contrast, the state spends about $1,000 in administrative costs per household just to hand out a $10,000 grant. That’s 10 percent of the budget before a single nail is driven. It’s the government engineering a solution to a problem it helped create by taxing safety in the first place.
This is the part where we should pause and ask: What would Milton Friedman do?
Friedman believed in simplicity. In trusting individuals over institutions. In using market forces to achieve public outcomes. He would see this not as a complicated housing resilience issue, but as a textbook case of government solving with one hand what it broke with the other. Why not remove the tax and empower people to act on their own timeline, with their own contractor, without waiting on the state to play middleman?
The My Safe Florida program is bureaucratic nostalgia dressed as bold policy. It’s a system built for slowness, exclusion, and red tape. It doesn’t scale. It doesn’t serve. And it doesn’t deliver.
Real reform is simple. Trust the individual, not the institution. Use markets, not middlemen. Cut the red tape and the sales tax. Florida forgot its Friedman.
Someone needs to ask: What Would Milton Friedman Do?
And then put it on a bracelet and wear it around the Capitol.
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Former Sen. Jeff Brandes is the founder and president of the Florida Policy Project.
