Maria Elvira Salazar LiesControversy Florida

Maria Elvira Salazar Handed a Children's Hospital a Giant Check for Money She Voted Against. Then She Said She Couldn't Remember the Vote.

Salazar posed with oversized checks for a children's hospital, a university, an airport and a road project — all paid for by bills she voted no on. Caught on camera, she said she forgot. She is still counting that money as hers today.

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Maria Elvira Salazar Handed a Children's Hospital a Giant Check for Money She Voted Against. Then She Said She Couldn't Remember the Vote.

There is a simple thing a member of Congress can say when they get caught celebrating money they voted against. It goes something like: I didn't like the whole bill, but I fought to get our piece of it.

It isn't a great answer. But it's an answer.

Maria Elvira Salazar has been given the chance to say it on camera, more than once. Instead she said she couldn't remember how she voted.

The check she handed the children's hospital

In February 2024, Salazar showed up at Nicklaus Children's Hospital in Miami with the oversized novelty checks. She handed them to the hospital's leadership and staff. She posed for photos. She put the photos on social media.

"I am thrilled to have secured over $1.4 million to provide cutting-edge medicine to children and help the hospital confront our nation's growing mental health crisis," she said in a press release.

That money came from the Fiscal Year 2023 Consolidated Appropriations Act. Her own press release said so.

She voted no on it.

You can look it up yourself. It's Roll Call 549 in the House on December 23, 2022 — H.R. 2617, the $1.7 trillion bill that funded the whole federal government. Republicans voted against it 200 to 9. Salazar was one of the 200.

So she voted to block the bill, then drove to a children's hospital to hand out its money with her name on the check.

Here is how strange that is: she didn't even hide where the money came from. She named the bill in her own press release. As HuffPost put it, it's as if she was just hoping nobody would notice.

What her office said when reporters noticed

Her spokeswoman, Mariza Smajlaj, tried the normal defense. "Congresswoman Salazar secured this funding by working directly with Niklaus Children's Hospital and working to get this included in federal funding legislation," she said. "Unfortunately, the final bill also included wasteful measures and was far too large at $1.7 trillion."

Salazar had written the same thing in an op-ed the day before the photo op. She said she "fought to get Miami's priorities funded" into the bill, and then: "I did not agree with that shameful practice or with wasteful measures, so I voted against the bill in final passage."

Read that twice. She wants credit for putting the money in, and credit for trying to stop the bill that carried it.

If the bill she voted against had failed, Nicklaus Children's Hospital would have gotten nothing. There was no version of this where the money arrived and the bill didn't pass. She was on the side that would have killed it.

Eleven days earlier, she said she forgot

The children's hospital was not the first time. She had been confronted about the exact same habit on television about eleven days earlier.

In late January 2024, Jim DeFede, an investigative reporter at the CBS station in Miami, sat Salazar down and walked her through it. She had recently presented a check for $650,000 to help small businesses at Florida International University.

"You voted against the bill that gave the money that you then signed a check for and handed and had a photo op," DeFede told her, as MaddowBlog recounted.

DeFede kept going. She voted against the CHIPS and Science Act — Roll Call 404, July 28, 2022 — but celebrated the South Florida Climate Resilience Tech Hub that the law made possible. She voted against the bipartisan infrastructure law — Roll Call 369, November 5, 2021 — but talked up all the money it sent to Miami International Airport.

Salazar's answer:

"Listen I, that was, I think, last cycle. I cannot really remember right now."

Elsewhere in the same interview: "I really cannot, I mean, right now, and I'm not trying to be a politician, there's so many bills that I've introduced that I know that many of them…" DeFede had to interrupt to remind her they were not talking about bills she introduced. They were talking about bills she voted against.

By MaddowBlog's account of the appearance, she also told the host she needed to speak to her staff to be reminded of her own voting record.

This was her fourth year in Congress. She had cast the votes herself.

The performance was bad enough that a fellow Florida Republican, then-Rep. Matt Gaetz, posted about it: "So many lawmakers in both parties are husks of humans who merely hand their vote card to the leadership. Then, stuff like this happens."

When a member of your own party's Florida delegation says you're just handing your vote card to leadership, that's not a partisan attack. That's a description.

She never stopped

You might think a televised disaster would end the habit. It didn't.

In September 2025 — a year and a half later — Salazar showed up in Cutler Bay with another ceremonial check, this one for the $4.4 million Marlin Road Expansion project.

"I was proud to secure $4.4 million for the Marlin Road project, which will make this corridor safer for drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists, while also reducing congestion and making daily commutes easier for everyone in Cutler Bay," she said.

The Marlin Road money came from the same FY2023 appropriations bill. The same one she voted no on.

WLRN reported that she staged the check presentation the day after a Democratic candidate held a press conference in Cutler Bay calling her out for it. That candidate, Robin Peguero, stood there holding a check with Salazar's name on it and zero dollars written in.

"This is the height of hypocrisy," Peguero said.

WLRN asked Salazar's office for comment. She didn't respond.

It's still on her official website right now

This isn't old news you have to dig up. It's on her congressional website today.

On February 20, 2026, Salazar's office announced $25.6 million in federal funding for FL-27 from the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026. To her credit, she actually voted for that one — and again when it came back from the Senate.

But scroll down that same press release, past the new projects, to the section headed "Building on a Strong Record of Results." There it is:

FY23: $23.86 million secured for 12 projects

And in the list of "major investments" she takes credit for: "Mental health expansion at Nicklaus Children's Hospital."

FY23 is the year of the bill she voted against, and the Nicklaus mental health money is the exact item HuffPost caught her taking credit for in 2024. It is still listed as hers, in an official government press release, five months ago. And it's folded into the grand total she advertises at the bottom: "over $89 Million for 47 Community Projects."

She is still adding money she voted against into the number she runs on.

Her current answer is better. It's also an admission.

Earlier this month, on July 5, Salazar went on This Week in South Florida and finally gave a version of the normal politician's answer. Local 10 reported that she told anchor Glenna Milberg she had voted for $25 million in district projects even though she voted against the broader spending bill.

"I represent the interests of my constituents," she told Milberg.

Fine. But notice what that concedes. She does remember the votes. She knows exactly what she did. The "I cannot really remember right now" was never true — it was just easier than explaining.

And it doesn't fix the checks. A press release that says she "secured over $1.4 million" for a children's hospital doesn't mention that she voted to sink the bill carrying it. Neither did the photo op. Neither did the tweet. The whole point of the giant novelty check is that nobody reads the roll call.

Why this matters more than one photo op

Salazar has built her Miami brand on being the one who delivers. Over $89 million. Forty-seven projects. Checks and ribbon-cuttings and press releases.

But the record underneath it keeps pointing the other way:

There's a pattern in all of it: take the credit, dodge the record, hope nobody checks.

Somebody checked. Twice, on television. And she still hasn't taken the Nicklaus Children's Hospital money off her list.

Florida's primary is August 18, and the general election is November 3. The roll calls are public. They take about thirty seconds to look up — which is roughly twenty-nine seconds longer than reading the number on a novelty check.

Sources

Photo via Associated Press.

Maria Elvira Salazar Report Card

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