H.R. 8646 passed 213-210 on June 4. It comes in $380 million below last year and, in the Appropriations Committee's own words, reduces salaries and expenses "to account for staffing reductions" — the nearly 4,300 FDA and roughly 900 meat-inspection jobs already gone. 188 members with a page on this site voted yes. Four voted no.
Donalds said the Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Florida Voting Rights Act would make Florida count ballots for a month like California. The bill leaves Florida's Election Day ballot deadline exactly where it is.
On Face the Nation, Margaret Brennan told Byron Donalds nearly all of Florida is below the vaccination rate needed for herd immunity and asked if his message to parents was to vaccinate. He answered 'No' and said the outbreaks are caused by 'rampant illegal immigration.' Florida had 141 measles cases by late July.
Food, rent, electricity, healthcare - in America we should be able to afford these basic necessities of life without going bankrupt.
Byron Donalds has supported the current administration's tariffs and other policies which have led to:
Half of all Americans struggling to afford groceries
47% struggling to afford their utility bills
47% struggling to afford healthcare
48% struggling to afford housing
1 in 4 Americans saying they have skipped a medical checkup due to affordability
23% skipping a prescription dose
Gas prices skyrocketing
Between December 2020 and January 2026, Tampa Electric raised its bills 86%, Duke Energy 49%, and Florida Power & Light 45%, according to Food & Water Watch. Over that same stretch Donalds took $1.13 million from Florida's investor-owned utilities — more than any other candidate in the state except Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson. As Governor, Donalds would appoint every member of the Public Service Commission that signs off on those rate hikes.
We are feeling this directly in our wallets. What is Byron Donalds doing about that? Making things worse. We deserve better.
We all deserve access to quality healthcare so we can live healthy and productive lives.
Byron Donalds disagrees:
He voted to cut more than $1 trillion in federal health care and food assistance as part of the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act"
He voted to let ACA tax credits expire, increasing health costs for millions of Americans, driving many of them to switch to cheaper plans or abandon health insurance coverage altogether. And the less people there are with coverage, the higher the rest of our premiums will be.
He wants to repeal the ACA, reduce Medicare and Medicaid spending, and add work requirements to Medicaid.
An estimated 990,000 Floridians will lose Medicaid coverage under Trump's budget bill — and that number rises to 1.5 million when cuts to ACA marketplace subsidies are included, pushing Florida's uninsured rate from a historic low of 10.7% back up to 16.7%.
Wants to Gut Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security
Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security aren't handouts. They're earned benefits that we pay into out of every single paycheck, our entire working lives, so that we can see a doctor, take care of our parents, and retire with dignity instead of going bankrupt when we get old or sick.
For years, Byron Donalds and his party have been quietly laying the groundwork to gut these programs. Now they've said the quiet part out loud.
They admitted the plan. Speaker Mike Johnson told the "Moon Griffon Show" that "entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid and things like Social Security ... have to be adjusted and fixed," and that "We have a plan to do that next year ... desperate times call for desperate measures."
We know what the plan looks like. The Republican Study Committee — a caucus of more than 170 House Republicans that includes Speaker Johnson and his top three deputies in leadership — released a budget calling for raising the Social Security retirement age for future retirees and converting Medicare into a privatized "premium support" model that would hand seniors over to for-profit insurance companies.
They already started. The "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" that Byron Donalds supported cut roughly $1 trillion from Medicaid to help pay for tax cuts for the richest 1 percent.
Even Republicans admit what "reform" means. Sen. Josh Hawley, on the push to "address" and "reform" these programs: "That's usually code for 'cut.' I'm not in favor of that."
It's a broken promise. Donald Trump pledged in 2024, "I will never do anything that will jeopardize or hurt Social Security or Medicare." Byron Donalds and his party are now preparing to do exactly that.
These programs are a promise: work hard, pay in your whole life, and your country will be there for you when you need it. Byron Donalds wants to break that promise so he can keep cutting taxes for billionaires. We deserve better.
Cut Taxes for the Rich, While the Rest of Us Pay For It
We all need to pay our fair share to the government so it can provide the services that benefit all of us.
But billionaires in the U.S. pay a smaller tax rate than most teachers and nurses. That's not fair.
The wealthiest 400 billionaire families in the U.S. paid an average federal individual tax rate of just 8.2 percent. For comparison, the average American taxpayer in the same year paid 13 percent.
23 of the largest and most profitable companies in the US paid no federal corporate income taxes from 2018-2022. And 109 corporations paid zero federal tax in at least one of those years.
