How A Revisionist Tax Focus Is Affecting Us

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Florida TaxWatch (FTW) has released a list of Ten Taxpayer Priorities for the 2026 Legislative Session. What areas in the FL statewide tax focus are relevant to citizens in other US states and around the world? What is hidden in eloquent taxation language? How will these proposals affect initiatives for clean energy and climate action?

Let’s investigate these questions together.

A New Tax Focus and its Effect on Fair and Equitable Systems

A much talked-about proposal is to eliminate or reduce the property tax burden on FL homeowners. On first glance to us who reside in FL, that seems great — hey, who doesn’t want to pay fewer taxes? But, on a more granular level, it’s important to ask, how is or is not shifting tax burden beneficial and equitable to all taxpayers? The tax reform proposal comes as federal changes to the corporate income tax are underway. How will local towns, cities, and counties provide the services they currently do if locals don’t pay homeowner taxes?

Take Broward County, where property taxes account for 48% of a city’s general fund on average. A property tax reduction would cause most cities there to drastically reduce services. The largest portion of every municipality’s general fund is spent on public safety, which includes police, fire, and EMS services. In Broward, public safety accounts of cities represent an average of 55% of their general fund. The property tax bills House legislators are considering would bar local government from reducing funding for law enforcement, meaning that budget cuts would have to come from other departments — like parks and recreation and public works.

On a nation-wide level, we already know how federal tax cuts hurt working and low-income people. To help offset the cost of its nearly $4 trillion in regressive tax cuts, the House Republican reconciliation bill included $546 billion in cuts to tax credits and other programs designed to promote clean energy. Those cuts — $336 billion in clean energy tax credits, $199 billion for efforts to adopt less polluting vehicles, and over $11 billion in funding for climate-related programs enacted in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) — have raised households’ energy costs, undermined economic opportunity in struggling communities, and hastened climate change, as projected by Rachel Jacobson and Mikaela Tajo with the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.

People with low incomes and people of color, who were already most burdened by pollution, disinvestment, and climate impacts, have been disproportionately harmed. It’s important to scrutinize each tax focus for its affects on the most vulnerable.

Beware Calls for Government Efficiency

FTWs report advocates for the FL governor’s annual budget to include explicit efficiency and cost-saving items to help make government efficiency business as usual. It’s important to do another deep dig here. In February 2025, FL Governor DeSantis signed an executive order to form what he’s calling a “DOGE Task Force” to look at state spending and efficiency as part of a new tax focus.

Described as a mechanism to eliminate “bureaucratic bloat” and modernize the state government “to best serve the people of Florida in the years ahead,” the governor said the task force would operate similarly to Elon Musk’s federal DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE? Arrgghh!

The FL version will expire on March 31, 2026, and has used AI to examine operations, payments, and contracts in the government and make sure tax dollars are used efficiently, DeSantis said. A major component of the initiative was to subject universities to independent review and audit to study efficiency and effectiveness of operations and financing, he added.

Yet weather patterns are shifting as the global climate warms, and scientists are working to understand those changes. Academic research done at the university level is crucial because it is the first step toward even more accurate weather forecasts. Cuts made by the Trump administration to federal climate research are threatening that work, and the same is happening in FL and in other states where colleges and universities are being forced to pay bribes or lose funding.

Shifting resources as a result of tax breaks for billionaires have decimated many important climate resilience federal programs. Cuts by DOGE led to hundreds of vacancies at National Weather Service offices across the country in 2025 (though, the administration recognized the travesty, reversed course, and allowed that agency to refill many of those positions). In December 2025, the White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought announced plans to break up the National Center for Atmospheric Research, saying in a post on X that the center was undergoing a “comprehensive review.” The administration has cut significant staffing and implemented budget cuts to NASA’s earth science programs and to the National Science Foundation (NSF), which funds climate work by researchers at universities and other institutions.

Calls for collective action at universities are becoming more profound as a result.

Protect the Water System and Environmental Assets

Water is perhaps the world’s most valuable resource. Clean water is vital to our health, communities, and economy. Streams and wetlands provide many benefits by trapping floodwaters, recharging groundwater supplies, filtering pollution, and providing habitat for fish and wildlife. People depend on clean water sources for their health: about 117 million US residents — one in three people – get drinking water from streams that are vulnerable to pollution.

