On June 29, 2026, Governor Ron DeSantis signed Florida’s $117.6 billion budget for fiscal year 2026-27 and vetoed roughly $810 million in individual line items. The general budget coverage noted the biggest-ticket vetoes. What no outlet has compiled is the part that matters to the families this site serves: the autism, intellectual/developmental-disability, and disability-services programs that were cut — roughly $15 million across eighteen programs.

Each is a real program that served real people, and each was struck with a single line and no published explanation. Below is the full list, sorted by amount, every entry traceable to the veto list by its line number. Where a veto title doesn’t explicitly state a disability purpose, we say so rather than assume.

The full list

* Included as likely disability-related; the veto title does not specify. ** Learning/attention disabilities, distinct from intellectual/developmental disability.

What the totals show

Counting every line above, the vetoes touching disability populations come to roughly $14.5–$15.7 million — about $9.7 million in community programs plus the $6 million transportation grant. That is a small fraction of the $810 million in total line-item vetoes, but it is concentrated among a specific kind of recipient: local nonprofits and community projects — four different Arc chapters, two autism schools, IDD housing and employment programs, assistive technology, legal aid. Each of the community projects was a member project tied to a specific House and Senate bill on the veto list, vetoed the same way hundreds of other member projects were. The ISD transportation grant, by contrast, was a trust-fund program line — not a member project.

No item-specific rationale for any of these vetoes has been published.

What was not cut (for the full picture)

• The core disability entitlement was not touched by these vetoes. Florida’s iBudget Medicaid waiver — the developmental-disability program itself — does not appear on the veto list. (For where iBudget stands in 2026, see our Florida guide.)
• At least one autism program survived the veto pen: a $3 million appropriation for the Family Initiative’s autism community center kept its funding.

If your program or your family is on this list

Vetoed programs come back through the Legislature, not the agency — and this year’s budget is Governor DeSantis’s last (he is term-limited out in January 2027, so a new governor will sign the FY 2027-28 budget). The realistic path to restoration runs through the 2027 session, which means constituent contact now, not next spring. We’ve laid out exactly who to write and what to say: what Florida families can do →

We will keep this tracker current — updating each program’s status if it is restored, refiled, or funded another way. The newsletter gets each update the day it posts. If you know of a disability-related veto we’ve missed, or a correction to any figure, tell us — this list is only as good as its accuracy.

Sources

• Official 2026 Veto List (Executive Office of the Governor) — every line number and amount above. Archived copy on file.
• Governor’s budget-signing announcement, June 29, 2026; WUSF veto coverage.

Disclosure: the author’s family was directly affected by the ISD transportation veto listed above. This tracker relies on the public record cited here. Corrections and additions: see our editorial standards or contact us. Last updated Aug. 17, 2026.

The post Every Disability Program Florida Cut From Its 2026-27 Budget appeared first on Special Needs Trust By State.

On June 29, 2026, line item 2054-1 — $6 million for the Innovative Service Development (ISD) Grant Program, which funded door-to-door rides for transportation-disadvantaged Floridians — was vetoed from the state budget. Funding ended with the fiscal year on June 30, and services have been shutting down since — ours stopped July 1. If your family used one of these services, or your loved one will someday need one, here is everything you can actually do, in order of effort.

1. Write to your own state legislators (10 minutes, highest value)

Restoration of a vetoed program happens through the Legislature. Your own representative and senator are the ones with standing to fight for it in the 2027 session — and legislators consistently say that a handful of specific, personal constituent letters outweigh a stack of form letters.

• Find your state representative: flhouse.gov/FindYourRepresentative
• Find your state senator: flsenate.gov

In Tallahassee or Leon County? This story is centered in the Big Bend, so if you’re local, your legislative delegation (public offices — contact them as a constituent) is:

• Rep. Gallop Franklin II (D, House District 8 — central and west Tallahassee, plus Gadsden County): contact form at flhouse.gov, (850) 717-5008
• Rep. Allison Tant (D, House District 9 — northeast Tallahassee and eastern Leon, plus Jefferson and Madison counties): Allison.Tant@flhouse.gov
• Sen. Corey Simon (R, Senate District 3 — all of Leon County): simon.corey.web@flsenate.gov

Everyone else: use the find-your-legislator links above — your own representative and senator are the ones with standing to act for you.

