As more than $9 million in utility and utility-connected cash flooded the coffers of Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s campaign and the state Republican party he controls, his appointees to a little-known body allowed utility companies to stop disclosing information about how they are shutting off the power for thousands of struggling Florida residents.

In November 2021, Florida’s Public Service Commission (PSC) issued a memorandum allowing electric utilities to stop disclosing their shutoff data. The memorandum, which reversed the commission’s September 2020 decision to collect the data to track the pandemic’s effects on utility customers, came after DeSantis stacked the board with his appointees. The move came less than a month after commission members approved the largest electric rate hike in Florida’s history, resulting in a 20 percent increase in costs to residential ratepayers.

Now it’s impossible to know how many customers have been disconnected from their electric utilities for being unable to pay their increasing power bills. NextEra — the parent company of Florida’s largest utility, Florida Power & Light — disconnected 738,000 Floridians in 2021 and 1.1 million Americans nationwide since 2020, according to a report from Bailout Watch last month. If that disconnection rate continued, noted the report, NextEra would have shut off 1.2 million customers in 2022. But we do not know the total, because the DeSantis-appointed Florida PSC allowed the company to hide the data.