Danny Perez: The new disrupter

Danny Perez is not our typical Florida House speaker.

When their turn arrives, Florida’s speakers typically step humbly through the speaker’s towering office doors, calmly belying the adrenaline of power beginning to course through their minds and bodies. 

This is their moment. 

And before they begin their two years as one of the three most powerful people in state government, there is an overriding urge to leave a mark on Florida, to make history … in their names.

They usually come with a personal agenda, a short list of new legislation that will enshrine their legacies. 

You can pinpoint their agendas. Just look at the upcoming session’s bill numbers — House Bill 1, HB 3, HB 5, HB 7, all on the calendar with the speaker’s imprimatur. Dare to derail any of them, and it’s woe be to the House member: The Capitol dog house.

But Perez is different. There are no HB 1, 3, 5. In his opening-day speech for the 2025 session, the sharply suited, 37-year-old lawmaker-lawyer from Miami told House members:

“I said I would be foregoing the traditional presiding officer game of defining the work of session around a set of my own personal priorities, that this process needed to be less about ‘me’ and more about ‘we.’

“I will not find meaning for my speakership in personal priorities. The mission of my speakership is to have this House be the most engaged, vibrant and dynamic legislative chamber in the country.”

Oh, how that had the sound of great, political rhetoric.

But it has been true — except for one item on Perez’s agenda. 

Danny Perez is the first House speaker in 40 years who is actually walking the walk of fiscal conservatism — of truly doggedly fighting to rein in the Legislature’s bad habit of spending however much money Florida’s dynamic, growing economy produces in tax revenues.

Since Gov. Ron DeSantis took office in January 2019, the governor and Legislature have increased Florida’s spending 33% — from $89.3 billion to $118.6 billion. Per capita income in that same period has increased 17%.

Unlike his predecessors, Perez says “no more.” Three weeks into the regular session, Perez told his House colleagues: 

“In the past, this House has justifiably called out local governments for misspending and mismanagement … We have railed against the excesses of the Federal government. 

“But we have been reluctant to … hold state government to those same standards.” Bluntly, he told them: “ … State government has a spending problem. More importantly, we have a recurring spending problem.”

Come this month, in the extended legislative session, Perez will confront what likely will be the biggest, toughest test of his speakership: Persuading a resistant, big-spending Senate to adopting a budget that is truly less than the current budget, and, likewise, persuading a governor who has palpable contempt for the Perez-led House to accept what the Legislature adopts. 

At 9 p.m. Friday, May 30, two weeks after temporarily adjourning with no deal, Perez and Senate President Ben Albritton announced they had reached an agreement. The key piece of the deal: To cut $2.5 billion of recurring revenue available for spending. That was only half of the $5 billion Perez and the House initially sought to cut from the budget.

Perez still must fight to avoid looking like your typical blowhard politician. He has this earlier promise hanging over him: “Our budget will not only be lower than the governor’s proposed budget, it will also be lower than the budget passed by the Legislature last term. For the first time since the Great Recession, we will roll out a budget that actually spends less money than we did in the prior fiscal year.”

Perez promised: “This will be a permanent, recurring tax reduction.”

Perez’s motivation is more than fiscal conservatism. He knows fiscal danger looms.

In the state’s Long-Range Financial Outlook, state forecasters explicitly stated that if the Legislature does not rein in recurring spending now, Florida will barrel into deficits of $2.8 billion in 2026-27 and mushroom to $6.9 billion in 2027-28.

And those projections are occurring when there are plenty of signs of a slowing Florida economy. 

Population growth, the primary fuel to Florida’s economy, is slowing. Between 2015 and 2020, Florida added more than 322,000 people each year. Forecasters are projecting population growth will dip to 315,000 in 2025, drop to 302,000 in 2026, and thereafter, growth will fall to 292,000 in 2027 and continue to fall each year to 257,000 by 2030.

The residential real estate market is in a stagnating stall. Sales statewide are declining year over year, while active listings are growing. First-quarter 2025 closed sales declined 1.9% compared to 2024 and 5.6% compared to Q1 in 2023. Active listings increased 9.6% in the first quarter, while the months’ supply of inventory for sale increased 34.1%.

New-home permits issued dropped 22% in April compared to the same month in 2024. And for the first four months of the year, new-home permits issued declined 3% compared to the same period a year ago, according to the Federal Reserve Bank.

Finally, consumer confidence in Florida has declined three consecutive months. And to be sure, the turmoil over tariffs is turning into what economist Thomas Sowell says what always happens when there is high economic uncertainty: People hold on to their money. They don’t spend.

Spending 'every dime'

All of this should be sending signals to state lawmakers as they work toward adopting a new budget by June 16. 