Template — make it yours by adding one paragraph about your family:

I’m a constituent and the [parent/guardian/sibling] of an adult with [disability]. On June 29, line item 2054-1 — $6 million for the Innovative Service Development Grant Program — was vetoed from the FY 2026-27 budget, cutting off funding for door-to-door disability transportation services across the state as of July 1.

The Commission for the Transportation Disadvantaged’s own records show the program spent 91% of its FY 2024-25 funds, committed 99.2% of FY 2025-26 funds, and received 24 applications requesting $11.6 million against the $6 million vetoed — nearly double oversubscribed.

[One short paragraph: who in your family rode, where the ride took them, and what your family is doing now instead.]

I’m asking you to support restoring this funding in the 2027 session, and to ask the Commission and the Governor’s office why a fully-utilized program was vetoed. I would appreciate a reply.

2. Write to the CTD Ombudsman and the Governor’s office (5 minutes each)

• CTD Ombudsman (the official channel for transportation-disadvantaged riders): CTDOmbudsman@dot.state.fl.us — the affected providers themselves have asked rider families to use this channel. Same template works.
• TD Helpline: 800-983-2435 — if writing isn’t your thing, calls are logged too.
• Governor’s office: governorron.desantis@eog.myflorida.com, the official contact page, or (850) 488-7146 — cite line item 2054-1 specifically. (Note: correspondence to the Governor’s office is a public record under Florida law.)

3. Show up (or watch): the public meetings

• September 17, 2026 (location TBA — check the CTD meetings page): the first Commission meeting since the veto — state law requires an opportunity for public comment, making it the first official venue where affected families can put their story on the record. The June 11 minutes publish with this package (the first official record of what the board did with the staff recommendations) — the first public meeting where the Commission faces a program the Legislature funded and the Governor cut.
• December 10, 2026 (location TBA): the Commission’s following meeting, same opportunity.
• Agendas and packages post at the CTD meetings page.

4. Watch the two dates that decide whether this comes back

• ~Mid-October 2026: agency budget requests for FY 2027-28 become public. If the Commission requests ISD funding again, restoration is live. (It did exactly that last year — Interim Executive Director Karen Somerset reported a $4 million legislative budget request to continue the program at the September 25, 2025 meeting.)
• The 2027 legislative session: where any restored appropriation would actually happen — which is why the letters in step 1 matter now, not next spring. Two things worth knowing: this program has come back from zero before (the Legislature let it lapse entirely in FY 2021-22, then refunded it the next year), and Gov. DeSantis is term-limited out in January 2027 — so a new governor will sign the FY 2027-28 budget that could carry it.

If you’re not in Florida

Every state runs some version of transportation for disabled adults, and every state budget can do this to it in one line. The lesson travels: know which line item funds your loved one’s ride, because programs that take years to build can end in a single budget line. Your state’s services are covered in our state guides and waiver waitlist database.

We’ll update this guide at each development — the newsletter gets each update the day it posts.

Disclosure: the author’s family used an ISD-funded service and has written to the officials listed above. Sources for every figure cited: the companion article’s document list.

The post What Florida Families Can Do About the ISD Transportation Veto appeared first on Special Needs Trust By State.

My son is 21. He has profound autism. He will never be able to drive, and he cannot navigate public transportation. For the past two years, a driver from a local provider called iEnable has picked him up at our front door, Monday through Friday, and taken him to the Leon County Schools ACE Transition Program — drivers who know him, door to door, there and back. The program is teaching him the skills that could one day make him self-sufficient — or at least let him find a job, and purpose.

The ride cost our family three dollars.

On July 1, it stopped.

Not because the van broke down, or the driver quit, or the program failed. It stopped because of a single line on page 13 of a veto list: item 2054-1, the Innovative Service Development Grant Program, $6 million — struck from Florida’s budget on June 29. The service that carried my son and 88 other riders in our corner of the state — most of them adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities, few of them with any other way to get where they were going — had, in its last completed budget year, delivered nearly 10,000 rides and spent 100 percent of its funding. I’ve laid out those records, with sources, in the companion article. This one is about what a line item looks like from inside a family.

Here is the thing I keep coming back to: the ride is the access. Without it, there is no program. Nobody vetoed the transition program. Nobody had to.

The cliff every special needs parent knows is coming

If you’re raising a younger child with a disability, here is the thing nobody tells you early enough: the school bus is a countdown clock. Federal law guarantees your child transportation to school services — until the school years end. In Florida that’s age 22. After that, there is no bus. (We now track how many students with disabilities leave school each year in every state.) There is no guaranteed anything. There is whatever your county happens to have — and a parent with car keys.

