• Oversight of COVID relief money in Florida
• An audit that flagged missing monitoring
• Rep. Jared Moskowitz and his record at FDEM
• Republican challenger Scott Singer’s criticism
• Past disaster funding questions and campaign fallout
Florida’s handling of pandemic aid is back under the microscope after an audit pointed to a serious lapse in oversight during Rep. Jared Moskowitz’s time leading the state’s emergency management office. The findings have given his Republican challenger, Scott Singer, fresh ammunition as the two head into a tightly watched general election race.
According to the audit, more than $1 billion in Coronavirus Relief Fund money moved through the Florida Division of Emergency Management without the kind of monitoring federal rules expect. The report said the agency did not track subrecipients the way it should have, a failure that is now being used to question how carefully taxpayer money was managed when it mattered most.
The audit covered the 2020-2021 fiscal year and said FDEM approved $210,562,500 for 39 local government recipients one year, then sent out $1,026,225,200 to 55 locations the next. Put together, that came to roughly $1.23 billion, a huge stack of public money and exactly the kind of spending that demands tight control.
The language in the report was blunt. It said the agency did not monitor the activities of CRF subrecipients and explained that proper oversight should have included reviewing reports, checking for problems, and making sure any issues were fixed in a timely way. In plain terms, the audit described a system that should have been watching the money closely but apparently was not.
Moskowitz was not running FDEM for the entire period covered by the audit, since he left the post near the end of April 2021. Still, he served through most of the cycle in question, and Singer is not letting him off the hook for that stretch.
“When Jared Moskowitz ran a state agency, federal regulators and state auditors found that there was a gross lack of oversight of billions of dollars of taxpayer funds, a lack of reporting, a lack of review of where the funds were going,” Singer said. “And that’s unacceptable, especially with public tax dollars. But it’s not surprising.”
Singer also tied the audit to older concerns about Moskowitz’s work in disaster recovery. He pointed back to a 2017 episode involving AshBritt, a disaster-cleanup company, when Moskowitz helped renegotiate compensation with the City of Parkland after Hurricane Irma while also drawing a salary from the company.
That detail has lingered because it feeds a broader argument about judgment and public trust. For Singer, the problem is not just one audit, but a pattern that he says raises red flags about how Moskowitz handled responsibilities connected to huge sums of public money.
Moskowitz’s side pushed back, saying his work at the emergency management office was something he stood behind. He also noted that he served under Governor Ron DeSantis and pointed out that he had been reappointed by a Republican governor, which he says speaks to the quality of his disaster response work.
“As Director of FDEM, I worked directly for Governor DeSantis and his administration. Florida had one of the best COVID responses in the country,” Moskowitz said. He added that he left the agency before the report came out because he needed to be with his father, who was battling cancer.
There was also a political twist in the exchange, with Moskowitz saying Singer had once praised his disaster work. He shared messages that included compliments about the state being “in a much better place because of what you’ve done” and another note thanking him for “all of the amazing work you’ve done and all the help you’re providing to our stay [sic].”
The back-and-forth now sits inside a race that is already drawing attention because of how close it could be. Both candidates cleared their primaries, and the general election matchup is set to put the audit, the pandemic spending, and the broader question of government accountability right in the middle of the campaign. That is the kind of issue that can stick, especially when voters are staring at billions in relief money and asking who was watching the store.
