A phrase for wasteful spending in a nation’s capital is often “pork barrel spending,” but in Florida, it’s called “Turkey Projects.”
For the last 40 years, Florida TaxWatch has published its yearly report exposing some of the areas where the turkey projects occur.
In this year’s list, Florida TaxWatch identified 621 items costing Florida taxpayers around $830 million.
“These are appropriations that bypass or violate established budget procedures or legislative and public scrutiny,” the report reads.
Here’s a cleaner version:
TaxWatch’s leadership asserts that most of these projects involve issues that should be determined by local officials rather than state legislators.
Despite Republicans controlling the Florida House and Senate and repeatedly calling for leaner budgets, TaxWatch says elected officials have approved more hometown projects than ever before.
Here’s some of the breakdown by TaxWatch
House and Senate members submitted more than 5,600 project requests (most projects are requested in both chambers) totaling $12.5 billion, an average of 35 requests and $78 million per legislator. These totals eclipse last year’s amounts – 5,100 requests worth $11.7 billion.
The FY2026-27 budget includes nearly 2,000 local member projects worth $2.7 billion. Since almost every member project in the budget was requested by both a House member and a Senate member, the average Senator had approximately 45 projects worth $60 million funded, and the average Representative got 15 projects worth $20 million.
Where do these budget turkeys occur?
Higher education construction. TaxWatch list 11 university projects ($76.8 million) and 11 college projects ($71.7 million) received funding despite not appearing on the statutorily required priority lists — while some of the highest-ranked projects went unfunded.
Water quality fared no better: for the second year in a row, the Legislature earmarked all $380 million in Water Quality Improvement Grant Program funding for 344 individual member projects, using the implementing bill to override the competitive, criteria-driven process the Legislature itself created.
Wasteful spending on local parks, historic preservation, cultural facilities, library construction, and local transportation projects.
According to TaxWatch’s findings, millions of public dollars were spent without formal selection criteria, no competitive ranking, and limited accountability for outcomes.
Like hundreds of additional projects in housing and community development, law enforcement, fire service, emergency management, education, and workforce development, totaling $441.1 million.
On the state’s long-term fiscal outlook, the researchers at TaxWatch point out that if the increase in wasteful items continues, the state will see budget shortfalls.
“Many in the Florida Legislature have been rightly criticizing local governments for rapidly increasing property taxes and budgets and wasteful and inefficient spending,” an excerpt from the report reads. “Despite this, legislators continue to request and fund billions of dollars for projects back in their districts, rewarding local governments that may not be sufficiently protecting taxpayers. And while many of these projects are worthwhile, many more are hardly priorities or even essential.”