The "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" that Byron Donalds supported will reduce taxes for the top 1 percent of taxpayers by more than $1 trillion over the next decade, while raising taxes for the poorest Americans.
Byron Donalds is on the side of the billionaires and big business. We deserve better.
We all deserve clean air, clean water, and a healthy planet to live on.
Byron Donalds has supported the repealing and rolling back of environmental protections and climate change regulations, all so that billionaires and big business can plunder natural resources and destroy our environment in the name of profit.
Is Intentionally Wrecking Our Public Schools and Our Kids' Futures
Nine out of ten American children — 49.6 million of them — go to a public school. It's where they learn to read, where they eat breakfast and lunch, where kids with disabilities are guaranteed an education by law, and where a kid from any family, rich or poor, religious or not, gets a fair shot.
Byron Donalds and his party are taking that apart on purpose: draining public school money into private and religious schools, pushing one religion into everybody else's classrooms, and shutting down the federal department that is supposed to look out for our kids.
He voted to create the first national private school voucher in American history. It is hidden inside the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act." You give up to $1,700 a year to a charity that hands out private school scholarships, and the government gives you back every penny you gave on your taxes. It costs you nothing — no other tax break in the country works that way. Each person is capped at $1,700, but any number of people can do it, so there is no limit on what it drains from the Treasury. It starts January 1, 2027. Congress's own scorekeepers say $26 billion over ten years; one tax research group says as much as $51 billion every year — more than the government spends on Title I ($18.4 billion) for poor schools and IDEA ($14.6 billion) for kids with disabilities combined. And "low-income" means a family earning three times what a normal family in their area earns still qualifies — in some places, $500,000 a year.
They are giving away our tax dollars to families who are already wealthy and were never in public school to begin with. Every state that has tried it gets the same result — the money goes to people already paying private tuition: 95% of Arkansas voucher users never attended a public school. In Florida's first year of universal vouchers, 69% of new recipients were already in private school and only 13% had ever set foot in a public one. In Iowa, two-thirds were already in private school. We aren't rescuing kids from bad schools — we're cutting checks to families who never needed them, with the money coming out of the schools 90% of our kids actually attend.
And the kids who do switch end up doing worse. Four careful studies found the same thing. In Washington, DC, voucher kids fell behind in math. In Louisiana, a student who started in the middle of the class dropped to the bottom third in math after three years. Indiana and Ohio found the same. Kids with disabilities lost the most.
The money goes to religious schools that can turn our kids away. Ohio now spends nearly $1 billion a year on vouchers, the vast majority going to Catholic and evangelical schools — schools that, unlike public schools, can reject your child over their religion, their disability, or who their parents are, or for ANY REASON AT ALL with almost no accountability for the public money they take. Many have simply raised tuition to capture the vouchers instead of enrolling more students.
About 500,000 Florida students — more than 15% of the state's school-age children are now on private school choice programs. Only 31% of them ever attended a Florida public school. Roughly seven in ten never set foot in one — so for most recipients this isn't an escape hatch, it's the state picking up a tuition bill those families were already paying themselves. Meanwhile $400 million in awarded voucher money was sitting unused while public schools went without.
Our public schools took generations to build, and they are the one institution that has to take every single child who walks in the door. Byron Donalds is helping tear them down and hand the pieces to private interests. Our kids will pay for it for the rest of their lives. We deserve better.
A good job where we can make a living to support our families, own a home, and have a good life. That's the American Dream.
Byron Donalds supports policies and an administration that are turning the American Dream into a nightmare.
There were 20.8 million layoffs in the U.S. in 2025
55% of employed Americans say they're concerned about losing their jobs
The unemployment rate is 4.2%
In 2025 the U.S. economy averaged just 15,000 jobs added per month, a dramatic decrease from the monthly average of 125,000 the year before Trump took office.
Overall employment for workers without college degrees fell by 361,000 jobs from January to September 2025.
58,000 net manufacturing jobs have been lost from April, when the administration announced "Liberation Day" tariffs, to September 2025.
Works for Billionaires, Big Business & Special Interests and Not for Us
Our elected officials should work for us, the people.
Byron Donalds works for billionaires and big business, not for us. He sits on the House Financial Services Committee, which writes the rules for banks, insurers, mortgage lenders and credit companies — and virtually every one of those lobbies is on his donor list. Look at who some of his biggest backers are:
The banking and mortgage lobby before his own Financial Services Committee — the American Bankers Association, the Mortgage Bankers Association and America's Credit Unions
The insurance lobby he also regulates — the Council of Insurance Agents & Brokers and the Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America
The National Association of Realtors, the largest real-estate lobby in the country
American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) — his second-largest donor in the 2022 cycle. Pro-Israel PACs have given him $77,628 over his career, according to FEC filings compiled by TrackAIPAC
Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm
The Freedom Caucus Fund — $35,956
NextEra Energy, parent of Florida Power & Light
Koch, Inc.'s corporate PAC — the Koch brothers' political network
Blue Owl Capital and the American Council of Engineering Companies
Byron Donalds is funded by billionaires, big business and special interests. No wonder he's not doing anything to improve OUR lives. We deserve better.
