Florida's DOGE kicks off with audit of Broward County spending, Gov. DeSantis says
DeSantis said reviews by his Office of Policy and Budget and Ingoglia's Department of Financial Services will focus on governments that have "refused" to comply with state "Department of Government Efficiency" efforts, which were announced in February.
The reviews also are tied to DeSantis' effort to get the Legislature to put a proposed constitutional amendment on the 2026 ballot to lower property taxes.
State auditors will be in Broward County and Gainesville starting July 31, DeSantis said. The two local governments were advised Monday night about the announcement.
According to the Florida governor, Broward local government spending just doesn't add up.
"Their county government has increased property tax burdens by the tune of $450 million, in addition to ad valorem collections, that's an increase of close to 50% just since 2020, but yet the population of Broward has barely grown at all, less than 5%," he said.
The governor said the county is spending as if the money belongs to someone else.
"I think it was, was it $800,000 for the Rose Bowl? They did a float in the Rose Bowl. The county administrator here makes almost half a million dollars a year. So there's a lot of things that really deserve scrutiny," he said.
DeSantis said Broward is among communities that have drawn complaints since the state announced its DOGE efforts, with others being in places such as Hillsborough County, Manatee County, Northeast Florida and South Florida.
"In particular, there's a couple sheriff's departments across the state that people find concerns about," DeSantis said.
"I find it interesting that the two counties he chosen to audit first are two bright blue counties, but I'm sure that's merely a coincidence," said Geller.
He said the state's numbers are off and explained that a large amount of money goes toward the airport, seaport and public safety.
Geller also said recently passed legislation is also causing Broward to spend more.
"They passed a law saying if there's homeless people, you have to remove them, but they didn't give us any money to do that; the county's having to do that. So, the legislature keeps passing laws that are costing us money and then complaining that we have to spend money!"
"We've given them everything they've asked for. They said, 'Well, you didn't pass a resolution telling us you support DOGE.' I don't support it. I'm not grateful they're planning on giving the county a colonoscopy, but we will follow the law."
Ingoglia, who was sworn-in as CFO on Monday, said they're going to begin auditing municipalities and agencies with a team on the ground and using artificial intelligence.
If the municipalities and agencies don't comply, DeSantis said not only will the state withhold funding, there will also be fines.
"For example, if we send a letter to a city and say, you know, provide us information on these 100 things, and they don't do it, then each individual item would be a daily fine of $1,000, so that'd be $100,000 a day," he said.
The governor said they are starting with areas where they've gotten a lot of complaints and little compliance.
So where does Miami-Dade County stand?
"I don't think they fully got on board, but we do have some of the commissioners that are helping on that. So I would say that they've been better than some, but not good enough. So, I think it's very possible that you'll see an announcement on Miami-Dade within the next couple weeks," DeSantis said.
DeSantis said Ingoglia, a former state congressman who was sworn in as CFO on Monday, will make his top priority auditing local government spending.
In addition to local government audits, Ingoglia said he will focus on ensuring insurance companies follow requirements.
"If they're slowing stuff, we're going to have conversations with them," Ingoglia said. "I'm not going to sit back. I'm not going to allow anyone to game the system, whether it is on one side or the other side, whether it is trial attorneys gaming the system or insurance companies gaming the system."
Critics have accused some property insurers of not properly paying claims and have raised questions about carriers sending money to shareholders and affiliated companies while seeking rate increases.
In his remarks during Monday's ceremony, Ingoglia called the appointment to the Cabinet post an "honor that has been bestowed upon me."
This report includes information from the News Service of Florida.
