Our late publisher of the Appalachian Observer, Ernest F. Phillips, a County Commissioner, would call such greedy government officials "glorified welfare recipients."
On the public dole: Ben Sasse leaves UF presidency with multi-million-dollar parachute
Frank CerabinoWe Floridians need to find Ben Sasse a new job.
Seriously. The freshy resigned president of the University of Florida is taking us to the cleaners. We need to get this principled conservative off the public dole.
Even though Sasse stepped down as University of Florida president in July after only 17 months on the job, he will continue to receive his annual $1 million base pay as president until February 2028.
For those keeping score at home: That’s 43 months of getting paid not to have the job you had for 17 months.
I believe here in the Free State of Florida we call that “picking yourself up by somebody else’s bootstraps.”
If you do the math: Sasse will end up being paid about $3.58 million not to be president of the university, more than double the $1.4 million in base pay he got for the time he actually did the job.
It’s not unusual for people who leave good public-sector jobs to get a bit of a going-away present, usually in the form of severance.
But not like this. Florida law says that for people paid from tax revenues and state-appropriated funds, “severance pay provided may not exceed an amount greater than 20 weeks of compensation.”
The employment contract for Sasse makes a feeble attempt at camouflaging this act of top-shelf welfare by saying that Sasse is not really gone, that he will continue to be "president emeritus, professor and external adviser to Board of Trustees Chairperson Mori Hosseini."
Oh, an “external adviser”! Yeah, that’ll tidy things up.
Hosseini is a real estate developer who functions as Gov. Ron DeSantis’ political piggybank, and the stooge behind the questionable selection of Sasse at UF in the first place.
Sasse, a Republican U.S. senator from Nebraska, whose political career had dead-ended with his vote to impeach Donald Trump, found a cushy landing spot at the University of Florida — where he was selected in an opaque process that magically made him the only finalist for the job.
Sasse’s tenure there was brief and wildly expensive. In his first year as UF president he spent $17.3 million, triple of the spending of the prior president, the Independent Florida Alligator reported.
Sasse hired former political staffers and Republican party officials for six-figure no-show jobs, handed out millions in murky consultant contracts and spent $633,000 in travel, a 20-fold increase of the annual travel spending of his predecessor, the university newspaper reported.
Sasse had no experience running a major public university, and just a few years of running a small Lutheran college in his hometown in Nebraska before becoming a U.S. senator. He abruptly stepped away from the UF presidency this summer, citing his need to devote more time to his wife, who was diagnosed with epilepsy.
Perhaps we should have expected that extracting Sasse from his UF job would be as expensive for the public university as hiring him in the first place turned out to be.
His generous employment package didn’t just have a base pay of $1 million per year. It also included an annual bump of $200,000 called a “retention payment,” an annual performance bonus of up to 15 percent of his base salary, and another annual contribution of 15 percent of his base salary to his retirement fund.
The university also paid the premiums for a life insurance policy for him with a death benefit of 2½ times his annual pay plus his retention bonus. He was also given free residence for him and his family in The Dasburg President’s House on campus, with the university picking up the expenses of liability insurance, utilities, internet service, housekeeping, home office facilities, landscaping, maintenance, and grounds keeping and security.
His contract also gave him as much as $10,000 to pay the lawyers he used to negotiate the contract with the university.
Even for a former U.S. senator, this was a sweet public-sector gig, and hardly in line with his image of a fiscal conservative always looking for people to shed the yoke of government handouts and learn the virtue in making it on your own.
More:The short, expensive, politically driven folly of Ben Sasse at the University of Florida
More:Chomp on this: Government out of the sunshine taps Nebraska senator as UF president
I’ve been looking back at some of the things the politician Sasse used to say, words that now seem oddly out of place, considering his plundering at UF.
“We should be reforming our entitlement programs to empower people,” Sasse has said.
I’ll bet that when he said that, he had no idea that he would turn out to be the guy who needed to be “empowered” to free himself from the entitlements he will be receiving from the taxpayers of Florida.
The good news is there’s an out to the annual million-dollar payments to Sasse for the next three-and-a-half years.
His deal says the payments would stop if he got a full-time job.
Bail us out, America. We’re stuck with DeSantis for the next two years but you can help us get rid of Sasse today.
Offer him a job. Please. If he bites, you’ll be doing us all a great public service.
You’ll be getting a principled conservative off seven-figure welfare while helping Florida’s flagship university get back on track.
Frank Cerabino is a news columnist with The Palm Beach Post, part of the Gannett Newspapers chain.
He knew he'd be paid to do the cultural dirty work even if he was fired. He was incentivzed to burn it all down.
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