A tax focus doesn’t always promote the healthiest of water systems and environmental assets. Hydrologist Thomas Boving, chair of the University of Rhode Island Department of Geosciences, explains why we have to rethink our relationship with water.

“We have to be cognizant of the limitations of our natural environment and think about the future — that should be on everyone’s minds. We need to change our attitudes toward water. It is a finite resource; high-quality water has a value that must be accounted for properly. And if that means water costs more in the future, well, maybe that incentives us to use less of what we have — and to use it more wisely.”

Florida TaxWatch’s research promotes a state tax focus redirection that lends itself to the creation of a five-year water projects work program, the conversion of septic to sewer, and better processes to select which local water projects are selected for state funding. Clearly, eliminating effluent from the sanitation ecosystem means fewer people would get sick every year, and the environment would suffer fewer impacts. While not sexy, these kinds of tax focus can make water systems much safer and have direct and indirect effects on the environment.

The Need for a New Tax Focus

Several other interrelated areas of tax focus can enhance clean energy and environmental protections.

With legislative changes that helped to stabilize FL’s insurance market, FTW continues to pursue efforts to increase competition, reduce the size of the state-sponsored property insurance corporation, and expand programs to harden homes, including condos. The gist, the FTW concludes, is that resiliency requires valid, transparent public-private partnerships.

Manufacturing comprises a significant economic impact, and it’s important to deploy new technologies, enhance cybersecurity infrastructure, and bolster workforce training for small manufacturers. To do so, according to the FTW, it takes more consumer awareness, market exposure, and entrepreneurship for manufactured products. Public developers undertake capital investment and manage the resulting assets on behalf of the public, like pursuing renewable energy infrastructure. While they can include some project financing, public developers are more on-the-ground consultants that assist with project development and planning, legalities, workforce enhancement, procurement, construction, operations, maintenance, portfolio management, and even service delivery.

When Al Gore lost his bid for the US presidency because the US Supreme Court intervened due to hanging chad issues in Florida (that intervention violated the Fourteenth Amendment, by the way, due to using disparate vote-counting procedures in different counties), he conceded with grace and dignity.  Why are we ending the wind farms that are now being built on the coast of the United States?” David Rubenstein asked Gore during a conversation at Bloomberg House in Davos this week. Gore answered promptly: “Because Trump is insane.”

Solar and wind are the cheapest forms of electricity, Gore said. “Renewable is taking over” in powering the ongoing electrification of economies, so “we really don’t have any choice about this,” he added. Solar power installations are exactly the type of public-private partnerships that states and federal agencies should be pursuing, not the ridiculous policy rants from Trump this week in Davos — “The Green New Scam: windmills all over the place, destroy your land.” Ugh.

Resources

• “Al Gore says it’s ‘insane’ of Trump to fight offshore wind power.” January 20, 2026.
• “Bollinger calls for universities to take ‘collective action’ against Trump administration in first post-presidency Spectator interview.” Sydney Lee. Columbia Daily Spectator. January 21, 2026.
• “Cuts to climate, energy funding in House bill would mean higher costs, fewer jobs, poorer health.” Rachel Jacobson and Mikaela Tajo. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. June 10, 2025.
• “Davos 2026: Special Address by Donald J Trump, President of the United States of America.” World Economic Forum. January 21, 2026.
• “DeSantis creating ‘DOGE Task Force’ to examine Florida spending, efficiency.” NBC6. February 24, 2025.
• “Florida TaxWatch announces 2026 taxpayer priorities, provides independent research.” January 8, 2026. Lake Okeechobee News.
• “How cuts to federal climate funds could threaten polar vortex research.” Rebecca Hersher. NPR. January 23, 2026.
• “Report warns of ‘dramatic’ impact of proposed property tax reforms in Broward.” Carlton Gillespie. WLRN Public Media. November 18, 2025.
• “US clean energy investments: 2025 Quarter 3 analysis.” Clean Air Task Force. December 22, 2025.