Tallahassee, Fla. — July 7, 2026
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 grant program funding door-to-door, on-demand rides for transportation-disadvantaged Floridians, a service heavily used by adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities who cannot drive or use fixed-route buses.
Two days later, on July 1, the rides stopped.
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, oversubscribed for what it had, and eighteen days away from deploying the next year’s awards when the funding 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.
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:
| Year | Funding | What the record shows | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| FY 2024-25 | $3 million awarded | $2.73 million expensed — 91%. One project alone (the Wakulla-Leon service operated by provider iEnable) delivered 9,880 trips to 89 riders, primarily adults with I/DD, and expensed 100% of its $444,854 award. | FY 2024-25 Annual Report, Dec. 8, 2025 meeting package |
| FY 2025-26 | $6 million appropriated | 99.2% committed: $4,179,232 in awards approved June 26, 2025, and $1,770,701 more approved Dec. 8, 2025. The second round was oversubscribed. | June 26 and Dec. 8, 2025 meeting packages |
| FY 2026-27 | $6 million appropriated — then vetoed | The spring application cycle drew 24 applications requesting $11.6 million against the $6 million available — nearly double oversubscribed. Staff recommendations to deploy the full $6 million — presented by Interim Executive Director Karen Somerset at the Commission’s June 11, 2026 meeting — were made contingent on the budget. Eighteen days later, the appropriation was vetoed. | June 11, 2026 meeting package |
The Commission itself asked to keep the program: Interim Executive Director Karen Somerset reported at the September 25, 2025 meeting that the agency had submitted a legislative budget request to continue ISD funding.
The Commission’s own April 8, 2026 meeting package records an internal policy debate worth knowing about: what should count as “innovation” in a program named for it, and whether projects should face a four-year funding cap. Those are fair questions for a grant program to ask itself. But they are questions about how to run the program — the same meetings show a program fully subscribed, fully spent, and asked for at nearly twice its funding.
Which leaves the question the documents cannot answer. The Commission’s own records show it requesting the program’s continuation and recommending full deployment as late as June 11. 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.
One open question, and when it resolves
Whether the Commission formally voted on the FY 2026-27 staff recommendations at its June 11 meeting is not yet answerable from the public record — the minutes of that meeting are scheduled to publish with the September meeting package. We’ve marked that question open and will update this article when the minutes appear. (This is also a test of our own standard: what we can’t verify, we say we can’t verify.)
Who this touches
The 24 FY 2026-27 applications came from providers and communities across roughly twenty counties — this is not one town’s problem. The riders are disproportionately adults with I/DD 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 — but as of this writing, no outlet has covered the ISD veto or connected it to the riders who lost service July 1. We’ve since compiled the rest: every disability program Florida cut from this budget.
What happens next
- September 17, 2026: the first Commission meeting since the veto (Tallahassee; public comment available). The June 11 minutes publish with this package — the first official record of what the board did with the recommendations — and the Commission must publicly address 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: the Legislature let it lapse entirely in FY 2021-22, then refunded it 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.
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).
- ISD program description (Florida CTD).
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.