By Dan Christensen, FloridaBulldog.org
A year later, the stink from Ben Sasse’s spending scandal during his 541-day tenure as president of the University of Florida hasn’t gone away.
Following up on shocking findings by student journalists at The Independent Florida Alligator, the university’s auditor general in February released its operational audit of Sasse’s “expenses and selected activities” that found apparently both unnecessary and unreasonable spending and lax university controls over the president’s spending.
The 2023-2024 fiscal year expenses of the president’s office totaled $14.8 million, “which was $6.2 million or 72 percent more” than the office’s expenses the year before, the audit found.
Most of that spending was “driven by lucrative contracts with big-name consulting firms and high-salaried, remote positions for Sasse’s former U.S. Senate staff and Republican officials,” the Alligator reported. It also included things like hundreds of thousands of dollars for flights on private jets and $1.3 million for catering events, with one holiday party featuring a $38,000 sushi bar and another a $7,000 liquor tab.
Sasse, a Nebraska Republican, quit the Senate on Jan. 8, 2023 to take the helm of the University of Florida one month later. He quit the university on July 31, 2024 citing his wife’s ill health. He’s since denied that any “inappropriate spending” occurred while he was UF’s president.
Today, as the university continues to struggle to find a permanent replacement, Sasse has ready access to a pile of cash he could use to help make whole the university he continues to work at as “president emeritus and professor” – a place he affectionately calls “the best dang public university in America.” He could do it out of the kindness of his heart, and it wouldn’t cost him a nickel.
How?
SASSE CAMPAIGN DOLLARS
While Sasse may be gone from the Senate for more than two years, his campaign committee lives on. Federal election records show Ben Sasse for U.S. Senate is currently stuffed with $2,468,153.02. And he controls it.
As Florida Bulldog has noted before, Sasse also controls his old leadership PAC, cleverly named Sensible American Solutions Supporting Everyone, which has $119,570.32.
Campaign funds, of course, cannot be used to pay personal expenses. To help prevent that, the Federal Election Commission advises candidates to wind down or convert their former campaign committees to political action committees within two years of leaving office. Sasse, like most other ex-candidates, has ignored that guidance.
The law offers options to dispose of leftover campaign funds. Sasse could refund to donors or keep the cash for future election campaigns. He could contribute to federal, state and local candidates subject to dollar limits. He could give unlimited amounts to the federal and state Republican parties. He could also give unlimited amounts to Super PACS or dark money 501(c)(4) organizations.
But Sasse could also donate to charities like the University of Florida Foundation, which was founded in 1934 “to strengthen, benefit and assist” it.
“As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization (Tax ID #59-0974739) and an institutionally related foundation, we help provide revenue through private resources and serve as a philanthropic and entrepreneurial partner to the university,” its website says. “The UF Foundation is essential to the financial sustainability, institutional integrity and educational excellence of the university, fueling UF’s land-grant mandate of serving the public good via research, education and public engagement.”
Significant controversy accompanied the student newspaper’s exposure of Sasse’s spending spree – to include calls by Gov. Ron DeSantis and then-state Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis for an investigation into Sasse’s apparent “exorbitant spending” and the issuance of new rules by the Board of Trustees to tighten the president’s spending practices – and the audit’s findings.
Still, there has been no indication that UF or the board of trustees will seek to recover losses by suing Sasse for mismanaging university funds. Instead, following the audit’s release in February, the Alligator reported that the school released a seven-page memo by Interim General Counsel Ryan Fuller in which it “acknowledged some wrongdoing but defended itself.”
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