Let Elon Musk and DOGE Cut More Than $1.1 BILLION from Florida
We all want a government that works for us as efficiently and effectively as possible. Unfortunately our government doesn't always work that way, so reform is badly needed. Given how big and complicated the government is, it's a tough problem that needs well-thought out solutions, so that we don't make things worse.
That's not what we got.
Byron Donalds stood idly by while billionaire and ketamine-addled chaos monkey Elon Musk and his DOGE goons chainsawed their way through the U.S. government, promising to save the government at least $2 trillion annually in waste, fraud and abuse. Because they had no idea what they were doing and no one to stop them, in the end our government suffered, people suffered, Florida suffered, government spending actually went UP and Elon Musk became even richer.
Elon Musk and DOGE:
Had access to and exfiltrated (stole) all our sensitive personal information.
Kneecapped the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which had returned over $26 billion to the American people since 2011.
Attempted to cut $4 billion in funding for medical research.
Will cost the federal government an estimated $500 billion in lost tax revenue (that could pay for programs for us), due to cuts at the IRS.
Laid waste to the employees at several government departments, removing their top experts and most skilled practitioners, and making their services less effective for all of us. This badly affected veterans, who make up 30% of the federal workforce.
DOGE cut more than $53 million in grants from Florida State University alone — terminating 54 federal grants and contracts from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, the USDA, the Department of Education, USAID, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
We'd like to thank you, Byron Donalds, for doing absolutely nothing while an unelected South African big tech billionaire took a chainsaw to vital U.S. government functions and completely failed to make the government more efficient. We deserve better.
As a member of Congress, part of Byron Donalds's job is to act as a check and balance to the executive branch. He and his fellow members of Congress from Florida have completely abdicated their responsibility. These spineless cowards are rubber stamping everything Donald Trump wants to do, no matter how crazy, dangerous or harmful. And we've seen the results. We deserve better.
We deserve to feel safe in our neighborhoods, schools, and places of worship.
In order to do that, we need to take real steps to prevent gun violence. And despite what we've been told, it is possible to support the 2nd Amendment and support common-sense gun safety laws at the same time. But Byron Donalds has opposed bipartisan gun safety laws, while offering meaningless thoughts and prayers every time there's a new mass shooting.
America is the land of FREEDOM. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to start a business, freedom to choose your own career path, freedom to make your own medical decisions, freedom to raise your children according to your values, and freedom to pursue happiness. Freedom is what makes America great.
Unless you're a woman and you're making the deeply personal decision about whether to have a baby or not. A decision that will dramatically affect the rest of your life. In that case Byron Donalds thinks that your freedom doesn't matter and that the government should get to control your body. That's not freedom, that's tyranny.
Byron Donalds:
Opposed Roe v. Wade
Supported federal efforts to ban abortion
Attacked Planned Parenthood throughout his career
Here in Florida, abortion is banned after about 6 weeks — before many women even know they're pregnant. In 2024 a 57% majority voted to protect abortion rights, but the measure fell just short of Florida's 60% threshold, leaving the ban in place.
Scored 0% on Reproductive Freedom for All's 2025 scorecard — voting against reproductive freedom on every tracked vote, including the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, the budget bill defunding Planned Parenthood, and a defense bill provision restricting servicemembers' access to abortion. He has also voted against the Right to Contraception Act and the Women's Health Protection Act.
Would have direct power over Florida's abortion laws as Governor, enforcement of the existing abortion ban, and control access to reproductive health care statewide.
Arkansas House of Representatives candidate (and pastor) Robb Ryerse stated it well: "Abortion should remain safe and legal. These are personal decisions best made by patients, their doctors, and their faith — not politicians. You don't have to agree with every decision someone makes to believe they should be free to make it. That's what personal liberty means." Almost 2/3 of Americans agree and believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. But Byron Donalds thinks he knows better, and doesn't believe that we should have the freedom to make our own decisions. We deserve better.
In America our vote represents our will. It gives us the power to make the change that we want to see in the world.
