PEMBROKE PARK, Fla. — Local 10’s Jackie Pascale sat down exclusively with Florida Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia during his visit to South Florida this week.
Ingoglia runs the Department of Government Efficiency, or “DOGE.”
Task force members are auditing both Miami-Dade and Broward counties as part of an effort to eliminate wasteful spending throughout Florida.
Pascale began by asking Ingoglia to explain the DOGE audit process.
You can watch their full interview here.
“What we’re doing right now in terms of our DOGE FAFO efforts are actually changing behavior,” Ingoglia said.
Ingoglia name-checked Broward County as an accused spender, reforming its ways.
“Broward County for the first time reduced their millage rate and basically kept spending levels the same,” he said. “That doesn’t happen if we’re not watching them.”
“We probably saved the taxpayers $100 million just in Broward County,” he added.
Ingoglia had a far different take and different math from the Broward commissioners who set that budget this week.
“56% of our money that we can spend goes to the sheriff, so do the math,” Commissioner Steve Geller, who represents District 5, said.
Broward, the state’s largest majority Democrat county, has been on blast for months with the DeSantis administration.
“You got a place like Broward -- they’ve had no net population increase in the last five years and their budget’s gone up 60%,” the governor said.
“The governor left out one really important detail -- inflation,” Geller countered.
The Broward DOGE audit is still underway and Miami-Dade may be next.
“I think the purpose of it is to create a narrative that we don’t need as much property tax because local government should be able to get by on less. And I would simply say that that’s not true,” Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said.
“The vast majority of our general fund budget goes to public safety, and people don’t want less of that,” she added.
Ingoglia says his office is analyzing what he calls high level spending trends.
“What we’re doing is we’re going back to the fiscal year 2019, pre-COVID, and we are indexing every year forward for inflation and population, and for government inefficiencies to see where the budgets should be right now,” Ingoglia said. “And then we’re comparing them to what the budgets actually are and that’s how we’re seeing a lot of this excessive, wasteful spending.”
Details of wasteful spending are hard to pin down. The CFO calls it anything that is not core spending.
“The first function of government is to protect its people and that’s where we have to make sure that we are funding fire and police first,” he said. “But there’s a lot of wants versus needs that we look at. Do we need to protect our people? Yes. Do we want to give money to maybe an arts foundation that has the CEO getting paid a half a million dollars off of taxpayer dollars? I’d probably say that’s a very bad use of taxpayer money.”
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