Republican Senate President Wilton Simpson wants to be the next Florida agriculture commissioner, and he is using his power over the $105 billion state budget to give the agency a gift: $331 million in new spending. But it also comes with a catch: It can’t be spent until after the election. The money — $300 million for land acquisition, plus aerial drones, agriculture promotion and new jobs — must be held in reserve and not used by Nikki Fried, the current agriculture commissioner who is a Democratic candidate for governor.

Few government contractors could orchestrate getting the $7.5 million compensation package the head of the Florida Coalition Against Domestic Violence managed to obtain for three years of work, but Tiffany Carr did it by leveraging connections.

The largest share of Florida's budget is outsourced to contractors who also write checks to lawmakers. It's a trend that has grown exponentially in the past two decades as governors and legislators have steered a greater share of the state’s budget to outside vendors.

The law that allowed millionaire former Gov. Rick Scott to create a blind trust to shield his investments from public disclosure was quietly wiped from the books in June by his successor, Gov. Ron DeSantis.

The former state legislator and Uber driver Gov. Rick Scott named to regulate the state’s utilities used his clout to block efforts to put a measure on the 2014 ballot to make it easier for businesses to install solar panels — the same month he partied with a Duke Energy lobbyist — and routinely used his political committee to finance daily meals and expenses.

Before he ran for governor, Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam steered $1.8 million to his political consultant, raising legal issues about whether the report is in compliance with state campaign finance law that requires all major expenditures to be reported, and federal tax law, which requires that political committees disclose the campaigns for which they are operating.

In the latest election cycle, dozens of Florida legislators raked in $6 million in special-interest campaign money and spent a good deal of it on themselves for meals, rental cars, plane trips and hotels. Some lawmakers are feeding at the trough of contributors, enjoying expensive dinners at upscale restaurants with donors’ money at a time when one in 10 Floridians are on food stamps. Others are churning cash from one political committee to another, sing it to finance direct contributions and attack ads for other candidates, thereby strengthening their own clout in a virtually untraceable shell game.

We found the only recorded payment against the Florida Legislature for a sexual harassment claim and it became the precedent for a settlement signed in December 2018.

Gov. Rick Scott's promise that private prisons would save money have never materialized, according to audits done by state legislator and offered exclusively to the Miami Herald. We use the story as a way to give readers another window into the political influence of Florida's private prison industry.

The head of the state's environmental regulatory agency and his wife run a political consulting business on the side, making money off many of the same people who need Gov. Rick Scott's help.

On deadline reporting of the release of the Senate investigation into sexual harassment allegations against one of Florida's most powerful politicians.

In an exclusive report, we were the first to reveal documents that detailed the Republican effort to circumvent Florida's new redistricting laws and create Republican-leaning maps.

I anchored a deep look into how sex has been used as a tool and a weapon for the politically powerful in Florida’s capital city.

After plotting the key decision points related to the struggle to clean polluted water from the Florida Everglades, a pattern emerged. It became this story.

After a landmark court ruling that threw out Florida's congressional redistricting map, we peeled back the evidence in an exclusive report to show how the plaintiffs figured out that Republican operatives had fixed the maps to favor their candidates.