Mike Haridopolos Corruption & Ethics DOGE Florida

Mike Haridopolos Wants Spending 'in the Sunshine.' A College Paid Him $152,000 for a Book With One Copy.

The Florida congressman now praising DOGE for exposing government waste once collected $152,000 in public money from a community college for a 175-page double-spaced manuscript that existed in a single copy.

MAGA Report Cards · Aug 10, 2026

In April 2025, Mike Haridopolos went on a Florida podcast to talk about DOGE and what he had learned about government waste back home in Tallahassee. His line was a good one:

"When you put government in the sunshine and spending in the sunshine, people spend smarter this way."

He said it again a few different ways in the same interview. "We are the government in the sunshine, [and] we also need to have spending in the sunshine." Transparency Florida, he explained, lets you see everything — contracts, salaries, how the money moves.

Fine. Let's put some spending in the sunshine.

$152,000. One book. One copy.

While Haridopolos was a Florida state senator, Brevard Community College paid him $152,000 to write a book about Florida government.

The Associated Press went looking for it. What the college had bought was a 175-page, double-spaced manuscript titled Florida Legislative History and Processes — and the single existing copy could only be read in person, at the college's administration office.

The AP reported that the manuscript did not come close to meeting the contract's call for a publishable, textbook-quality work, and that much of it was Haridopolos's own advice on how to run for office.

The college's president at the time of the story, Jim Drake, defended it: "I thought that the book was a very fine piece of work as a primer in the political process." He was less sure about the arrangement itself, saying he wasn't familiar with a case "in which where is a leave given over an extended period of time unless the research purpose is so compelling."

The AP also surfaced why a community college wanted a sitting legislator on the payroll in the first place. In a 2005 memo to the board of trustees, Drake's predecessor Thomas Gamble wrote that Haridopolos's "roles in the Florida Legislature have provided unique access to both houses in Tallahassee."

Unique access. That was the product.

Haridopolos did not return the AP's calls or answer its e-mails for that story.

Then they put it on Kindle

Days after the story ran, Brevard Community College uploaded the manuscript to Amazon and listed it for $9.99.

The Miami New Times did the arithmetic on March 2, 2011: at $9.99 a copy, the college would need to sell 15,216 copies to get the taxpayers' $152,000 back. At the time of that story, the book ranked 45,340th on Amazon's paid Kindle list.

Haridopolos's defense, when he finally gave one, was that this is simply what academics do:

"What you do as a college teacher is you do three things, you teach, you write, and you publish."

Most college teachers who write and publish do not receive $152,000 of public money for a manuscript that exists in one copy in an administrator's office.

It cost him a Senate seat

This was not a story that blew over.

Haridopolos was running for the U.S. Senate in 2012 against Bill Nelson, and by the summer of 2011 the campaign was coming apart. His second-quarter fundraising fell to about $900,000 from $2.5 million the quarter before. His campaign manager and a senior adviser both left. He was facing a deposition over allegations — which he denied — involving payments to former state Republican Party chairman Jim Greer.

And the book kept coming up. Political science professor McKee's assessment, given to WFSU at the time: the more exposure Haridopolos got, the less viable he looked.

On July 18, 2011, he dropped out of the Senate race, saying the responsibilities he was managing on both fronts were in conflict.

Fifteen years later he is in Congress, and the story is not part of the standard biography.

Why an old story still counts

Because he keeps bringing it up himself.

A man who took six figures in public money for a book almost nobody could read is now one of the members telling Floridians that the answer to government waste is transparency and a cost-cutting task force. He praised DOGE by name. He held up Florida's spending website as the model.

Meanwhile, the actual cuts made in DOGE's name landed on people who never had a $152,000 contract for a one-copy book to fall back on. In Florida, DOGE cut more than $53 million in grants from Florida State University alone. And the task force he praised expired on July 4, 2026 without a final report, having promised $2 trillion in savings and claimed $215 billion.

There is a version of "spending in the sunshine" that means every public dollar gets scrutiny, including the ones that went to you. There's another version that means you get to point at somebody else's grant.

Haridopolos has told us which one he practices. We had to read the AP to find out.

We deserve better.