Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday excoriated "legacy media" for sympathizing with the scores of federal workers fired by a new department in Donald Trump's administration, but not with the thousands of employees laid off for refusing the Covid vaccine.
Media outlets are attacking the President and trying to preserve bureaucracy, DeSantis claimed at an Ocala press conference. He weighed the outcry over the potential 200,000 federal workers set to be laid off by the Elon Musk-led agency, the Department of Government Efficiency, and the 8,000 troops fired for refusing to comply with then-President Joe Biden's vaccine mandate.
"The media is very sympathetic to [the employees getting laid off by DOGE], which I would be fine with, but the legacy media was not sympathetic when people were losing their jobs in other states because they didn't want the Covid shot," DeSantis said to applause.
He pivoted to the backlash surrounding Trump's firing of six high-ranking military officials earlier this week, noting that President Barack Obama also dismissed top officials when he came into power.
"You hear bedwetting and D.C. media [saying] 'Oh my god, [Trump's] doing all this,'" he continued, defending Trump. "They have this idea that 'Oh, the President is trying to remove institutional resistance to his policies amongst the military.' The military officers have no right to indulge in institutional resistance.
"If they're not able to carry out those policies, then they should just find another line of work," DeSantis added.
According to varying estimates, DOGE could end up firing as many as 300,000 federal employees in Trump's and Musk's journey to find and cut $2 trillion in federal budget cuts. Over the weekend, Musk, a tech billionaire, sent a mass email blast to federal workers demanding they explain their work from last week or lose their jobs, sparking conflicting messages from the Trump administration.
The deadline was Monday night.
Despite backlash surrounding the mass firings, including cutting park rangers overseeing Florida's only manatee refuge, DeSantis has maintained that the Sunshine State was "DOGE before DOGE was cool." On Monday, he announced the creation of a state version of the federal agency, aimed at tackling noncompliant state universities and eliminating "obsolete" commissions.
DeSantis was also a frontrunner in pushing back against the Covid vaccine under both the Trump and Biden administrations. It was one of the key issues he used to differentiate himself from Trump during the Florida Governor's failed presidential bid.
