Florida's Ron DeSantis and teacher pensions.

And I thought things were bad in Illinois.

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Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis is Trump without the outward signs of crazy.

If the law finally and very unlikely catches up with Trump, Governor DeSantis stands ready and willing to take Trump’s place in the White House in 2024.

A lot of what DeSantis does and says gets national publicity as a result.

That is not so true about what he’s up to with teacher pensions.

Naturally, I have been looking into it.

It is not unusual for Illinois public school teachers to move to Florida when they retire. They take their Illinois teacher pension with them when they do.

But Florida teachers have their own teacher pension system.

The pension plan that provides retirement benefits to over one million Florida teachers and state and local government workers has over $36 billion in public pension debt.

While this is far smaller than Illinois, it is also typical of public pensions across the country which rarely are fully funded.

It is also important to remember that Illinois has a constitutional pension protection clause, which Florida and most other states do not.

Yet, if nothing is done to address this debt and the pension system’s rising costs, Florida will struggle to deliver the pension benefits that workers are counting on.

And Florida’s pension problem is rapidly getting worse. In just the last few years, the Florida Retirement System (FRS) has added $6 billion in unfunded liabilities.

Twenty years ago, FRS had a surplus of $13.5 billion in funds for retirement benefits and was 115 percent funded.

This problem has been largely created by years of inadequate plan contributions on the part of the state.

And then to add to the problem there is the what pension expert Edward Siedle reports in Forbes.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently proposed that his state’s pension system work with pensions in other Republican-controlled states like Texas to push back against activist-led environmental, social and governance—or ESG—initiatives at corporate shareholder meetings. With assets of nearly $6 trillion, U.S. state and local public pensions have often been a powerful force helping activists pursue ESG issues on corporate ballots but, since they are rarely the largest investors in U.S. publicly traded companies, their influence is limited.

DeSantis wants Republican-controlled state pensions to vote together as a bloc seemingly to make a political statement—regardless of the investment merits of such ESG proposals and whether pension participants may support them.

Florida’s state pension has a terrible governance structure. DeSantis is one of only three trustees who oversee the pension.

It is in sharp contrast to Illinois’ pension board of trustees where the governor is only allowed to appoint some members while active and retired pension members elect their own representatives to the board.

So DeSantis has an extraordinary amount of power in using Florida teacher pensions for his own reactionary political purposes.

Those political purposes have little in common with preserving the retirement benefits of Florida teachers.