The ISD-funded service was the answer to that cliff in our community. And this is the part I tried to explain in my letters to the state, because I don’t believe it was visible when the veto decision was made: this isn’t parents rushing their kids to band practice and baseball games. These are older adults managing transportation for their adult children as well as for themselves.

What the ride actually paid for

The service gave me the peace of mind that my son was safe and where he needed to be, so that I could focus on running my business — which is what provides for him. His program and my work are on opposite sides of town. Without the ride, I cut back my work every single weekday to drive him — and the work I’m cutting is the very thing that has to provide for him after I’m gone, for the rest of his life.

That’s the trade the veto forced on the families of the 89 riders our service carried in its last completed year, and it’s why I want every reader who found this site through a trust question to see this story as connected to that one: the plan we all build — the trust, the savings, the benefits — runs on parents being able to work. A vanished $3 ride reaches all the way into that plan. And families like ours are the reason the math works for the state, too — family caregivers keeping our adult children cared for at home save Florida enormous sums compared to the alternatives. This program was part of what made that possible.

What we did, and what you can do

When the provider told rider families the funding had been vetoed, they asked us to write to the state’s transportation-disadvantaged ombudsman. I did — and to our state representative, our state senator, and the governor’s office, asking them to fight to restore the funding in the next budget and to support anything that can keep riders moving in the meantime. I don’t know yet whether any of it moves anything. The Commission that runs the program meets September 17, in Tallahassee, with public comment on the agenda, and its minutes from June should tell us more about what was about to be funded when the veto landed.

What I know is that this program’s riders are, almost by definition, the Floridians least able to show up in Tallahassee and advocate for themselves. Their families can. If yours is one of them — or if you’re a Florida family whose child will someday reach the cliff at 22 — here is exactly who to contact, what to cite, and when the public meetings are.

I started this website because I’m a parent who had to learn a complicated system the hard way, and I didn’t want other families to learn it alone. I never planned to write news. But this happened to my family, it’s happening to families across the state, and as of today no news outlet has covered it. So we will.

Update, Aug. 5, 2026: The St. Pete Catalyst has since reported on another casualty of the same veto — ISD-funded rides to cancer treatment in Pinellas County. The documents article tracks coverage as it develops.

— Randy Smith is a special needs father in Tallahassee and the publisher of SpecialNeedsTrustByState.com. His family used the ISD-funded Wakulla-Leon service for two years. Facts about the program and veto are documented in the companion article.

The post My Son Lost His Ride to His Future on July 1 appeared first on Special Needs Trust By State.

On June 29, Governor Ron DeSantis signed Florida’s $117.6 billion budget for fiscal year 2026-27 and vetoed roughly $810 million in individual line items. One of them was line item 2054-1: $6 million for the Innovative Service Development (ISD) Grant Program — the state’s only competitive grant program dedicated to launching new door-to-door, on-demand ride services for transportation-disadvantaged Floridians — services heavily used by riders with intellectual and developmental disabilities who cannot drive or use fixed-route buses.

Two days later, on July 1, the new fiscal year began without the program — and the rides began stopping. In our corner of the state, they stopped that same day.

No public explanation accompanied the individual line-item veto — the governor’s budget-signing announcement does not mention the program. What the public record does show, in the state’s own published documents, is a program that was spending what it was given, that drew requests worth nearly twice what it had, and whose next year of awards was still pending before its board. Staff funding options were published in the board’s June 11 meeting materials, eighteen days before the money disappeared.

This article lays out that record, document by document. Our family used one of these funded services for two years, and I’ve written about what the cutoff means in our house separately. Here, the documents can speak for themselves.

What the program was

The ISD Grant Program is run by Florida’s Commission for the Transportation Disadvantaged (CTD), the state agency responsible for people who, in the state’s own language, cannot obtain their own transportation due to disability, age, or income. Per the program’s official description, ISD grants fund door-to-door, on-demand and scheduled transportation projects that increase access to job training, employment, and health care — the trips that fixed-route transit can’t serve and that most adults with I/DD cannot make any other way.

Per the FY 2026-27 General Appropriations Act summary, the Legislature funded the program’s continuation at $6 million within $66.4 million in Transportation Disadvantaged Trust Fund grants: up to $750,000 per single-county project, up to $1.5 million for regional projects, a 10% local match required, and all funds required to go to direct services for transportation-disadvantaged clients.