Unfortunately that's not a sentiment that Byron Donalds's billionaire and big business donors can stomach. Because when we have voting power, we use it to make our lives better, and they lose power. Read about all the ways they're trying to take away our voting power on our about page, then come back here.
Byron Donalds has opposed legislation to make voting easier while supporting the SAVE Act, which would force every single American citizen to prove their citizenship status in person when registering to vote or updating their voter registration information. For the vast majority of Americans, this would mean presenting a passport or birth certificate at their local election office. This would disenfranchise millions of U.S. citizens: 146 million Americans do not have a passport, and 69 million women who have married do not have a birth certificate that matches their new legal name. Working-class and low-income Americans would also be disproportionately disenfranchised if the bill became law, as the vast majority of these groups do not possess a passport.
YOU HAVE POWER. Why else do you think Byron Donalds and his bosses are working so hard to take it away? Don't let them. We deserve better.
Whether white, black, or brown, we should all be able to live in America and exercise our constitutional rights without fear that law enforcement will turn on us.
But the current administration has created a secret police force that is abusing their power against anyone who stands in their way, U.S. citizen or not. They claim to be going after "the worst of the worst", but are taking daycare workers, day laborers, grandmas and kids who are valued members of our communities. And Byron Donalds, staunch defender of the Second Amendment to fight back against government tyranny, is doing nothing while the government tyrannizes us.
ProPublica:They describe the legions of masked immigration officers operating in near-total anonymity on the orders of the president as the crossing of a line that had long set the United States apart from the world's most repressive regimes. ICE, in their view, has become an unfettered and unaccountable national police force.
ProPublica:Accosting people outside of their immigration court hearings where they're showing up and trying to do the right thing and then hauling them off to an immigration jail in the middle of the country where they can't access loved ones or speak to counsel. Bands of masked men apprehending people in broad daylight in the streets and hauling them off. Disappearing people to a third country, to a prison where there's a documented record of serious torture and human rights abuse.
New York Times:Masked and heavily armed, ICE agents are sent to cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles and Minneapolis to terrorize immigrant communities and brutalize people who challenge their efforts to stop and detain anyone deemed suspicious. To expand its reach, ICE greatly lowered its recruitment standards, effectively enlisting anyone who cares to sign up. To attract new officers, ICE advertises the chance to do violence to people deemed "enemies" of the United States, likening civil immigration enforcement to a war on a dangerous, alien force. The result is an agency whose agents' first recourse appears to be violence or the threat of violence.
They are executing American citizens. On January 7, 2026 an ICE agent in Minneapolis murdered an American citizen, a mother of 3, by shooting her in the face as she tried to drive away. Then the killer walked away, and our government lied and tried to gaslight us about what happened. Decent politicians condemned the murder. What did Byron Donalds have to say? Nothing.
They are executing American citizens: Part 2. On January 24, 2026 ICE agents in Minneapolis murdered an American citizen, a 37 year old ICU nurse, who was filming their activity and trying to help others. Then our government lied and tried to gaslight us about what happened.
And the list of the dead keeps growing. ICE agents — on duty and off — keep killing members of our communities, while Byron Donalds says nothing:
On December 31, 2025, an off-duty ICE officer in Northridge, Los Angeles shot and killed Keith Porter Jr., a 43-year-old U.S. citizen and father of two who was born and raised in Compton. Federal officials called it self-defense against an "active shooter," but Porter's family says he was peacefully returning home and never posed a threat — and witnesses reported only three shots, matching his autopsy and contradicting claims of an exchange of gunfire.
On July 7, 2026, an ICE officer in Houston shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old father of three and small-business owner who had lived in the U.S. for 35 years. Agents had been hunting a different white van. Harris County's medical examiner ruled his death a homicide, and his co-workers disputed ICE's claim that he used his vehicle as a weapon.
On July 13, 2026, an ICE agent in Biddeford, Maine shot and killed Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a 26-year-old Colombian father who was legally authorized to work in the U.S. and supported his wife and 3-year-old daughter by delivering food and cleaning a veterinary clinic. He was not the target of ICE's warrant — agents were looking for someone else — and were not wearing body cameras. Even Maine's Republican Senator Susan Collins urged DHS to halt non-urgent vehicle stops in the state.
If ICE can murder innocent U.S. citizens without repercussions, what could they do to you? ICE is out of control and a danger to us all - no one is safe. What's Byron Donalds going to do about it? Absolutely nothing. We deserve better.
Voted for the Unnecessary and Unpopular War in Iran
War destroys human lives, families and innocent people, causes economic ruin, and triggers immense suffering. War should always be the option of last resort.
