State DEO chief Lawson resigns
Gov. DeSantis removed him earlier from overseeing jobless system.
Ken Lawson, Florida Department of Economic Opportunity chief, resigned Monday, making official what had been implied in April when Gov. Ron DeSantis removed him from overseeing the state’s beleaguered unemployment system.
Lawson said in his resignation letter he was leaving his DEO position in “the spirit of turning the page and moving forward.”
The resignation is effective at the end of the business day on Tuesday.
Lawson previously had served as executive director of Visit Florida, the state’s public-private tourism marketing group, and the head of the state Department of Business and Professional Regulation.
Lawson came under fire in March and April as the state was inundated with unemployment requests since the coronavirus pandemic began.
The state heard weeks of complaints that signing up through the CONNECT unemployment system was slow and cumbersome, and by mid-April it had only processed only 33,623 of an estimated 850,000 new applications.
DeSantis has blamed his predecessor, now-U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, and vendor Deloitte Consulting LLP for the embattled system, which he has called a ”jalopy” that was not built to handle an economic downturn.
Yet, he stripped Lawson of his duties overseeing the system on April 15, while still keeping him as head of DEO.
DeSantis specifically cited his request to waive requirements to seek work every two weeks, which he said Lawson did not implement.
“I needed to do an executive order because the Labor
Department has said, ‘this can be waived,’ ” DeSantis said on April 16. “The agency didn’t do it. So I had to force their hand to do it. And I think that that’ll make things move a little bit smoother.”
Unemployment system duties were transferred in April to Management Services director Jonathan Satter.
The governor’s office had not announced Lawson’s replacement DEO by Monday afternoon.
State Rep. Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando, one of Lawson’s harshest critics, said the move hadn’t changed anything at the department.
“We haven’t seen Ken Lawson or Secretary Satter in months — as far as I’m concerned, he wasn’t even at DEO anymore,” Eskamani said. “Meanwhile, we continue to see new unemployment claims come our way, including from Floridians who haven’t seen a dime and others who are missing weeks of back pay.”
Florida has one of the lowest weekly benefits in the nation at $275, and the federal $600-a-week benefit from the CARES Act ended in late July. The Republican-led Senate has not taken up a Democratic House bill renewing the program.
DeSantis said last week the state would sign up for the plan outlined under President Trump’s controversial executive order creating a joint statefederal program to provide $300 from the federal government, by diverting funds from other sources. DeSantis did not mention the additional $100 states can provide as part of the program.
But Trump’s plan caught federal and state agencies by surprise, DeSantis said, and while 32 states have been approved for the program only two, Texas and Arizona, have begun issuing the funds.
“When the executive order came down no one was anticipating that,” DeSantis said last week. “We’ve been working through that.”