DeSantis Suing Biden Administration for Acting Against Florida’s Higher Education System

desantis biden
Alex Brandon/AP; Gage Skidmore (inset)
Hannah Knudsen

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis along with Attorney General Ashley Moody are filing a lawsuit against the Biden administration over claims it is unconstitutionally acting against Florida’s education system, the governor announced on Thursday.

“The Attorney General and I today are filing a lawsuit against the Biden administration against the Department of Education, Secretary Cardona and other plaintiffs, and we’re asking the court to find this arrangement to be unconstitutional,” he said, explaining the number of reforms Florida has enacted, including legislative reforms, in higher education.

“These accrediting agencies are not the end all be all, that we have an ability to go see different accreditors to make sure that we’re getting the proper accreditation,” he said during the press conference.

“And the reason why that’s important is because they tie all the federal money to it. … If you don’t get accredited, then they will not give any of this any of this federal aid and so who these accreditors are, nobody really knows,” he continued.

“They’re just kind of existing … and we’re supposed to genuflect without any accountability and so we recognize that that is not appropriate,” he said, adding that Florida also has it so all tenured professors must undergo review every five years “and can be let go for poor performance.”

DeSantis also said Florida has tackled Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, as people should be treated as individuals, awarded for merit and achievement. 

However, DeSantis said some of their higher education reforms are not welcomed by accreditation agencies, which “believe that they believe they know better than the people Florida.”
He explained [emphasis added]:
They believe that Florida should potentially lose student aid as a result of making these types of reforms. And so the Biden administration is seeking to crack down on the state of Florida for what we are doing and the way it works is these trade, there’s accreditors, and the Department of Education approves whoever they want to be an accreditor. And then under their theory, the creditor can serve as a veto against the entire state of Florida, that if our legislature passes, you know, reasonable reforms, governor signs it, that they somehow get a veto of that process. And I read the state and federal constitutions a lot and I don’t recall seeing that clause in either of those constitutions, and so we reject the idea that a totally unaccountable and appointed, unelected accrediting agency can trump what the state of Florida is doing and some of these things we did prior to the election and we ran on it in the election. And this was a big part of what we did.
Because of that, DeSantis, announcing the lawsuit, said his administration finds the arrangement “unconstitutional in a couple of ways.”
“First, you cannot take legislative power and delegate it to an unaccountable private body and let them administer that power without any type of checks and balances. And so we believe it violates what’s called the private non-delegation doctrine,” DeSantis said, expressing confidence that they will be right as “there’s over $100 billion in student aid every year that hinges on the decisions of these accreditation agencies.”
 “In America, you need to be accountable to somebody and right now they’re accountable to nobody. So that’s one way right reason we’re doing,” he said. “We’re also saying that that it violates the appointments clause of the Constitution.”
“If this is exercising government power effectively, then people who get appointed need to be confirmed by the Senate like any other executive appointee,” he added.

WATCH the full press conference below:

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