DeSantis Blocked a Pro-Marijuana Republican From Florida’s CFO Job

Gov. Ron DeSantis named Sen. Blaise Ingoglia Florida’s chief financial officer on July 16, 2025, and used a cannabis vote to explain who did not get the job. He said Sen. Joe Gruters, already backed by Donald Trump for the 2026 race, had sided with Trulieve on the 2024 recreational marijuana amendment and could not stand on that Tampa stage.

The pick filled a Cabinet seat that had sat empty after Jimmy Patronis left for Congress. It also told every Florida Republican that a yes on adult-use weed can still end a statewide appointment, even when the polls and the president point the other way.

DeSantis Made a Cannabis Vote the Dealbreaker

DeSantis had a ready list when reporters asked why he skipped the Trump-endorsed senator. He said Gruters had taken “major positions that are totally contrary from what our voter base wants to do,” and he put the 2024 cannabis fight in that pile next to guns, unions, and an immigration bill he branded as amnesty.

The cannabis line was the one built for a camera. DeSantis named a company, a failed ballot measure, and a party heresy in a single breath, and he tied it to the voters who sent him to Tallahassee.

Gruters sided with the mega-weed company Trulieve and was joining with liberal Democrats to try to do it, so his record is contrary to what we’ve told the voters what we would do.

Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida, in Tampa on July 16, 2025

He went further on the immigration piece, which is a different bill from the cannabis fight and gets mixed in because he mixed them. If Ingoglia had backed the Perez-Gruters “amnesty” measure, DeSantis said, “He would not be standing on this stage today.” House Speaker Daniel Perez was the other name on that immigration file. The governor said even a tap on the shoulder from George Washington would not have moved him to appoint Gruters.

THE RECORD DESANTIS READ OUT

• Cannabis, 2024: Gruters backed the recreational marijuana amendment and, in the governor’s telling, Trulieve.
• Guns, 2018: Gruters voted for the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act, which raised the long-gun age to 21, added a three-day wait, and created a red-flag process; Ingoglia opposed it.
• Unions, 2023: Gruters opposed a bill that cut deep into Florida’s public-sector unions.
• Immigration bill: DeSantis called the Perez-Gruters measure amnesty and said Ingoglia would have been disqualified for supporting it.

The gun and union votes are old Tallahassee fights. Naming Trulieve put a licensed marijuana company on a statewide disqualifier list in public, which is the part cannabis operators actually have to live with.

A Spring Hill Homebuilder Now Signs the State’s Checks

Ingoglia is a New York-born homebuilder who moved to Spring Hill, about 50 miles north of Tampa, in the mid-1990s. He won a Florida House seat in 2014 and ran the Republican Party of Florida from 2015 to 2019 while he was still in that chamber. He reached the Senate in 2022 and became one of DeSantis’s closest votes.

He told the Tampa crowd he had already talked to the governor about a higher-office run, and that DeSantis had guessed it would be the CFO job. He pitched himself as a spending hawk who will “call out wasteful spending, whether it was Democrats or Republicans,” and he promised to work “hand and glove” on homestead property-tax relief.

Insurance was the other half of the stump speech, and it is the half that reaches shops, farms, and clinics. “If an insurance company does not do what they say they are going to do and contractually obligated to do, I am going to call you out,” Ingoglia said. Fentrice Driskell, then the House Democratic leader, answered that Floridians needed someone who would actually make coverage cheaper, and that DeSantis had picked “a Tallahassee politician more loyal to him than to the people.”

What the Florida CFO Can Touch

Florida’s chief financial officer is one of three Cabinet jobs, alongside the attorney general and the agriculture commissioner, and it goes before voters every four years. The pay is $140,000 a year. The holder runs the Department of Financial Services, which the office says covers