JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia held a news conference Wednesday afternoon at Jacksonville International Airport, speaking at a lectern next to a hologram of Mayor Donna Deegan.
“There she is, Mrs. Donna Deegan. It’s kind of funny because Donna Deegan, Mayor Deegan, said that this was not an example of wasteful spending,” Ingoglia said. “(...) This is just a stark example of tone deafness. This is $75,000 of waste, fraud and abuse. This is $75,000 that could have gone out to law-enforcement raises, could have helped repave roads; there’s a lot of money that this money could have been used for.”
The state’s DOGE task force — a take on President Donald Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” which was led for a time by Elon Musk and has a decade-old meme for a namesake — has spent the year auditing local governments for the purported goal of identifying wasteful spending.
Framing Wednesday’s remarks as an exposé of such spending, DeSantis and Ingoglia claimed some $199 million in such waste had been uncovered in Jacksonville.
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DeSantis has joked before about giving a new name to Florida’s DOGE, calling it the “Florida Agency for Fiscal Oversight,” or FAFO, in reference to an acronym for the “F*** Around and Find Out” saying. That, at least, is how Wednesday’s news conference began.
”I’ve got our chief financial officer for the state of Florida with us, Blaise Ingoglia, who’s doing a great job and really spearheading this movement where we call it the ‘Florida Agency for Fiscal Oversight,’ FAFO, these FAFO audits that are being done around the state, for local governments," DeSantis said Wednesday.
While much of DeSantis’ second term as Florida’s governor has been more and more about taking questions from his constituents about property taxes, he’s adapted the conversation on “FAFO” audits to suggest local governments’ “wasteful” spending of property-tax revenue is the reason Floridians have property-tax issues at all.
For example, DeSantis had previously brought up the Deegan hologram during his remarks two weeks ago in Franklin County — asking the crowd if they wanted “to pay property taxes to fund that” — and continued the same rhetoric Wednesday.
”We’ve got places around the state like Broward, they haven’t really had population growth on net but you’ve had a 60% increase in their budget over the last four or five years. Why do they need 60%? Why should you pay more, or have to keep doing this on property tax, so that they can increase budget 60%? (...) This is a natural thing with government. A gusher of revenue comes in because the values are going up — and some of these locals actually raise millage on top of that, which is wrong, but they did do that — so you have a gusher of revenue coming in, and what do politicians do with that revenue? I can tell you they don’t do what we did at the state level and pay down half the debt, that’s not what they typically do. They typically spend it, and so then the spending goes up and we don’t want people to have to continue to be in this property-tax situation simply to fund the increases in that." DeSantis said.
DeSantis and his team have appeared in Orange County, Broward County, Hillsborough County, Alachua County and Duval County to discuss so-called wasteful spending by local governments, claiming Wednesday that Floridians were being overtaxed by almost $1 billion in those five counties alone.
”Our number for Orange County is probably closer to $230 million. The city of Jacksonville, $199 million worth of wasteful and excessive spending — I’m sorry Donna Deegan, you’re saying that you can’t cut, you need every dollar. The taxpayers disagree with you — Hillsborough County, $278 million worth of excessful (sic) wasteful spending. Alachua County, $84 million. We were in Broward yesterday unveiling their number, $189 million of wasteful and excessive spending; waste and excess that you, the taxpayers, are footing the bill for," Ingoglia said. “All total, with just those five counties, we are almost $1 billion worth of the citizens of the state of Florida being overtaxed. (...) Now imagine when we get to every city and every county, you can see how that number could easily be in the tens of billions of dollars, so when people start talking about property-tax relief and property-tax reform and getting rid of property taxes on homesteaded properties, they say you can never do it. You disagree. We vehemently disagree. You could just do that by going back to the 2019-2020 levels of government pre-COVID. It would be easy to do.”
In September, when Ingoglia claimed $190 million in overtaxing had occurred in Orange County, Mayor Jerry Demings accused the CFO of using fuzzy math and political rhetoric to divide residents.
“They suggested that we could reduce our taxation and our budget by $200 million on an $8.2 billion budget. That’s a 2.4% decrease. I can tell you today, even with $8.2 billion, it simply is not enough to solve the myriad of issues that we have as a local government,” Demings said. “If the state really cared about us here at the local level, they will sit down and talk to us like decent folk would do, rather than issue subpoenas. They could just simply come and have a conversation with us. No, they wanted to be heavy-handed. They want us to perform before the cameras."
[VIDEO: Florida CFO, Orange County mayor cite conflicting numbers in DOGE battle]
As far as presenting a strategy to slash or eliminate the property taxes he says are being misused, the governor has maintained that the state is powerless to intervene in such local matters and it would have to be left to a constitutional amendment ballot measure.
DeSantis said Wednesday, “We’re working on the exact proposal.”
“The reason is because it’s got to pass the legislature by two thirds to get on the ballot, and then it requires 60% of the voters for approval, and so we want to make sure that we’ve got a product, you know? I’m not just doing this to just go around and crow about property tax,” he said. “(...) We’ve got numbers. We’ve got language. We’re doing that. So that will happen, you guys will see that in due time.”
The governor went on to say he views it differently between someone like a Florida resident with a primary homesteaded residence and an out-of-state investor who owns property in Florida for the purpose of running Airbnbs and so on, suggesting the latter foot the bill.
As far as a timetable, however, DeSantis said that the measure would not be voted on prior to November 2026.
“We really have to get it passed and on the ballot prior to the primary cycle being done in August and so, I’m not saying we’re going to wait that long, but, you know, we could potentially have a special session on property tax right in the middle of the Republican primary season in July or August. Imagine that,” he said.
Watch the news conference again in the video player below or by clicking here.