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A few months before Florida’s public healthcare agency launched an ad campaign to stop Florida voters from overturning the state’s near-total abortion ban, state lawmakers in Tallahassee quietly gave the agency $1 million in taxpayer money to spend on “marketing.”

Lawmakers slipped the money into the state budget under a misleading line item that gave no hint of how it could be used. They did so at the request of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration, where anti-abortion senior officials are scurrying to stop Amendment 4 — a proposed constitutional amendment on the ballot this fall that would undo a statewide abortion ban and limit further government interference with abortion.

Administration officials have taken increasingly aggressive actions to derail Amendment 4, which polls show has broad and bipartisan support from voters. They have even sent state police to interrogate some of the 1 million Floridians who signed petitions in support of the ballot measure.

Their tactics also now include a taxpayer-funded advertising campaign, launched last week by the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration, aimed at weakening support for Amendment 4.

The campaign features a television commercial that makes misleading claims about Florida’s statewide abortion ban, which prohibits nearly all abortions after six weeks of pregnancy — before most women even realize they are pregnant. Florida’s ban, which went into effect about four months ago, is one of the strictest abortion bans in the nation.

For instance, the 30-second spot suggests that abortion is still readily available in Florida to patients who are the victims of crime or whose lives are endangered by their pregnancy — even though those exceptions are so narrow and restrictive as to be meaningless for many. Patients have already reported terrifying stories of spending three months carrying a dead fetus in their womb or suffering severe blood loss because they were forced to give birth to a fetus with no chance of survival.

The television ad then directs viewers to a state website that explicitly attacks Amendment 4. “Amendment 4 threatens women’s safety,” the website screams in angry red letters.

DeSantis has defended his administration’s actions against Amendment 4, likening the advertising to apolitical public awareness campaigns such as those that discourage drunk driving or promote seatbelt use.

“Everything’s above board,” DeSantis told reporters Monday in Miami Lakes. “It is not electioneering…It’s not weighing in on any particular measure, whether you should vote for or against something.”

The second-term Republican governor and failed presidential candidate declined to specify how his healthcare agency is paying for the campaign, beyond vaguely alluding to “a wide variety of pots of money that are used for public service announcements.”

But records show that DeSantis got the Republican-controlled Florida Legislature to give him a likely source of funding earlier this year.

In late February, near the end of the Legislature’s annual lawmaking session, Republican leaders in Tallahassee agreed to give $1 million to the Agency for Health Care Administration to spend on “marketing and outreach” of the state’s Florida Health Finder website.

That’s a public website that is supposed to be a neutral resource for Floridians — one that empowers people to comparison shop for healthcare services, allowing them to review the performance records of providers and find the best prices for procedures.

But AHCA has turned the site into the hub of its campaign against Amendment 4. The agency’s television ads direct viewers to a webpage housed on the Health Finder site, while the page itself delves into explicitly political details — like listing organizations that have made financial contributions in support of Amendment 4.

The money to market the website was buried deep inside Florida’s $116.5 billion budget.

There’s no specific mention of it all in the 523-page state spending plan. It only briefly surfaced during secretive negotiations near the end of session, where lawmakers swap lengthy budget spreadsheets back and forth in meetings that typically end in a matter of minutes. And even then, it appeared under a line item identified only as “Health Care Data Transparency” that gave no indication that the money was for advertising.

You have to dig through dense budget documents posted on an obscure website to learn that the $1 million was requested by the DeSantis administration in order to promote “website enhancements” on the Florida Health Finder site.

Officials at the Agency for Health Care Administration have also been careful to frame their campaign against Amendment 4 in a way that could justify being funded by a budget earmark ostensibly for “Health Care Data Transparency.”

“Part of the Agency’s mission is to provide information and transparency to Floridians on the quality of care they receive,” the agency said in a written statement provided to Nate Monroe, a columnist at the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville. “Our new transparency page serves to educate Floridians on the state’s current abortion laws and provide information on a proposed policy change that would impact care across the state.”