Indeed, that’s what Perez and his House colleagues have been trying to get across to their counterparts in the Senate, who haven’t grasped the urgency for big spending cuts. You can see that in the accompanying table. In the two houses’ initial proposed budgets, the Senate proposed only a 1% cut.

From one perspective, say, compared to what happens in Congress, Floridians can gloat about the governor and state lawmakers’ handling of taxpayer money. In the 2024 legislative session, lawmakers adopted a budget that was equal to that of the previous year — $118.6 billion. No increase. 

But when you see the increases that occurred since fiscal 2019-20 (see table) and add the forecasts for deficits and the coming economic slowdown, Perez and his House colleagues make a convincing case that, to paraphrase Perez, lawmakers cannot continue to spend “every single dime of recurring revenue.”

We also have seen Perez wants to go further than cutting spending. He proposed cutting the state’s sale tax rate from 6% to 5.25%. That would have been the boldest change to Florida’s tax code since 1987, when Gov. Bob Martinez backed the ill-fated 5% sales tax on services. 

Martinez reversed course after fierce taxpayer backlash. The Legislature withdrew the services tax and instead raised the state’s sales tax rate to its current 6%. The services tax debacle essentially made Martinez a one-term Republican governor. But now, nearly 40 years later, as irony goes, Perez has run into resistance from the Republican governor and Republican Senate to cutting the sales tax rate.

In the case of the governor, DeSantis, of course, has tried to outdo Perez with his own populism — a call to eliminate Florida’s property tax. And along the way, he has taken pot shots at Perez’s proposal.

DeSantis said any bill in the special session to cut the sales tax to 5.25% would be “DOA.” And at a press conference in Orlando last month, DeSantis said: “I want Canadian tourists and Brazilian tourists subsidizing the state and make it so Florida residents pay less taxes.”

Perez responded by forming a Select Committee on Property Taxes, charged with presenting a constitutional amendment for 2026. But he also needled the governor and his proposal: “Unfortunately, the governor has not yet come forward with any specific answers” to how local governments would pay for police, fire and infrastructure. 

Clearly, there would have to be an increase in taxes elsewhere.

What’s more, Perez told us, the governor “is also working on flawed assumptions about who pays sales taxes — only about 16% of sales taxes are paid by tourists.” 

Relations between Perez and DeSantis have continued to deteriorate. “The governor isn’t willing to have a conversation, period,” Perez told reporters after the Senate reneged on a budget a deal at end of the regular session. “There’s no difference between him and any seventh grader in Miami-Dade County right now who tweets.”

As that rift festers, there is also the split between Perez and Senate President Albritton, R-Wauchula. Perez is still smarting over Albritton reneging on a budget deal they reached on Day 60 of the regular session. When Albritton took the deal back to his fellow Senate leaders, they balked, sending Albritton back to Perez to pull out.

 “I have very strong feelings about the Senate president’s actions,” Perez said in a memo to House members May 13. “As presiding officers, as elected officials, our word is our bond.”

We will see in the next two weeks whether Perez and Albritton and the House and Senate have kissed and made up.

Who will hold sway?

Perez isn’t going to get his cut in the sales tax rate, nor the $5 billion cut in the budget the House initially proposed. He did get $2.5 billion in recurring revenues to be excluded from the budget (see box), which curtails at least some spending.

What’s left is whether the final budget will be less then it is and the details of how that total will be allocated. This is the standard horse trading that goes on at the end of every session: “You give us this, we’ll give you that.”

At the same time, lingering in the background is Albritton’s Rural Renaissance bill — his pet legislation to spend money to help boost rural counties. At the opening day of the session, Albritton had placed on each senator’s desk a coin signifying this signature legislation. 

After making its way through the session, it totaled $287 million — $157 million in recurring expenses and $130 million in nonrecurring expenses.

When the regular session ended, Albritton’s bill was sitting in messages in the House, waiting for approval or rejection. Perez told us “it will not be heard or brought up” in the extended session. You can be sure that will fester with Albritton.

By the time the two sides finally agree on a final budget number, we will see how much Perez’s persuasiveness holds sway. Whether he can put a stop to  spending “every dime” that comes in; or if lawmakers stick with the status quo opposite. That approach also includes the governor and Legislature’s annual ruse and gimmick of selected sales tax holidays. Rather than cut everyone’s taxes, they pick winners and losers and then tout their fiscal magnanimity.

Taxpayers should hope for the Perez approach. 

Regardless of who prevails, however, then there will be the governor. When the budget and other bills are sent to him, we will see whether he will wield a fiery penal pen, cutting and slashing anything associated with Speaker Perez, the rare lawmaker who dared to be a real fiscal conservative.