In order to distract from the Epstein Files, Donald Trump started an illegal war of choice with Iran, and now:
We are being dog-walked by Israel, who has been trying to convince presidents to attack Iran forever, and finally found one dumb enough to do so
Pro-Israel PACs, led by AIPAC, have given Byron Donalds $77,628.
The American people don't want this war with Iran. But Byron Donalds supports this madness and voted against the War Powers Resolution that would have stopped it. Does Byron Donalds work for Israel or the people of Florida? We deserve better.
The peaceful transfer of power is the foundation of our democracy. Byron Donalds attacked it — and now he wants us to put him in charge of Florida's election system.
Hours after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, Donalds voted to throw out Arizona's electoral votes — an objection that failed 121 to 303. In the early hours of January 7 he did it again for Pennsylvania, joining an objection that failed 138 to 282. It was one of his first votes as a member of Congress.
He has never let it go. Asked point blank by Vanity Fair in July 2023 whether he believes Joe Biden is a legitimate president, Donalds answered: "I mean, me, personally? No." That was two and a half years after the votes were counted, certified, and litigated.
Now he wants to be Florida's Governor — the official who oversees the state's elections and whose Department of State certifies election results.
Donalds voted to throw out our votes. We should not let him run our elections. We deserve better.
We deserve leaders who bring people together. At a June 4, 2024 Republican outreach event in Philadelphia promoting Donald Trump's campaign, Byron Donalds told the crowd that "during Jim Crow, the Black family was together" — arguing Black families were more intact and more Black people voted conservatively during the era of legal racial segregation, before Democratic social programs.
Historians told PolitiFact the voting claim cannot be shown at all, because in the Jim Crow South "most Black people could not vote." Democratic leaders condemned the remarks: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called them "outlandish, outrageous and out-of-pocket" on the House floor, and the Congressional Black Caucus demanded Donalds apologize "for misrepresenting one of the darkest chapters in our history for his own political gain." Donalds defended himself on MSNBC, saying he was not being "nostalgic" about Jim Crow and was only making a narrow point about marriage rates.
Jim Crow was a system of segregation, disenfranchisement, and racial terror — not a model for anyone's family. We deserve better.
When did it become okay for our leaders to lie to us? Do they think we're too stupid to check? Byron Donalds has spent his career sanding down the rough edges of his own story — and the people who were there tell it differently.
In July 2024, the Florida Trident published an on-the-record interview with Bisa Hall, Donalds' first wife:
After transferring to Florida State, Donalds was arrested again — this time on a felony bribery charge. He pleaded no contest and the record was later expunged, so the only public account is his own. He told a Southwest Florida TV station a girl "offered me a thousand dollars for my debit card and my PIN number and I gave it to her," and that he repaid the bank over $7,000. Hall remembers him explaining it to her at the time as getting caught stealing from the campus bookstore and then offering money to keep it quiet.
Donalds and Hall married on June 15, 1999 — not, she says, because they were in love, but because her out-of-state tuition had become unaffordable. "We didn't get married for a romantic reason," she told the Trident. "I had a residency issue. The easiest way to fix that was to get married to a Florida resident."
It started early. When Hall first met him on campus in 1996, Donalds told her he was from Jamaica and spoke with a Jamaican accent. The next time she saw him, the accent was gone and he was from New York. He explained that he thought being Jamaican would help him stand out — and, Hall says, it worked: "There were a ton of guys from New York around, but there weren't any guys from Jamaica."
Everyone makes mistakes when they're young, and nobody should be defined by them forever. But a man who wants to run our state shouldn't be shading the record about what those mistakes actually were. We deserve better.
Hundreds of constituents packed the auditorium for nearly two hours. What they got was a congressman who defended DOGE, lectured them for being upset, had a woman escorted out by the sheriff's department, and watched a large share of the room walk out on him.
Asked what oversight he was doing on Elon Musk and DOGE — as a member of the House Oversight Committee — he said there wouldn't be any yet. "We actually have to let the DOGE actually finish its work. What they are examining right now is inefficiency in the federal system," Donalds told the crowd. Then he tried to compare Musk's operation to Barack Obama's efficiency efforts, which "prompted loud shouting from the crowd."
Holding a town hall isn't the same as listening at one. Byron Donalds' constituents came with questions about their Social Security files, their consumer protections, their kids' opportunities, and a war their tax dollars are paying for. He told them they were yelling, they were disrespectful, they weren't being heard — and then he asked to be promoted to Governor of the whole state.
A governor works for all of us, including the people who disagree with him. We deserve better.
We're all going to pay the price for this with increased rates of asthma, cancer, and premature deaths. We deserve better.