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Forbes
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When Apparel Is Resistance: The Historic Style Of Movements For Change
Martin Luther King III speaks at the 2020 'Commitment March: Get Your Knee Off Our Necks,' at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 2020 in Washington, DC, on on the 57th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s March on Washington, and his 'I Have A Dream' speech in 1963. (Photo by) Getty Images 'Sometimes the clothing manifests the ideology,' my friend Josh Johnson said to me. We were sitting in a law firm conference room in what was once a Studebaker dealership, a beautiful historic building owned by my friend Bob Cox, who gave us the space to have a complicated conversation. I had been wanting to explore some rather complex ideas related to the tense political situation we are all living through right now. Johnson is an education and activist, and as long as I have known him he has been working to improve our community. His tireless efforts include work with our local public radio station, WFSU, and he'd interviewed me earlier this year for his show The Warehouse, a series of weekly conversations with people in our area working in the arts. Johnson teaches high school and college courses and he's the CEO of 621 Gallery, a nonprofit arts programming and exhibition space that is something close to the last bastion of an arts center in Florida's mostly arts-free capital. Very seriously, our city leadership has almost no interest in saving our tiny arts district, which was decimated by tornados last year. It's a part of town right near Florida Agricultural & Mining University, one of our nation's many exceptional Historically Black Colleges and Universities. So please know, when I say we don't have a performing arts venue or city art museum, I am not being hyperbolic. But that is a different conversation. I asked my friend to have a conversation about what apparel means to resistance, because regardless of political persuasion, I believe that we dress in a manner that reflects our beliefs. Everyone is divided right now, it feels important to examine why and how, the nuances seem particularly important. Flower Power by Bernie Boston for the now-defunct newspaper The Washington Evening Star. Taken on October 21, 1967 / protester George Harris placing a carnation into the barrel of an M14 rifle held by a soldier of the 503rd Military Police Battalion (Airborne) The Washington Post via Getty Images I started with a hard question. I asked him about the extremes we see in images of ICE agents and the communities they are arresting, the way their unofficial store bought face coverings impact the way we see them, the way that regardless of opinion about the need for what they are doing, the look of the ICE agent almost instantly became ubiquitous in American culture. 'The famous picture in the 1960s,' Johnson continued, 'of the young man who was a part of the flower we power movement sticking the flowers into the barrels of guns. The soldiers juxtaposed against him did highlight who was who and which sides were which.' In the protest photograph the distinctions are clear, and perhaps that explains part of why the image remains powerful after so many decades; it is clear who is good and who is bad. This sort of simplicity, the absolutes of black and white, are rarely reflections of the real world. There probably isn't anything in existence that doesn't exist in grey scale, and when we are making decisions about who is who, thinking in degrees makes everything exponentially complicated. This was not always the case. Without judgement about whether the casual nature of clothing worn to protests today is a good thing or a bad thing, it is objectively true that the clothing worn to protest, historically, was a much more formal affair. 'A lot of the time,' Johnson said, ' activists are dressed exactly like their opponents. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had a deep problem with Bull Connor in the 1960s, you can't find very much difference in the way that those two men were dressed. They're both in suits of their time, ties of their time, shirts of their time, shoes, whatever. Sometimes that juxtaposition gives weight to the activism. I do not think that those points are either mutually exclusive or are necessary because sometimes it just happens how it happens.' Josh Johnson, educator, arts advocate and activist. Courtesy of Joshua Johnson I have been feeling like when I watch or read the news, increasingly there seem to be examples of cultural identity in dress, and through a media lens, it is hard not to worry that those divisive visuals are being exploited for attention. There is a lot of money involved in Americans hating or fearing communities that look different than their own. 'It's a Cultural tribalism,' Johnson said. 'Cultural Tribalism is something that either separates people within a culture or groups people together to show the distinctions of culture. Many times, this is a helpful thing or a point of pride for cultures. The poncho and the sombrero is something that an authentic indigenous Mexican man or woman is proud of. The dashiki is something that an indigenous Ghanaian is proud of.' While preparing for our conversation, I'd found Daisy Maldonado's article in Vogue about young Mexican Americans using traditional dress as a form of resistance. I asked Johnson what he thought about this, and like the educator he is, his answer was an analogy. 'As a journalist,' Johnson told me, "I had the grand pleasure at the beginning of this year to interview Roy Wood, Jr. And in one of his routines he says these very overtly political things that are wrapped up in comedy. He goes off in a very real moment and says, and I'm paraphrasing here, that sometimes it is incumbent on us to fall back and believe what people are saying. That their experience is really happening and us not having to critique that experience as being right or wrong.' Joshua Johnson and Roy Wood, Jr. in February of 2025. Courtesy of Joshua Johnson 'As a man and not as a journalist,' Johnson said, 'I believe that a return to culture is always a healthy thing for an individual. Not only does it secure that individual's knowledge of themselves, it also exposes other people to a way of life that is just simply beautiful, no matter who you are. Culture cannot inherently be bad when we're talking about people. Now, there are obviously visceral and terrible things about all cultures, all cultures come with good and bad, but culture cannot be inherently bad. I think a return to cultural garb can only signify a good thing. As a non-political statement, America is an experiment based on the idea that cultures will come together. So, anything that's the antithesis of that seems anti-American.' I asked Johnson if he felt like, in any way, there was a look specific to activism. And while my question was clumsy he understood the root of it and that was the question my friend answered. 