One clarification, because it matters. The veto did not end door-to-door transportation for disabled Floridians statewide. CTD runs four grant programs, and only ISD was vetoed. The largest of the others, the Trip and Equipment Grant, is the workhorse that pays for the state’s ongoing door-to-door paratransit service, and it was not touched: CTD’s 2024 Annual Performance Report shows roughly $53 million allocated through that grant in FY 2023-24, supporting more than 1.5 million paratransit trips. What ISD uniquely did was fund the launch of new services where none existed. It is the only competitive, statewide grant program dedicated to starting them, and it is the one the Governor cut.

For riders, the cost was a few dollars a trip. For many adults with developmental disabilities — who cannot drive, cannot navigate a bus system, and cannot safely ride with strangers — it was the only transportation to a day program, a job-training site, or a doctor that did not require a parent behind the wheel.

What the state’s own records show

The Commission publishes its meeting packages — annual reports, award approvals, staff recommendations — on its public calendar. Here is the program’s recent history, drawn from those documents:

The Commission itself asked to keep the program: then-Interim Executive Director Karen Somerset reported at the September 25, 2025 meeting that the agency had submitted a $4 million legislative budget request to continue ISD funding.

The record also shows a program the Commission was actively tightening, and it is worth being straight about that. The FY 2026-27 ISD program manual sets “a strict maximum project lifetime of four years,” and staff applied that limit in the spring cycle, which is part of why they recommended less than the full $6 million. The Commission has also been working through what should count as “innovation” in a program named for it. Individual grantees have underbilled badly: Bay County was awarded $286,074 in FY 2022-23 and, per the June 11 package, provided no trips and used no funding that year, then was paid $182,540 of a $668,793 award in FY 2023-24. Those are real questions and real problems. They are also questions about how to run a program, not whether to have one, and the same records show demand well past what the program could fund.

Which leaves the question the documents cannot answer. The Commission’s own records show it requesting the program’s continuation and publishing funding options for its June 11 meeting. Eighteen days later the line was vetoed. No explanation for the line-item veto has been published, and what changed is not in the public record. This article will be updated if the governor’s office provides one.

What the Commission did on June 11

When this article first ran, we wrote that whether the Commission voted on the FY 2026-27 staff recommendations was not yet answerable from the public record, and that we would update when the minutes appeared. That was wrong, and we can answer it now. FDOT publishes video of Commission meetings, and the June 11, 2026 recording is on the same public calendar we cite above.

The Commission did not vote on the recommendations. It tabled them, deliberately, to wait for the Governor’s signature on the budget.

Chair Monica Russell said so at the top of the meeting, before public comment, so that anyone who had come for the item would know it was coming: she would ask the Commission to table the Shirley Conroy and Innovative Service Development grant recommendations “to post signature of the budget, just so we know exactly what we are working with.”

When the agenda reached the item, she repeated the reason on the record:

“The next two items are the ones that I am going to respectfully ask to table for now. We do not have a finalized budget at this point, and I want to make sure we understand the full scope of what we have or do not have before we start making these types of decisions.”

A motion followed, and a second, and a voice vote with no opposition. “So these will be tabled,” the chair said, “until we do have a finalized budget.”

Two things follow from that. The staff funding options were never presented or debated on their merits; they were published in the meeting materials and the item was set aside before discussion. And the finalized budget the Commission was waiting for is the one that arrived eighteen days later with the program’s $6 million struck out. The chair also told the room she expected to call an additional meeting once the budget was final, guessing it would be signed by June 30.

Who this touches

The 24 FY 2026-27 applications came from providers whose proposed service areas span more than thirty counties — this is not one town’s problem. The Commission’s published records do not break ISD ridership out by disability type, so we cannot tell you what share of riders program-wide have I/DD. What the records do document in detail is the Wakulla-Leon project, whose riders were primarily individuals with I/DD, and that matches what these services are built to do: reach people whose school-system transportation ended, as it does for every Florida family, when they aged out of public school. For those families the ISD-funded ride was the bridge between school and an adult life that includes work, training, and community — and the fallback, now, is aging parents driving, often by cutting the working hours that fund their child’s lifetime care.