'The uniform of activism is something that has been talked about and debated,' Johnson told me, 'you really have to boil it down to the fact that an activist doesn't look any specific way. However, we would be glib to think that whether it's Chairman Fred Hampton from the Black Panther Party, or whether it's some foreign dictator, that counter-cultural apparel adds to the seriousness of an activist.' A Make America Great Again Hat; photo illustration from June 23, 2025 in London, England. (Photo by Peter Dazeley via Getty Images) Peter Dazeley I've been trying to deal with the hyper awareness I've noticed in myself when I encounter someone wearing a red hat in public. I want to understand that response. 'Whether we like them, love them, hate them, despise them, their existence is an organic representation of populism,' Johnson said. 'Sometimes populism is the type of populism we like. Sometimes it's the type we don't like. That's the nature of populism. What populism is always going to do is give us very organic things of that movement. Going back to the hats, it wouldn't be possible to organize and facilitate anything counter because it wouldn't be organic. Some people might want a counter uniform, that can only happen if another movement arises in response and comes equipped. But that's the beauty of populism. You can't manufacture it. Now, don't get me wrong, you can do things to co-opt it. But the feelings and the sentiments and the loyalties that will allow people to want to wear something has to be natural and organic. It has to come from a place of either deep passion, deep feelings, or deep aggrievement.' All of the public discourse right now does feel emotionally driven, and to some extent that is rational. It makes sense that we would have strong feelings about the state of the world. The world is scary and the general state of the planet feels a lot less stable than it did not long ago. Josh Johnson speaking at an Art District revitalization effort he spearheaded after building a coalition of local arts organizations. Courtesy of Joshua Johnson Johnson still remembers his debate team coach, Ms. Sears, and the music she would play on team road trips. Johnson credits his coach and the experience with opening his ear to music he might not have otherwise discovered. Teachers like Ms. Sears inspire their students to grow up and find vocations instead of careers. Mentors are vital to anyone seriously interested in learning, to people growing or developing anything. But the relationship is good for the mentors too, I don't think we talk about that enough, how mentoring is symbiotic by nature. How mentoring is a closed loop system that teaches self-regulation. 'Joining that debate team was the start of my life,' he said to me. 'It was my baptism. It was an outward expression of an inward change.' One of the many great things about America and American culture is how we, most of us anyway, allow teenagers to try on identities during this developmental stage. It's simple to divide kids up by cafeteria tables in content for a screen, but in the real world, students are much more empathetic and sensitive to the needs of others than they were when Josh and I were students. Greta Thunberg, then a teenager,speaks at the 'Fridays For Future' Denver Climate Strike on October 11, 2019 (Photo by) Getty Images I asked him about his work as an educator and how he saw his students reacting to all the forces he and I were discussing. Josh and I are both millennials, but all generations get castigated for their perceived faults as they near their majority. I was curious about their response; of course it was related to music. 'I teach college level kids and I teach older high school level kids,' Johnson told me, 'the high school seniors in dual enrollment classes. The time when people start to begin figuring themselves out.' 'People are trying on their identities to see what fits and to find out what feels comfortable for them,' he said. I love this quote, 'a good educator shows you others. A great educator shows you yourself or brings you back to yourself.' So, if somebody walks in my classroom, no matter which classroom it is, wearing the t-shirt of a band, whether it's Nirvana, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, S.L.Y and THE FAMILY STONE, the Eagles, whatever, there's a resurgence in the band t-shirt. The music shirt stamps a person as cool, because it makes you look like you've got this seasoned taste that you maybe shouldn't have. It propels you into the zeitgeist as being one of the cool kids. I want to turn that on its head. I'll say, I'll give you extra credit if you can name two or more songs from the band that you have on your shirt. A hundred percent of the time, they can't name one song.' Sly Stone of Sly And The Family Stone posed in London on 16th July 1973. (Photo by) Getty Images This surprised me a little, but probably because I own far too many obscure tees that I wear in hope of someone appreciating the niche interest. An entirely different sort of conversation than my friend was describing. Was it about the graphics from the album covers or tours? 'They like the idea of people thinking that they like Nirvana, because Nirvana is cool,' Josh said with a smile. 'But when they can't name a song, two things happen there. First thing is they don't get the extra credit. The second thing is, now they live in a world where they're aware that people might converse with you about who you think you are or the identity that you're trying on. So if you're smart, you'll learn a little of the context of what comes with the uniform, not just put on the uniform. If you're going to wear a S.L.Y and THE FAMILY STONE shirt, maybe you ought to listen to If You Want Me to Stay or Family Affair , so that at least you don't make a fool of yourself and have to prove the identity that you're trying on.' The last question I asked my friend was enormous, but after such heavy contemplation, I wanted to be certain that we both left ready to return to our respective work. So I asked him what he felt was worth working for, above and beyond all else. He grinned before he answered me. Educator, arts advocate and activist, Josh Johnson. Courtesy of Joshua Johnson 'The cheap answer,' Johnson said, 'which I don't want to give you, is everything.' Josh and I first became friends when we bonded over a mutual desire to find ways to help our community be better for more members of our community. So I smiled right back at him and gave him the space to complete his thoughts. 'Access has always been the most important thing in all of my work,' Johnson told me, 'education, activism, politics, art and culture... To me it has been nothing but a pursuit of challenging the notion that some people should and some people shouldn't, or vice versa. That doesn't matter, I think everybody should have the same access. I do believe that access is the greatest education because it's oftentimes exposure.' MORE FROM FORBES Forbes Birthplace: Remember Louisiana's Forgotten Women With Carrie Ann Baade By Rachel Elspeth Gross Forbes 'Dressed To Kill': PBS' 'Human Footprint' Examines Apparel And Evolution By Rachel Elspeth Gross Forbes Surface Tension: A Conversation With Textile Artist Linda Hall By Rachel Elspeth Gross
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Tesla ordered by Florida jury to pay $243 million in fatal Autopilot crash
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