The broader press has covered some of this budget’s disability-related vetoes — Florida Politics noted the Jonathan’s Landing ($750,000) and Connections Autism School ($1 million) vetoes. Searching Florida news outlets and the open web, we found no coverage of the ISD veto itself in the month after it was signed. On July 31, the St. Pete Catalyst reported the first local consequence to make the news: PSTA’s ISD-funded service carrying roughly 200 riders to cancer treatment at Moffitt Cancer Center, ended by the same line item. On Aug. 7, Power Broker News covered the same Pinellas cutoff, citing this article’s account of the Commission’s records. We have not found reporting that connects the veto to its statewide toll. We’ve since compiled the rest ourselves: every disability program Florida cut from this budget.

What happens next

• September 17, 2026: the next scheduled Commission meeting (location TBA — check the CTD calendar; state law requires an opportunity for public comment). The two grant items tabled on June 11 are still unresolved, and the ISD recommendations were written against an appropriation that no longer exists. It is the first scheduled public meeting where the Commission faces a program the Legislature funded and the Governor cut.
• ~Mid-October 2026: state agencies’ FY 2027-28 legislative budget requests become public — the first signal of whether ISD funding will be requested again. (Gov. DeSantis is term-limited out in January 2027, so a new governor will sign the FY 2027-28 budget.)
• December 10, 2026: the Commission’s next meeting, also with public comment.
• 2027 legislative session: the restoration fight, if there is one, happens here — and it’s worth knowing this program has come back from zero before. ISD was created with money from M-CORES, the 2019 toll-road program, and when the Legislature repealed M-CORES in 2021 it also repealed the license-tax proceeds that had fed the grant. The program went unfunded in FY 2021-22 as a result, then was refunded the following year.

If your family is affected, here is exactly who to contact and what to say — including the line-item number that makes your message specific.

We will keep covering this story at each of those dates. If you want the updates without checking back, the newsletter is the easiest way.

Updated and corrected Aug. 5, 2026: An earlier version said staff recommendations would have deployed the full $6 million; the June 11 staff recommendations presented two options, $4.28 million and $5.52 million. The county count for FY 2026-27 applications was corrected from “roughly twenty” to more than thirty. Added the St. Pete Catalyst’s July 31 coverage of the veto’s impact in Pinellas County. Aug. 17: added Power Broker News’s Aug. 7 coverage.

Updated and corrected Aug. 31, 2026: The headline previously called ISD the state’s only door-to-door disability transportation program. It is the only competitive grant program for launching new door-to-door services; the larger Trip and Equipment Grant, which funds ongoing paratransit, was not vetoed, and the article now says so explicitly. We resolved our own open question using the June 11, 2026 meeting recording: the Commission did not vote on the recommendations, it tabled them to await the Governor’s signature, and that section has been rewritten. Karen Somerset’s title was corrected from “Interim Executive Director” to “Director” for 2026 references, per the Commission’s June 11 agenda. Added staff findings that eight of the 24 applications were incomplete and ineligible, that others had reached the four-year funding limit or proposed unfunded service types, and Bay County’s underbilling history. The four-year cap is described as adopted policy rather than an open debate. Ridership by disability type is now attributed to the Wakulla-Leon project rather than the program. Absence-of-coverage claims are now stated as what our searches found. Corrected “iEnable” to “i-Enable,” and noted that the FY 2021-22 lapse followed the repeal of M-CORES.

Sources and documents

• Official 2026 Veto List — line item 2054-1, page 13 ($6,000,000). We have archived a copy.
• Governor’s budget-signing announcement, June 29, 2026; see also WUSF’s veto coverage.
• FY 2026-27 General Appropriations Act summary (Florida Association of Counties).
• CTD meeting packages — Sept. 25, 2025; Dec. 8, 2025; April 8, 2026; June 11, 2026 (primary source for all utilization figures above).
• CTD Business Meeting recording, June 11, 2026 (MyFDOT) — source for the tabling motion and the chair’s quoted remarks.
• ISD program description and FY 2026-27 ISD Grant Program Manual (Florida CTD).
• CTD 2024 Annual Performance Report — Trip and Equipment Grant allocations and paratransit trip totals.
• Florida SB 100 (2021) — repeal of M-CORES and the associated license-tax proceeds.

Disclosure: The author’s family used an ISD-funded service for two years, and the author has written to his state representative, state senator, the governor’s office, and the CTD ombudsman about this veto as a private citizen. This article relies on the public record cited above. Corrections: see our editorial standards.

The post Florida Vetoed Its Only Grant Program for New Door-to-Door Disability Rides. The State’s Own Records Show It Was Oversubscribed. appeared first on Special Needs Trust By State.